Philip Weiss

Union collective bargaining rights

Well, the Wisconsin Republicans have found a way to strip collective bargaining rights from government employees over the objections of the Democrats. They’ve managed to set union legal rights back by 5 to 10 decades in the state. That’s awful. And I have nothing good to say about it.

But…

It’s not the end of the world. Really.

Striking Miners Parade — Striking miners parade, Latrobe, PA

Unions once had no bargaining rights, and they managed to do a lot, and obtain those rights to boot. They can do it again. It would be hard. If the members of the union really act in concert, they can do it. They can strike. It may be illegal, but they can do it. They can do their jobs by the book. Politically, the Republicans are not likely to win re-election or even defeat a fair number of their recall elections because Wisconsinites support unions generally. What I’ve read indicates a lot of buyer’s remorse.

If Egyptians and Libyans and 100 years ago union members can face down guns, public employees in Wisconsin can fight back and win against stuff that’s much less threatening. But it’ll be ugly.

Cascadia Summit – Sounders vs. Whitecaps

The match today was a lot more entertaining than Friday’s match. The Sounders started their second string guys. Unlike the first string guys, they controlled the ball a lot better. On Friday it felt like we would inevitably turn the ball over before we could get down the field. We had a lot of chances then, but they came from our mids taking the ball away. Today, Friberg had some really good passes and through balls. He worked really well with Michael Tetteh on the left side. Both of them really impressed me. As for the other new guys, Servando Carrasco played solidly, though not spectacularly. O’Brian White on the other hand, seemed like he was really out of step. His timing was really off. He was not in the right place for winning headers. He missed passes from the wing that were as if they expected him to be somewhere else.

What was bad though, shockingly, was our defense. Supposedly that’s our deepest area. For the most part they played well. I wasn’t cringing every time the Whitecaps attacked. I knew they could handle them and they did. But they had three unforced errors that led to goals for the Whitecaps. Tyson Wahl inexplicably didn’t handle a back pass and it dropped onto the feet of the other team. The guys sitting behind me thought it was Boss’ fault there for not coming out. I don’t think he had a chance though. Two on the goal keeper means he’s gonna lose no matter what he does. The second he mishandled what should have been a clean snatch. The third Ianni failed to clear the ball.

I love Montano’s enthusiasm. I really hope they keep him over Pat Noonan. Noonan doesn’t add a lot to the team skill wise anymore. I think he’s actually somewhat better than Montano at this point, but he has no upside. Montano has a huge upside, and obviously loves to play.

I wish we could have seen Mauro Rosales play. I’d like to see for myself if he’s any good.

Cascadia Summit – Sounders vs. Timbers

I went to the preseason Cascadia Summit match between the Sounders and the Timbers last night. Thank you to Calissa for accompanying me. I’m really anticipating the season, although unfortunately I won’t make the opener versus the Galaxy on the 15th. Would have been nice to see all three of Juan Pablo Angel, David Beckham, and Landon Donovan.

The match last night? No so pretty. My impression from the stands was that the Sounders have not improved on their problems from last year.

Passing. The Sounders couldn’t pass to save their lives. Even simple passes kept being sent too far in front of or too far behind their intended recipients. Long passes were invariably intercepted. That might be the result of playing on a small pitch where there isn’t a lot of separation in space. However, the Timbers got some long passes in just fine. Short passes were often directly to the feet of the Timbers. I think the longest passing sequence was maybe 6 or 7 touches.
Ball control. Also awful. When passes were on target, the recipient couldn’t control it, a Timber would swoop in and take it away. When our center backs knocks balls in the air down, the ball wouldn’t fall to us. They couldn’t get it out of the final third, and they couldn’t get it to a Sounder.
Finishing. The shots taken were rarely on frame unless they were softly hit. Fernandez somehow managed to take a shot from 4 yards out that went 10 feet over the top of the goal. There had already been a foul called, so it wouldn’t have counted. You can have a shot defended from that range, but you really shouldn’t miss over the top. I’m a big fan of testing the keeper. If you don’t have an open shot, hit it hard on frame and make the keeper work. Then someone can swoop in and get rebound shots or get a corner. We had a lot of corner kicks in the match, but not from saved shots.

On the plus side, our defense was actually pretty good despite giving up two goals. Portland’s Kenny Cooper looks really pretty good, but Parke and Hurtado were up to the task. Alonso was a hustling monster as always. Montero worked his butt off too. That’s an improvement over his first year or so when he didn’t always keep playing when he lost the ball.

I have tickets to the Whitecaps match on Sunday. I’m looking forward to that. The games are fun even when we don’t play well. (Well, except for that Galaxy game last year where the Sounders just gave up.)

Opinions and analysis are the product of armchair coaching by an unqualified amateur. This is worth exactly how much you paid for it.

Working out goal

Well, I didn’t get started quite like I wanted, but I’m moving on it now. Sometimes the universe conspires against you and the best thing to do is use it as inspiration.

When you are out of shape getting you’re heart rate up for cardio is really easy. According to the machine 32 minutes, 3500 strides, 292 calories.

Also, using the phone keyboard feels very odd with the left tip of my thumb still healing. I can’t feel the keys normally. Just a tingly sensation.

Shrimp and Stuffing Bake

Back to cooking some new things for me. This one is based off a recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Casseroles (page 105 if you care). Other than the soup, little else is pre-made.

The recipe calls for frozen or fresh medium shrimp, but I prefer smaller shrimp in dishes. So I got canned since I didn’t see any of the small shrimp in the freezer. The downside is there’s a lot of salt in canned shrimp. I figure boiling the shrimp removes some of the salt though. I also avoided the condensed soup in the recipe because the only condensed version of cream of celery at Whole Foods was super high in salt. If I remember correctly, it was about 33% U.S. R.D.A. per serving. So I got an uncondensed kind and used a little bit more. It was pretty thick stuff, so I only increased the amount used by a couple of ounces over the book’s recipe. I bought bread made in store, which unfortunately doesn’t list the sodium content. It is the third ingredient on the list though. I’m thinking the sodium I don’t know about in the bread is balanced somewhat by the amount of sodium taken out by boiling the shrimp.

12 oz. canned shrimp (1980 mg sodium)
1 celery stalk
½ large onion
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
about 12 ounces creamy celery soup (720 mg sodium)
¼ cup milk (32 mg sodium)
½ teaspoon sage
¼ teaspoon dried thyme
dash of pepper
2 eggs
10 oz. crusty bread loaf

Cut bread into cubes/small chunks
Bake bread at 350° for 15 to 25 minutes to dry it out/firm it up
Boil shrimp for about 3 minutes (if fresh/frozen, until they are opaque)
Chop the celery
Chop the onion
Cook celery and onion in butter until tender (can use the same as the shrimp)
Add soup, milk, sage, thyme (crush first), and pepper
Beat eggs
Add eggs to the concoction
Mix well
Fold in bread chunks
Fold in shrimp
Transfer to 1.5 quart casserole dish
Bake covered for 30 minutes at 350°
Bake uncovered for 15 minutes.
Let it cool.

Pretty tasty is the result. About 4 servings. About 690 mg sodium per serving, done my way.

Also, now I know basically how to make stuffing. Can’t say it tastes a whole lot better than boxed though, which is cheaper. This has less salt. Without the shrimp the price might be comparable and the salt in this really a lot less.

And yeah, I know I’ve been harping on the salt a lot lately. It’s been one year today since my grandfather died, and I’m basically of the opinion that a high salt diet was the proximate cause of his heart attacks in the last year. The doctors told him on a couple of E.R. visits that salt intake was what caused his shortness of breath that prompted the 911 call. Can’t know what would have been; without the salt it might have been just as bad. Still, I owe it to myself to make these changes now rather than when I have heart problems at 83.

Negative interest rates

One of the problems with the economy is that we are up against the zero lower bound. For my non-economics inclined friends, one of the ways that the government (specifically the Federal Reserve, our central bank) manages things is by raising or lowering interest rates. If inflation gets too high, they raise interest rates. If unemployment gets too high, they lower them. In other words, to combat high inflation, they put people out of work. To combat high unemployment they allow inflation to rise.

However, unemployment has been high in the U.S. for long enough that the Fed has run out of room to lower interest rates. It’s been at 0.25% since December 2008. They can’t lower it any more, which causes all sorts of issues. Paul Krugman has been blogging about this for 3 or 4 years.

However, it turns out that the zero lower bound is more psychological than real. I missed it at the time, but Sweden instituted a negative interest rate in August 2009. Banks that banked their money with the Swedish central bank actually paid a penalty to do so. I don’t think they went negative on interest rates to loan money, which might be more complicated. The Fed funds rate above is more like the second, but the two interest rates should move in tandem. (Couldn’t find a link to the comparable Fed rate.)

What penalizing banks for saving money does is make it worth their while to loan it out, where they can make money.

And what’s the result been? Sweden’s highest quarterly growth rate ever.

The Sorensons, found

One of the first branches of the family that I worked on was that of my grandmother, Lillian Solle. My aunts Sue and Jane put together a book of mementos about the Weiss, Solle and Sorenson families and gave it to me in 2004. Prior to that I knew nothing about my grandmother. She and my grandfather divorced in 1966. After that, according to my mother, Lillian would have nothing to do with the family.

I took the information in the memory book about Lillian and her parents and their parents, and started gathering what I could find. Lillian’s mother was Flora Sorenson, the 4th of Nels Hansen Sorenson and Katherine Hansen’s living children. Nels and Katherine emigrated to the U.S. in July of 1883, and settled in Madison, Wisconsin. They built a house at 1118 E. Gorham St., and lived there until they died. They were both from Langeland, Denmark, an island about 2/3 the size of Whidbey Island.

I’ve documented a number of other descendants of Nels and Katherine, some of whom make for a really good story. But I was kind of stuck at finding more information on their parents. I assumed the church in Denmark kept pretty good records, like the church in Sweden did. But I didn’t know how to obtain them and, being swamped with other branches, hadn’t pursued it yet. (I’m not kidding about being swamped. Click the thumbnail to the right to see my Windows desktop filled with icons of newspaper articles I’ve saved in the last few days and that I haven’t yet cataloged.)

All I’d found from Denmark was a record on the Sorensons in the Danish Emigration Archives that showed when they left. It’s just an index, and I haven’t yet purchased a copy of the actual records.

A couple of days ago, I came across a profile on Ancestry.com that looked very much like it matched up with the Sorenson family as of the time they left Denmark. It was entered by a woman in Denmark. I wrote to her, then sat on pins and needles hoping for a reply. I get replies about half the time when I write to relatives I find. One in Sweden wrote back once, and then didn’t reply after that when he realized I wasn’t going to pay him. Like a few genealogy people, he’d turned his hobby into a business and was looking only to sell what he knew about the family. I have living relatives in Sweden who will correspond without payment, so I didn’t bother. I was hoping this woman wasn’t one of that group, because she’s the only person in Denmark I’ve found so far who is connected to the family.

I got a reply this morning! She traces her ancestry to Rasmus Jensen Jørgensen. He married Nels’ mother Marthe Kirstine Nielsen after she had Nels by someone else. So we aren’t related by blood, but do have some of our trees in common.

I had found Niels’ marriage and the birth of his two sons and then suddenly I could not find him anywhere. I should have guess that he emmigrated. Two of his halfsisters did.

So now I have a bunch of information to add. A lot.

Taqwacores

I had lunch at Louisa’s today, and grabbed a Stranger rather than read my book. The Stranger Suggests for tonight was The Taqwacores, based on a book I read 2 or 3 years ago that I loved. So I headed up to the Northwest Film Forum tonight to see it (last night showing).

It’s hard to be as good as the book, because they can’t just fit everything in. There was less punk in it than the book. So some of it was more like Muslim deadbeats living together rather than Muslim punks. And it was choppy; the character progression wasn’t smooth. Both issues really attributable to being able to fit less story in. But they kept all the main characters, and the best scenes. The acting was really superb, particularly the “straight-edge” Muslim punk who you could just see the anger at having to live with less devout Muslims steaming off him. And the overall effect was just as good as the book: outcasts trying to reconcile their heritage they don’t want to give up with their rebellion which rejects a lot of that heritage.

Also, I swear the roof of the building they lived in coulda been the same roof as in Clerks. There’s just not a hell of a lot of difference between tarred roofs of brick buildings.

Magic Fields proportional image resizing bug

I’m posting this in the hope that it becomes sufficiently Google ranked that other folks who have had the problem can find the answer explain, as the sources of this information were buried in a Google Group and were not complete answers.

I am attempting to build a new book review blog. I want to have book cover images attached to posts, as well as a lot of other meta-data. My current plan is to use the Magic Fields WordPress plugin.

I created a new MF custom panel called ‘Review’ and added a field called ‘Cover’ with the type of ‘Image (Upload Media)’. Then I used get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150’) to retrieve the image in my theme. This seems to do a ‘zoom-crop’, which is a term I haven’t heard before (call me clueless). What I got was an image that where the smallest dimension (in this case, the width) was reduced to 150, and the extra from the other dimension is just cropped off. What I want is for both height and width to be reduced until both are below 150.

There’s a zoom crop option, that can be forced off. I tried that: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’). The result is the upper left corner of the cover.

The solution as reported by Brandon Sorg is to replace part of the code of of the Magic Field file MF_thumb.php. Lines 118 to 174 of the original file get replaced with this much smaller piece of code:

	        // don't crop, just resize using $dest_w x $dest_h as a maximum bounding box 
	        $crop_w = $orig_w; 
	        $crop_h = $orig_h; 
	        $s_x = 0; 
	        $s_y = 0; 
	        list( $new_w, $new_h ) = wp_constrain_dimensions( $orig_w, $orig_h, $dest_w, $dest_h ); 
        }

MF_thumb.txt is the complete file (with .php replaced with .txt). Download, rename to MF_thumb.php and copy over the file in your plugins/magic-fields directory. Please check the contents of the file and verify them yourself, as I take no responsibility if it does not work as intended.

After that, the zc=0 in get_image must still be used: get_image(‘cover’, 1, 1, 1, $post_id, ‘h=150&w=150&zc=0’)

The next time you upgrade Magic Fields to a new version, your changes will be overwritten. Hopefully they’ll have fixed the problem by then. If not, you’ll need to re-do the changes. Which is why I hate hate hate fixing bugs by hacking around someone’s original code. I do not like forking.

WordPress as a CMS? Not so much.

Over the last year or so, Matt Mullenweg, Automattic (his company), and a coterie of bloggers who develop the WordPress platform have been claiming WordPress is a content management system.

I gotta call bullshit on that.

What they’ve done is build a back end (if you use the right plugins) that can be used to create content.

What WordPress can’t do right now, so far as I can tell, is deliver the content. So far, I’ve seen only one plugin that lets you do layout, Carrington Build ($499). I’ve seen no plugins that let you display generic meta-data. Lots and lots that let you create generic meta-data. But every single one that I’ve seen requires that user modify code in a theme to display the information.

To illustrate: let’s say I want to build a book review web site in WordPress. Now let’s say I want to have an index of reviews where all reviews of a certain author are displayed, sorted by author using a standard name sort (surname, given name). Really not easily done without writing code.

I have any number of plugins that allow me to add that author information. None so far for displaying it. Not without writing code.

And I’m pretty sure that moving the created data from one plugin to another would be a complete pain in the ass, because there’s no standard format for storing that.

I so wish the Drupal user interface were comprehensible. (Maybe it is now, I haven’t looked at it in a year plus.)