It’s supposed to be up into the 90’s again today, making it an official heat wave. And we all know how I feel about that. But it’s supposed to cool off for the weekend, so that’s good. As for the weekend, I’ll be kicking it off right by having a tooth yanked tomorrow afternoon. Apparently it was too infected to pull yesterday, so I need a couple days of antibiotics to keep me from getting blood poisoning. I’m looking forward to having the damn thing gone, and am promising myself to be a good boy from now on, and get regular dental care again. My goal is to have myself in relatively decent shape (tooth, blood pressure, and weight-wise) in time for my 50th birthday. I’ll start drinking beer again when I retire.
My new Kindle is supposed to finally be delivered today (I have my doubts, though; it didn’t leave Memphis ’til 3:00 this morning). I signed off on all the contingencies, have my mortgage rate locked in (3.875% without points; I remember when 8% was considered ‘fantastic’), so this will probably be the last non-house related purchase I’ll be making for a while, now that I’m about to saddle myself with untold debt and endless repairs on my little fixer-upper out in the country. If anybody has a used plow truck for sale (cheap), let me know.
Oh well, time to go.
An old friend might be in the sights of Hurricane Earl. We trained for disaster during the Loma Prieta Bay Bridge Series in 1989. He’s stocked up and waiting and I wish him well. All of this is happening near where I spent a week in May for my niece’s wedding.
So here’s one for Earl. Every once in a while, a fun tune pops up and my love of the ‘f’ bomb is large. Ain’t that some shit?!
Gail Collins:
Sarah Palin is going to Iowa to be the headliner at a Republican fund-raiser. In the state that will be the first to hold a contest in the 2012 presidential campaign, even if it has to do it in 2011.
Her staff says this means nothing whatsoever, but let us acknowledge that Palin is on a roll. She’s got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on the president’s Iraq speech was: “may make u want to dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered.â€
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/opinion/02collins.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
There is a major article on Sarah in Vanity Fair that it sounds like she will try to spin into a poor, poor pitiful me party.
That’s good. I’ve personally given up on this country, and I think it’s pretty clear that we’re headed for a period much darker than the Bush days. I blame the ineptitude of what they call the Democrats these days for squandering the opportunity they were given, and also the current President for being, well, whatever it is that he’s been so far.
If I wasn’t too lazy to look for a job in Canada, I’d get out of here.
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100902/lf_nm_life/us_britain_hawking
NEW ORLEANS, La. – A mile-long oil sheen spread Thursday from an offshore petroleum platform burning in the Gulf of Mexico off Lousiana, west of the site of BP’s massive spill.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Coklough said the sheen, about 100 feet wide, was spotted near the platform owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy Inc.
Information is still scarce, though the presence of the sheen does not necessarily indicate an ongoing leak. La. Gov. Bobby Jindal says that he’s been told the well has been “shut in” which would suggest that no oil or gas should be flowing through it. If that’s the case, the sheen could have come from a storage tank on the platform. According to an expert on CNN, the total spill from such a storage tank could be as many as 1,000 barrels, but unlike the BP disaster, would be finite — assuming that the well is in fact shut in.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/2/898503/-AP:-Mile-long-sheen-spreading-from-Gulf-platform-explosion