I saw this ad on the tube the other day.
What. Are you nutz?
You have to touch the seat. You have to touch yourself, for heaven’s sake. Why would anyone in the world fall for a “touchless” flush?
It was a rough winter in North Puffin. Fortunately, I was in South Puffin at the time. We had some plumbing issues. It turns out we also had a difficulty with the frig.
I have changed my spelling preference.
♦ The first citation of “frig” as short for refrigerator in the OED is from E. F. Spanner’s 1926 novel Broken Trident: “Best part of our stuff here is chilled, and with no ’frig plant working, the mercury will climb like a rocket.”
♦ The earliest “fridge” cite is from Frame-Up, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”
Hmmm.
The frig didn’t seem as cold as it should but our only freezer thermometer died in the freezer downstairs, so our first clue was that the milk seemed warm in the glass.
I’ve always resisted buying a refrigerator. We bought this more-than-20-years old frig because SWMBO wanted it, not because our previous white-box-that-makes-cold stopped making cold. It’s a really nice bottom freezer model with adjustable shelves and great access. It was the champ when it was young and had lots of fans. Unfortunately one of the fans has maybe gone on to love someone else. The white-box-that-makes-cold stopped pushing the cold into the box with the food in it.
I put some of the frozen canisters I use in my coolers in the frig and moved the ice cream to the otter freezer.
SWMBO and I both have wanted a French door, bottom freezer, frig.
New French door, bottom freezer appliances cost more than some cars. As my friend “Bob” said in 2009, “$1,200 is too much. $3,000 is mindless.”
I agree wholeheartedly. I gave SWMBO the assignment. Check the sale fliers. Check the garage sales. Check craigislist. Find something we can afford.
Regular readers know I like Craigs List.
She found one in the third listing. “Brand new Kenmore…” The asking price was about half the current sale price for that model. I was on the road 10 minutes later.
I don’t really think the young seller is in the Russian Mafia, but it is indeed a brand new frig, fresh off the truck, with original packing and wrapping and taping. SWMBO is quite pleased.
On the subject of tape, if there is an uptick in refrigerator sales, buy stock in tape companies. It took most of a day to find the seller, inspect and buy the frig, and install it. It took twice that to remove all the tape. I don’t think I actually removed all the tape.
We arranged to meet in a hotel parking lot because the seller wasn’t sure of his mother-in-law’s address where the frig was in the garage. We arrived at the hotel first to find a Vermont Law Enforcement convention but no seller. He eventually drove in (the truck he was going to bring it with wouldn’t start), sneezed on us, and lead us back north to his mother-in-law’s house at the exit just south of where we started.
My truck has a cap so we had to lay the new frig down in the bed. The widest door in the house is the front door to the great room. That’s the only possible entrance for a box that is 34″ deep and 36″ wide.
Step 1: Stand the new frig up on the front porch. Cover with blue tarp so it is invisible. Let it stay awhile to reacclimate to being vertical.
Step 2: Move old frig into the middle of the great room and plug it back in until the new one settles down.
Step 3: We renovated the kitchen a few years ago, including building an alcove for the 33″ wide old frig with a nice liquor cabinet beside it. The carpenter had buried the screws in the side of the liquor cabinet, kind of behind the 2″ butcher block top. I pulled the top, got to the screws, and pulled the cabinet. I put it in the garage — out of sight, out of mind. It won’t fit beside the new 36″ wide frig but it’s too nice to toss.
Step 4: When I say I covered a mouse hole in the wall behind the frig, I mean a MOUSE hole. About 4″ high and 12″ wide. I have a vague recollection that the carpenter punched that hole by drilling lots of holes around the perimeter, then punching it out so we’d have access for a water line if desired. It left something that really looked chewed. And I could be misremembering. I do not want to meet that mouse. I covered it with a piece of steel. Since I have now really annoyed it, I really really do not want to meet that mouse.
Step 5: Boy howdy, new frigs don’t roll sideways.
Lurve jail blankets. Lurve.
This is a story very much like the platform bed coming down the low clearance stairway in Jersey. The tape measure said it wouldn’t fit so we just didn’t tell the movers.
I removed the door handles (bad design: two different size allen wrenches required) from the new frig. Popped the great room and cellar doors off their hinges. Moved furniture. There was no wiggle room, even if the frig had been inclined to move sideways when wiggled. I put a plywood plate on my handtruck to distribute the load and used my truck loadbinders to strap the thing on. Used jail blankets to pad the box. Anne pushed. I pulled and balanced. And we got the thing in the door. After considerable jockeying, it landed in front of the alcove and slid right in as if made for it.
I did not break my hand. Anne did not get concussed. We had to put it down while it was still on the porch because we didn’t get lined up straight. She stopped it with her head. And putting it down next to the alcove, it caught my hand. No apparent damage to the frig.
Step 6: Plug it in, run it a couple of hours, and fill.
Lo and behold, it ran like a new frig. Even the door alarm works, evidenced by how long we had it open while loading it. (Thankfully, that isn’t a siren call; it makes a steady ping-ping-ping, then the lights turned off.) There is both more and less room innit. I can put two gallons of milk and three 2-liter bottles in the door(s) but there isn’t as much room for butter or salad dressings because the door shelves aren’t adjustable height.
The worst part of having a new frig is the inconvenience of retraining. I have spent 20 years walking into the kitchen and opening the door by popping it on the edge. Now I have to pull a handle in the middle.
Step 7: Took the handles off the old frig and rolled it out onto the porch. Number One Daughter gave me instruction for that. “For the love of God, Pete and all that is Holy — please put the old fridge directly on the truck and take it to Hodgdons. Seriously, why touch something more than once — don’t move it from one place to another — JUST GET RID OF IT.”
Seriously, after we bounced it around the great room, the temp came down to normal. Maybe the mouse (remember the mouse?) had climbed in the air duct to build a home …
Writing the craigslist ad to sell it now.
Want to know why I distrust our liberal friends?
They drive how science goes wrong.
I started this three-part series with the simple question, “If you distrust what the Administration told you about the military, why do you trust what they say about global warming?”
Yes, I chose two hot button issues across the political spectrum. It’s always more interesting than yattering in a corner about National Safe Digging Month versus potholes
The responses follow a predictable pattern:
“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the latest IPCC AR say it is so.”
“in Europe, where environmental awareness is far higher, everyone takes human caused global warming seriously.”
“There is 97% agreement on human caused global warming.”
“Man-Made Climate Change Deniers are the authentic environmental wackos.”
“BS, Dick.”
“Trust but do not verify” follows every “complete agreement,” the Liberal signal that people have not thought through their pet issue, are mistaken about their pet issue, don’t want to hear contradictions about their pet issue, and go ballistic if I ask them to rethink it.
See the summary of responses above.
Let’s look at the 97% agreement on human caused global warming and the IPCC.
John Cook published a paper in Skeptical Science that claims he and others reviewed nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. They found that “97 percent of the papers” that expressed a position on anthropogenic global warming “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
Our liberal friends latched onto that one, you betcha.
Unfortunately, Mr. Cook, um, cooked the books.
It turns out he was not alone.
The Economist reports that “modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying — to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity” — and they are doing it in fields from biotechnology and rust to, yes, “global warming.”
Papers from PNAS and IPCC fill most of the categories the Economist lists. Unfortunately, I do not expect my Liberal friends to accept the Economist [La la la la la la la la la la la] as a source, though. After all the Economist said of Liberal darling Paul Krugman, “the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.”
And finally, for those who pray at the institutionalized ignorance altar to Al Gore, there may be a scientific consensus on global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans have created global warming, although I suspect 100 percent of them believe humans have created the crisis itself. Of course, this finding was in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies, so it must be suspect, yes?
There is good news: The Economist also reports, “The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.” [Emphasis added]
That small trend is a good start, but I don’t see it taking hold anywhere in the human-caused global warming industry and I don’t see it taking hold in the media or populace that supports and pays for said human-caused global warming industry.
Want to know why I distrust our liberal friends?
The NYTimes reports that the National Climate Assessment study was prepared by a “large scientific panel overseen by the government and received final approval…” The White House released the report May 6.
The White House “wants to maximize its impact to drum up a sense of urgency among Americans about climate change — and thus to build political support for a contentious new climate change regulation that President Obama plans to issue in June.”
Mr. Obama wants to drum up urgency about climate change and build political support for [his] new climate change regulation.
Mr. Obama didn’t introduce it with a Rose Garden speech, though, because that would (a) give him only one shot at marketing it and (b) would give the people who understand the actual science yet another major opportunity to demonstrate how political this is. Instead, Mr. Obama “spent Tuesday giving interviews to local and national weather broadcasters on climate change and extreme weather.”
Don’t want to take my word for it? Read what climatologist Roy Spencer has to say. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Spencer was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Climate Confusion is his popular book on global warming.
For the record, there are still 975 days until Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, so there is little doubt among our liberal friends that LAX will be underwater before the next President takes office.
“We Only Have 500 Days Left to Avoid Climate Chaos!”
Cool!
I started a kerfuffle without really trying when I posted a random quip on Facebook.
If you distrust what the Administration told you about the military, why do you trust what they say about global warming?
There’s nothing particularly profound about tossing out a query that rotated into my email signature file. On the other hand, it does ask a profound question.
You can read the more than 100 comments here but I’ll summarize the discussion:
“Because they said so!”
“Oh no they didn’t and besides, they’re wrong!”
“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
That’s the usual take on social media these days when a person who studied materials science, a cartoonist, an international banker, a retired chemist, and a couple of writers set themselves up as the experts on climate science. Or any other hot button issue.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
–Mark Twain
The solar deniers in this argument are quick to blame “the Internet” or “Faux News” or the “Koch Brothers” for any data that contradicts them. The irony that their proofs come from “the Internet” or “MSNBC” or “Tom Steyer” or the totally political IPCC aggregation committee apparently eludes them.
Once upon a time, I thought that nothing rivaled the misinformation spewed by global warming true believers and spinmeisters. Then I reported on the anti-GMO campaign. The way the Far Green consortium has distorted science makes Dr. Murari Lal look pure.
“We thought that if we can highlight [the fake ice melt data], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action,” Dr. Lal told the Daily Mail.
In both cases, the purpose is to convince you, Dear Reader, to take up arms in the cause.
In both cases, the purpose is to keep the Green flowing. The green research dollars. The green investment dollars. The green tax dollars.
Science is not a Harris poll. It doesn’t matter a whit whether you believe in cold fusion or phrenology or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. It doesn’t matter if 71% or 51% or 0% of all mankind believe in global warming. 100% of scientists believed Aristotle who told them a heavy body falls to earth faster than a light one. One man didn’t. The Church later found him “vehemently suspect of heresy” for saying the sun didn’t rotate around the earth. He spent the last years of his life under house arrest.
The trouble with our liberal friends
is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just
that they know so much that isn’t so.
And they would force us to go along.
–Dick Harper paraphrasing Ronald Reagan paraphrasing Mark Twain
Want to to know why I distrust our liberal friends?
Because they deride faith but put their faith in all the fads their polls tell them to believe. Because they adhere to vaccination denials but don’t accept the things Galileo (and others) showed them data to support.
And because everyone jumped to defend their faith in the “settled science” in this thread but not one of them answered the original question.