exempli gratia

If they are going to be labeling Genetically Modified food stuffs, and are concerned that the labels are going to scare people, why don’t they add “USDA Approved” to the label. ( I certainly hope the USDA is approving the basic foods in our grocery stores.) That should get rid of the GMO scare for folks that don’t know what GMO is all about and still contain the alert for those that are concerned about GMO.

It is very hard to capture the scale of the smoke. This is taken from about 10 miles away. Tuesday, June 26

An 82 – The best round of my life. With handicap that was a net 61.

Next, break 80.

May 2012 be your best one yet.

First thing – DO NOT RE-ELECT any incumbents. It doesn’t matter if they are the best public servant you have ever had. Sweep the table clean and let a new mind-set in to office.  And don’t vote for an incumbent until the system rights itself.

• If you are party-bound, do not re-nominate any incumbent in the primary.

Second thing – get another political party going. Enough of these Republican/Mini-Republican electoral choices. A choice between the greater and the lesser evil isn’t much of a choice.

We the People of the United States, in Order to

• form a more perfect Union,
• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defence,
• promote the general Welfare, and
• secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,

do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Borders Stores Closing – The Wall Street Journal Online – Interactive Graphics.

Looks like our Borders survived the first round.

How to boil water

Every time I write a bit on Congress, I go back to thinking about Representation. I am rethinking my original idea on making it 1 representative for every 100,000 citizens. The Constitution sets a lower limit of 30,000 per representative but it doesn’t set an upper limit. Evidently, 100 years ago Congress fixed the House of Representatives at 435 because they ran out of room in their chamber. This leads to one representative for over 700,000 citizens, on average, with Montana having one representative for over 950,000, today.

While 1/100K is a reasonable number – I think it give the citizens of each district a better chance to meet and know their representative and to share their views with them – I am willing to work with other numbers. 210,000 is about as high as I would like to go.  Close to what the level was when congress fixed the number of Representatives. People still have an opportunity to know their rep. Montana would have 5 representatives (OK there is a down side to most ideas). We would be closer to a representative democracy, closer than the country has been in a hundred years.

Of course, if We the People don’t do our job, nothing much will change in Washington.

I watched Tom Watson make his penultimate putt on the 72nd hole of the British Open. If it goes in he wins and it is the Ultimate putt. Oh, the heartache.

I had been watching Tom play the previous day and as he sat there at the top of the leaderboard, the TV cameras captured his image and it was an image of joie de vivre. As some of the commentators remarked, he had spirit. And I saw it today, as well. Here was a man playing the game of his life and loving it. He knew he could win and he would win. But that penultimate putt veered away from the hole and ultimate putt put him into a playoff. You could see that the spirit had left him at that point and that he had conceded the playoff; he was just going through the motions. And when the cameras focused on his face duringm the playoff you could see that the spirit had been replaced by a dull heartache. It was such a vivid heartache I felt it myself.

Thanks, Tom, for a great tournament and I hope you make the ultimate putt next year at St Andrews.

I am looking at going to Montreal this summer and decided to see what it would take to train my way there.

Basically, it takes time.

I looked at two different route options: DEN to MTR via TOR or via ALB.

For your consideration.

No matter which way you go, you will need to overnight in either Toronto or Albany.

So the Optimal way to train it seems to be go via Toronto. That is a nice city to visit plus there are a number of TOR-MTR trains to choose from if you don’t want to catch the 1135. I I actually ignored some earlier trains so I could sleep in.

And Return via Albany, where the are minimal layover times and you can get back to Denver in three days.