text: In a strange kind of way, I have some sympathy for the civilians in the Gaza strip.
  Hear me out on this.
  Some folks are saying "They elected Hamas to represent them. They made the bed. They should be content to lie in it. Inshallah!"
  That is all very reasonable.
  Prepare the smelling-salts
  But what if Hamas' political ascendancy was by artifice and fraud? What if they had gained the reins of power through intimidation, fraud, ballot-stuffing and bad-math?
  In hindsight, the "innocent" civilians should have resisted more vigorously because now they are paying the price of going-with-the-flow.
  Hard thoughts for a conservative trapped in a Blue state that seems to have more similarities with Gaza than I am comfortable with.
  One disadvantage sorghum based ethanol has is that the time-window for harvest is short and it does not store nearly as well as grain. This made sorghum (juice) based whiskey a non-starter in days of yore, but today we have all kinds of inexpensive, above-ground swimming pools that can serve as fermentation vessels. Throw a solar cover over the top to exclude oxygen and you are off to the races.
  I doubt that I will pull the trigger on growing sorghum but it would be spiffy if somebody in my neighborhood did.
  Belladonna LOVES lifting heavy weights and she adores "dead-lifts". That is where the lifter picks up a barbell that is on the ground and lifts the weight to mid-thigh height. She also likes squats but she LOVES dead-lifts. (Bragging a bit: her PR for dead-lifts is about 420 pounds which is a bit more than the average girl can DL)
  That got me curious about what a reasonable expectation would be for an old-geezer to be able to dead-lift.
  For guys between 20-and-40, an untrained, random dude can be expected to dead-lift between 80% and 90% of their body-weight for a single repetition.
  A young man who has been weight-lifting for six-to-twelve months can be expected to dead-lift about 130% of their body-weight for a single repetition. Extrapolating, a geezer in his sixties who doesn't have issues with his joints or his back has nothing to apologize for if he can dead-lift his body-weight. Anything over that is frosting on the cake.
  Because single-lift maximums can cause injury, the more conservative approach is to determine the maximum amount of weight you can lift six times or ten times and then use a "fudge factor" to estimate your single-lift maximum.
  So, if you can lift 150 pounds six times the fudge-factor is 1.2 which means that you can probably lift 180 pounds ONCE. If you can lift 150 pounds ten times the fudge-factor is 1.33 which means you can probably lift 200 pounds ONCE.
  For the record, I have a set of barbells made from two sacks of concrete and 60" of black-iron pipe. I think it weighs 135 pounds. I ordered 4, five-pound plates to add to the device to increase its weight. Being able to pick items up off the ground (logs, bodies, lumber, rocks, bags of grain...) is part of life.
  Beware of January and December
  I was mining data from the CDC database on mortality. January is the most dangerous month for death due to cardio-vascular diseases with December a close second.
  January is 25% more lethal than September which is the "safest" month.
  I remember one January when I was a supervisor. We were down for three weeks. When we started back up, Don informed me that he was going to be out for an extended period. Like an idiot, I suggested that he should apply for vacation.
  He straightened me right out. "I am going on sick-leave."
  He spent the three weeks of down-time watching TV from his recliner. He developed blood-clots in the calves of his legs. His doctor threw him into the hospital.
  He stopped into work as a courtesy to me.
  So...everybody talks about shoveling snow as being a risk factor. May I suggest that binge watching the bowl-games this Christmas-through-Jan 2 might be equally risky?
  As a personal favor, I ask you to take a short walk-about every commercial break. Walk down the hall. Step outside and check the weather. Take a leak even if you can hold it until the next time-out. Give your wife or girlfriend a hug (but not if they are in the same room). Shoot your pellet gun at a target you hung in the yard.
  For the medical professionals: Short of an autopsy, can a medical examiner discriminate between a lung embolism and an ischemic heart-attack on anecdotal evidence? Suppose an overweight, 55 y-o male turns blue and falls over dead on January 3. What will the ME default to as the Cause-of-Death on the Death Certificate?
  I will be a little bit ADHD over the next few weeks.
  Firearm deer season opens November 15 and our hunting lease, which was in limbo, finally snapped into focus. We will be able to hunt there this year.
  The preparations which historically we would have been making since September have been crammed into a much shorter time-frame.
  I beg your indulgence.