One might expect that a band that was formed FIFTY YEARS ago this year might have some significant connexions with others, and one would be correct.  That is a long time ago, and The Zombies were early, British, and quite good.  They were not as prolific as many other bands, and almost became victims of their own success in a manner of speaking.

Interestingly, The Zombies were always more popular in the United States than they were in the United Kingdom.  I have no explanation for that other than the hypothesis that when they were getting “hot”, other bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles were getting even hotter in the UK.

Please come with me to review the career of this very, very underrated British Invasion band.  As a preview to Pique the Geek for Sunday evening at 9:00 PM Eastern, the topic for the evening will be a new installment to my off and on series about firearms, this time about the propellants black powder and the modern smokeless powders, with a nod to Pryodex(r), a more modern substitute for black powder.

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, so this installment is about a long dead denizen of Hackett.  I never learnt what Dee’s real first name was; everyone just called him Dee.

He was a deputy sheriff just about forever.  This was in the mid 1960s to around 1980, give or take.  Here is what I remember about him.

Hydraulic fracturing, also called hydrofracture or just fracking, is a commonly used method to increase the yield of fluid raw materials, usually petroleum or natural gas, from formations that are not “easy” extraction targets.  Easy targets are ones that the fluids dispersed in sands or very porous rock formation.  

Let us dispel a common myth right now:  oil and gas is almost NEVER found as big pools of those materials in large holes in the rock.  Almost without exception, and perhaps quite without exception, these materials are dispersed in some more or less porous rock or sand.    When you see pictures of underground reservoirs of gas or oil, you are really looking at the fluid as it is dispersed in the native matrix.

Sand and very “rotten” sandstone are easy matrices from which to extract the fluids.  Shale and hard sandstone are much more difficult matrices, and hydraulic fracturing is used to increase yields from such formations.

There are bands and there are bands.  This band has gone through so many transitions that even I, The Geek, can not keep up with all of them, but I do know that in their original lineup that they were close to, if not actually, great.

Deep Purple were a sort of late on the invasion set band from England, only releasing their first record in 1968.  They did some original material, but their first hit was a cover of Hush, by Joe South, written for Billy Joe Royal, and it was an OK hit.

I only intend to treat the Mark I lineup, because I personally found their material to deteriorate quickly after the band were realigned, although their big hits were later.  Please come with me and explore what was to later become one of the first big hair bands, and one of the loudest in concert.

Like many of you, I have been keeping up with the activity at the Madison, Wisconsin capitol.  Whilst I have been sympathetic to the folks bivouacking there, it got very personal to me a little while ago.

A Kossack, her name to be not reported here, sent me a Happy Birthday email complete with a picture of her in the rotunda!  This person and I go back several years, only online and always platonic, but I love her very much in a political way this evening.

She is a fine example of what this community represents.  I almost always back off from political posts, because others do it much better than I could hope to try.

Anterior poliomyelitis, mainly called polio (the old name was infantile paralysis) was a scourge for centuries, but was not recognized as a specific disease until comparatively recently.  This piece is in honor of the huge immunization program that was begun 56 years ago last week in the United States, that fact kindly pointed out by our good friend ek hornbeck at TheStarsHollowGazette.com a couple of days ago.

Most people do not know anyone who was infected with the paralytic form of this disease these days, partly because they either died or got better, but mostly because of the most successful vaccination program against an infectious disease ever attempted.  I have first hand experience with two cases, and will turn 54 on this coming Wednesday.  Few people younger than about my age will have known anyone who had it.

It is not often that I have such a ripe opportunity to combine TeeVee, politics, the FOX “News” Network, the horribly biased Governor of Wisconsin, and my own parody songwriting skills into a post.  As a matter of fact, it has never happened before.  Please allow me to explain.

I usually do not do purely political pieces here, there, or anywhere, because so many other are much more talented than I am at it.  But I do keep an eye out for popular culture, and this opportunity just hit me in the face.  I do not have to explain how Governor Scott Walker, a Tea Party wingnut, has probably disqualified himself for holding a position of trust, but I will!  

This is an installment of an extremely irregular series that I write when I begin to remember people from my childhood.  I grew up, for the most part, in Hackett, Arkansas, just about nine miles south of Fort Smith, Arkansas, almost on the border with Oklahoma.  This was quite the “redneck” part of the nation.

Hackett, when I was little, still had a sunset law on the books.  Those of you not from the South may not be familiar with such a law, but they were real (and likely still are on many books, but obviously not enforceable any more).  Essentially, a sunset law dictated that any black person (NOT the term used at the time) could not remain in the town after sunset, to prevent black families from moving into the town.

The penalty was, at least in my town, that being black and there after sunset was not just an offense, but a shooting cause, both by citizens and law enforcement.  I report this not to titillate, but just to illustrate how many southern jurisdictions were run until recently, and some still are.

Everyone is familiar with phase transitions even it they are not familiar with the term.  Amongst the most familiar is the melting of ice and the boiling of water to form steam.  Technically, these transitions are called fusion and vaporization, respectively.  There are more and we shall discuss some of them later.

All phase transitions are accompanied by changes in the free energy of the substance undergoing the transition, and this free energy has two components, the enthalpy of the transition and the entropy of the transition.  Unless very careful work is being done, the entropy change is often ignored because it, in many cases, is the lesser contributor.  However, it is never zero (except at absolute zero) and sometimes is the dominant factor.

Hello, all!  Tonight I am publishing the introduction to a new cooking book that I have in the works.  It is not so much a cook book as it is a guide for people who have not cooked much before, or who want to improve their skills.  It will also have information that even experienced cooks will find interesting.  I do not want it to be a very big book, because I really think that the essentials of cooking well are not that complicated.

Besides, there are lots of good recipe books available, and I want this to be a little different.  It is intended to more like a operator’s manual for the kitchen.

The introduction will be essentially all of the extended text box except for my signoff.  I would appreciate any suggestions for improvement in the comments, and hope that the purpose of the book is clear from the introduction.  Without further ado, here we go.  By the way, I have not given the work a name yet.

Many of you will dismiss this installment as sentimental drivel about a TeeVee show that ran when Translator was a kid.  I beg to differ.  This program was much, much deeper than that, and was actually a shining example of how good TeeVee should work.

It had excellent writing, excellent production, and excellent acting from all of the principal players.  It also started the careers of several, now prominent, actors.

Please put up with me here and open your mind to what was a really wonderful situation comedy.  Also, I will pepper this with a bit of insight into the man himself and other roles that he has played that do not jibe with the kindly sheriff of Mayberry.

I was astonished at the response for the first installment for this series, and so decided that instead of just a couple of survey pieces, reader interest justifies a bit longer treatment, getting more into the weeds. Thus, I have come up with a bit more structured series.

Unlike rifled firearms like pistols and rifles, shotguns are smoothbore weapons. That is, they have no rifling to impart spin to stabilize the projectile, in the case of shotguns usually multiple projectiles. Shotguns are a relatively recent development in their current form, but the concept of firing more than one projectile at a time goes back a very long time.

Modern shotguns are designed to fire a relatively large diameter cartridge as opposed to rifles and pistols. In addition, a different system is used to state the diameter of the cartridge in most cases.