Dakota Today

**Storms and hits on SD Highway Cameras at DT

Not much of a surprise to anybody in South Dakota that our weather goes up and down like a roller coaster. Might be shirtsleeve weather one day and a day or two later we may be "enjoying" a foot of snow. Whatever, the TypePad hit counter shows a post here on the SD Hiway Cameras generates more hits when the weather may be causing driving problems.

It would be nice if South Dakota and perhaps the SD Rural Electrics and Rural Telephone coops could get together to add a few more photo sites such as down here in South Central South Dakota where the weather radar sometimes grossly misses actual local conditions. While SD DOT is at it, they might think about adding some weather data to the photos. Below is a not too good suggestion, but might be worth somebody with more influence than me pushing a bit.

And, below just in case we get some more nasty driving weather is the link to those cameras...even if they do ignore southern South Dakota.

New Window LINK to SD Highway Cameras

**Stay tuned even if my lunar eclipse photos were over-exposed--- Doug Wiken

Winner Spring Winter or Snow and Mud

I watched KELO weather for the last week or so with doom-filled projections for monstrous snows and thought their initial predictions would put most of it in SE South Dakota. But, I cleaned up most of the tools outside anyway. Then when the snow hit, there wasn't much...until it hit again and again. I don't know, there may be something between 6 inches and a foot of snow. A lot of it melted on the bottom making mud out of the township road and also making it very hard to move the snow off after my little Mitsubishi Eclipse proved it was not a snow plow. Anyway, I got it shoveled out and moved enough that I could clear off most of the snow with the tractor. Below is a photo I took this morning in Winner a few hours before they got around to blading the snow off the streets.

The sun is shining now and if the wind slows down a bit, the area would be pretty tolerable. Sounds like next week is going to be more like actual spring. This snow seems wet enough, most of it may stay where it fell which would be some good moisture for the area.

My son-in-law said he saw something like 20 cars and two semi-truck-trailers in the ditch along the interstate in eastern SD last night. The slush on the roads out here yesterday could have pulled vehicles into the ditch, but I haven't heard yet if there were any serious crashes around here. Electric power flickered off and on so that hospitals, etc. had to switch to standby power generators.

**Stay tuned. The weather is always a topic even if it is never interesting to anybody except the victims themselves--- Doug Wiken

**Some ideas just go to pot

A few weeks ago I happened to see a cooking show where a pasta pot was used. It was actually two nested pots-- an outer pot with an inner perforated pot. Cook the pasta in the nested pots, and then just lift out the pasta with the water draining out the perforations into the larger outer pot. Really looked slick compared to trying to carefully pour a gallon or two of boiling water off pasta without dumping pasta or steaming fingers, etc.

I did some searching on web and at a local discount store. Such pots were not cheap compared to ordinary stew pots. At Pamida, an eight quart version that also included a steam tray was around $24. A stew pot that would fit right into our 16 or 20 quart pot was on sale for about $8. The tightwad Norwegian tendencies kicked in and I thought, "How hard would it be to drill some holes?

Well, drilling holes in a stainless steel pot provided a small bit of education. The first two black oxide drill bits from a cheap set snapped before they made any more impression on stainless steel than my fingernail would have. So, off to a hardware store to get a better center punch and a 5/32" titanium drill bit. That worked much better. Of course, the price gap between $8 and $24 was narrowing. With tax, the bit was about $2. I will probably use the $4.79 punch for several years...but.... Anyway after some swearing and disgust at less than an ergonomic design for an electric drill spread over an evening and a morning, I had over 100 holes drilled without breaking the titanium bit. That wasn't so bad after all.

Time to clean up the fillings. Then I noticed that few of the holes drilled with a clean edge. Stainless steel like that in these pots made in China or India flake off like small bits of shiny oatmeal. And when they don't flake off leave a razor sharp tab next to the hole. Some tedious "grinding" with a sharpening stone which was the closest I had to a useful tool at the time and place and the pot holes were more or less cleaned up.

Next day, I got a rotary steel brush which would fit a drill and finished the hole touch up. By then I had enough holes that something in the neighborhood of 9 quarts of water would drain out in 10 to 15 seconds.

One advantage of working on something like that is that one looks at the pot very carefully and in good light to see if the holes are cleaned up or if filings remain. I noticed a black substance around rivets and rolled seams and in every groove or indentation. Hmm. Wiping with a paper towel and soap and water gradually removed that. I don't know if it is a polishing grit or a mixture of polishing grit and fine stainless steel or what, but I did see rather quickly how contamination could get into processed food and even machine filings, etc. So, next was putting the pots together and boiling some water in it to remove oils, etc.

Then, I wondered about the pot which we had used for a couple years. The lid on it had rolled seams. Running a paper towel around the rim into them yielded the result shown on the paper towel in the photo.
So, I suppose we have had some pasta over the past year that had water somewhat less than pure as a result of the whatever black stuff slowly washing into the water with the condensed steam.

Based on my experience, I would suggest not trying to save a few dollars and instead finding a good pasta pot if you can. The combination did really work slick after it was finished and clean. I assume the ready-made ones would be as useful or more so. I also became very aware of how filings, etc. could end up in cooking equipment and food processing machinery. Cleaning up was really a pain in the rear.

BUT, I also think it would be wise to carefully examine all metal pots in a good light and then carefully wipe around rivets and seams with significant pressure and persistence if you notice a black stain or grit in seams or around rivets, etc.

So much for how-to-do-it or more likely how not to save a few dollars.

***Stay tuned, I'm sure there are more political events going to pot than there are even pots going to pot--Doug Wiken

**Dominoes, Dominoes, and more dominoes

First, like a stopped clock, now and then Sibby is perhaps on track. I don't know if violent games are a good target, but they may be in the same category as the trash violence that pervades television. So, read Sibby and think about this for awhile. Corporations and politicians would not advertise on TV or in games if they thought TV had no mind-changing capability. I find TV and media executives who keep claiming their violence has no effect on minds less than persuasive.

New Window link to SIBBY on Court, Games, Violence

Meanwhile in the Rapid City Journal's newest incarnation of Mt. Blogmore, Randy Rasmussen has dredged up the Vietnam War and claiming that it was lost only because of a lack of political will, etc. etc. He doesn't mention the "domino theory", but that was one of several arguments used to support the Vietnam War. Amoebic, aggressive communism was going to tip over a country and take control using that to tip over another domino country in a chain of dominoes. It seems to have been a flawed theory. Had it been a theory of the kind scientists test, it would have been tossed out into the dustbin of history before it had a chance to fail again.

Now, we have the Bush administration pushing several forms of domino theories. Domino variation one in the Bush prospective dustbin is that if we did not bomb Iraq back a few more years in its Islamic stoneage, we would be overun with terrorism and the whole world would fall like an enormous string of dominoes as planes fell out of the air, ships sunk in the sea, skyscrapers toppled one after another into each other, etc. etc. Domino after Domino.

But wait, there are more disasters waiting for another Bush,Inc domino theory or two. What if we attack Iraq? Well, democracy becomes the new domino pusher. One after another middle east countries mired under the grasp of a desert religion or perversions of it for political purposes will move from oppression of women into the light of modern day and then as that domino tips, it will bring light to the next and then wonder of wonders, another domino will fall over opening up the light of democracy, etc. etc. etc.

I don't think we want to take the latest incarnation of domino theories any more seriously than we want to take the latest apologies for the old Vietnam domino theory.

Call Bush,Inc folly what it really is...a series of domino theories elevated into a new level of clouds and smog with a whole raft of politicians and pundits willing to claim it all makes sense so that all those lives they have already wasted really weren't wasted after all.

The new domino theories will be popping out of the cemeteries like flowers on graves in the hopes that the pilot who got shot down over Vietnam can be taken seriously as a GOP presidential candidate.

***Stay tuned even if your only relationship to dominoes is the current peculiarly dumb Domino Pizza ad--- Doug Wiken