Month: July 2012

GeekDad is reporting that The Hobbit will now be a movie trilogy.

Count me amongst those whom find this a disheartening bit of news. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but I can’t imagine there’s enough material to make 3 movies worth. In particular, I’m having a hard time imagining the break points between the movies. While the defeat of Smaug and the War of the 5 Armies seems like a logical point between 2 and three, I can’t think where the first would make for a decent break point. Perhaps the escape from the goblins?

Either way, it seems likely this is a money making move. If 1000 pages of LOTR took 3 movies, I can’t see why 300 pages of The Hobbit couldn’t have been squeezed into 1. Perhaps Peter Jackson has gotten a bit big for his britches.

The kids watched a bit of the Olympic coverage again tonight. At that point, they got to watch a bit of the team platform diving. I’ll leave aside any comments about the merits of team diving.

But the boy asked “Why do they wear those things? The look funny.”

“I don’t know, that’s just what divers wear,” I answered.

“They look like tighty whitey’s,” he continued.

The lass was giggling at this point. Naturally, as soon as the conversation turns to underwear, things get giggly.

Then he said “They shouldn’t be wearing that stuff, girls wear underwear like that.”

The lass then offered her own observation, “Yeah, but then their boobs would be showing.”

More giggling.

An Olympics like no other.

This new paper by Anthony Watts seems like it could be a game changer. The key bit from the press release:

The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward.

The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, so it’s possible there are problems. But if the paper holds, then this paper basically says that the data used to calculate global warming sucks so much that we can’t reliably predict “climate change” with it.

It will be interesting to see what kind of press attention this paper receives. Especially from these sorts of folks. Might give us a chance to see just how serious they are about science.

Michael Phelps is a bit of a sore loser, it seems.

I base that on the interview after his race. Normally, I’d give a guy like that some slack since the last thing anyone wants, after a loss, is a microphone stuck in their mug with the “What went wrong?” question. But Phelps has been doing this since he was 15, so the mic isn’t anything new to him.

Watching him stammer, say that they “had the wrong plan” and that he was frustrated was kind of surprising. Interestingly, Bob Costas even mentioned it, but shluffed it off as him “not knowing how to handle it because he’s never been there before.”

I guess now we find out what kind of competitor he really is.

We had BBQ spare ribs tonight and, if I do say so myself, they were pretty darn tasty. The key was soaking them in a brine overnight. Well, that and the 6 hours at low heat.

The brine was just salt and molasses. I used about a cup of pickling salt and about a half-cup of molasses in 5 quarts of water that I put in a roasting pan, since that’s all I had big enough to set the rack of ribs in for soaking purposes. The soak lasted about 12 hours.

We don’t have a dedicated smoker, but we do have a Weber Kettle grill, which has to be the most versatile grill going. I got about a dozen or so charcoal briquettes going and then divide them up on opposite sides of the grill. Finally, I got a tinfoil cooking sheet and set that down on the grill so the dripping from the ribs wouldn’t get all over the place.

The grilling is the hard part, because the idea is to maintain a temp of about 225 for as long as it takes to cook the meat until it’s falling off the bone. In order to do that, I have to keep adding briquettes to the grill, about every hour or so. I use a digital thermometer to keep an eye on the temp, I just dangle the probe down through the exhaust port in the grill top.

One of these days I’ll get a Big Green Egg to make this a lot easier. But in the meantime, no one was complaining about the results. Even the kids had a couple of helpings. Although they felt the need to inform me that they liked baby back ribs better. There’s no pleasing some people.

One of the cooler (I think) Summer features of our yard are the Cicada Killers which appear each year about this time. They are a giant wasp (the one pictured above is about 1 1/4 inches long and perhaps 1/4″ thick) and live for about a month. Yes, really. But in that time, they demonstrate themselves to be extremely effective hunters of cicadas. By the time they are all gone, the lawn will be littered with dead cicadas that were unsuccessfully brought back to their nests.

The CK’s live in underground nests. They capture and paralyze the cicadas and bring them back to their nests, where they lay an egg on them. Their young then have the food to last them through the until next Summer, where the cycle starts over again. They also appear to be solitary insects, rather than a hive sort. While there may be many in the yard, they do not band together in a single nest. They are literally sprinkled around the yard, each with their own place. They engage in some pretty nasty aerial combat sequences with each other, though that’s typically only for the first few days after they first emerge from the nests.

The other interesting thing is when they return from the trees with a cicada, which are several times bigger than the CK, even as big as they are. The cicada is held between the CK’s legs and it’s obviously a struggle to get back to their nest with their payload. In fact, it typically appears that it’s all they can do to maintain any semblance of controlled flight. They try to get as close to their nest as possible. Once they’re on the ground, they can drag their prize for a bit, but don’t seem to be capable finding their nest if they are too far from it. If they don’t make it, they’ll abandon the cicada and get another one and try again. I’ve tried putting cicadas near a nest opening, but the CK’s won’t use them.

I’ve found that they are very passive where people are concerned. I’ve walked through a swarm of them in the yard (mowing the lawn) and they are content to let me pass. The one in the picture allowed me to get the camera within several inches of it without getting upset. I’m glad of that, as I wouldn’t want to be stung by one based on their size.