Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Vladimir Putin KNOWS public relations

Here's the best example of an old pro doing PR that you will ever see.

Are you POLITICAL? Do you follow political PR campaigns? You should, and you should follow them wherever you can find them, Left or Right.

 

THIS is how an old PR-pro, Vladimir Putin, does PR: Recent floods inundated the St Petersburg area. The city had to be restored quickly, big foreign-exchange money comes in from St. Petersburg.

 

Problem: Families didn't want to evacuate the flooded zones so re-constitution could be done. There were about 6,000 young children living in the upper floors of flooded-out apartments.

 

Solution: Russian State Tourism controls/owns many resorts all over Russia. Putin wrote an executive order that all those resorts take St Petersburg flood-evacuees in as priority guests. Transportation to the resorts was also ordered, free to the evacuee-families.

 

Result: In 36 hours, most of the families WERE moved to the resorts, and arrangements made for the rest of them. Re-constitution crews are working safely and more efficiently to restore St Petersburg now.

 

Putin took a major PITA and made it into a tour-de-force victory for his government. Neighboring countries then jumped on the bandwagon and offered THEIR resorts for St Petersburg evacuees.

 

Putin then staged a news-conference in a government palace, in a large room full of well-behaved kids & their parents. He read out the statistics of the kids saved by relocation. He read out the timing this was all done in. It was all in Russian on R/T, of course, but you can watch it on YouTube's "Russia Insight" channel, which is subtitled in English.

 

Russia SHOULD be Trump's biggest worry, not China. The Russian handling of this issue, turning a potential tragedy into a PR victory he can RIGHTLY boast about, is why we need to worry about Putin.

 

Read it yourself, I'm sure you will agree.

Recycling - The Liberals' dirty secret

Recycling has been all over the Western World like a wet diaper on a baby for almost 50 years now. What could POSSIBLY be more liberal that the recycling habit? Well, besides gun control, but I digress.

Recycling is one of those ideas we conservatives never looked into adequately. We're paying for that failure NOW.

You see, all along, recycling was an ARTIFICIAL idea, an idea which ONLY EVER WORKED because of an ENGINEERED MARKET for the recycled plastics which are it's main component. That engineered market was China, which early on, figured out how to avoid having to make their own tosser-plastics. They bought up all of ours. Paid good money for them, too, because of all that expensive oil they WEREN'T buying to make those plastics they NEEDED.

The Chinese engineered market for our recyclables has collapsed, for two reasons: First, China is much more industrialized than it was three decades ago, so they generate their own recyclables to re-use. Second, the bottom dropped out of the oil market, and prices are much lower now, so it's cheaper again to make plastic from scratch than it is to buy and ship it from the USA.

Where does this all leave the USA? With recycling yards closing, or worse, just using their hidden-in-contract safety-valves and sending all that plastic to landfills to be buried.

Wait! You scream in your best liberal protest voice. How can they just dump all those plastics I laboriously recycle (and in many cases, at the point of liberal/commie guns - just look up the penalties for failing to recycle every scrap that are in place in King County, WA.

So, my Guru Of All Things Thinkable, you sniffle & sob, WHAT DO WE DO?

We write off the entire idea, that's what we do. We improve our landfills as much as we can, we invest in incineration facilities, we site more landfills, we go back to old systems like wrapping the meat in PAPER, not PLASTIC. Above all, the next cockamamie idea the Liberals bring us, we actually LOOK at it, not just try to FEEL it like they want us to do.

Geezer reminiscing

It's not quite time for the NFL game, so the gudwife and I are watching a Bill Murray movie.

Having watched only Bill Murray comedies/farces before, I was unaware that he had done any serious work. I'm now watching "Broken Flowers", a very good work. Set me to wondering why I never did one of those mid-life-crisis, guy-thing wanderings to look up all the old flames...then I remembered why: all those old flames were on the other side of all those burning bridges!

(audible sigh)

You know your cat is too fat when...

The animal hops up on the gudwife's lap, and the TV remote control sits there, and the cat fat-asses the TV to another channel...

Swear to God, I witnessed this this ayem.

The Wordsmithy

...has been prohibited from fueling it's forge with coal and hardwood charcoal can't be found either, only dried dung remains to fuel my forge. Fortunately, it's in great abundance from the large herds of intellectually-castrated steer-citizens hereabouts.

Apprentice! Shovel more shit on that forge-fire and lean into that bellows! I'm trying to work this soft iron of a language into some steel-armored words which might inspire this Nation to offer adequate resistance to our cruel overseers.

Trucking Poo in Dubai

...by now you've probably seen photographs of the stunning new construction in Dubai, an Islamic Kingdom out near the Sandbox.

Now their little-known secret is exposed.

They built that city...

WITHOUT A FARGING SEWAGE SYSTEM!

Yep, each building/complex is built with a cesspool, which has to be constantly emptied. That is done by a monster fleet of huge semi-tankers, and those tankers go somewhere out in the desert where there supposedly IS a sewage treatment facility (or, more likely, a very large lake o'poo). This video shows miles and miles of tankers on a Ring Road, waiting to get to their destination and dump their poo. The video reports that some of the drivers are in those rigs for three days waiting to dump, and some of them don't wait, but go off-road and dump into ditches out in the desert, ditches that flow directly into the sea, where tourists swim at the posh resorts.

H/T to the Coyote Kid, way out in SD

Splodey Tofu - UPDATED!

No, really!

Let this be a lesson: eat meat, and cook it as little as possible. It will never explode.

My take on it, but dependent on my fact set:

She was frying the tofu, and after taking the fried tofu from the pan (the report doesn't actually say the tofu exploded), she poured the hot oil from frying down the drain, where it floated on top of the water in the sink trap. Next, she turned on the tap water to rinse the pan, and when that water got on top of the hot oil, it "tanked", directing a steam explosion upwards at the window, possibly blowing the fry pan through the window (report doesn't say where the fry pan wound up).

"Tanking" of hot oil is the worst hazard in deep-fat frying (as opposed to just sauteeing), and it burns a lot of folks every year. It is responsible for burning houses down, too, if the "tanking" occurs on a lit burner, the resulting ignition of the blast-cloud of hot oil creates a fireball of significant size.

What the reporter said: keeping Portland weird!

*******************************************************************************

UPDATE: 120111 0857 PDT: It happened exactly as I said. Grease fire in pan, airhead cook tries to extinguish same with water, has giant steam explosion, blows up kitchen, is lucky to still have all her skin and vision.

Detritus from the camera - photo potpourri

Just read out the digital camera's chip, and the old Minolta Dimage XT had some pix on it I had intended to post, but never got a roundtuit.

Remember the old Knife Meme a couple months ago? I had just bought a new knife to replace my old Almar Eagle Ultralight Talon which now graces the bottom of Portland Harbor (WAAAAAAH!). This one is not half the knife the Almar was, but it serves. It's a Gerber Paraframe, a skeletonized liner-lock folder, no assist other than the thumb stud.

It DOES have the pocket-clip from HELL though, and will never get bumped out of the pocket, like the Almar did while climbing around on the gunwale of my boat. It was on sale for $26, not a bad price for a Gerber.

**********************************

OK, all y'all can read, but be honest now, how many of you have seen motor oil in THIS form of container? Hint, they've been using plastic bottles exclusively for about 25 years now.

I don't maintain an automotive museum here, but I'll keep this can of oil, since it's unopened, and 20-weight is a decent medium-weight shop oil. I probably paid 70 cents for that can of oil when I bought it, 49 cents if it was on sale. Motor oil now is not found below $3 per quart, and the better oils run up to $6. Lemme see, am I making 9 times the salary I did back 25 years ago? Noooooooooo....

The essence of blogging...

The purity of the essence. Our pure blogging essence. Something like that, eh, "Bat"?

No, a frequent commenter, JustThisGuy, who even gives us his essence here from time to time, has evidently nailed the essence of blogging.

Blogging is emissions. He doesn't say from where, though. All emissions emanate, don't they?

So, I ask a question which needs an answer: If I blog after supper, is that a Night Emission?

Call the EPA!

Yes, Virginia, bears do, in fact, shit in the woods, and so do deer! No photos of the bears, but I did manage to shoot one of defecating Bambi:

...and deer squat, too! BTW, I was close enough to this fine skinful of deerburger to have taken her out with a Flying Ashtray from the Bulldog 44. I was 15 feet from the ag gate in the foreground, and Mrs. Bambi was 15 feet the other side of the gate.

Tame deer, though. It strolls about on a shooting range with impunity (4 months until Bambi season).