AGU (nsfw-couple swear words)

EE&V

Eyes
Open field of knee high green grass.

Ears
Metal on metal in time with footsteps.

Voice
"Those people are all too busy to care."

"I know, but I'm going to do it anyway."

Happy Turkey Day

It's an official holiday here in the U.S. called Thanksgiving. It's a day when we're supposed to stop and reflect on all the things we're thankful for. Typically, we celebrate this day by bickering with relatives, over-eating, and falling asleep in front of the TV.

I'm thankful that I'm not doing any of those things today. :-)

Clear Sky

Life is a funny place sometimes, a cyclical thing that just keeps going. After you get a few years under your shoes, less and less of it surprises you. But it is kind of interesting how different it can look when you leave the rose colored glasses at home.

Karen is 32 and Single

Yeah, great, ask me if I care. I'm getting kind of tired of targeted ads on line. I mean, I wouldn't be if they actually *were* properly targeted. If they actually showed me something I was interested in it would be different. Most of the things I like are pretty hard to find when you actually look for them, so you can imagine how far off these things are.

And no, I don't want to give these idiots even more personal data so they can try to target better. And yes I know that if I actually signed up for their crappy dating site that "Karen" is taken and the rest of the people on there are going to be less attractive than Karen and no more interesting than I am. Apparently, they think I'm stupid, or utterly ruled by emotional perceptions of the world.

I guess I better go fine tune my ad blocking software again.

:-)

Sarah Palin, Post Turtle

I read this thing I found amazingly amusing and thought I'd share. Sarah Palin is a post turtle. What's that, you ask?
When you're driving down a country road and you see a turtle balanced on top of a wooden fence post. You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she has no idea what to do, and you wonder what kind of a dumbass put her up there in the first place.

LOL - still.

Ahh, The Weekend

Back down to 2 visits for the day, no mysteries, no drama. It's supposed to be mostly sunny and comfortably above freezing for the daytime temps here, what more could a guy ask for?

:-)

Okay, I Give

So no word from Mystery Visitor, and now there are others. Lots of others. I'm just going to roll along and try not to pay attention to the logs. No sense making myself crazy (-crazier-).

Hello to half of Australia. Bigpond, Optusnet, IInet, whatever. :-)

Hello France as well.


I'm just going to go over in the corner and hang out with Dascha. At least she still talks to me.

:-)

Mystery Visitor

Okay, normally I don't pester people who visit the blog to join in, it's just not everyone's style. Besides, sometimes when you do that, they get self-conscious at being noticed and go away. But curiosity is a powerful motivator.

So I have repeat visits from someone on IINET, with the same OS, the same browser, the same screen resolution, and sequential visit count from vastly different locations. Now I'm intrigued. The inbound link is always from the same blog, but from places as far apart as Queensland, Sydney, and Adelaide. On adjacent days, I might add. So somebody, or at least their computer, really covers some ground. If this sounds like you, give me some kind of a hint, okay? A comment would be cool. If that's not comfortable, you can find an e-mail address in my profile. Or if that seems like a big step, drop a hint to the owner of the blog you travel in from and let her pass it along.

Or you can just keep me twisting in suspense if that sounds like fun to you. I'm okay with it either way. :-)

Elections Of Tomorrow?

Maybe we should run this past Wall Street, it makes more sense than a lot of what they do.

Or should I have titled this post, "The Elves Have It"?

:-)

Never To Forget The Fallen

Daylight Stupid Time

Rach gave me permission to rant about this, so I went looking for ammo. There's lots. Never having been one to reinvent the wheel, or re-print stuff available elsewhere I'm just gonna post a couple links to get people started and then a few thoughts.

Wikipedia has a nice article.

Treehugger thinks it's a bad idea.

Here's another from the Green side.


I WILL reprint one thing I found particularly funny. It's a comment from the green article by a guy named "Greg".



"Why even have daylight savings and time zones? Phoenix has no DST, nor Hawaii, but I can drive over a state border to celebrate the new year again.

Let's all surrender to a 24-hr clock based off GMT, which shall be inaccurately named Universal Earth Time. Also, the US can usurp the metric system and rename it the UStric system so they can actually use it.

Then, when a steroids ball player crushes a 160kph fastball 150m on the west coast, people on the east coast will stay up til 5:00 UET to watch despite their 13:00 meeting."



Which brings up the utter stupidity of us not using the metric system even now. I won't go into a rant on that one right now, but it's STUPID. Really.

I guess where this lands is that about 80% of the people (in this country at least) are Idiots. Even many of the smart ones choose not to think critically or much further than the ends of their finger tips. I've had conversations with people who have a wall full of degrees and accolades who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag.

We keep calling ourselves "The Greatest Nation on Earth". Really? Think maybe it's time we started acting like it? Please?

(End rant)

Help Me With Dascha

Yeah, I know she's completely fictional, but I think I might have a use for her after all. So, I'm interested in input, I'm taking votes.
I think she's a brunette, just a hunch I have, but what about the rest?
What color are her eyes?
How tall is she?
What does her ethnic background include?
Is she blue collar or professional?
Siblings?
What do her parents do?
What part of Russia does she come from?
Does she still live there or has she moved?
Rural or urban?
She seems to be computer literate, so she has some smarts, but has she gotten an advanced degree?
She said she's 28, has she ever been married?
Any kids?
Is she basically happy, or a tragic figure?
How about face shape? (It's okay to reference famous people for descriptive purposes.)
Short or long hair?
What have I forgotten to ask?



Jump in here people and help, it might be fun.
Maybe I can come up with some sort of doctored picture when it's all done. :-)

Meet President Obama

So, I guess I don't have to head north after all. Some sanity remains in my nation, let's see if we can do some good with it.


And a Nation Breathes a collective sigh of relief.

November

Some noteworthy stuff for November.

The week of the 8-14th is Pursuit of Happiness Week, after that I guess we have to go back to whatever we were doing before.

The 4th is Election Day here, and also ironically Use Your Common Sense Day. Somebody is trying to be funny, methinks.

The 7th is International Tongue Twister Day.

The 8th is Abet and Aid Punsters Day. (A personal favorite)
It's also Cook Something Bold and Pungent Day. Does anybody see the potential for mischief here?



I'm trying to refrain from excessive ranting about the stupidity of Daylight Stupid Time. We just did it. You all know how much I hate it. 'Nuff said.

:-)

You Decide

Global Cooling is Here! Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades

By Professor Don Easterbrook, Western Washington University

In 2007-2008, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) and computer modelers who believe that CO2 is the cause of global warming still predict the Earth is in store for catastrophic warming in this century. IPCC computer models have predicted global warming of 1F per decade and 5-6C (10-11F) by 2100, which would cause global catastrophe with ramifications for human life, natural habitat, energy and water resources, and food production. All of this is predicated on the assumption that global warming is caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 and that CO2 will continue to rise rapidly.

However, records of past climate changes suggest an altogether different scenario for the 21st century. Rather than drastic global warming at a rate of 0.5C (1F) per decade, historic records of past natural cycles suggest global cooling for the first several decades of the 21st century to about 2030, followed by global warming from about 2030 to about 2060, and renewed global cooling from 2060 to 2090 (Easterbrook, D.J., 2005, 2006a, b, 2007, 2008a, b); Easterbrook and Kovanen, 2000, 2001). Climatic fuctuations over the past several hundred years suggest ~30 year climatic cycles of global warming and cooling, on a general rising trend from the Little Ice Age.

Now a decade later, the global climate has not warmed 1F as forecast by the IPCC but has cooled slightly until 2007-08 when global temperatures turned sharply downward. In 2008, NASA satellite imagery confirmed that the Pacific Ocean had switched from the warm mode it had been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period. The shift strongly suggests that the next several decades will be cooler, not warmer as predicted by the IPCC.

Global warming (i.e, the warming since 1977) is over. The minute increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere (0.008%) was not the cause of the warming- it was a continuation of natural cycles that occurred over the past 500 years.

The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling, perhaps much deeper than the global cooling from about 1945 to 1977. Just how much cooler the global climate will be during this cool cycle is uncertain. Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely.


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I think it's worth mentioning (again) that the IPCC split a Nobel prize with Al Gore a while back, but it was *NOT* the prize for science.