Its starting to feel a lot like Christmas...

Frost warning tonight. Went out and covered all the peppers and tomatoes. See, DQ was not wrong to use an "e". It is in the dikshunairy.

Looks like Global Warming is tied to the mortgage securities market.

Practicing Safe Thinking

Thought I would post a picture of yours truly using his tin foil hat.

While picking beans this afternoon I pondered the problem of information versus freedom of choice. I have come to the conclusion that the more information a person has, the more limited his choices are. The only truly free people (at least from the perspective of making multiple choices), are the most ignorant ones. The more a person knows for certain, the more limited his courses of action become. Ultimately, we must choose between good and evil.

Beans and tin foil. That's how great minds work.

No Spic Angles

Today I installed three smoke detectors. They were puchased at Sam's Club. Made by Kidde, of North Carolina. Made in China. After I finished putting them up, I noticed that the package said there were bilingual instructions in Spanish and English inside. So I took a look. What I found first made me upset, then made me a bit cocky.

You see, I'm an American. I am functionally illiterate in foreign languages. As a result, I have to be smarter than people in the rest of the world, who have to have instructions printed up in their languages to tell them how to do things. As an American, I figure it out on my own.

The instructions in the package were in Spanish. Only Spanish. There were no bilingual instructions, and no separate English instructions. I took that as confirmation that the Kidde Company believes that English speaking Americans are smart enough to hang smoke detectors without any instruction, but people who speak Spanish are not that quick on the uptake.

That, or Kidde is being blackmailed by La Raza.

Maybe next the printing on dollar bills will have to be in Spanish so certain people will understand how to use them.

Kind of frosts a person. There is a cost to everything. I wonder how much extra it costs American consumers (that's U.S. Americans, goofballs!) to have additional instructions included in every package. How many extra trees have to be cut down every year to supply the paper? Maybe the companies should be required to post the extra costs on the package labels, just like the nutritional information. And no, HP, I am not in any way inferring that anyone would eat a smoke detector. Unless they thought it was a Norte Americano tortilla.

Still in Chains

I received an interesting letter today from Bank of America (you know, the people who take mortgages from undocumented workers). The letter announced some "enhancements" to their system.

On or after January 19, 2008, the APR for Cash Advances (which includes using an ATM with their card) will go to 26.24%. This is also expressed as a Daily Periodic Rate (DPR) because they compound the interest every day.

Also on the same date, a new term, "default re-pricing event" becomes part of the card agreement. A "default re-pricing event" occurs (1) if the minimum payment is late, or (2) if the outstanding balance exceeds the credit limit during the billing cycle. Two such "default re-pricing events" in a 12 month period will result in a default APR of 32.24% being applied to the account.

Third, effective March 10, 2008, any Balance Transfer, Check Cash Advance, or Direct Deposit Cash Advance will have a Balance Transfer Fee of 3% with a minimum fee of $10. It appears from the letter that the maximum fee of $75 will no longer apply. They aren't really clear on that one.

Fourth, the letter formally announces that interest on the balance will be compounded daily.

Finally, effective November 30, 2007, the arbitration section of the agreement is amended. Either party may choose to arbitrate a claim, and if arbitration is chosen, the decision to arbitrate shall cover "any third party providing benefits, services, or products in connection with the account"; in other words, if you were provided with a faulty product that caused injury, Bank of America can choose to arbitrate any damage claim and [their bold and caps] "...PRECLUDES YOU AND US FROM HAVING A RIGHT OR OPPORTUNITY TO LITIGATE CLAIMS THROUGH COURT, OR TO PARTICIPATE OR BE REPRESENTED IN LITIGATION FILED IN COURT BY OTHERS." So if somebody else sues, and you had a similar experience, you are forbidden to testify in court for them if your own claim has been arbitrated.

Personally, I think the people at Bank of America are totally un-American. Consider this : the borrower who has two "default re-pricing events" within a 12 month period is probably already in financial difficulty. The bank would be much further ahead if the credit were halted, the interest rate rolled back to a level where the borrower could pay, and as much of the principal as possible recovered. They certainly are not listening to Ben Bernanke. Raising the interest rate on a financially troubled borrower to 32.24% is asinine.

It is time to cancel this card.

The Bible states that the borrower is the slave of the lender. The biggest slave-owners in America today are the credit card companies.

Killer on the Loose

While working on the mower gas tank, some of those pesky yellow jackets buzzed me and not liking them anyway (they are terrible enemies of honeybees) I decided to take a little break and get even. I cobbled together a yellow jacket trap.

The first step was gathering the material. An empty fruit juice bottle and some scrap 3/4" plastic pipe.

The bottle measured about 4-1/4" across.

I figured to cut the pipe about 1/2" longer. In retrospect, I should have made it about 1" longer, but that will show up later.

A 3/8" hole was drilled through one side at the center.

A Sharpie can be a tinker's best friend. Never leave {your} home without one. The holes through the bottle should be marked on both sides.

Just like you learned in kindergarten, stay inside the lines. I have cut these too big in the past and ended up sealing them with hot-melt glue.

Pushing the pipe through the holes (nice, tight fit here), I discover that I should have allowed some extra length on the pipe because the plastic bottle sides flex liberally. I cut some narrow strips of duct tape and wrapped the ends of the pipe to make them big enough to keep them from sliding into the bottle.

Now for some 1/16" vent holes. We need to allow the scent from the lure to get out. Note the duct tape wrapped around the tube ends. In retrospect, I think it would be smarter to put the vent holes just above the pipe; the yellow jackets spend too much time flying around the vent holes when they could be busy dying.

I had some old yellow jacket lure from a while back. It would be applied to a chunk of cotton cloth (old t-shirt) and hung inside the bottle with fishing line.

All set up and ready to go. Next to it is a trap Jesse gave me. He recommended using grape Kool-Aid as a lure. For some reason, I think that might be more effective than the commercial lure.

Yup. it works. I think a "whiff of grape" might be better. Maybe I'll try some grape pop.

How now, mechanical cow? goat?

Last winter, when Jim and Maria moved south, they left us with their old Bolens lawn mower since they were going to be moving into an apartment. The Flower of My Life has a propensity for being in the wrong place whenever one of the mowers breaks down, and most recently she was mowing on the Lawn Chief when the quill in the mower deck discombobulated itself. We needed to get another grass-whacker contraption into operation, and a likely candidate was the Bolens.

Unfortunately, my Blossom had previously tried out the Bolens and discovered that it would not run properly; it had a broken gas tank. The engine is a Briggs and has a gas tank with a sheet metal body crimped to a pot metal top. It was obviously not a candidate for soldering. Draconian (hey, Draco was simply a misunderstood Democrat) measures were called for. I made sure I could put the broken piece back into the top of the tank as it was supposed to fit.

Then I got out my old epoxy. I originally bought this to glue my heirloom Apple mug back together after something got dropped on it. The package says 90 seconds. It did not lie.

I barely had time to get the broken piece back into place. To make extra certain, I mixed a second batch and coated the top of the tank near the break to seal any cracks.

Sadly, the impact of whatever broke the tank in the first place caused the pot metal to bend slightly before it broke. The little ear is no longer at 90 degrees to the tank top. Also, having had some prior experience with this particular epoxy (I do NOT trust the Apple mug's handle, and it is simply a dust catcher in the display cabinet now) I figured I had better back up the repair.

The proper thickness of sheet metal for the strap was a problem. I had some 1/16" strap, but that would be too heavy. Galvanized duct would be too light. I finally settled on a left-over scrap piece of metal wind brace, from which I cut the flange. From there, I bent and formed a bracket.

It fit acceptably.

Everything bolted back up.

I filled the tank, primed the carb, started the mower, and mowed the lawn.