Why Live in New England?

While my heritage is New England, my family relocated to the South for work reasons back when I was a college undergraduate. My younger brother and sister were then raised in the South and it became their home and their culture.  My wife’s family is also anchored to the South.  My wife and I have remained in New England all these years, raising two daughters and a great crop of friends.  In our minds, the benefits of living in history-rich New England well outweigh some of the downside (taxes and often miserable late Winter-early Spring weather come immediately to mind).  We are frequently trading good natured barbs with our Southern family about which part of the country is preferable.  A few years ago I penned the top ten reasons why I’m a Yankee, and not a Southerner.  Here is that top 10 list.  Sometime I’ll post my brother’s response to my offering.  

10.  Can delay cutting my lawn until May, sometimes June!

9.    I don't have to eat grits, or explain why.

8.    Can never remember if your president is Jefferson Davis or Davis Jefferson.

7.    I’m close to the source of that true heavenly sustenance, maple syrup.

6.    Tried but can't pronounce "dog" in three syllables.

5.    One hour from mountains, one hour from ocean, one hour from Boston.

4.    Can hone my driving skills to NASCAR level by dodging potholes and frost heaves.

3.    Air conditioning supplied by nature all summer long.

2.    Experience snow falling in dark woods on a crisp night, just like Robert Frost did.

1.    Somebody has to do it; I was one of the fortunate few selected among the many who applied.

A Highly Recommended Site

A must-visit site, with a frequent rinse-and-repeat cycle, is the Assistant Village Idiot (AVI).  I occasionally post comments there as “akafred” (a story for another day). AVI mostly tackles serious topics with his keen insight and a conservative perspective. Always provides you issues and commentary worth mulling over.  Now, if he happens to be off on a tangent expounding on the virtues of ABBA, well then it’s OK to high tail it back over to my site.     

Hoover Dam Bridge

I’m not an engineer but I have an appreciation for difficult engineering feats such as the completion of the bridge that bypasses the old Hoover Dam route crossing the Lower Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, not too far from Las Vegas (here).  I assist the federal Bureau of Reclamation with their environmental and sustainability programs, so Hoover Dam is one of my “clients” you might say (but Reclamation has nothing to do with the highway bridge, to be clear).  On business trips to the area I’ve observed the bridge’s progress through these eight years of construction – the highway approach on each side of Black Canyon was no small feat of development either.

Is this project an environmental plus?  Can a huge concrete structure and 3+ miles of roadway be environmentally friendly when all factors are taken into consideration?  I confess I haven’t looked into the specific environmental impacts of this bridge project, but just consider one component: the future vehicle fuels savings from travelers not creeping along the former six mile roadway that physically crossed the top of the dam. And after 9/11 for security reasons heavy trucks were not allowed over Hoover Dam and had to make a 23 mile detour through Laughlin, NV. How much petro will this bridge project save in the next 5, 10 or 30 years?  It would be interesting to know. 

Corporate Work-arounds

Back when I worked for a national (read "bureaucratic") engineering firm, company policy did not allow us to exchange any items of commercial value with our clients.  We couldn’t give or receive gifts in other words.  But the manager of our Ohio office wanted to send something nice to a client who was coming in to Cincinnati the following weekend, so he decided to send the client a few choice passes to a special event.  To disguise the gift from the corporate police he sent the tickets to the client with a letter that read:

Dear So and So:

As requested, please find enclosed your admission passes to the Mass Versus Distance Seminars in Cincinnati, Ohio on Sunday afternoon.  Both sessions of these Seminars focus on the theoretical trajectories of spherical objects under uncontrolled, non-steady state conditions.

Please enjoy.

Yours truly…..

Question: What did my colleague send to his client?

But I meant to say...

With a daughter who teaches High School English I’m always listening for interesting expressions of our language.

I think Yogi Berra could have said this.

On a recent Public Radio talk show about the long-term unemployed, a woman caller was explaining the frustration of sending out on-line resumes for jobs and why she’s turned more to personal networking in her pursuit of employment:  “On the computer, you’re just another piece of paper!”

The company I work for had a summer research internship that was filled by a PhD candidate in geology at a Midwest university.  The intern is a Chinese national, and she speaks and writes quite well.  But she recently e-mailed me to tell me that the schedule we had agreed upon for her research project would need to slip a few weeks and she closed her e-mail by writing:

“I am sorry if there is any incontinence caused.  Best regards,”  Nope, so far there’s no incontinence here at least!

Happy Meal Rant

OK, I’m not usually running to the keyboard to defend McDonalds’ Happy Meals but my disdain for pseudo-science drove me here.  That disdain is why I can’t watch the popular “reality” show Mythbusters. Stunts for the masses with a veil of science. Ugh.

But on to the Happy Meal Project:  Here and here

Admittedly this is an entertaining story, with the emphasis on entertainment.  Yet I’m sure 95% of good Americas who were exposed to this story will take it to their graves as science-based fact: McDonald’s food will not decompose.  Well, to get mold growth and bacterial decomposition you need Mr. Moisture.  How much water do you think there is in potatoes cooked by French frying?  And that hamburger in the story: Hmmm, no lettuce, tomato or sauce in sight.  Just a fried patty and a dry bun.  Hmmm again.  Dry food left out to dry in a dry apartment.   “Amazing, hey this thing is DRY!”

Even human and animal bodies will dry and mummify in low humidity (think Mohave or Death Valley). Why did the Dead Sea scrolls survive 2000 years?  Our old friend again, yep dryness.