Hee hee hee....

Intellectual property rights (Again)

So this isn't showing up all over the blogosphere, and I don't know why. Because it should. While the President's assing it up, having squabbles with his military leadership in the pages of Rolling Stone-...while the media is saturating us with Gulf Hurricane! Oil Spill! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE Wharrgarble.... something insidious just happened.

If you don't want to clicky the links, I won't force you. But know this: Zombie Copyright is here, and it doesn't look to be going away. Remember Eldridge V Ashcroft- remember what I told you then. Eternal copyright on the installment plan. Keep paying campaign contribution "Bribes" to your congresscritters and you will always get your copyright extension, while the public domain starves for new additions.

Well, the public domain's under attack again. In order to come into line with "Europe's" copyright laws, stuff can be removed from the American public domain.

Dammit, I want out of here. I think? I want off this rock. Is there noplace left to go in order to have Freedom? Real, physical and intellectual freedom? I guess not. His Highness even shuttered our space program, so our grandkids won't be able to escape either.

Genealogy Post- thinking out loud

Summer's come, and it's the season for my research to begin anew. I've been at this since 1997, but it's always so piecemeal. I'd give anything if I had the time and money to work on this as much as I want to.

I've decided this summer to work the bottom branches. Goal? Find Thomas B. Lambert- find his grave, records of his kids... anything. He's my grandmother's grandpa and he's a damn ghost. I don't even know what the B stands for, for certain. Someone named "Sunny Lambert" cited him as Thomas Bluford Lambert- but I've no idea where she got that middle name. I'd sure like to find her and ask!

So here's the mystery and the clues: Thomas, born abt 1857 to Thomas B. Lambert Senior, and his wife. Cousin Edna gave me the middle initial and the "junior," and told me that he and my greatgreatgrandma Letitia had the three girls, Zadie, Cora, and Deola (my greatgrandma) and a baby son who died. I tracked down record of newlywed Thomas and wife "Lottie" in the 1880 census. Pretty sure Lottie is supposed to be Letitia; the ages match up and they're in Port Royal, Henry County, where Letitia's family had been for generations. But he's dead by 1900, wherein Letitia is head of household in Jefferson county, widowed, bringing up her girls. And although she has her girls, there are three dead babies to account for, not just one; she gives number of kids as seven, with only three now living. One would THINK I could find birth recs for at least one of these seven offspring, but so far, no dice. No death recs either, for the kids or for their father. Perhaps none were recorded? Edna told me she thought he was probably buried "on their farm," but that was before she was born; she had no idea even what county the farm was in.

Damn I need the 1890 census. Anyway- what I know (or think I know) about Thomas: I've found him at home with stepmom and dad as a boy in earlier census recs; living in Grant county, KY. Not a far piece from Henry. I've actually found other folks who've tracked Thos Jr's mom and dad's lines, but the man himself is an enigma. He intrigues me. Frankly, he's the best looking fella in my family tree. And his wife, lord love her- well, maybe she was one of those ladies who is beautiful when she smiles. I have their wedding tintype, but.. perhaps it's one of those bad hair/clothes days for Letitia. Not all brides are beautiful.

Anyway- that's mystery one, goal one. Goal two? Find out what Hatfield sired my greatgrandmother's daddy. (On the other side of my Mom's family.) Moses Dial married Nancy Welch... but he didn't father two of her sons. "Jefferson Davis Dial", my ancestor, is supposedly a bastard Hatfield. I've got them in Wyoming county, WV in 1860; Jefferson Davis Dial is born in April of the following year. I need to find out when Moses left for the war. Figure that Pappy Jeff was conceived June or July of 1860 in time for an April 1st birthday. Anyway- I've looked at the 1860 census and there's a goodly number of young Hatfields to account for in the neighborhood. I wonder what the liklihood would be of finding a male-line descendent from one of Nancy's byblow boys, and getting a dna test? Most probably, the hatfields all share their Y chromosome anyway though, so finding the RIGHT one would be a challenge.

Skillet love

Today I stumbled across an article about the basic necessities of a functioning kitchen. But I won't link it for you, because it was useless. Oh, yes, it had some practical advice about knives and sheet pans- but it dismissed cast iron with a single line. "I like cast iron, and I have used it in some kitchens for nearly everything; but it can be more expensive than this quite decent cheap stuff, and it’s very heavy. "

To the author, I say this: You, sir, are no cook. And you can't shop worth a damn.

Whenever one of my friends marries or has a housewarming, I hit the flea markets and thrift shops. Your humble Ornithophobe is not inherently cheap about wedding gifts; there is method to my madness. A "new" cast iron skillet is both expensive and ill-made. Its surface is microscopically pockmarked and uneven. That will show in your cooking, as no amount of seasoning will completely eradicate sticking to such a surface.

No, for my gift-skillets, I look for the battle-hardened veterans of cookery. The older, the better. A bit of rust doesn't frighten me. Time and again, I've dug up the skillets of your great-grandmothers, moldering in boxes at yard sales, or collecting dust on thrift shop shelves. The most I've ever paid for one is a ten dollar bill- but I've also found an egg skillet for a quarter. Right now, on Ebay, there are dozens available in the under 20.00 range, some sitting unbid at 99 cents and no reserve. Lovely Griswolds and Wagners, and lots of nameless beauties waiting to be returned to service. Just watch out for the shipping!

Anyway... once you find your skillet, you need to restore it- take the gunk off, strip it down to bare metal. A go on self-clean in your oven will do for the nastiest ones, but most can be taken care of with a plastic scrubby and copious quantities of hot water. Salt makes a good abrasive in a pinch. Once it's stripped, it needs reseasoning. Rub the warm skillet down in a thin layer of lard and bake it for a few hours. Repeat this step two or three times, before welcoming your skillet back to work. The first thing you should cook in it is a nice bunch of bacon; it'll work wonders for the smoothness of the finish. Then maybe fry up some chicken and give it a proper workout. If you've done the job right, the finish will be smooth, not lumpy, and the surface will not be tacky to the touch. (Tacky means too much uncarbonised fat; strip and start over.) A good skillet is a deep black in color, with a glossy inner bottom. To keep it that way, wash in HOT water and spare the soap- it won't really hurt your skillet but it damages the seasoning.

I do most meats in my skillets, but they're also indispensable for corn bread, eggs, sauteed vegetables... they even make good cake pans. (Try pulling off pineapple upside down cake without one. Go on, I dare you.) And nothing caramelises sugar faster than cast iron. I'd no sooner try to cook in a kitchen with no cast iron than I'd try to cook without, oh, I dunno... food.

I really think it's time to get out of Dodge...

"For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death."-- Robert A. Heinlein

Maury says, Akhenaten, you're the father...

So Tut's DNA results are in, and they are fascinating. I won't link you, because JAMA is charging 15.00 a pop for the article... but you can look at the stuff elsewhere in bits. (cough, EgytianDreams forum, cough.)

But basically- Tutankhamun is the offspring of full-siblings, the mummy in KV-55 and the mummy identified as the "Younger Lady". KV-55 and the younger lady are the son and daughter of Amenhotep3 and the mummy identified as the Elder Lady, now definitively identified as Queen Tiye. The babies in Tut's tomb are his kids, and also the kids of another unidentified female mummy. But the paper is silent on the relationship between KV-55 (putative heretic pharaoh) and said unidentified female mummy. Also silent on Younger Lady and unidentified female mummy.

More questions than answers right now. If no relationship between unidentified female and the parents of Tut, who the hell is this woman Tut was breeding with? Is it possible the relationships exist, and haven't been stated for some reason? Could further testing flesh this mess out?

I'll put my suspicions out there. When all is said and done, I'm betting the Younger Lady actually is Nefertiti- that we've been wrong about her nonroyal background. And I'm betting the unidentified female is Ankesenamun.... which would mean the babies were born of multi-generational inbreeding.

Of course, if Kv-55 mummy is potentially Akhenaten, there's equal chance he could be Smenkhare.... but that would mean he had a wife other than Meritaten, and that he was not the son of Akhenaten but rather Amenhotep and Tiye, making him the heretic's brother.

Again- more questions than answers.

Obama to the people of the USA: No can has moon. Not yours.

Heck, why not put our money into looking for Atlantis and Mu while we're at it?

I've changed my mind: Obama's not "naive" and "idealistic." He's arrogant, bullheaded, and downright unintelligent. He cannot have missed Climategate, Glaciergate, etc. Either he's the most willfully ignorant, uninformed man to hold office in my lifetime- or he's just plain stupid.

Wake me when we can vote this incompetent schlub out of office. And pray it happens in time to save this nation from his foolish, meddlesome iniquity.

A Timely Reminder...

Climaquiddick...

I'm not going to link anything here; if you want the details, head over to Wattsupwiththat.com, or hell, just throw "CRU" "Jones" and "Mann" into a search engine. Even google can't suppress this story; throw Climategate in and you'll hit paydirt. (Of course, you won't get autosuggested.)

If you haven't read the emails, you should. They're yummy; salacious and gossipy. No, if you've any familiarity with the sort of cliquishness that goes on in academia, they won't really shock you. We've all seen stubborn bullheaded people blinded by their beliefs before, nothing new there.

But what you really need to read are the code files.

It's all a scam, anthropogenic "climate change" is bunk. We've all been had, to the tune of millions of dollars in grant money.

I started reading this crap a week ago and it's still fascinating. This is Piltdown and Lysenko all rolled into one.

If only the journalists would, you know... do a little journalism. They can spare a dozen fact checkers for Sarah Palin's book, but they can't find a few folks who know Fortran to do a little investigating?

More fun with the farm bill

You know, the more I learn about how our congress operates, the more concerned I become. Frankly? I'm starting to think amendments, insertions, and riders should be prohibited from bills under consideration. I'm also starting to think that no bill should be permitted that cannot be read by your average congresscritter in an hour. Furthermore, I think the buggers ought to be tested on every bill before they're allowed to vote on it; no pass, no vote, your constituents are shit out of luck and should've voted for a smarter human being. Better luck next time. Hey Barry, didn't you promise me that I could look at every bill coming up for vote before it hits the floor? How's that coming, any sort of ETA on when I can expect that "change"?

Just FYI, y'all ought to be checking your furniture for place-of-origin and tree species. Supposedly this asinine idea includes labeling for all wood products, including paper. I wonder if they'll have to tell us where our printer paper comes from. Or our paperback books- will they have to leave room on the back cover to tell us "this book printed from pulped garbage and 100% domestically grown American sprucewood"? Oooh. Wonder if they'll have to label the ginormous bills that congress votes on, too. Ooh. Rubber trees- will rubber stuff have to be labeled as well? Will those quarter bouncy- balls in the machines all have to have a sticker on them saying where their rubber comes from? THE LABELS! Will the label stickers all have to say what they're made out of, too?

It's about time...

Okay, I'm a little late to the party, I know. But I want to pontificate on Roman Polanski for a moment. Be not alarmed, gentle reader- I shall not make apologies for the man. "Brilliant director," I keep hearing. Alas, I've seen a grand total of three of his films- Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, and Tess. Mind you, I loved Tess, but then I love Hardy, so I would've seen it regardless. Anywhoo... it occurred to me today that in all three of these movies, there is a recurrent theme. Some innocent young girl is always being taken advantage of by some wicked man. So I got to wondering, just how many of this man's movies involve rape?

So Hollyweird wants his sin expiated. Or at least some of the louder and less sane parts of it do. Sorry, for that he needs apply to his priest, not fellow perv Woody Allen. Never has the divide between middle America and the entertainment elite seemed so vast. I rather want to grab some of these folks and shake them. "Have you daughters?" I wonder, "Would you trust this man with your child?" Or is there some sort of karmic sliding scale these "compassionate" people would employ? One murdered wife and child exchanges for one rape of an underage girl?

Yes, he's old, yes, she forgave him, yes, the judge was an imbecile and the case was wonky. But it was wonky from the get-go; he should've gone to trial. What sort of people craft a plea bargain for drugging and sodomizing a thirteen year old girl? And yes, Ms. Goldberg, it WAS "rape-rape." What is described in the victim's statement is not just statutory rape, it's rape by coercion and force.

I told you this was coming...

Law of unintended consequences and all that. Damn CPSIA law strikes again. They're coming for the craigslisters, and the ebayers, and the thrift-shops, and your yardsale is next, bub. Nobody sells kiddie crap without first crossing federal palm with the requisite silver. Walmart's already prepaid for the right to sell cheap shit to the public; you haven't. And you can't afford to.

---

Cash for Clunkers... the ugly truth.

Let me preface this post with my own car-owning history. My mother bought a brand newDodge Omni in 1985; this is the only new car I ever remember our family owning. When I started driving in 1992, it passed to me, and was my first car. It was followed by an 87 toyota corolla (bought in 94), and a 95 corolla (bought in 97.) This year, I reluctantly parted with the 95, replacing it with a 2000 Mazda MPV (which lived less than a month) and finally, my current car... I've gone oldschool; she's a 92 Toyota Corolla, with 25000 less miles on her than my old 95. The point to this is: I buy used cars. I am the used-car market, and until this year, I bought cars that were slightly used- a couple of years old when they came to me. New enough to be reliable, and used enough to be affordable.

I'm the market that will be adversely affected by Cash for Clunkers, a program which rightly should be called Handouts for Rich People; as it helps buy cars for the wealthy, at the expense of the poor. Poor people don't buy new cars, they don't get new cars every couple of years. No, my fellow struggling students, single mamas, etc; we buy a car for cash, and we drive it until pieces start falling off in traffic. Or even after; the 95 hadn't had left windshield wiper in a year when I said my goodbyes.

So I'm more than a little put out over this. Have a look-see at what becomes of the "clunker" after Obama buys it. I must say, I was a little sick looking at such colossal waste. If he HAD to buy these things in order to prop up the new car market, why not at least make the clunker available to the used car market? or if it can't be sold as a driveable car, why not part it out to keep other cars running? Why this need to destroy perfectly good, drivable cars?

These are not "clunkers" in any sense of the traditional understanding of the word. Every one of these cars has to have had insurance on it for the previous year; clearly, that means most of them were driving until they went in to be killed. Let's make this very clear: public tax money, spent to destroy saleable merchandise, during an economic recession/depression. Who on EARTH thought this was a good idea?

The brilliant minds who thought up this swindle are right now hard at work overhauling our healthcare. Feeling under the weather yet?

Completely Non-political genealogy post

This will be a completely non-political post. I'm putting it here because Googlebots can pick this up and make it searchable, whereas they miss a good bit on the various genealogy boards. Besides, I'm not sure where I'd put a post like this on those anyway...

I have been researching the family history since 1997. Over the years, I've made contact with dozens of cousins all over the country. I've also lost contact with them the same way. People switch providers, people get divorced, people lose contact. Life happens, and we lose each other. 

My phone number has changed, but my name's the same and so's my physical address. And my nonphysical one.  I'm Nmissi at aol dot com. If you write me there, I will get it.  I've had various other addresses through the years, but that one has never gone away. I still get feedback there on really bad fanfic stories I wrote more than ten years ago; I KNOW y'all can find me! 

Here's the thing... I'd like to try to arrange a get together at some point for all the various cousins. A meet and greet, swap recipes and photographs, kind of thing. Nothing massive that needs advertising- we'd meet at my home, and by way of hospitality I might be persuaded to make lunch. I can cough up a few local relations, but for the distant cousins, I'm gonna need some help. So... I know they're out there somewhere: Leslie Shover, Karen Collier, Bobbette Givens, Ruth Prewitt... drop me an email? Let me know how to find you! 

This message has been brought to you by the DEVER/LAMBERT/HARNESS/DIAL/JONES/TINGLE/TERRELL/FORD/BRADEN

/ATHERTON/BETHUREM/HALL/WRIGHT/WARNER commission to put names on all my photographs.

Emergency post- Blood Donors Needed

If you're in Texas, and eligible to donate blood, please consider making a donation for my friend Aaron. He is in the hospital recovering from a heart bypass. Click for more details.
Please keep Aaron and his loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.

Obama, translated