Great story there.  We carry a huge inventory on key parts (6 - 18 months) because of issues we've had, and times we've been burned.  I would not be averse to liquidating that inventory during a panic if the price was right, though I tend to avoid parking lot deals (Hey, you want some Infineon IPBs?  Fresh off the reel man, still in the foil pack!  No?  I gotta load of ST7s in QFP, 32 AND 44 pin models too..). 

Often it is a cart/ horse issue - did the panic cause the shortage or did the shortage cause the panic.

In ammo my bet has been on the former.

I make apple wine myself, which is a lot of fun as I can make applesauce at the same time, using the peels for the wine.

Friends made "rootbeer" in college, and made some explosive mistakes with 2L bottles and wrong ratios during priming.  Very sticky.

Maryland, WashDC, Mass

I got so tired of hearing about 24 all the time, now I have to hear about it again?!?  Ugh.

I'm looking for cheap lowers too.  My #2 daughter has a birthday coming up.

5. "The moment Obama got elected he changed his mind on federal shield laws for the press, unless they had a broad, and almost unlimited exemption for 'national security."

To which she added "Straight out of the Dick Cheney/double high authoritarian 'national security' neo-con playbook."

And I'll add to that that Barack Obama has kept Gitmo open, continued the war in Afghanistan and expanded the use of drones in the War on Terror.

Bush did not attack the press for leaks.

As for the WOT, Bushie was a liberal, not a "moderate".  He was Clinton with libido control.

The whole drone issue is highly remniscent of good ole Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive thug who never met a small country he couldn't invade.

Except that many senate Rs did not support it even then, and Heritage recanted that position well before Romneycare passed.

Also, Obama railroaded his through well after there was plenty of evidence that Romneycare was a disaster.  In fact, Obama knew Romneycare would break the private market, his entire goal in the first place.  Broken private market = government takeover = socialism.

Your friend sounds like my mother in law.

Wait for the kid to develop, to quote "Ask Penelope", be a mensch.

I think we can guess the answers, and they weren't pretty.  

Based on our earlier conversations, I was right, you really are wine critic :')

But what if you can't tell the difference?  I was talking to a microdistiller on bourbon and the chemistry of the flavors.  What he said is that chemists are getting better at isolating individual flavor compounds and synthesizing them.  Many of the compounds in vanilla, for instance, are also common to oak. 

American distillers, for instance, are attempting to replicate the taste and feel of Scotch whiskey, and they're getting close.  Other chemists are narrowing on the flavors of red wine.  Someday you might be able to order wine made to your_own_taste.

Most people don't have the patience to crack open a bottle and wait.  Anyway spot on.  I personally like to drain a glass or 2 off with the wife, then let the bottle sit loosly corked in the pantry for a couple of days.  The flavor change can be significant.

As for food, I love pairing with cheese.  A good pinot noir with mild to medium cheese makes for a great evening.

Unless they have a taste for michelin rubber and fiberglass bumper.

Worst wines ever:  

Peach bubbly - would have been better poured over pancakes.

Cherry "Wine" - a particularly noxious bottle which tasted like fermented benadryl.  Best described as having legs like a Bulgarian ballet dancer and a nose like WC Fields the morning after.

This is not the first case I've heard of like this.  There has been a strong preference for decades for doing this to little boys for all sorts of reasons. See here for instance.  

There was a documentary I saw a few years ago (can't remember the name) covering a number of similar cases, all disasters of one order or another.  Also a Scientific American article back in the early 90s (before that mag went full PC).

What happens, if I understand it right, is that in most of these cases the kids are genetically male but develop as hermaphrodites due to hormonal responses from the mother in utero (the mechanism is still not understood).

But the gender politics of medicine has had an orthodoxy of thought since the 1960s that nurture matters more.  Removing any male organs is surgically easy, and the PC culture teaches that it's "better" to raise these kids as girls.  The suicide rate of these poor people is very high as a result.

There is no sensation quite so exquisite as telling why Monster Cables are vastly overpriced, then explaining scientifically why their gold connectors are electrical BS, or why their "fat" cables perform more poorly than my cut up lamp cord due to the cheap elcrapo terminations.

Doesn't matter if you 2/0 cable if you only terminate 1/100 of the strands in a dinky solder joint.