What's wrong with the anti-gun control people. Do they like living in the wild west?

36 people shot, 9 die, during weekend in Chicago
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- An outburst of gunfire rattled the city during the weekend, with at least nine people killed in 36 separate acts of violence. Police respond to one of the numerous shootings over the weekend in Chicago. The shootings were reported from Friday until Monday morning, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said. They included gang shootings, drive-by attacks, and even one case in which someone used an AK-47 to shoot up a plumbing supply store. Authorities did not immediately say whether any of the shootings were thought to be related. Police Superintendent Jody Weis blamed an excess of guns and gangs."There are just too many weapons here," Weis said Sunday. "Too many guns, too many gangs." During the same weekend last year, there were 19 shootings in Chicago, including four homicides, and 21 shootings were reported during the same weekend in 2006, police statistics show.

A plumbing thought.

I'm told that when running water was first piped into our homes that the first sinks had a cold water faucet on one side and a hot water faucet on the other. You could get hot or cold running water, but not warm. Mix them together in the bowl and you had warm. It was fifty years later before anyone put the two lines together and let you adjust the water to any temperature you wanted. So I have a plumbing idea.

In the summer when I shower, I fix the single handle that regulates temperature at about the "two o'clock" position. On the cold side of gauge. In the winter I fix the same handle to the "ten o'clock" position, over on the hot side of the gauge. Now the temperature of the water is about the same coming out of the spout, and the temperature of the hot water from the tank is regulated at the same temperature, so the difference can only be the temperature of the cold water coming inside from out in the ground. That makes sense.

So why don't I have a cold water tank in the house, next to my hot water heater, upstairs in the furnace room, holding say 75 gallons of luke warm, room temperature water. I can't even think of a time when I need really cold water. Okay to make ice cubes I guess, but what else? This would me to reduce the hot water I need by a lot. Often I warm the water up just a bit, wasting water letting it run until it is warm, just to wash my hands. If the cold water were already room temperature, I doubt if I'd do that so much, and when I need warm or hot water I wouldn't have to mix in so much 140 degree water to get the 110 degree water I want. Wouldn't I save boo coo on my water bill and on my natural gas bill? What could it cost $300 for such an installation. Wouldn't I get thousands back over the years? Hmm. I must investigate. What if everyone had a cold water holding tank inside the house. What would the savings be nationwide. Wouldn't it be like discovering a major new energy source in the country? And a cool thing about money saved is that it is worth way more than money earned. You had to pay 40% or so in taxes to put a dollar in your pocket. The increase in your pocket from savings, is tax free.

Let's all rush out and get cold water holding tanks.

Observations on walking a dog

If "dawn" is "when the sun comes up," then it is not always darkest just before the dawn. There is a good hour of the sky lightening before dawn. It is darkest a long time before dawn, say midnight. This is not good news for people in difficulty. It may be a looooonnnng time before the sun shines on you.

The program on optimism and pessimism was enlighting in that it said optimists were more successful, they were elected to office, they were more popular, and generally held in high regard by the world. Pessimists had only one valuable quality. They were almost always right. No joke here. It was a science show. Darkest before dawn made me think of that.

When I was a child I read the funnies every day. That was a luxury that we had I guess. We took the daily paper. I never thought about how the newspaper influenced me. We were people who read the paper. As I walk the dog, I see the AJC (Atlanta Journal and Constitution), thrown in driveways, then there is the Peachtree Citizen (usually in the gutter), and the occasional Wall Street Journal. They are all bagged these days. [When I was a lad throwing papers from my bicycle at 5 a.m. we only bagged the papers when it rained. We were required to bag the papers when it was going to rain or it had just rained, and the bags cost the paper boys 1/2 a cent per bag. We made 1 cent for throwing a paper. So on rainey days we lost half our money. I had 100 papers, got up at 4:00 a.m. to throw them, waited at the drop in the cold and rain, had to go around to each house and collect the money for the papers (That was a great trick, the company sold the papers to the boys. We had to collect the bills. If someone wouldn't pay, which happened alot, the paper never lost money, the paper boys lost money. Cool huh?) and when it rained, we lost 50 cents of the dollar we could have made that day. But there were Sundays. On Sunday we made seven cents a paper. So in a good week I could make $13. I averaged about $40 a month for about 60 hours a month of work. But hey. I was rich. And in 13 months as a paperboy I saved $400. Tips. I forgot to add that some people gave tips for porching their paper every day, say an extra 15 cent a week. That was my mad money for icecream at lunch, or improvements on my bike. I had a second hand bike that had been hit by a car and the frame broken in two. But someone welded it back together and my dad bought if for me for $17. I got the paperboy baskets from the previous paperboy on my route for about $3. When I first started the route I was little that I had to load the papers into the bike with it standing up because I couldn't pick the bike up once it was loaded. I wobbled around the route with each toss threatening to knock me down. In fact when I did crash, I couldn't pick the bike back up again, so I'd stack the papers by the side of the road and go throw part of them and then ride back and pick up the rest. It was an adventure.] Back to today's papers. Who would know that the papers aren't news. Were they ever? Businessmen start papers and invest a lot of money to do so. The papers print the news that the businessmen want printed. It's no coincidence that the plastic bags used for the Wall Street Journal are Red. It is a red-state paper. And the Peachtree Citizen couldn't be any more of a rightwing conservative hack paper than it is. I refuse to look at it and view it as litter thrown in my yard each week. The AJC has some balance, but remember Georgia is a Red state. If the reporting were balanced, no one in Georgia would buy the AJC.

Okay, why not a Manhattan project for energy? We built an atomic bomb. We went to the moon. Pull the best minds together on a crash course with unlimited funds to figure out how to use Hydrogen, or to convert solar, or to store energy in new forms of batteries. Imagine solar batteries that would power your car. We already have solar golf carts here in PTCity.

I've been off judging choirs in Tennessee this week and I've decided music education is a failure in America.

What makes a spiral galaxy spiral? Does there have to be a black hole at the center? I read that there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And there are an unknown number of billions of galaxies. What is 200 billion squared? 4 plus 18 zeros? How many planets around those stars? How many other perfect places for life? Yet we can't get to any of them. Sheeesh.

My spirits seem to elevate when the weather warms and finally the weather has broken here in Georgia. Finally I don't have to don stocking cap and gloves, heavy coat and ear muffs to walk the pooch her 1.1 miles at 7:30 a.m. What's more baseball has begun, just when you've given up hope that the game will be played again. Right now the front porch, the walk, the car, the cartpaths are covered with yellow dust, and overactive effort of the pine trees to recreate themselves. It's a mess.

In a couple of weeks, April 18 were are having a local competition for music majors that will end in $25,000 in scholarships given to a dozen music majors for next fall. It has been fun, yet a lot of work to coordinate this process. I did the leg work which was probably worth $3-4K if you had to employ me, but the real work came from Randy who sprung for the $35K or so that it has taken to put on the whole thing. I hope the kids don't fold under pressure.

It is not being reported in the news, but apparently Barack Obama actually won the Texas primary and caucus. Hillary Clinton got slightly more of the popular vote, but lost the caucuses by a wide enough margin that Obama got more delegates overall, and it's delegates that make the difference.

Congratulations Barack. So much for the Clinton momentum. She didn't win 2 of 2 last time out. In fact, we could say that Obama won the last one so big mo must be in his corner, right. Only no one is mentioning it on TV. Hmmm, does this mean they are for Clinton and not Obama?

No one is talking about that approximately 100,000 Republicans crossed over in Texas to vote for Hillary. Not because they are for Hillary. Heaven's no. Rather, they think she would be much easier to beat so they want her to be the candidate. The Repubs are tricky. They want to pick the Democratic candidate and then defeat him, er her.