necturus

If the people of Massachusetts stop to think about it, they'll surely understand that allowing casinos to open here is not a good idea. Other than Nevada, which is a special case, what state has ever seen a benefit from having casinos? The whole point of these businesses is to remove wealth from working people and their communities. Every dollar lost at a casino is a dollar not spent at local stores, restaurants, or other businesses; the presence of the casino means local car dealers will sell fewer cars, plumbers and electricians will see less work, home improvements and other major projects will get deferred, and the whole community will be the poorer.

From a Marxist perspective, the casino can be seen as a regressive, parasitic enterprise that takes wealth from working people and concentrates it in the hands of casino owners, who give back nothing, not even the investment that a classic capitalist provides in the means of wealth production. The casino owner is not unlike a drug dealer, but the casino owner is likely to be far richer and more influential in local politics, making him, her or it (in the case of a corporation) a danger not just to the gambler but to the integrity of the Commonwealth itself.

If you're in Massachusetts, vote Yes on question 3 this November. Let's repeal the ill-considered act of the General Court and Governor Patrick in allowing casinos to operate in our Commonwealth.

There is a legend that in June of 1941, an anthropologist opening the tomb of the medieval Mongol conqueror Tamerlane found on it an inscription that read, "when I arise from the dead, the world shall tremble", and within the coffin, another: "whoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I".

Seventy-three years ago today, on June 22, 1941, 3.8 million German, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian, and Finnish soldiers suddenly and without warning invaded their eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union, on the orders of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, in violation of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

This computer claims that the square root of 2 is exactly 1.414213562373095048802. If I tell it to multiply that number by itself, I get 2.000000000000000000000.

I went for a long walk today. God, I'm tired.

There are red-eared sliders in Jamaica Pond, young ones. That means there is likely a breeding population there. The red-eared slider is a turtle native to the Mississippi Valley; supposedly it can't breed this far north, but methinks otherwise. The turtles in the pond, and others I've seen in the Muddy River and the Charles, are likely the descendents of escaped pets.

Someone got up in front of the assembled multitude at church and declared today to be the fourth Sunday after Easter. That's wrong; it is only the third Sunday after Easter Day, which was of course a Sunday.

But Easter, like Christmas, is a season, and whereas that dark and depressing time of year lasts a mere twelve days, Easter consists of fifty days, eight of them Sundays. Today is therefore the fourth Sunday *of* Easter, not after it.

I've been up to my ears in archosaurs. I had to make two trips to Block Island last week; then the satellite dish on the roof at WUMB got taken out by a wind gust; then a transistor fried in WSRO's new transmitter, and I had no spares. Fortunately the station can still go on the air, but at reduced power.

When I called the factory, they gave me a price of $100 apiece for the transistors and recommended I order two and replace both the failed one and its counterpart. However, they couldn't tell me whether or not they actually had the things in stock.

Googling revealed a source for the same transistors that will sell them for $5 apiece. So, I ordered five of them. The trouble is, I won't see them for at least two weeks; the transistors are made in China, and that's where my source turned out to be. Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó wànsuì!

I spent most of yesterday working on a replacement for my venerable home mail/Web server, which is running out of space and hinting that it might be time for a new hard drive. I have the new server running in parallel with the old one, and hope to have everything moved over to it by the end of the weekend.

I had planned to go to Binghamton this weekend, but work intervened, and I ended up spending most of today wrestling with automation system problems and a truly bizarre Emergency Alert System issue -- those annoying buzzes were going over the air out of phase, so listeners in mono couldn;t hear them. Unfortunately, the FCC has a bug up its butt about EAS, so this is a big deal.

If this had been an actual emergency, the annoying buzz you couldn't hear would have been followed by official disinformation, noise, and confusion. This station serves the corrupt capitalist elite. This concludes this test of the Emergency Alert System.

Between work and family commitments, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. When I do find some free time, I can't seem to motivate myself to do anything constructive with it. That bothers me more than a little.

It seems my brothe is going to fetch my father for my nephew's graduation; all I have to do is get him back to Bighamton when all is done,

Now I have to decide if I want to attend my college class reunion. The featured speaker at Commencement is Michael Bloomberg; ugh.

Tomorrow isn't just any old Easter. It's also Russian Orthodox Easter: Христос воскресе! Usually Orthodox Easter lags western Easter, sometimes by several weeks, due to the eastern churches' adherence to the old Julian calendar. But this year, eastern and western Easter fall on the same day. It's 420 day, so expect an unusually mellow Easter in Colorado and Washington. And, of course, it's That Asshole's birthday. But it's also the 35th anniversary of President Jimmy Carter's encounter with a rabbit, about which Tom Paxton sang this song.

If you don't eat your rat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your rat?

I went out last night to see if any frogs were singing. They were, but only the peepers, and there were none of them close by. I did not try tonight, as we had choir practice, which we usually have on Thursdays, but the choir director had a conflict tomorrow, so we reschedued for today.

We are practicing a Kodaly piece for this Sunday, and Mozart's Ave Verum for next Thursday, which will be Maundy Thursday.

We seem to be singing a lot in Latin these days.

If the Last Supper had happened three days earlier, we'd have Maundy Monday.

While I was visiting my father over the weekend, the phone rang with news that one of his friends has died. There has been way too much death lately.

My accountant asked me the other day if I regret not going to business school and working on Wall Street. Well, there are some things in my life I regret, but that's not one of them. I enjoy what I do for a living, even if it doesn't pay what Wall Street does.

I do think I should have taken more risks when I was young, though.

Oh, well. Water over the dam... The future begins tomorrow, as W.D. Richter would say. We must work while the clock she's a-ticking.

I miss Marion. It was hard not to think of her yesterday at the NH station when the Yankees were on. She would have been pissed, though, as the Yankees got shellacked by the Orioles. THUH-uh-UH-uh pitch...

Just under four hours from now, WBUR AM 1240 in West Yarmouth, MA will become WBAS, with a Brazilian format. I have spent an immense amount of time getting this to work. The studio in Centervile is still not ready -- no heat, for one thing -- so the programming is going to come from my client's other station, WSRO in Framingham. There is a local automation system and a switcher capable of accommodating up to eight different audio sources; a lot of the programming is eventually going to come from people with home studios.

My biggest problem right now is that there is no way to monitor the station from off Cape, as the signal doesn't reach the Boston area. If we spent the money we could get something like the Comrex BRIClink, which can pass audio in two directions, allowing the folks in Framingham to hear the station. But the BRIClink is not cheap, and my client doesn't want to spend the money.

I have something with me called a Barix Instreamer, and I could use it to encode an Internet stream, but I need to install it in Centerville tomorrow.

Hmm. I wonder if there's something I can do with this automation computer...

The problem at the New Hampshire station wasn't the contactor; it was a relay, probably as old as I am, with a spring that no longer sprung, and therefore no longer made contact sufficiently to feed the 208 volts into the contactor to flip it from day to night position.

Working in what felt like extreme cold -- no more than 10 F -- was a challenge, and it took from 4:30 AM until about 10:00 to replace the relay. The screw holding one of the wires in place wouldn't loosen, and instead the lug broke off, requiring me to solder a new one in its place. Getting the soldering iron to heat up sufficiently was surprisingly difficult.

Part of the field behind the station was an enormous frozen lake whose surface was like polished marble. It is amazing what beauty one finds in nature, even in the bleakest midwinter.

I had intended to wait until today, but my usual Thursday client wants me to meet the phone company on Cape Cod today, so I switched him to today and took care of the NH problem yesterday.

I had to sing to myself on the road home to keep from falling asleep. I noticed that my voice had become raspy and hoarse, perhaps from breathing so much cold air.