Salad Is Slaughter

We knew we were going to be stuck around the house this weekend because the new fence is going up. We wanted to be around the house while the workers were doing their thing, so I rented some movies to keep us occupied.

Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo and Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo  B- I rented the original Deuce Bagalow to go along with the sequel because I barely remembered it. Both movies are essentially identical; the location changes to Amsterdam and someone is killing man-whores. I did like the sympathetic way that they treated the women who hired Deuce. Adam Sandler appeared for about 10 seconds, and we had to replay that part to see if it was really him. They’re both decent movies for what they are.

Fantastic 4  B A standard super hero movie with lots of action, special effects and humorous one-liners. Five people are sent to a space station to study a radioactive cloud, and end up with super powers. Four of them become the Fantastic 4, the other becomes their nemesis. It’s escapism and it works.

Wedding Crashers  B+ The Wedding Crashers started off with an A grade, but it started to drag a bit when the “crashers” spent the weekend at the estate. The premise was pretty good: two guys crash weddings to try to pick up women and get free food and booze. I think their plan would work if the reception didn’t have name cards on the tables. The movie picked up again at the end when Will Ferrell made an appearance as the guy who’s moved on from crashing weddings to crashing funerals to get women.

Lord of War  A+ Lord of War was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while. Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer who will sell weapons to anyone. Except for Osama bin Laden. And not for moral reasons. He doesn’t sell to bin Laden because his checks always bounce. There are some great scenes in this movie, like watching a piece of copper move through a factory to form a bullet, then following it as it’s shipped, then put into a weapon, then finally fired, and hitting an African kid in the head. Or when Orlov finds that his sleeping son has a toy gun in bed with him, and he takes it and throws it away. Lord of War is the story of a guy who knows what he’s doing is wrong, but tries to distance himself from his business by telling himself that he isn’t pulling the trigger. Everything about this movie felt real.

Four Brothers  C+ Standard cliché movie: four brothers from the worst part of Detroit were taken in by a kindly women. She’s murdered, and they hunt down the people responsible. It’s mindless entertainment with lots of car chases and shooting things up.

The Aristocrats  B+ Some of the best comedians in the business tell the same obscenely filthy joke in their own style and add their own embellishments. There are also some good discussions on the history of the joke, its evolution, and about comedy in general. I thought the best telling of all was by Eric Cartman. I recommend that you stop this movie about every 20 minutes or so, and go do something else for a while. Then come back and continue from where you were.

Technorati Tags: movies

I guess people do read my ramblings. I got the following email this evening from Chez TJ explaining their chef change that I talked about here. Since she sent it to my gmail address, and I don’t sign up to mailing lists with it, she must have seen my comments.

It was nice of her to write, and I do agree that we’ll be hearing more of Joshua Skenes in the future. He is a fabulous chef, definitely world class.

Hello Mr. Hofer,Thank you for your patronage over the years. I do feel we owe our longtime guests an explanation for recent changes at Chez TJ. I just wanted to let you know that the last chef change at Chez TJ was a matter of support for our employee and not a reflection of any other issue. When Michael Mina came in with his corporate ceo we knew something was up. Bottomline, they made Joshua an incredible offer so we did what we felt was right: we thanked Josh for all he did for us and encouraged him take his career as far as he could. (Let’s just say you will be reading quite a bit more about Josh in the future!)

We do have an excellent chef working for us now (and we tried out at least 1/2 dozen this fall!) His bio is up on our website if you are interested. http://www.cheztj.com/ We are also sending out an invitation to all of our customers in the next few weeks to come try his menu. We hope you are able to join us sometime this year to see what he is doing. In addition, I think you will find the winelist has undergone some very nice renovations complete with a new wine steward on our floor. She and Chef Kostow are doing a dish by dish wine pairing that is very nice indeed!We always strive to maintain a world class experience at Chez TJ even though we are just a little restaurant in Mountain View. Hopefully, we will not go through a chef change again for long time. We are very confident in Christopher Kostow and his cuisine. When we do find the right person, we hope to offer them a partnership in the business, thus avoiding the changes in the kitchen.

So, now we know what happened. I don’t know when we’ll get a chance to go back to Chez TJ to try out the new guy. Our current fine dining plans are Valentines day at Manresa, Joel Robuchon at The Mansion and Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill in Las Vegas, and Janet’s birthday at .  We’ve been meaning to try La Foret for a couple of years now.  Maybe we can sneek Chez TJ in on my birthday, but it’s going to be a while.

I’ve been back in the space biz for over three months now and it’s like I never left. I spent a year helping people put banner ads on their websites and five years testing database search software when I was gone, and got some good experience. But when I returned, the fourteen years experience playing with satellites – twelve years in day-to-day operations – came roaring back within days.

During those dozen years in operations I flew a lots of unique satellites. I just missed working on SOLWIND, the first satellite to take a picture of a comet hitting the sun because it was destroyed by the first ASAT weapon ever used. It would have been good experience because the antenna was busted in several places which made commanding a bear, and it had power problems that made payload planning difficult. That would have been interesting.

I don’t think I ever summarized the satellites I did fly, so here goes:

SCATHA – The Spacecraft Charging at High Altitudes satellite was my first. Near the end of its life we flipped the spin axis from the orbit plane to normal to the orbit plane to save fuel. Not only did we not have to do an attitude maneuver every two weeks, the scientists got some different data.

P72-1 – This satellite was probably 16 years old when we finally turned it off. The batteries used to get so low during eclipse that the clock would stop.

Instrumented Test Vehicle – There were two of these satellites and they were originally intended to be targets. My favorite ITV story is here.

Thrusted Vector – This was the first SDIO project I ever worked on, and we worked for about three months without a day off. We practiced the command load we needed to load after the circularization burn so many times that we could do it in our sleep. That was an interesting time.

Delta Star – Who says you can’t make a satellite out of spare parts, go from concept to on-orbit in nine months, and have it collect data three times longer than its design life? This satellite had more downlinks than any other vehicle I’ve seen before or since. A guy at one of the tracking stations put off his retirement to see if we could pull off the mission. This is also the satellite where I first met current NASA boss Mike Griffin who was instrumental in making everything happen. He impressed the hell out of me. Delta Star was my all time favorite satellite and I’ve written about it several times here and here.

Relay Mirror Experiment – We proved that you could shoot a laser at an orbiting mirror and hit a target. Of course, it helped that there were a couple of guide lasers to help with the aiming. Still, it proved the concept.

CRRES – I know who I blame for the premature death of this satellite, and it wasn’t the operators. If they had just over-charged the batteries by changing the V-T curve instead of overriding the solar panel safeties it would have returned data for at least 15 years. But they didn’t, and the batteries ended up severely damaged because they were really over heated. As it was, it did launch all of its chemical canisters (the NASA part of the project) and did get several years of data as it traveled in its geosynchronous transfer orbit (the Air Force part of the project). I do know that when they requested battery telemetry for in-depth analysis, some of the people didn’t appreciate that I labeled the fax cover sheet as “The Big Battery Bake Off.” My CRRES tape recorder story is here.

APEX – This is probably my second favorite satellite because I was the ops lead. I did a lot of traveling for this program; The DC area for the spacecraft bus, and Boston, Baltimore, and Monterey for the experiments. I wrote a lengthy piece on science and the way it works based upon what I saw during the APEX mission.

Skipper – I was really looking forward to this project. Skipper was a joint US-Russian satellite that would skip across the atmosphere (hence the name) then eventually come screaming in along the California coast and burn up. We could have watched the fireworks that night and it would have been really cool. Unfortunately, there was a wiring problem and the batteries discharged more in the sun than they did during eclipse. Whoops. I guess they needed to do more testing.

I thought there were a couple of other smaller projects too, but they escape me right now. But seeing everything that’s gone right and wrong with those satellites has been really helpful recently.

“Space,” says The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

At 36,000 miles per hour, the New Horizons spacecraft will pass the Moon’s orbit sometime during the first period of tonight’s Sharks-Oilers game, about nine hours after it launched. It will fly past Jupiter 13 months from now, and Jupiter will speed the craft even more, cutting years off of its travel time. And it’s still going to take nine years to get out to Pluto. When it gets there, it will take the radio signals four and half hours, traveling at 186282 miles per second to reach Earth. Space is big. Really big.

Of course, there were the dozen or so protesters at the launch site this week. They were upset that New Horizons has a nuclear power source. It has to. Pluto is so far away that there isn’t enough sunlight out there for solar panels to generate a usable amount of electricity. Their first rant was that if a launch accident occurred, radioactive material would be dispersed, hurt people, and more importantly it could harm plants and animals. Since they’re activists, the fact that the nuclear fuel container was designed to withstand a launch catastrophe and NOT spread plutonium around didn’t phase them. They aren’t interested in facts when nuclear power was involved. Some also protested that the nuclear power source is similar to what the Pentagon might use in a space-based weapons system. My response is, “so what?” You can use almost anything as a weapon.

This flight is worth doing, even if the payoff won’t come until 2015. As Alan Stern, the mission’s principle investigator says, “It is a window into the ancient solar system. It is a chance to look back into the history of the formation of the planets, and see worlds formed over four billion years ago and kept in the deep freeze — preserved as they once were — ever since.”

And what does that mean? Hal Weaver, the New Horizons project scientist explained that Pluto’s “atmosphere is kind of a weird one. It is a little bit like what the Earth’s atmosphere was at the time the Earth was formed. Some of the molecules are escaping out of the top of the atmosphere, escaping into space. Some of the instruments onboard the spacecraft are supposed to capture some of these escaping molecules so that we can tell what’s coming off the top and at what rate. So that will tell us something about how planetary atmospheres form and evolve.”

New Horizons has seven instruments — cameras, spectrometers and particle measurement devices that will reveal the landscape and chemical makeup of Pluto and its moons. In other words, it will take really cool 3-D pictures, figure out what stuff is made of out where the temperature is 419 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and search for rings and more moons.

There’s even organic material on the planet’s surface. No, that doesn’t mean that there’s life. It does mean that the building blocks that we would have expected to see on Earth 4,500,000,000 years ago are out there. Knowing what was around that long ago helps scientists understand how life first evolved on Earth.

Does the knowledge that New Horizons will return have any practical application to your everyday life? Not today or tomorrow, but like Robert A. Heinein said, “scientific research, no matter how ‘pure’ and useless it may seem, has an annoying habit of paying for itself many times.”

I was going to try to make a reservation on line at Manresa for February 11, since that was the closest Saturday to Valentine’s day. I clicked on their link (which takes you to Open Table.com and they said nothing was available. I called the restaurant about 30 minutes later, spoke to a live person, and got the exact reservation that I wanted.

I saw a commercial on Fox yesterday that said that Bones was moving to Wednesdays at 9:00. So far we’re recording Criminal Minds at that time, and if we’ve got something else on the other recorder, Bones loses. It’s an okay show, but Criminal Minds is orders of magnitude better. We still may catch Bones during its regular broadcast time, but if we’re busy, too bad. We won’t fret.

Some evenings I just want to stop my car, knock on people’s doors, and tell them to take down their damned Xmas lights already.

I noticed on the Chez TJ web site that they’ve replaced their head chef again. That’s at least the third chef in the past four years. Their last chef, Joshua Skenes was really good and I’m sorry to see him go. A quick Google search takes you to the James Beard site and reveals that Skenes is now at The St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort 

Monday’s Sharks game started at 5:00 PM, so I had to leave work after 8 hours instead of putting in my usual nine. I hated rushing home then heading to the arena for the early game, but I did like getting home by 8:30. Now I have to add an hour to Friday to get my work hours straight.

About 3:00 AM last night Rolfe decided that he wanted to climb up on the bed and snuggle. He’s been doing that a lot lately. I told him to get down. He moved to a different part of the bed. I told him to get down. He moved to another part of the bed. I repeated myself. He laid on top of my legs. I told him one final time. He moved to where he was originally. I finally said “to hell with it” and rolled over and went back to sleep. Dogs!