Weather sucks...

M is off today.  I will be on light duties while I recover from my Turkey induced coma.

I cooked yesterday and, at special request, made candied yams for the first time.  Not sure what the point is.  But in cooking them I spoiled the small number of roast potatoes I was making...  Apart from that it was a success.

We also found that M, queen of the 80s era had never seen Beverly Hills Cop (either of them, I deny the 3rd one exists) I suspect this has something to do with the movie franchise not being all that popular in South Africa in the 1980s...  weirdly, however, she did see Lethal Weapon II, which is just barking mad.

Anyway, a fun trip back in time to when Eddie Murphy wasn't a parody of himself.  Weird to see Ronnie Cox as a good guy too.

M vetoed us watching Office Space with my medical friend Bill who has only ever worked in hospitals.  He doesn't really get what people do all day if it doesn't involve cutting people open and then making sure they don't die afterwards.

30 Years of Failure

An interesting piece in the NYT about the last 30 years of failed policy.  One of the money quotes, for me:

Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.

I have a friend who is a Civil Engineer working on road and bridge projects.  He points out, frequently, that the core problem facing the US is a bunch of infrastructure that reached the end of it's design life in the 1980s and ought to have been replaced.  Instead, roads and bridges are being patched up and expensive and poor substitutes for a planned travel infrastructure are being used.  He points out that the NorthWest 'high speed' rail improvements on the Seattle-Portland line will only increase the net speed by 5 mph as most of the billions are being spent shoring up bankings that are prone to slides rather than improving the line quality.

I see it in roads when I go back to the UK and then see the nightmare of the roads over here.

I sit on planes stuck in holding at SeaTac because there isn't space in the Bay Area airspace to allow them to physically leave the ground in Seattle.  I drive to Portland because the train takes an hour longer - and yet in the UK I'd never have considered driving that when I could take the train.

In another thread I've seen people have been complaining that CFLs burn out quickly, and it's clear that the problem isn't the technology of the light bulb, but the poor quality of the electrical infrastructure.

Last year I gave up on a home phone line and DSL and went to cable because the line to my house wasn't copper but was cloth covered lead because they'd put the lines in this area up first and hadn't changed them out in the last century.

It's insane.