THE WEISS CHRONICLES

Monday, December 29, 2014

A Local Museum Trip 

With traffic light and the weather not too bad, Ann and I decided to take in a museum today.


We went to the Crime and Punishment Museum which is only a half block from the 7th and F entrance to the Gallery Metrorail station.

The image, the car Bonnie and Clyde were in when they were killed, is one of the exhibits.


They also have a lot of the stuff that was found in Ted Kaczynski's cabin. He had, among other books, The Brother's Karmazov, the Bible (with the ten commandments underlined) and Al Gore's book "Earth in the Balance".

The images at left are of the amusingly and egregiously inaccurate forensic sketch and  Kaczynski at booking (and SNL sketch was based on the presumption that the artist just doesn't like drawing eyes). 


The museum has many, many original items and some fun games. For example, I got to be a simulated Swat Team member and hit an armed suspect with a non lethal shot pretty quickly after I spotted him - this earned me an 'attaboy' from the staffer). 


We spent over 3 hours in the museum without being bored.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 5:59 PM

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Water Saving Toilets Do Seem to Work 

When we moved in to this house, we had three toilets, all of which used about 4 gallons per flush.

About a year ago, we got one of the 1.28 gallon toilets (American Standard brand - the cadet) and it worked considerably better than our other toilets. I had done an hour or so of on line reviews of customer on line comments before I made the selection.

So yesterday we replaced the other toilets with the 1.28 per flush types. Our water bill isn't that high anyway so I don't expect to save much on that side but simply reducing the 'overflow' events from, say, 2 per year to zero per year is a big improvement. 

posted by Martin Weiss  # 11:09 AM

Friday, December 19, 2014

Our fourth shower wall crack 

Since we've been in this house (1996), the inside wall of the master bathroom has had long longitudinal cracks 4 times. The first time we had a professional regrout the whole thing. That lasted only about 9 months and the guy had to come back and patch a crack. Then about 2 years later it happened again but our warranty had expired so I did it myself (the hardware stores had products that were usable by amateurs). That actually lasted about 5 years but a few weeks ago we had another long crack (over 3 feet long). 

The only problem with doing it by hand is that after the grout patch, you need several coats of sealant and that stuff smells bad.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 11:02 AM

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Beef Rib - all you can eat for free 

Today I was doing mashgiach work at a place where they were preparing for the White House Hanukkah reception tomorrow.

One of the appetizers for the guests is beef rib pieces. Of course at the event there will be four types of latkas (Sweet Potato, White Potato, Red Potato and Mixed Potato) as well as a dozen other items. There are two 500 person functions one from about 2 pm to 5 pm (starting on day 1 of Hanukkah) one from about 630 pm to 930 pm (on day 2 of Hanukkah).

The process of making the beef rib pieces requires getting rectangular non-fatty chunks which means getting rid of the bone, the fat and any uneven portions of beef. The butchering team saved all the uneven pieces and the whole preparation squad had lunch with it.  It was probably better than what the guests at the White House will have because the uneven pieces included some with more fat than what would 'look good' at the White House.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 7:03 PM

Monday, December 15, 2014

Did you give your cat aspirin today? 

I brought our cat Trina (aka Katrina) in to the pet hospital today for an ultra sound scan.

She has been losing weight  (see post of  Nov 26, 2014)

The technician asked me if I had given her aspirin that day. I wasn't sure I heard the question right so I said, "Huh, what" and the technician repeated the question.

It turns out that a company actually makes aspirin for dogs (but not for cats). If various websites can be believed, use of aspirin in cats is pretty dicey as cats can't digest it. Nonetheless, some people evidently do give their cat this medicine when they think the pet is in pain (or at least the Vet community thinks so).

\\ Picked up Trina today. They only did about 75% of the ultra scan because Trina kept crawling into the carrier or was very, very uncooperative. The scan didn't find anything significant.  She had, however, only lost about an ounce since Nov 28 and her bacterial infection was gone. 

Based on everything, the working hypothesis is that she got a bacterial infection sometime in early 2014 and began to eat less and less because of decreased olfactory capacity and thus decreased appetite. With the bacterial infection gone and us switching to wet cat food, this might end up bringing her back to a more robust weight, although not quickly as wet food has a lower caloric content by weight and volume than the dry food she had been eating since we got her in 2006.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 9:56 AM

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Diet Dreaming by Ann 

Ann had an annoying dream last night.

It was annoying because it was so banal.

She dreamed she received email from a friend.

The email had a rave review of a new diet and asked Ann to click on a link but the link turned out to be a combination of a hack and scam. 


Yes, that's an annoying dream.

posted by Martin Weiss  # 9:00 PM

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Coke Exec Presentation 

I was doing Mashgiach work at a conference downtown on Dec 5. 

It was an annual meeting of the Israel-US Chambers of Commerce.

The first plenary session (all the sessions were plenary) had executives from GE, Noble Energy and Coca Cola.

The Coke Exec mentioned Coke's long history in Israel (since 1966 or so) and the number of employees and the number of products, etc. He also made a statement that went something like this, "We Israel uses the marketing platform developed in the US to leverage its product innovation and the US uses the Israeli product innovation as a platform expedite marketing improvements in the US". The first image is a cool exec type Coke Bear and the second image, which I took back in 5772 has a Coke machine at the entrance to the Caro synagogue in Safed where someone had put the benediction "...whose word brings all things to be", aka the Shehakal, under the beverage selection buttons.

This reminds me of other great management-speak comments.

Of course there is the "we have honed our core competencies to exceed our benchmarks" comment from Darth Vader's blog. 

Several years ago, I remember the following statements made in plenary sessions at the Transportation Research Board,

"What we need are management systems that are robust and meaningful but do not require the actual collection and analysis of data" 

and

"I'm proud that the Federal Highway Administration is not just considering ITS, we are also actively investigating it."

posted by Martin Weiss  # 10:27 PM

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