Omens and portents

Of course I heard of the bird and fish deaths so far this year in the southeastern part of the US.  But I had no idea the extent of the problem: this map is the most comprehensive I've found.

The last few years have seen a panic about bee die-offs, and the news keeps getting worse.  The first comprehensive study shows declines in bee populations by 85-95%.  This summer I smiled every time I saw a bee, even when on one memorable occasion the damned thing buzzed around my face and hair for twenty minutes.

Even if this is just the beginning of the manmade climate disaster, I've gotta say; this doesn't sound good.  I've always been stubbornly scientific in my thinking, and certainly none of the prophecies of the end of the world sound particularly authoritative.

But I'm making extra time for my friends and loved ones (you can never do too much of that regardless).

Interesting bits of legislative action

The US House of Representatives has a much nicer website than the Senate. Their list of legislative resources includes Thomas, "in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson," which gives a ton of information from the Library of Congress about bills currently in progress.  You can also get a pretty comprehensive collection of information about enacted laws and treaties, plus other interesting legislative documents, from the Government Printing Office.

Private bills govern only a specific person, group, or corporation. For a current example that I found picking through Thomas, H.R.6499 is specifically for the relief of Celina Hernandez.  It allows her to stay in the US for another year despite her illegal immigration status in order to care for her two sons, who are both US citizens.
 Private bills are always discriminatory, but the US constitution prohibits Bills of Attainder, or any legislative action to declare people guilty or to retroactively declare an act criminal.

US Senate

A guy at work was horrified that I didn't recognize the name of some politician  who was going to give a speech, so I'm remedying my deficiency.  Then I embarrassed myself by not being able to remember the Vice President's name (standing there going, Joe somebody... not Lieberman...). I did cough up Hilary Clinton for Secretary of State, so it wasn't a total loss.  Not gonna lie, the politicking this past three months or so was so ugly that I averted my eyes even more than I usually do; I know even less about the incoming politicians than I knew about the ones we already had.  So I figure I'll start from scratch, one branch of government at a time.  Sadly, I forgot the name of whatever politician was going to give a speech, but I suppose you can't have everything.

The President of the Senate is the Vice President of the US (currently Joe Biden, thank you very much).  The Vice President's only constitutionally mandated governmental power is as President of the Sentate- casting the deciding vote in any Senatorial tie.  The first Vice President, John Adams, set the precedent for the office by keeping his nose out of most Executive Branch duties - he was reluctant to challenge George Washington's newly-minted authority.  But Adams had anticipated that, as President of the Senate, he could be the guiding hand and general leader of the Senate.  He bitched at them endlessly until apparently the rules were changed and the day-to-day senatorial governance was delegated to the President pro tempore (in general the most senior senator of the majority party). See this article under the heading "President of the Senate."

The Dean of the Senate is different - an informal title with no official duties, given to the senator with the longest continuous service.  Currently the President pro tempore and the Dean are both Daniel Inouye, D-HI, born 1924(!) and in office since 1963 (!). If he serves until June 29, 2014, he will become the longest-serving Senator in history.

The current senate Majority Leader is Harry Reid D-NV (since 2007), but after the January swearing-in it will be Eric Cantor R-VA.  The leaders of each party are selected by general vote from all the members of the party caucus, not by seniority. Seniority is used rather to decide who gets to sit in which committees, who gets to sit closest to the floor, and who gets the best offices.

The rules governing seniority in the US Senate are more complex than I realized. If I thought about it at all, I suppose I assumed that seniority was simply based on cumulative time spent as a Senator.  Instead, it's based first on current consecutive time spent as a Senator, then whether you've previously been a Senator and for how long, then what other kinds of political offices you've ever held.

Second-to-last is which state has the highest population.  If the newest census reversed the population ranking of two states, I wonder if their seniorities would retroactively switch?  After you get down the list of all 11 criteria, final ties are broken by alphabetical order by last name (in case two senators came from the same state on the same day and have identical credentials).  Has that ever happened?

It sounds like there is considerable rule-making for the purpose of preventing pettiness.  According to Wikipedia, John Cornyn's predecessor, Phil Gramm, "resigned early, effective November 30, 2002, so that Cornyn could take office early, and move into Gramm's office suite in order to begin organizing his staff. Cornyn did not, however, gain seniority, owing to a 1980 Rules Committee policy that no longer gave seniority to senators who entered Congress early for the purpose of gaining advantageous office space."  Seriously.  They had a problem with people resigning from the Senate in order to give their successor a nicer office.

Anyway.  The US Senate.  Soon I will learn something about the actual Senators.  After that, the world. 

Smuggling in Hawaii

 Recent (entertaining) smuggling busts in Hawaii include a surfer with a duffel full of weed, a couple who kept claiming they had no more wads of cash and were lying every time, and last but not least, 42 exotic turtles.

In other news, Hawaii News Now actually has an entire section of the site dedicated to the TV show Hawaii 5-0.

The Mafia & co.

I've always been confused about the terminology used to refer to the mafia- and apparently I'm not the only one. In the United States, "The Mafia" is generally understood to the Italian-American Mafia operating within the US.  In 1962, Joseph Valachi introduced the world to the term "Costa Nostra", literally meaing "our thing," (though there is apparently some evidence that he was coached to use it as a proper noun instead of an informal phrase used by members).  The FBI added the article "La" for some reason.  Anyway, "Cosa Nostra" is used for any branch of the Mafia, or the organization/network as a whole. ( This 1967 article by Time Magazine about Joseph Valachi includes an amazingly straight-faced report of the slang used by the mafia - apparently before the terminology was a part of popular culture at all.) "The Five Families" refers specifically to the main mafia families who have ruled New York City since the 1930s.

While the Italian-American Mafia's primary activities only include, bookmaking, loan-sharking, extortion, gambling, drug trafficking.  Until the 1960s, they also dealt in prostitution. the Sicilian Mafia adds political corruption, arms trafficking, contract killing, arson, fraud, and counterfeiting. Apparently the Sicilian Mafia isn't super into drug trafficking.

Instead of one big organization, the mafia is more like a loose association of "families", "cosche", "borgatas" or "clans" (despite the name, their members are generally not related by blood). Today, according to the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, Francesco Messineo, there are 94 Mafia clans in Sicily subject to 29 mandamenti, with a total of at least 3,500 to 4,000 full members.

"Knowing" vs. "Knowing how to"

I've been a little stuck on what to write the last couple of weeks because most of what I've been doing is crafts.  But I figure I can just as well share some "how to" posts.

Today's installment:  Finger loop braiding!

This is about the coolest, fastest braiding I've ever done (and I really did learn it in the last couple of weeks so this isn't cheating at all).  Basically, instead of holding individual thread ends and braiding, you hold loops (two threads tied together or one long actual loop) and work them two at a time by passing the loops around and through each other.  It makes the movements easy and instinctive and it goes more than twice as fast because you're working with multiple threads at each motion.

I'm still trying to get the hang of getting the final color patterns to come out right; unless I'm looking right at the diagram I can't intuit how the colors ought to go.  But there are tons of patterns and instructions at fingerloop.org and the other sites they link to.

Since I quit my job, a number of people are going to be getting handmade gifts this year, and I have a sneaking suspicion that finger loop bracelets and necklaces, or even belts, may be much in attendance.

The end of the long silence

50,165, bitch!

In all seriousness, this is the most I have ever written for a single project.  Now it's just a case of getting to the actual end of the story, since this 50,000 is only a bit more than halfway there.