Autumn and Its Village Festival
museum days
This past weekend was Museum Days, with all the usual things you find in a village festival.
- The Grand Parade, with the antique cars and tractors, Shriners with their red fezzes on motor scooters, clowns, a high school band (just one now), politicians seeking election, and in the end the Drum Corps.
- The Book Sale, for which I gave my Friday and Saturday evenings, but which was the best ever this year in terms of visitors and of proceeds.
- The Family Get-Together, which was somewhat broken due to my sister the ex-teacher having a rummage sale (primo site for one, as she lives near the park) and my sister the editor up to her ears in work.
- The Elephant Ears, the archetypal carnival food!
This year's Museum Days was not as big as in years past. But it was a good festival.
autumn
The goldenrod plants next to my deck bloomed their bright yellow flowers during the late summer. Now they are ready to come down, now that the flowers have wilted. The trees are changing colors from green to mostly red; yellow is now infrequent thanks to this summer's drought. Some are starting to shed their leaves already. Autumn is here.
I marked the first day of autumn by putting my air conditioners away for the year. With the first of October here, it is time to call the folks that installed the furnace, back before I bought the house, for an estimate to clean out the furnace and ducts.
lugar
I never thought too much of the senator from Indiana. Lugar was more East Coast than Hoosier, a Rhodes Scholar internationalist
whose forté was foreign policy and whose advice was followed by Obama. Yet, Lugar's long presence in the U.S. Senate also gave Indiana a lot of pull, especially in agriculture.
The two people running for Lugar's Senate seat are nobodies. They are nothing. It does not matter which of them wins: The loss of Lugar will put Indiana on a high shelf in a dark corner of a vast warehouse: I am talking Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones film, folks!
I know Lugar would have had to quit soon: He's 80 now. However, it would have been better to let him quit on his own terms, not to have him (figuratively) hit in the back of the head by a tea-bag cosh!
not another javascript replacement!
Google has had a JavaScript replacement (Dart) for a long while now. Now it is Microsoft's turn to introduce another JavaScript replacement, called TypeScript. This article asks the question: Do we need yet another JavaScript replacement?
With Microsoft's mottled history of programming languages (usually in reaction to those of competitors), I will let the article answer that:
At this early stage it is difficult to see the development as good. It isn't particularly good for JavaScript developers who already have alternatives, and it isn't good for C# developers who now have confirmation that Anders Hejlsberg [creator of both C# and TypeScript] is looking elsewhere.