Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Your fashion critic speaks...

Yeah, Rivrdog, fashion critic...

Have you stopped ROFLYAO yet?

Okay then.

Allow me to present my creds as a fashion critic:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, grandpappy was a tailor.

Notice that there's nothing current in the above line?

You're very observant.

Okay, a few years back, I watched a few episodes of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", not so much because I wanted to be better dressed, but because I really wanted to know exactly why being queer would make one automatically into a fashion guru. I failed to find out and gave up the effort. No gender-identity slur here, but I doubt if queer guys have mojo on this subject any more than straight guys. My go-to source for men's fashion has been GQ for years, although I'll admit that I don't buy the mag, only read it in doctors' or dentists' offices, and find that most professional athletes don't have any more smarts on fashion than anyone else, except that they DO go for quality and fit in men's clothing, which is over half the fight towards looking sharp. Grooming and body carriage is the rest of it.

Men's fashion is a no-brainer, because "good" is almost always measured in conservative style; suits, sport jackets, dress shirts and ties. Shiny leather shoes and a Pocket Square or correctly-folded handkerchief being the only accessories really required. If I REALLY wanted to put on the dog, I could change my usual Timex Camper wristwatch out for my Rolex Oyster Perpetual, (willed me by my Dad, I would never buy such an expensive watch), but I get nervous with that level of spendy jewelry on.

Now, look at women's fashion. Or don't look, unless you want a reason to visit the psychiatrist's couch, because it makes NO sense at all in most cases. Here's the perfect example of current fashion, in today's fishwrap, front page of the "Living" section:

Okay then. Heidi Klum, supposed fashion expert, is wearing a psychedelic-print jumpsuit layered over with an ill-fitting* blazer of double-breasted cut. Her protege, Michelle Lesniak Franklin, the winner of some sort of reality-show on fashion (I've never watched it), has clothed herself in an alternatively-designed (uneven-hemmed) sheath skirt topped by a see-through sleeveless blouse, nicely showing off all her tats but not her tatas, which are smothered in a Wagnerian metal-looking brassiere. The very latest in PDX millinery adorns her head, and it seems to be either the bottom cut out of a steel-mesh wastebasket or a BBQ grilling accessory designed to grill fish on. Her hose are nominally normal, but she appears to be wearing them over her shoes, which are kludge-modern and otherwise unremarkable.

If readers know about the modern Portland scene though, they will have to consider these ensembles rather conservative, and thereby, tasteful within their range, because the young-uns do, in fact, "keep Portland weird".

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* Dispite being tailored to her form, I consider this blazer to be "ill-fitting" because it is cut as double-breasted, which means it's supposed to have overlapping breast sections, but this one is cut away so that it has to be fastened with some sort of string arrangement to stay closed. That closure arrangement on a blazer is a strict fashion faux-pas for men, and since the blazer started out as a menswear concept, menswear rules for wearing it ought to apply.

Super Bowl AAR, the power dump

I may not be an electrical engineer, but...

The game was so-so, so I didn't stroke out in front of my new ghetto-screen teevee, but the most interesting part was the power dump, which some self-annointed engineer, hired for the purpose by Fox News, completely failed to explain this ayem, so here's my best:

Take the following facts in the following order:

1. It's New Orleans, which rebuilt the Super Dome after Hurricane Katrina, expecially the dome. One might reasonably expect that they refurbished or replaced the HVAC system at that point, so it's relatively new, and wired to the lates codes, or is it?
2. It's New Orleans, known for it's graft under previous Administrations.
3. The standard scam for building contracts (from the scammer point of view) is that I, the Administrator of the contract, award you, the subcontractor, a juicy sub-contract in return for paying me (kicking-back) 10% of the contracted amount for that subcontract. Because of that nearly-universal practice, the subcontracts are almost always shorted by the 10% as to their completion. In an HVAC contract, that shorting could easily be made up in the complexity and sufficiency of the wiring.
4. At half-time, there were a lot of pyrotechnics shot off, all generating a large amount of smoke, which had to be rapidly pushed out of the cavernous building in time to play the game within a few minutes. That takes huge ventilating capacity to accomplish.
5. The combination of bringing all the inside lighting back up to full-bright, and running the exhaust fans at full power to clear all the fireworks smoke, created a maximum load for the building's electrical system.
6. The cheapened wiring meant that there was a weak leg in the wiring system, and the emergency sensors detected a pending overload, and tripped the breakers, darkening half the stadium.

That's probably how it happened, folks. If it did happen this way, it will happen again. Maybe next time, it will be actually investigated.

Or, maybe you could just go to Ray Nagin and ask him what he did with the 10% of that sub-contract, get it back if he still has it, and fix the wiring of the SuperDome.

I might not be Martha Stewart

...but I do know my way around a cookbook, and this is a handy-dandy little cookbook, it has a big bennie attached: the recipe for "quick mix" which might just be highly similar to Bisquick.

Camp uses, SHTF uses, and I suppose you could use it like the authors intended, to help stretch your food budget if you are dependent on EBT.

You will note that the recipes are very basic, and easy to follow and most are one-stage recipes, i.e. you mix up the ingredients and cook it, and if you don't burn it, you can eat it quickly.

Here's the cookbook:

Download Utah Quick Mix Cookbook

Note the strange page set-up. This is so you can just hit "print" on Adobe Acrobat Reader, and the thing will print right up into a proper page-ordered booklet. Supposedly. I'm not going to do the paper booklet. Someone else let me know how it comes out.

Over the next few days I might just have to try out that oatmeal raisin recipe, although I have no clue how raisins get into anyone's EBT budget, with a small package costing upwards of $5.

H/T to the Country Gal

I may not be a fashion designer, but...

Yoga pants: for 90% of wearers, they are male contraceptives. Discuss

Fiscal Cliff: the solution

There's been nothing less than a cubic buttload of crap flung about on the "Fiscal Cliff negotiations". I might not be a degreed economist, but I know a solution to a problem when I see one. Here's the end of the crap-slinging.

I propose a true compromise:

• Set the definition of "Rich" at $400,000 Adjusted Gross Income (for a couple, single would be $225,000). Everyone below that level keeps their present tax rates.
• Raise the personal income taxes on everyone making over that amount to the pre-Bush level.
• Adopt a new personal income tax deduction: Any new hire of any employee in the "Rich" taxpayer's business, in a position previously closed for three years, or never before existing, is a tax credit ("consultants" won't count, it has to be a permanent employee, with filed W-4). Negotiate the tax credits for new hires on a sliding scale, so that the money put into those new hires can't create a tax credit exceeding the total tax liability of today's tax rates.
• Generate a new personal income tax deduction for salaried taxpayers who are NOT business owners. This deduction would allow an investment tax credit for investing in a business (not including buying their stock or bonds) for the specific purpose of allowing that business to expand it's work force. This would require a new item of accountantcy, but it's worth it for the results it generates.

With this system, some "Rich" will pay more, but none will have to, and if they don't, it will be because PRIVATE SECTOR jobs have been created.

Isn't it supposed to be all about job creation?

This idea is a "win-win". It lets the (D)onks crow that they've taxed the "Rich", something that, if not accomplished by 010113 at 0001 EST, will cause them all to keel over dead (or so they have inferred). It lets the GOPes claim that they've protected the Private Sector, and facilitated Private Sector job creation.

Let's git 'er Done!

I might not be...

...a real TeeVee critic, but I know a pig-in-a-poke when I see one.

Does anyone else feel that all the spendy, splashy "talent" shows are merely vehicles for washed-up entertainers (the judges) to have another fifteen minutes?

It's all about the judges now. Few of the promos ever show even past talent which did okay, all they push is the judges and the fancy sets with their swivel seats, etc.

Wotta waste of time!

I may not be...

.the most important man in the world, but I bet I can name him.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Okay, you say, he's got a few nukes, a well-trained military, but he also has as enemies every single Islamic Republic in the world. He's got a helluva box built around him right now, you say, and you are correct.

Netanyahu holds the wild cards in the biggest poker game of all: the US presidential election.

Think about it.

I have yet another report of the IDF's movement in Israel, and this report says that Israeli armor is moving towards the Sinai, my guess would be to stalemate the Egyptian military, which, under the Islamist President Borsi, can be counted to try to take the Sinai as a side-door into Israel in the coming conflict.

So, Netanyahu is about to force the hand of the most anti-semitic President since FDR. When Israel goes to war, Obama will resist helping him. That will cost Obama the election, period. Full Stop.

Oh, it might also cost the Democrats control of the Senate, because never again will a single Jew vote Democratic, the party of the betrayal of their home.

I might not be a fashion designer, but...

I've been to Anchorage AK, and I'm here to tell you that Alaskans are much more interested in what caliber to carry for bear defense in the environs than in what they might wear to go hiking.

I recall one nasty night in mid-winter, flying into Elmendorf AFB on a USAF C-141B I was navigating to that city and beyond, and first having to "go around" (abort landing) because of a moose on the runway, then having to go around a second time because the combination of the horrible Matanuska crosswinds and a low RCR reading from packed snow on the runway made landing too risky, then after the third approach was a charm and we got down, getting blown off my feet crossing an icy street near the BOQ (fortunately, my wearing of full Arctic Gear padded the fall). The temp at the time was -20 and the wind 40+ and gusty. Later that night, our large transport aircraft blew off of it's parking pad and onto the taxiway, stopped only in it's unmanned cross-country ground journey by a snowplow-windrow at the far side of the taxiway (Use Ice Chocks next time, Ground Crew!)

Nope, in AK, fashion in clothing is something you watch on the satellite TeeVee Style Channel. In AK, you dress for the weather, for the bugs, and for your comfort, in that order. Fashion is not on that list.

I might not be...

...a PhD sociologist*, but I know a societal trend when I see one.

Going on my socio-police training Maxim Number One, which says "there are no coincidences, only un-researched connections", and going on what seems obvious to me as an adult who has lived through the entire period of our history in question (1970s-present), it seems to me that the issue of Gen-X obesity and forward through the generations to the present is directly related to...

...wait for it....

....no, click the next page for it...

Jobs, the REAL question

In honor of Joe Huffman, who taught me to ask the One Big Question...Joe's a bit busy this weekend, so I'll iterate what he would say if someone asked him the One Big Question which has formed in my mind.

Simple question, that.

It seems that we are about to decide the policy direction of our Nation based on one little word, "Jobs", but has ANYONE stopped to ask what a "Job" actually is, how it is properly defined, how the statistics about "Jobs" are actually derived, and whether ANYONE ever checks those statistics for accuracy?

I might not be an economist, but I have dealt, to some degree, with the idea of budgeting. In budgeting, we have a concept called "Full Time Equivalent". At any sizable organization, public or private, that employs people, there is a standard definition of what it costs to have one person perform work, and that is the FTE.

Basically, the FTE is what one "standard" person draws as a wage, together with the value of that person's economic benefits (vacation days, health insurance, etc), over a period of 2,080 hours (one standard working year of 52 forty-hour weeks). My FTE, just before I retired from copping, was just over $90,0000. That was a wage of $28.56/hr, plus annual benefits running to just over $30K.

So, for full-time employees, the costs are fairly easy to break down. The tricky part is how to measure less-than-full-time work.

That's NOT tricky if fractions or decimals of an FTE are used. The average US wage (Median wage, to be accurate) last year was $26,364. Just search on "average US wage", and you will get all sorts of sites which display the statistic, and tell you how it was derived.

Why then, does the Government "play" with the figure so loosely? Here's an example of "playing". With "Job Creation" now the measure of whether a candidate "has it in him" to be President, why haven't we demanded, and gotten, a precise definition of what One Created Job actually is?

Here's what "One Created Job" ought to be: One FTE, measured against the last, accurate US Median Wage, projected as if that job lasted one year. A couple of years ago, when the "stimulus" was the big topic of discussion inside the Beltway, and "shovel-ready jobs" were being "created", I remember reading that the Obama Administration was claiming One Created Job for every job opening that lasted 15 days or more. Of course, that's crap. No two-week job ought to ever be compared to a full-time position.

Since we all have calculators, let's do the math. Taking $26,000 as the annual wage in question, and adding in, say, $10K in benefits, we have an FTE for those "shovel-ready" jobs of $36,000, or $3K/month. If those jobs only last, say, 3 months each, then each one is 0.25 FTE, and the base earning is only $9K for each job. Did YOU ever see those jobs listed that way? I didn't. That same Obama Administration (and, likely the Bush II Administration before it) claimed Christmas Seasonal workers as "created jobs" every Fall, despite the fact that those jobs never last past the middle of January, and are less than .25 FTE each. Same thing with Summer Seasonals, etc

The Government (and candidates to run it) lies, and our entire National future is being decided by this particular brand of lie.

Let's ALL go activist on the political process here, and demand that ANYONE who uses Job Creation in any sort of political statement be REQUIRED to prove out how many actual FTEs he/she is referring to, and what the actual dollar figure of that FTE actually is.

Can we do that, people? I think we can, and I expect THAT sharp saber, if universally used, would deflate a LOT of political hot-air balloons, if not ALL of them.

You have your assignments. Attend political rallies, and at the right moment, shout the One Big Question at the candidate(s): "Sir, what is YOUR definition of a Job"? I guarantee that the pretenders will NOT be ready to answer you, so YOU be ready to repeat your question.