Fallout Shelter

It's too bad she won't live! But then again who does?

When I was a tortured young child, my private hell was that others were actually robots put on earth to abuse me and drive me crazy.  But I didn't know how to tell for sure that someone else was a robot.  So using the Voigt-Kampff test to tell humans from replicants in San Francisco's mayoral race seems like a good idea to me.  :)

By the way, the putative author of the article has the same last name as the Blade Runner character blown away at the beginning of the movie.  Coincidence? 

Dead men do tell tales

In what's becoming de rigueur (or maybe I should say de rigueur mortis), dead author Robert Heinlein has a new book out. At least he was alive when he wrote it.

2 Fast, 2 Furious, 2 Many Running

Do current California politics seem like a bad reality-TV show? Maybe it's a movie instead: the Hollywood Stock Exchange invites you to bet "Hollywood Dollars" on the California governor's race. Hey, why doesn't someone make a movie out of this crap? Never too early for a cattle call! Moooo!

Of course, if you want to bet real money, there's TradeSports et al.

It's enough to drive you to drink

When drunk driving laws result in innocent people dying, I wonder if something's wrong?

Woman left at store after accident dies, fell out of pickup making U-turn

Windshield killer gets 50-year term

Articles above require short free registration -- sorry.

Where Are the Cheap Hibachis?

I like to cook.  I don't cook so much as I want, but I try.  And I grill: my grilling season runs from February to December.  For years I've done that grilling on a cheap hibachi.  I think I paid four dollars for it at a drug store.  I had to assemble it: stamped sheet-metal body, grates that looked like recycled engine block, and unfinished, pre-cracked wooden handles.  But it worked.   It worked for, oh, eight or ten years.  I left it out in the rain.  I dropped it.  I moved it from house to house.  Three moves may be as good as a fire, but my hibachi kept working. 

But I got upscale.  I bought a $100 charcoal grill Cook's Illustrated said was the best of the lot.  You can cook a turkey in it -- hell, you can probably cook half a hog.  Adjustable fire pan height, temperature gauge in the lid, side tables: this thing has it all. 

I think Elie Wiesel said (maybe Joseph Fletcher beat him to it) that the opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference.   All I know is my hibachi fell apart a few weeks later. 

I live by myself.  I don't need to fire off five pounds of charcoal and heat up something the size of an oven for my Friday hot-dog-on-a-bun.  My new grill is too damn big.  Hell, I can put my old hibachi inside it.  And there was my idea: I'll buy a new hibachi, keep it inside the cavernous new grill, and keep the hibachi in better shape.

So where are they?  I've been all over this town: hardware stores, dollar stores, emporia, even the aforementioned drug store.  No cheap hibachis.  No hibachis at all.  Turns out my friend Reiko has been looking too -- no luck. 

At first I thought maybe grilling had become too popular, and no one wanted to pay four dollars for a cheap hibachi: they'd rather spend $40 for a Weber knockoff.  Then I found a $4.99 round barbecue grill at the aforementioned drug store.  But it's just not the same. 

Where are the cheap hibachis?