Science, explained

By no less than Richard Feynman.

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 24, 2018

Global Warming "Scientists" could not be reached for comment.

Whence comes the Thanksgiving bounty?

Perry Metzger muses on the Thanksgiving celebration:

It is a fine time to reflect on the bounty that the productivity increases brought by capital accumulation and technological improvements have brought to us. 

The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour. 

We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries. 

Whence comes this bounty?

Read the whole thing, and marvel at the world in which we live.  And ponder the fact that in the last 30 years, a billion people have escaped poverty.

Being thankful

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for a long time.  It's a meditation that we should do more than once a year, but here it is so meditate, damn it!

I'm thankful for The Queen Of The World who is a whirlwind of cooking and decorating energy.  The table is set and the house smells so good that tummies are rumbling.  And tomorrow she'll start Christmas decorating.  It's not for nothing that a neighbor calls her "Martha Stewart".  I love all this, and today's meditation makes me realize how lucky I am to have her in my life.

I'm thankful for Wolfgang, because without him I probably wouldn't get out looking for deer lurking around Castle Borepatch very often.

I'm thankful for my co-bloggers here, ASM826 and Brigid.  They bring a touch of class to what would just be my ravings, and so it's not just me who should be thankful but you as well ...

Lastly, I'm thankful for you, Gentle Reader.  This has become a community, one which we would never have come to know without the amazing magic of the Internet.  It has let us find each other and enrich each other's lives.  A special thanks and shout out here to long time commenter waepnedmann. Last week when the QOTW and I were in California he offered a bolt hole if the fires got dangerously near.  Fortunately it didn't come to that, but his kind and generous offer would never have been possible without this community that has grown up in our little corner of the 'net.  It's an amazing thing to see, and I am very grateful indeed.

Lastly, since it is Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for the greatest Thanksgiving day humor ever broadcast.



And the closing line, of course:

Tom Lehrer - A Christmas Carol

I know that it's not even Thanksgiving but ASM826 pointed out that the stores are already in a frenzy.  Here's a musical tribute to the corruption of the season by filthy lucre.

This is a perfect example of how Californians have ruined California

The Bay Area had a haze of smoke hanging over it, and by the end of a week I'd developed a nagging cough.  That's gone now that I'm back on the Right Coast.  It looks like the California government has been de-funding fire prevention for years (Governor Brown vetoed a bill to increase funding just a year or so back), so this seems entirely on point;

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 17, 2018

I'm so old that I remember when the rest of the country actually believed that California was an example to emulate, not reject with garlic and Holy Water ...

Global Warming causes cold and snowy winters

The Silicon Graybeard posts that the Earth may be headed into a cold spell - a "Grand Solar Minimum" of reduced solar activity that could lead to much colder weather.  It's a long post (hey, if anyone would know about long posts it's me!) and it has some long videos embedded in it, but you should read it all.

Those of you who are gluttons for punishment should also read this old post of mine, What do Occam's Razor, Sunspots, Climate, and Ernst Mach have in common?  It discusses many of the same issues from a historical perspective, but circles back to the science in the end.  Actually, this is one of my best posts on the whole Global Warming thing - it's held up very well over the years.

But back to the matter at hand.  The last decade has seen a huge amount of winter snow in the US Northeast:

NESIS (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

 The last decade stands out like a sore thumb! It has had 29 major impact northeast winter storms with NO previous 10-year period with more than 10 storms! In Boston, 7 out of the last 10 years have produced snowfall above the average 43.7 inches.

2008-09: 65.9″
2009-10: 35.7″
2010-11: 81.0″
2011-12: 9.3″
2012-13: 63.4″
2013-14: 58.9″
2014-15: 110.6″ Greatest On Record Back To 1872
2015-16: 36.1″
2016-17: 47.6″
2017-18: 59.9″

Ah, but the Global Warmers will say - you're just cherry picking the data here.  Despite what the Nightly News thinks, the world is more than just the Acela corridor from Washington DC to Boston.  Except the trend of greater snowfall is across the entire Northern Hemisphere:

NHEMIS snow (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

Additionally, the trend for fall snow across the northern hemisphere has been increasing, defying the forecasts over the last two decades for snows becoming an increasingly rare event.

Warmer temperatures (we're told) can lead to higher moisture content which can lead to bigger snowfalls.  Sadly for the Warmers, the last decade shows that the Northern Hemisphere has been cooling for the last decade:

Interestingly, some scientists have stated that increasing snow is consistent with climate change because warmer air holds more moisture, more water vapor and this can result in more storms with heavy precipitation. The trick, of course, is having sufficient cold air to produce that snow. But note that 93% of the years with more than 60″ of snow in Boston were colder than average years. The reality is cooling, not warming, increases snowfall. Note the graph depicting declining January through March temperatures for 20 years at a rate of 1.5 degrees F. per decade in the Northeast!

Northeast Average Temperature (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

Like I said, SiGraybeard has to work harder to get as wordy as I am.  But the theoretical predictions that his post points to sure seem to be backed up by the last ten years of actual measurements.

And while I'm on the point of measurements, I want to (once again) point out the terrible state of the temperature databases.  The data are repeatedly adjusted, making older temperatures colder than were measured and newer temperatures hotter than were measured.  This allows regular press releases saying "Hottest year EVAH!!" but interestingly, it does not change records.  Records like Boston's record snowfall of 2014-2015.  Or the record hottest day in United States history, set in 1913.  Or temperature records in any of the 50 states:

What don't get changed are the records.  Consider these:

Chicago - 1934
Milwaukee - 1934
New York State - 1926
Boston - 1911
St. Louis - 1954
USA lower 48 states - 1913

In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years.  In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago - over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).

Stop and think about that - if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn't there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently?  What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.

What a weird "science" of Global Warming, where the planet keeps heating up but where cold and snow have been increasing for a decade and no new all time high temperature records are getting set. You might almost wonder how settled all this "science" is - after all, if it were really settled, evidence supporting it would be falling off of every tree.

Add in the almost $50 Trillion cost of "Global Warming mitigation" and you might begin to wonder just how solid the field of climate science really is.  Me, I don't wonder much at all, but you know how nasty and suspicious I am.

The Gettysburg Address at 153

This is the 153rd anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history.  The great Baltimore newspaperman H. L. Mencken wrote the definitive analysis of that even, back in the 1920s.  Back then, the war was still in living memory, and so he had some perspective that we now lack.  And while the Lincoln hagiography was even then beginning to flower, it had not entirely replaced history as it had been lived.

You can - and should - read his full thoughts here, but this is the key bit:

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and irresistible gesture. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. 

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i. e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.

I've been pretty clear for quite some time that I think that Lincoln was the worst President in the Republic's history, and the war was a disaster for both North and South.

Catching up

I'm back home at Castle Borepatch, but still digging out from the trip.  Blogging will be back to normal soon, but in the meantime, here's a thief caught on camera.

The Democrats finally are honest about gun control

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 18, 2018

The next two years are fixin' to be fun.

Edward MacDowell - Sea Pieces No.3 “A. D. MDCXX”

MacDowell on a US Postage Stamp

Fame is fleeting, and in this day and age is joined at the hip with taste.  As taste changes, so does fame.  This is perhaps nowhere so easy to see as in musical taste and the strange story of Edward MacDowell.

As with many composers we've seen here, he was a musical prodigy as a child.  At 17, he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory, probably the world's premier musical college.  This started a long sojourn in Europe for MacDonald, living in France and Germany.  No less than Franz Liszt introduced him to music publishers.

Returning to the United States, he was invited to be the first music professor at Columbia University.  He was one of the first to be enrolled in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  After his untimely death his face appeared on the postage stamp above.

And yet, few have heard of him (I certainly had not).  I think that this is due to the fickle nature of taste.  You see, MacDonald composed at the end of the Romantic era.  While I love that music, it rapidly faded from fashion as the 20th Century progressed.  As Romantic music faded into the past, so to did MacDowell.

That's a shame.  Today's piece was written to commemorate the Mayflower voyage to Cape Cod.  Quite frankly, it seems perfectly appropriate to celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.



That was the bit about the Mayflower.  Since it was so short, here's the complete Sea Pieces:

Traveling

posting has been the interrupted as I've found myself on the West coast.   It will probably stay interrupted for a while longer.

A century on

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the Rings 

A hundred years is a long time if the hundred years is the 20th century. The Great War didn't end war, nor did the even bigger cataclysm of 1939. But that didn't end things either - the long, strange twilight conflict of the Cold War had its own body count which is all too easy to forget when standing in the shadows of the twin World Wars.

That's a lot of history to pack into what amounts to a single lifespan. The history is so big as to overwhelm the human. Actually, that's a fitting metaphor of the Great War. But the human story is the one we should try to see. And so imagine yourself in Tolkien's shoes. Every single one of your childhood friends were killed, except for one.

We (justly) scorn the appeasement in the run up to the second war,  But we really don't understand it because we've lost that human perspective. A generation was butchered and damned. A few passed echos of that to us in writing - Tolkien, Hemingway, Robert Graves. The futility of the Western Front is on plain display in A Farewell To Arms.

On this centenary of the silence that fell on Flander's fields, remember Tolkien's mates, all save one butchered. And remember that he carried that to the end of his life. That - multiplied ten million times - was the war.

Lessons of the last election

The Czar of Muscovy muses on the outcome of the vote this week.  As always, your Autocrat is clear, thoughtful, and to the point.  First, the Republicans:

You had a heavy majority and, for once, some mandates. You were supposed to remove and replace Obamacare. But it was too hard, and lots of people were starting to get familiar with it, and messing with it could possibly cost you an election. In fact, you were elected to do hard work, and you definitely lost an election because you didn’t want to do hard work. You were supposed to do immigration reform, but didn’t. You were supposed to cut the size of government, but instead increased it. A lot. You were supposed to reduce regulations, but barely got started. So you were fired. 

Know how you can tell? Because you lost the House. That’s the easiest thing to correct, and the voters seemed to have figured that out. Consider it a two-year probation, because that’s how long you have to fix it. 

Sure, you did cut some regulations, and you did indeed slash taxes and get the economy moving. That’s why you lost only a couple dozen seats and not a bunch. Voters still think Republicans can fix things—just that not all of you seemed to want to. And those guys have been fired.

And then the Democrats:

You aren’t going to change the world with a twenty-odd majority. 

In fact, you should probably ask yourselves if you are superheros or just interim replacements. Your newly appointed roles in the House may be nothing more than temporary help until the permanent hires arrive. You could of course make a strong enough impression that you keep those jobs. But to figure out how to do that, you better look to see why the people your replaced got let go. Not because they were Republicans, but because they were weak. They were culled from the herd. You might want to be a little more strong. 

Of course, you won’t listen.

I think it's more like a ten seat majority, which just underlines the Czar's point.  The problem for the Democrats is that they live in the Media bubble - they think that the American public is much more liberal than they really are.  This is actually the big challenge for the party, to recognize reality as it exists, instead of trying to "shape" that reality.  Their success is tied to offering what the public actually wants, rather than what they think that the public wants.  Quite frankly, this looks like a big hill for them to climb.

The Republican party has had a very difficult last two years, psychology-wise.  They have begun to come around to the view that Donald Trump has offered the voters, rather than the view their establishment donors wanted to serve up.  In the past, the donors had a win-win situation: either the Republicans won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. George Bush senior or junior), or the Democrats won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

Trump changed that dynamic, cutting the donors out and offering something much more palatable to the voters.  This is really all you need to know to understand why Hillary doesn't put her pumps up on the Resolute Desk.

But this change was painful for for the GOP.  It's still not over, as the Czar points out.  A similar change needs to occur in the Democratic party, but it not only hasn't begun yet, but there's nobody obvious to start that ball rolling.

Right now the smart money has to be betting on the Democrats continuing the same game of identity politics, radical socialist red meat for their ideological core base, and quite frankly not very smart handling of the inevitable provocations from Trump.  He excels at leading his opponents to self-destruct, and none of the current Democratic leadership inspires confidence that they will be able to impose the required discipline to keep the party from looking barking mad insane.

So it looks that it's Advantage: Trump.  And will continue to be so as the GOP completes its transformation.

Welcome to MittWorld

Looks like Mittens will assume the coveted "John McCain Sunday Morning Talk Show" spot since he has the election in the bag:

The latest polling in Utah’s senate race has Mitt Romney up by some 36 points over Jenny Wilson, his Democratic opponent. Barring an enormous upset, Mr. Romney will join the United States Senate. This will put him a few checks and balances away from a president — the leader of his party — whom he once called “terribly unfit for office.”

Ah, don't ever change, New York Times.

Of course, a deeper understanding of the soon-to-be-Senator Romney could be had by a quick perusal of the archives.  I'm a little shocked to find that the archives have over a hundred entries on Mitt.  (!!!)

He was my Governor when I lived in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  Now All Y'all will get a chance to enjoy his governing style, good and hard.    Note to self: Utah doesn't elect Republicans; Utah elects Mormons.  But then, I'm clearly biased, having endorsed Obama over Romney*.

But the future is Mitt-tastic, so there.  Gun control opponents beware.

 I expect that my post tag for him might approach 200 before his career is all and done.

* That was one of my finest rants, althoughI could not predict the rise of Donald Trump back in 2012.  I did hint at the reaction, though:

And rather than a million Tea Partiers taking to the streets, it will be two million, or three. Rather than five or ten corrupt GOP Establishment crooks turned out of office, it will be thirty, or fifty.

And this bit (from that same post) is perhaps the most prescient writing I've posted in this last ten years of blogging:

We f***ed up once, trusting him and the rest of the GOP team. How's that working out? Rebuilding a party that Reagan might actually recognize is what this country needs - and right now, damn it - and Mitt Romney isn't the man to do it. 

Barack Obama is.

You might want to click through and read the whole thing - and the over 60 (!) comments it drew.  Welcome to MittWorld.

Perspective

The Queen Of The World and I voted today.  There was a large turnout, and long lines which everyone seemed to put up with fairly cheerfully.

But while this is important, it's not everything.  Standing in line I recalled a post exactly ten years ago, And Back In The Real World:

--------------------

It seems that lots of folks are freaking out about who's going to win the election. I want to tell you a story that relates to this.

I live is a very pretty small town in Massachusetts. Our house is a very short walk to the town Common, and right beyond that is one of the prettiest cemeteries I've ever seen. Here's a picture I posted a while back of one of the little alleyways in the graveyard.

I take the dogs (Little One-Eyed Dog and Ivan the Terrier) there for their daily constitutional, because there's a big field just on the other side. Nobody much goes to the cemetery, so we don't bother anyone on our way through.

Nobody goes there much, but last Saturday someone did. As I walked up through the graveyard, I saw a car parked by one of the graves. A middle aged guy was sitting in a folding chair - the kind that you'd take to the Little League game. He'd decked out the grave for Halloween - pumpkins, decorations, even an oil lantern.

He was still there when we took the dogs back, so I didn't intrude. Yesterday he wasn't there, so I stopped to see whose grave it was.

It was his son's. #1 Son was with me, and said in a quiet voice, "He was in my grade." Cancer.

The lantern was still there. Still burning. It was burning today, too.

So while I care about who wins the election tomorrow, I don't care who wins. Not care like that. Whatever happens, the Republic will continue. The flag will still wave from sea to shining sea.

And a good man will still grieve over his son's grave. Instead of worrying about the election, go hug your family.

The tit-for-tat election

Tomorrow we vote (well, those of us in the USA).  I said recently that the polls are no helpful this election.  Everyone uses models to predict the outcome, but who has a model that knows what's happening when early voting is running twice the rate it was in 2014?  So we'll have to wait until tomorrow evening to find out what happened.

I find it really interesting that pollsters have backed WAY off their earlier "Blue Wave" predictions - even Nate Silver even admits that he just doesn't know what's going on.  And like I said in my post last week, the interesting races are in the House, and as Tip O'Neill said all politics is local.  My sense is general, not specific, and national not local.  But I think that the Democrats are going to be majorly disappointed.  The reason is that I think that the decades of Progressive pushing against the middle class - and the increasingly unhinged behavior of Progressives doing it - have led to a tit-for-tat response.

While this is a common term, there's a specific meaning that actually gives me hope for the Republic. I covered what the specifics mean almost 3 years ago in a post Game Theory and the rise of Donald Trump:

Game Theory is a field of mathematics originally developed to try to mathematically derive optimum solutions for card games in the 18th century.  It has developed into a major field of analysis used in computer science and even the design of crypto systems.  Any of you who saw the film "A Beautiful Mind" have at least a passing familiarity with the subject.

You probably even know the most famous example of Game Theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma.  Two prisoners are (separately) offered a deal - rat out the other guy or keep silent.  If they rat and the other guy doesn't, they go free and he gets a long sentence.  If neither of them rat, they both get short sentences.  If they both rat, they both get long sentences.  And most importantly to the prisoner, if he doesn't rat but the other guy does, he gets a long sentence while the other guy walks.

It's a one-time deal, which makes the math simpler.  Real world situations are not so simple, and a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma has incorporated this.  Tit For Tat is a sequential set of prisoner's dilemma events where the strategy is to play what your opponent played in the previous round.  If your opponent was cooperative, you will be cooperative; if he screwed you, you will screw him back.

What's interesting about Tit For Tat is that mathematical proofs have shown that it leads to the outcome with maximum combined utility.  If your opponent always screws you, you're no worse off playing Tit For Tat, but if your opponent is always cooperative or also plays Tit For Tat then both of you derive the maximum benefit.

The Middle Class has been playing cooperatively for decades, as the Progressives have been pushing and taking advantage of that cooperation.  It's worked very well for Progressives, and very badly for the Middle Class.  As I said in that post (almost a year before the 2016 election) it led to the rise of Donald Trump.

The last two years has been a series of Trump victories where he has shown the Middle Class that you can push back against the Progressives and win.  I believe that this is a fundamental shift in American politics, as the "deplorables" have not only had enough, but have seen that they can win.

Sure, the hard core Democrats hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns and will turn out heavily to vote against Republicans.  But the rest of their party doesn't seem to feel that way: Blue Collar/Union Democrats are making more money now, Blacks and Hispanics are making more money now, everyone has better employment prospects, Trump's favorability numbers are up.

There's a split between the core of the party and the rest of the party.

At the same time the Republican base has been energized and united - the Kavanaugh hearings in particular seem to have been a huge blunder for the Democrats.  Sure, it energized the Democratic base, but it seems to have united the GOP base against them.

And so we're seeing big turnouts in early voting, and Republicans out voting Democrats pretty much everywhere.  I don't think that any of the election models predicted or planned for this, and so none of the polls or predictions carry any weight.  Like I said, we'll see tomorrow but I think it will be a glum evening for the Democrats.

But I said earlier that this gives me hope for the Republic.  The reason is that tit-for-tat results in a game theory stable outcome.  If Republicans stick to push back, but also keep the Middle Class "we're all  in this together" spirit from the last few decades, game theory suggests that the Democrats may have to adjust to a less confrontational style of politics (if for nothing other than preventing the evaporation of the non-rabid part of their party).  We'll have to see how that plays out.  As I said in my post 3 years ago:

Tit For Tat is essentially a reputational game - get a bad reputation by screwing your opponent and you pay the price.  The mathematics is unmistakeable on that.

The Middle Class finally has an option to play against their opponent.  An opponent who has a deservedly poor reputation.

No wonder Trump's support seems rock solid.  The mathematics is unshakeable.

If the Blue Wave disappears in the face of an enraged GOP base, then the Democrats will have to change their tactics - or keep losing elections.

Domenico Sarro - Sinfonia from the opera Achille in Sciro

The Real Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest opera house in the world that is still in use.  It was inaugurated on this day in 1737, and this was the very first music performed there.

View from the Royal box.  Image from Il Wik

Domenico Sarro was one of the most important composers of Neapolitan opera in the 18th century, an era when it enjoyed popularity all over Europe.  His reputation was such that his work was chosen to inaugurate the new opera house, in a command performance before the King.  His relative obscurity today can be chalked up to changing musical tastes (and particularly the fading of both baroque and opera in favor of romantic era symphonies).  But at the time this stood equal to Handel and Bach.

Seen on reddit

r/The_Donald delivers!

Hate your neighbor? Does he have Google Home?

Of course, you'd never mess with him like this:

A security researcher says an undocumented API in the Google Home Hub assistant can be exploited to kick the gizmo off its own wireless network. 

Flaw finder Jerry Gamblin says the API allows the device to receive commands from systems and handhelds sharing its local wireless network that can, among other things, reboot the unit, or even cause it to disconnect from the Wi-Fi, necessitating a manual reconfiguration.

In layman's terms, and API is a way for a computer to connect to another computer and configure stuff.  "Undocumented" APIs are considered double plus ungood in the security world, for obvious reasons.  You'd think that Google wouldn't want to give us another reason to be suspicious of them ...

Of course, you'd never do anything like this because you only use your Powers for good.

I love Halloween

I get a real kick out of seeing the villagers dress up their kids for trick-or-treat at Castle Borepatch.  The Queen Of The World loves decorating the place for the spirit (heh) of the season, and so there are jack o'lanterns and headless horsemen and potion vials all over.

And co-blogger ASM826 came by and we went to the local tavern's halloween party.  The QOTW arranged fun constumes:

Last night we were the Flintstones.  The QOTW even dressed up Wolfgang as Dino, and he hung out on the lawn with us as the kids came by.  He's great with kids, and would come up to him for kisses.

Every year it's fun, and getting more fun.  Hope you had as good a time last night as we did.