A Tesla Model 3 travels approximately 4.13 miles on one kilowatt hour, or 871k Joules per mile. A 50% efficient ICE will have a theoretical 65,000,000 Joules of energy on one gallon of gas, capable of travelling about 75 miles at the same Joules per mile. A 20% efficient ICE will have a theoretical 26,000,000 Joules of energy on one gallon of gas, capable of travelling about 30 miles at the same Joules per mile. This makes a gallon of gas roughly equivalent to 7.3 kilowatt hours on a Tesla when considering an average ICE, or 18.2 kilowatt hours when considering the most efficient ICE in the world today.
So use the following formula. If you traveled X miles on Y kilowatt hours of energy, then your MPGe is between [X / (Y / 7.3)] and [X / (Y / 18.2)] based on the equivalent energy used. However, at current pricing of approximately $3 per gallon and $0.15 per kilowatt hour, the 7.3 kWH is 64% less expensive while the 18.2 kWH is 9% less expensive. For an average ICE, factoring in pricing, you travel, on the dollar equivalent of one gallon of gas, about 174% further with a Tesla Model 3. Which is where the 105MPGe comes from. If energy was priced similarly, and ICE were more efficient, that gap would be much closer.”
So, Tesla wins? Or do I just need to get more ice for my Pruis? It’s usually found in a freezer in front of the checkout counters at the supermarket but we’re making as few trips there as possible right now.
So, I guess I’m not not ready to get a Tesla. At least at this point I certainly don’t see hocking the family Joules for one.
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“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
— attributed to Abraham Lincoln
and in other words
“If It’s Tuesday, It’s Kibbutz Movie Night!”
Whether Abraham Lincoln said this about what fools we mortals are or are not the truth of the observation is indisputable for me. I have personal experience. Only for this story I will substitute the word “please” in place of “fool.”
In the 1970s I was responsible for picking a weekly movie for a village of 500 people. It was on the kibbutz in Israel where I lived for seven years. Tuesday night was movie night and we screened a 16mm print in the communal dining hall in the winter and outside on the lawn in the summer.
A list of movies available for rental for all the small communities in Israel was updated every few months and scheduling your preferences required making a trip to Tel Aviv as quickly as you could to get in the queue for the newest releases. On those occasions the tiny office of the distributor was besieged by representatives from villages like mine which were desperate for entertainment.
I lived on Kibbutz Gat, 45 miles south of Tel Aviv, about the same distance southwest from Jerusalem and less than 15 miles from the Mediterranean Sea– Israel, if you didn’t know, is a small country.
In Israel in the 1970s movies were pretty much it for seeing moving images on a screen. The country had only one television channel and my kibbutz had only a half dozen televisions so radio was mostly all there was for broadcast media and culture from the outside world unless you went into one of the kibbutz bomb shelters where the TVs were. The weekly movie was a big deal.
I had arrived in 1972 and hadn’t done my army service yet when the Yom Kippur War occurred the following year. Overnight I became one of the few men left on the kibbutz under the age of 50.
For several months I milked the dairy herd’s 200 cows twice a day and became the designated projectionist for our weekly movie which during the war expanded to twice a week. The films were a diversion from stress and uncertainty and most of all shock and mourning. During this time five men from the kibbutz were killed in combat.
In the fall of 1974 I began my own military obligation and after being posted to an artillery battery not far from the Suez Canal I was able to use my movie projection skills one night to get out of guard duty. Turns out I was the only one in my unit able to mount an anamorphic lens to make Barbra Streisand appear zoftig (voluptuously plump in Yiddish) instead of ridiculously skinny for our watching a cinemascope print of Hello Dolly.
I returned to the kibbutz after completing my regular service– my battery gave me a ballpoint pen inscribed with “From Battery Gimmel” as a going away present –and was drafted again to be the movie night majordomo. As the one choosing the movies for the kibbutz, I discovered it was a privilege not without a price and best described by another Yiddish word that usually applies more to the unhappy twists and turns of life than innocent projectionists… That word is TZURIS!
I found two definitions under tzuris in my Yiddish–English dictionary.
1. Daughter pregnant with child of an unemployed bartender.
2. Son loses his job and moves back home.
It was seldom that somebody on the kibbutz didn’t complain to me about my movie selections. Full disclosure… I admit I scheduled movies I wanted to see after reading Pauline Kael’s New Yorker reviews– my parents bundled their issues into monthly care packages to me that also included cans of tuna fish. Sometimes I indulged myself even further and ordered a movie I just wanted to see again.
Such was the case with Citizen Kane. I knew I was taking a risk with a film from that far back in the past but since I still consider Orson Welles’ masterpiece the best American film ever made, I went for it and believed it had been a success after one kibbutz member began talking to me effusively about how much he had enjoyed it.
Him: “Who was that guy who played Kane?”
Me: “That was Orson Wells and he was the director. It was his first movie.”
Him: “Amazing! What a genius!”
I was happy the film pleased this man. His name was Zvi Nahor and he worked as a bus driver with Israel’s largest bus company. Zvi was also an accomplished photographer who always took his camera with him and some of his best shots were taken from his bus driver’s perch.
Just as Zvi finished praising Kane another member of the kibbutz came up to me nearly as excited.
“Why did you bring us a black and white movie? Weren’t there any color ones available?” He stomped off without waiting for a response.
Well, in the land of the Bible praising Kane and raising Cain comes with the territory and yes, you most certainly cannot please all of the people all of the time. So why try! (Visualize me standing with my palms turned upward and my lips pressed together tightly.)
Below is a picture of Zvi Nahor and several of his photographs. He kept snapping into his 90s.
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Barbara: “Liz, so how’s biz?”
Add to the list of things that have changed for now due to the virus the dropping of the requirement by an increasing number of colleges for applicants to take admissions tests– the College Boards. I took them over 50 years ago. It’s safe to assume if you went to college, you did too.
I prepared for them. Does anybody else remember “vocabulary cards?” It was not far fetched back then to believe that your life might be determined by four hours or however long it took on a single Saturday to do the verbal and math sections and the optional tests called “achievements.”
At prep school I was very lucky to have a man I revered as my basketball coach and history teacher who always seemed to do the right thing at the right time. In the fall of our senior year we were about to take a test in his class that would determine much of the last grade the colleges we were applying to would see.
Some of us felt that weight heavily and Mr. Williams realizing that said this to us:
“I know that you think this test is important but in the scheme of things, many years from now, it will not be important in your lives at all.”
I’ve never forgotten that timely piece of wisdom. The words have stuck in my head ever since and the real tests in life have been both ones I could prepare for and others for which I couldn’t. Some I know I’ve passed and others I feel I’ve failed. But I do know this, Mr. Williams was right about THAT history test half a century ago.
I did a little digging and found a statistic that surprises me. Fewer than 50 schools of higher education in America have acceptance rates of less than 20 percent. Certainly, if you want to go to college, there is a college out there waiting for you. Many of them.
And I found something else. PrepScholar is an online tutoring company and recently published a list of the SAT scores of well known successful people which they claim they were able to find through their own research. Take it for what it’s worth but here are some scores from a time when a 1600 was perfect in the combined verbal and math.
Let’s’ start from the low end:
1032 Bill Clinton
1080 Scarlett Johannson
1200 Derek Jeter
1206 George W. Bush
1300+ Stephen King
1400+ Natalie Portman
1580 Bill O’Reilly
1590 Bill Gates
So, maybe the college boards are toast or maybe if we return to life as we used to know it, they’ll be back in a new reimagined form. But as you can see from the list of people above they don’t seem to have made a hell of a lot of difference in the lives of two American presidents or I bet any of the others.
To paraphrase the boxing philosopher Rocky Balboa: “It ain’t about how high you score, it’s about how you keep moving forward no matter what the score.”
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The sun reaches its highest point in the sky of the year today and the glass half empty guy says winter is just around the corner. Of course in Maine it’s all too easy to think like that but I’ve got some things I’d like to see changed that would help take the sting out of our days getting shorter.
I’m absolutely certain these changes will not now nor likely ever happen in the future. However, perhaps there’s hope if the earth’s rotation and orbit decide, like my internet service sometimes, to go offline.
Here’s what I’m griping about. In Camden, Maine this morning on the longest day of the year the sun rose at 4:53 a.m. and will set this evening at 8:24 p.m. I’ll be blunt. That sucks! Why? Because tonight in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan the sun goes down at 9:59 p.m.– over an hour and a half later. Both my location and the one in Michigan are in the Eastern Time Zone although we’re over 800 miles apart. It’s not right!
A hundred miles from us is St. Andrews, New Brunswick and like all of Canada’s Maritime Provinces it’s in the Atlantic Time Zone. Camden and St. Andrews are barely one degree of longitude apart but since we’re in different time zones the St. Andrews clock is always an hour ahead. That means that today the same exact sun appeared a bit before 6 a.m. there and this evening won’t sink below the horizon until almost 9:30 p.m. It’s not fair!
Maine’s legislature has had bills proposed that would allow us to go Atlantic but even if they were to pass here (and they never have) the U.S. Congress would have to vote its approval as well.
Boy, if Susan Collins is still a Maine senator and this were to have to be decided in Washington, her head would probably explode trying to justify her vote in either direction after Mitch McConnell let her know how she’d need to be setting her watch.
So, you might ask, what’s the big deal? How does this affect my life? Let me start with the dawns of a new day this time of year. When it’s happening at 5 a.m. that’s at least a lost hour in my opinion and to make it worse in the evening we’re being shortchanged on the other end. For example if we wanted to go out to eat (which we won’t right now) after a movie (which we can’t right now) pretty much all our restaurants are closed by 9 p.m.
Actually, being shoehorned into a time zone that doesn’t square with your circadian rhythms has led a lot of people to adopt a daily schedule they might not even be aware of is a coping mechanism. When we had just moved here and we needed a plumber, he said, “I’ll be over first thing in the morning,” and then true to his word knocked on our door at 7 a.m. Newsfilm isn’t at 11 here, lunch is.
Ok, if you’re thinking I should move to Canada remember the border is still closed but after you hear my next complaint, you might want to organize a fundraiser to send me there.
I think the seasons are all wrong. Why are we waiting until June 21st to proclaim that summer has started or delaying until December 21st to declare its winter? It was over 80 degrees at our house this weekend. By December 21st we’ve already had our driveway plowed and not just once!
The seasons should begin on the first day of the month– Spring on March 1st when baseball teams are or, once upon a time, were having “spring training.” Summer needs to start on June 1st when public swimming pools are already open, Fall on September 1st when it’s back to school and Winter on December 1st after the sleigh has already been to Grandfather’s house for Thanksgiving.
Yes, the way things are set up now it’s all about the earth’s orbiting around the sun and thank you Copernicus for your hard work. In astronomy court you’d chew me up and spit me but this business with the earth going around the sun every year isn’t a perfect arrangement to begin with. Just ask anybody born on February 29th.
So, how about it? Let’s make a few minor adjustments and have a more sensible calendar. King Solomon toward the end of his life wrote in Ecclesiastes that there was nothing new under the sun. I don’t think he was looking very hard.
Happy Summer Solstice!
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Is there anybody who can honestly say our president has done a good job dealing with the pandemic? I know my distribution list for my cartoons and opinions is, with few exceptions, those of you generally in agreement with my own thinking. That’s intentional. I just won’t engage anymore with people who believe that Donald Trump is competent to lead the nation through a crisis. For me it would be like talking to a member of the Flat Earth Society but exponentially more painful.
New Zealand and Taiwan have done well at containing COVID-19 for example. America has not. Leadership or the lack thereof has made a difference in outcomes everywhere.
Brazil might be considered an exception. There, President Jair Bolsonaro actually believed his countrymen were magically immune to the virus and has done nothing so far to indicate that he cares that over a million Brazilians have proven that they’re not. Bolsonaro is committing something akin to a war crime against his own nation.
But we have our own problem right here and now and I’ve put three quotes together that make me both angry and sad. See what you think and notice the dates when each of them occurred.
March 23, 2020
“From midnight tonight, we bunker down for four weeks to try and stop the virus in its tracks, to break the chain…Every move you then make is a risk to someone else. That is how we must all collectively think… That’s why the joy of physically visiting other family, children, grandchildren, friends, neighbors is on hold. Because we’re all now putting each other first. And that is what we as a nation do so well.”
— Jacinda Ardern
Prime Minister of New Zealand
April 16, 2020
“Upon the discovery of the first infected person in Taiwan on January 21st, we undertook rigorous investigative efforts to track travel and contact history for every patient, helping to isolate and contain the contagion before a mass community outbreak was possible.”
— Tsai Ing-Wen
President of Taiwan
June 20, 2020
“We’ve tested now, 25 million people. It’s probably 20 million people more than anybody else. Germany’s done a lot, South Korea’s done a lot. They call me, they say the job you’re doing — here’s the bad part, when you… when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases.So, I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. They test and they test. We had tests that people don’t know what’s going on. We got tests. We got another one over here, the young man’s 10 years old. He’s got the sniffles.”
— Donald Trump
President of the United States of America
It’s way too early in the day to have a drink.
I did a hearing test a few years ago. I’m a candidate for hearing aids but haven’t filed to run yet. I think my biggest hesitation about getting them is that I might lose them.
A lot of us probably damaged our hearing a long time ago listening to “our music.” I don’t believe I did. I wasn’t into loud bars or rock concerts. I never owned an album by Deep Purple who I discovered used speakers so loud and so powerful that people were knocked unconscious at one of their concerts when they stood too close to them.
But who knows? Apparently, the damage can also be done by what seem to be almost innocuous activities– operating a leaf blower, riding a motorcycle, Fourth of July firecrackers, the New York subways… Listening to music that’s louder than 100 decibels apparently, is still the main culprit.
A few years ago I was in an Apple store and had this conversation with a young sales guy.
Me: “How does music sound through the speaker in this desktop?”
Him: “Really nice and you won’t even need separate external speakers to crank things up. I get all the volume I want at home just from the computer.”
Me: “You know, my generation listened to loud music and many of us are paying the price for that now with hearing loss.”
Him: “Yeah, I’m not worried. By the time I’m your age I’m sure there will be an invention or a cure.”
Me: “You might not want to count on that.”
This conversation really happened and that guy’s faith in a future that will fix things for him seemed astounding to me. But hey, I get it. When the history of our times is written statins and viagra should surely get a mention. In significant ways science and medicine have prolonged the functioning of important parts of us and even come up with spare ones to replace some of those that no longer work.
But back to deafness. It’s well known that Beethoven continued composing some of his best work after he could no longer hear. The story goes that at the premiere of his 9th Symphony, because he conducted the work himself, he had to be turned around to see the audience’s applause.
Beethoven’s hearing loss started when he was in his mid-20s. It’s unlikely it was due to his behavior. But here’s a statistic about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that might or might not surprise you. It’s believed that over half of the inductees are hearing impaired and that list includes Brian Wilson, Neil Young, Pete Townsend, Phil Collins and Eric Clapton.
Says Clapton: “It was my own doing– being irresponsible and thinking I was invincible.”
Yes, invincible, infallible and innocent. All I can say is good luck to the guy in the Apple store. I hope my advice won’t have fallen on deaf ears.
It’s what can be defined as a “crowdsourced” or open collaboration where anyone can contribute to adding to it with their own definitions for words, especially slang. It’s to a dictionary as wikipedia is to an encyclopedia. And if there were still College Boards, the analogy above could be the answer to a question on the SATs today that I don’t think anyone could have seen coming half a century ago.
Peckham by the way is said to be worth $100 million from the Urban Dictionary and wants no venture funding or IPO and is not looking for his brainchild to be acquired. He’s already rich and happy the way things are. He’s no bozo.
And so I looked for the Urban Dictionary definition of bozo for a reason that will become clear in a second and here’s what I found…
Bozo is a name that references someone who has failed to achieve any level of formal education and is easily led and influenced by anyone who appears sympathetic. Bozos will, because of their lack of understanding of the english language, try to engage in conversation, but in almost all cases, will become irritated and abusive due to not understanding what is being said to them. Bozos will make up stories about their achievements, but everyone knows that they are just fabrications. Bozos are not smart enough to know that their lies have been discovered and will continue on prosecuting the lie.
Well, that certainly is close to describing one bozo who I am increasingly depressed reading about, but the original Bozo the Clown wasn’t a horrible human being who was incompetent, hateful, corrupt and a pathological liar… Whoa, let’s hold off on the last one for a moment.
Years ago I was asked to do a story about Bozo the Clown. The ABC News shows knew I liked to do almost anything that was off the wall.
We’d gotten a press release about Bozo celebrating his 50th year in show business and the quirky ABC News overnight broadcast, watched mainly by insomniacs and the incarcerated, wanted a piece for its show.
The late Larry Harmon was the man who developed and owned the Bozo the Clown empire, which he licensed to many local television stations around the country and the world, each then hiring their own actor to play Bozo. By the late 1960s Harmon had Bozo shows airing in nearly every major U.S. television market.
Harmon’s autobiography is titled “The Man behind the Nose” even though he rarely dressed up as the clown he so successfully marketed. I interviewed him at his office in Los Angeles on Hollywood Blvd. Ironically, for someone so legendary in the entertainment business neither Harmon nor Bozo have a star honoring them on that street’s Hollywood Walk of Fame but that’s another story.
When we finished the interview Harmon made the rest of my assignment very easy by offering me a large box of tapes with an amazing variety of Bozo milestones– Bozo on safari in Africa, Bozo riding an elephant in India, Bozo with the Pope at the Vatican, Bozo floating weightless while training with the astronauts… And in the box was also a printout with a timeline of Bozo’s many additional accomplishments, but as I looked at it back in my office something else leaped off the page.
Now, I knew Larry Harmon hadn’t been the original Bozo the Clown and had purchased the rights to a character who already existed. But what I didn’t know and what the timeline let slip was that Bozo the Clown wasn’t 50 at all. He was at that moment actually only 47!
Harmon, it appeared, was behaving the opposite of a Little League baseball team claiming that one of their players was younger than he actually was. That team, if they won anything, would have been disqualified and it looked like Bozo’s 50th birthday tribute might have to be put on hold.
I phoned Harmon to clear things up.
“Larry, I think we have a problem. According to the information you’ve given me, Bozo isn’t really 50 this year,” I said in a gotcha voice.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line and then Harmon spoke, “So?”
I did the story.
If you want to see it go to the link below…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZVYGe1P9pc
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As the co-creator of Seinfeld Larry David is now richer than God after mega syndication deals for its 180 episodes have made both him and Jerry Seinfeld the wealthiest comedians on earth.
I don’t think Roberts feels at all boxed in but he realizes that with a sharply divided court he stands on the fulcrum with enormous power and sobering responsibility to tip decisions that affirm, alter or negate the laws of America. He was the swing vote on the Affordable Care Act twice and this month on the court’s decision on DACA. For siding with the Court’s liberals a lot of Republicans may now want to box his ears.
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