The Road To New England Goes Through The White House; I Can't Make This Stuff Up -- December 29, 2014

From Investor's Buisness Daily:

Feeling low about the incessant screeching that the ice is catastrophically melting at the poles? A lot of us are, so it's good to see a researcher buck the narrative.

Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has drawn a conclusion that will surely bring him grief from the global-warming believers and cold shoulder from most of the mainstream media, which is heavily invested in the idea that man is heating his planet by burning fossil fuels.

"The North and South Poles are 'not melting,'" the British Express reported on Christmas.

"In fact," the Express said in its coverage of Maksym's finding, "the poles are 'much more stable' than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought."

Remember those words "previously thought." In the future we will be seeing them a lot more in reference to the continued unraveling of the global warming fable. In the meantime, kudos to the Express for publishing what the mainstream American media refuse to report.

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Can't Make This Stuff Up Either

Phoenix could experience coldest New Year's Day in recorded history ... going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Okay, I made that last part up.

There’s the potential for up to a foot of snow in Northern Arizona.

Farther south in Phoenix, it could be one of the coolest New Year’s on record, says Pace. All the way down to 50 degrees (10C).

All the way down to 50 degrees. LOL. That's a summer day in North Dakota. 

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Who Can't Read This Anyway Because The Blog Has Been Taken Down

What an incredibly good day! My daughter -- not granddaughter -- the daughter with no children wanted to visit a "big" Japanese bookstore in downtown Los Angeles to get a certain puzzle book, not Suduko or Suuduko as the Japanese call it. We haven't been able to find the "puzzle logic" magazines she normally gets; they are caught up in a teamsters union job slowdown with ships stranded out at sea. I doubt that's entirely correct, but there is some truth to the story. But that's for another time, I suppose.

She did find a "puzzle logic" book at the store, so she was very, very happy. I saw a whole new selection of books I would not generally see at a Barnes and Noble. It was awesome.

The store: Kinokuniya Bookstores --

 Los Angeles City bans plastic bags for large retail stores 

selling perishable goods (i.e., grocery stores) but bookstores are exempt. 

Go figure.

There are nine of these Japanese bookstores in the United States. I've now seen two of them (Los Angeles, Costa Mesa); our younger daughter has seen three of them (those two plus Portland, Orego). If she sees the two in the Bay Area, San Francisco and San Jose (possible), and the one in Seattle (very possible), she will have seen 6 of the 9. The other three: Chicago, New York, and New Jersey.

I assume 90 - 95% of the books were in Japanese and thus not for me, but the 5 - 10% of the books in English there were superb. I assume most of the books could be found in a Barnes and Noble, but with such a small "English" collection, the bookstore would only have the best of the best. And the Japanese have the best taste in almost everything, it seems.

I ended up with three books and could have bought many more but I had to stop. 

The three:

• an almost-500 page, small-print, hardcover, of the Los Angeles film culture "before Hollywood," 1905 - 1915; very, very unique;
• an elegant but very small 25-page (or thereabouts) graphic novella telling the story of Steve Jobs and re-inventing Apple after Sculley, The Zen and Steve Jobs; it can be read in 10 minutes but there's something about it that suggests it will be a hard-to-find-but-much-sought-after item ten years from now;
• and, of all things, The Manga Guide to Electricity, a sort of Japanese comic book (in English) that explains electricity. 

Regular readers know my difficulty with understanding electricity and how I want to help my granddaughters learn about it, so I find whatever tools I can to help me as well as help them. This book looks particularly promising. It is very much like the American "Books for Idiots" series, but this is in the Japanese manga style which is much more appealing to a third grader who is into the Diaries of a Wimpy Kid.

The "manga" book is also a fast read, but something tells me it will provide some insights and nuances into electricity that I have not seen before.

Just for the fun of it, I read the first 20 pages earlier this evening, and right or wrong, I think I understand why Europe (and I think Japan also) has 240 volt appliances as a general rule and Americans have 120 volt. Right or wrong, it provides a way for me to remember the "power formula" (current, power, voltage relationship).