That’s what the National Weather Service is predicting for our little neck of the woods.
In a few days, we’ll let you know what that means. Sometimes it’s interesting to read the words that the weather geeks come up with to describe a shitload of wet, blowing snow.
It makes us glad to be car-free.
In the next several weeks of nooze chatter, we won’t hear about the war, the Libby trial, the dismal state of the economy, the emergency of global warming, or any of the other urgent issues that cry for public attention.
Instead, we’ll incessantly hear about the new soap opera where an astronaut drove 900 miles in diapers to steal the heart of another astronaut from yet another astronaut. If this story involved airline pilots, we’d hear nothing about it except for a little blurb in “weird news.”
This is the new distraction, folks. The infatuated astronaut will dominate the headlines for months to come. Don’t be distracted.
Keep your eye on the ball.
(or, as our dear old friend Molly used to say, “always watch the shell with the pea under it.”)
Molly Ivins left us today.
I’d write more of a tribute if I had more time tonight. The best tribute I can offer right now is to ask you to click on the link above and peruse some of her columns.
We always looked forward to a new column from Molly. She was fun to read, and she could be amusing, astute and accurate at the same time. She will be missed.
That’s the advertising slogan for the new version of Windoze, called “Vista.” The word “Wow” was splashed all over teevee screens, newspapers and web ads on release day.
Wow, as in, “Wow, look how much this software costs!”
“Wow, look how much more memory I’m gonna need!”
“Wow, look how much slower my computer runs with this hog!”
I could continue to write a long series of equally obvious “wow” lines.
I’m sure that’s not what Micro$oft had in mind when their marketing geniasses came up with that slogan.
There are a lot of reasons that Hillary Clinton must not be elected president of the United States. Someone that we read a lot, Bob Harris, presented a laundry list of problems with Hillary, but he missed the most important one: she’s a corporatist.
She’s puts up a progressive facade, but ever since she got elected as a senator from New York, she’s been a whore for Wall Street. Corporate control of our society accellerated during the reign of her husband.
If we end up with another President Clinton, things will not get better for ordinary people. They’ll just get worse a little more slowly.
First off, don’t get me started on how the Bush regime always tries to find a cute little euphemism to replace a distasteful (but more accurate) word like “escalation.”
The emperor recently announced that he is sending another 21,500 soldiers into Iraq. It invokes images of a primitive warlord… the kind you’d see in some of those Hope/Crosby movies from the 40’s. Things are not going the warlord’s way, so he orders that more virgins be thrown into the volcano. I could say that warlord Bush’s actions were equally stupid, but I would be wrong.
Our hypothetical warlord can be forgiven for his ignorance… that he didn’t know any better. This emperor does not have that excuse. Every thinking person in the world (outside of the oil business) is screaming that this is a Very Bad Idea.
So where is he going to find an extra 21,500 soldiers?
During World War II, President Roosevelt’s sons fought on the front lines. If this Iraq fiasco is such a “noble cause,” Emperor Bush should send his two children of military age who are fit for duty. I don’t think any of us should sacrifice our lives or that of our loved ones unless the people asking us to make that sacrifice are willing to make that sacrifice themselves.
Watching the furious pace of gadget invention during the past decade or so, we’ve been looking forward to a Grand Convergence, where we only need to carry one gadget instead of two or three. The “iPhone” comes close.
It has everything we like about current pocket organizers: an address book, calendar, and notes, along with a means of typing information into the thing. It has everything we like about the iPod: music, pictures and videos. It can connect to the Internet, we like that. It seems to be a complete hand-held computer, with a beautiful display.
A co-worker told me that he would rather have it without the phone. I tend to agree (putting aside my distaste for mobile phones). A mobile phone is a power-intensive device, and would drain juice from the rest of this gadget’s useful functions. It might be better for the phone to be a seperate device that can communicate both ways with the expanded iPod.
I would trade the phone for a fat hard drive, and I would give it a USB port that can be a master or a slave, enabling the connection of cameras, keyboards, disk drives, and other useful stuff. I’ve read that you can’t access the battery, which means you can’t swap it for a fresh one when it burns out. The next generation of this thing needs a reliable swappable battery.
And there will be more generations. It’s exciting to imagine what this device will do five years from now. I mean, compare the current crop of iPods with the first ones that came out.
Regarding the stink over the “iPhone” name. It was all over the press that Linksys came out with something called the “iPhone” a few weeks ago, so I was a bit puzzled when Steve Jobs trotted out his own device with the same name. But then, he also trotted out the “Apple TV,” which was previewed last fall as the “iTV” (another name already attached to someone else’s product). So given that this new phone won’t be in people’s hands and pockets until June, it may end up being the “Apple phone.” (Like the TV, it’d be branded with the Apple logo with the word ‘phone’ next to it.) Maybe it was all deliberate, that Apple is letting Cisco generate more buzz for the product by suing them.
As it stands right now, this is not a compelling product for our needs, but it may be for a lot of other people. After this product evolves for a few years it may work for us, especially if we can get it without the phone.
Disclosure: we own a tiny tiny piece of Apple.
I grew up during the Cold War. My parents, teachers, and other adults in my life spent a lot of time teaching me why America was a great country, and why the Communists were evil.
I was taught that the Bad Countries had dictators, or maybe puppet legislatures. Their governments would listen to phone calls, read mail, and otherwise spy on the population. Anyone expressing an anti-government viewpoint would be arrested, and vast portions of their citizenry were imprisoned and tortured in ghastly gulags. Worst of all, the “Commies” were determined to conquer the world, so we had to be armed and wary against this “evil empire.”
We Americans, on the other hand, lived in a country that chose its leaders by popular vote. Rather than a king or a dictator, we had a president who couldn’t do anything without the approval of Congress or the courts. Our government cannot go searching and snooping without a damn good reason. People are free to criticize the government without fear of retribution. No one can go to jail without due process: every opportunity to present a case before a jury of one’s peers. Best of all, America is a benign power and would never go to war except to defend its own freedom.
It was freedom and government by the people that make America great, and it was oppression and tyranny that made the Nazis and the Communists bad. But what have we become?
We’ve become a country where the highest court violates the will of the people and the constitution it’s sworn to defend to appoint a government that proceeds to snoop through our records, read our mail (e- and snail-), and monitor every activity possible. Those that oppose this government’s policies are demonized and condemned. The American government claims the right to arrest anyone it pleases, torture them, and hold them indefinitely without providing any reason or answering to any judge or jury. And now it engages in wars of conquest, to depose governments that it doesn’t like, to impose puppet regimes, and to rob other countries of their resources.
In short, we have become the kind of country that we were all taught to despise. So when we criticise the country that America has become, it is in reverence to the America we were taught to believe in. This country still exists within the hearts of its people, but it has been sabotaged by a gang of looters and thugs. This is a shame not only for those of us who live here, but for those in the rest of the world who look to America as a beacon of liberty and hope.
Let me leave with a small bit of hope: Germany is now one of the most progressive and liveable countries in the world. If the country that gave us Hitler can come back to civilization in such a short time, so can we.
This story scares the insides out of me.
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.
-snip-
Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.
Both these countries are behaving like childish adolescents. The “mini-nukes” rationalization in this story is like an adolescent thinking that shooting someone is ok as long as you use a .22 instead of a 9mm. Once the guns come out – no matter what size – a terrible escalation is inevitable.
Breaking out the nukes can do nothing but make things worse, no matter how ‘mini’ they are. But both sides believe in Armageddon, so they don’t really care if they trigger the end of civilization as we know it.
It also bothers me that the rest of the world hasn’t risen up in outrage. It’s been invisible in the rest of the media. If this story is credible (and the London Times is pretty credible, in spite of Rupert Murdoch), then Israel is about to metaphorically throw a burning match into a warehouse full of high explosives.
Not to scream bloody murder amounts to complicity.
For most of my life, January in Wisconsin has been all about snow and cold. After Christmas, there’d always be a ‘cold spell’ where it wouldn’t get above zero (Fahrenheit) for several days. Then it would never get above freezing until sometime in March, except for a handful of days where the thermometer would flirt with 40F, days that we knew as The January Thaw.
But now, in the Dead of Winter, there is no snow on the ground. We got a dusting in November, but that’s been it. It’s been close to 50F for several days, and we just lived through what can best be described as a warm spring rain.
Ten years ago, people were ice fishing on the Mississippi River at this time of year. Now it’s hard to find ice. RoZ used to say that climate change was bringing Kansas weather to Wisconsin, but I don’t think even Kansas normally enjoys this kind of weather in January.
And the old geezers who should be ice fishing are putting their boats in the water instead, shaking their heads and muttering, “it just ain’t right.”