"The first family of Minnesota Blogging"
- Mitch Berg, Shot in the Dark
Night Lights
Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog
Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir
A Good Husband: Marriage & Relationship Advice
plein air sketches - stories, tales and ponderings from the landscape of daily life
Twinkie Town :: A Minnesota Twins Online Community
Northern Alliance
LILEKS (James) Screeeeeeedblog
Daily MOB reads
Cake Eater Chronicles | De recta non tolerandum sunt!
PolicyGuy: Public Policy in the States. K-12, health care, budgets
Update:
Delmar: Gopher, Everett?
Everett: No thank you, Delmar. I'm afraid one-third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite without beddin' her back down.
I thought, again, My grandfather shouldn’t have to have it so hard and asked him “Do you ever sit around and wonder at how different things are? Back when you were young and now. How different things could have been or might still be?”
This is what he told me:
“You know, a lot of things have changed. A lot of people aint around any more. I think about that a lot. Sometimes. But it don’t bother me like all the talk going on now. What bothers me is people saying ‘I don’t know how we’re gonna make it. Times is so tough’.
“I can’t understand it. Everybody talking about the hard times we’re in. They don’t know a thing about it. That’s the trouble. Talking about hard times and such. They don’t have no idea what hard times is. People starving in other parts of the world. Let me tell you, there’s all kinds of things that start to not-matter real fast when you can’t put food in your belly.
“Buddy I know about that stuff. I aint kidding you. Back when we was raised up there was times there wasn’t things to eat. And winters! You aint never seen such winters. You couldn’t even walk in the snow it was so deep. I remember wearing old thin shirts. Shoes you had to strap on cause they wasn’t nothing much but bottoms. I seen many a day where all there was to eat was a little meat grease and some green onions. I had that a lot. And it tasted real good too.”
He laughed.
“It was years ago. Man, that comes back to me whenever I see people filling their plates so full they gotta throw half of it away. Then standing there, shaking their heads and rubbing their bellies and talking about how hard times is.
“Why, I never had it so good. Neither have they. They just don’t know it.”
One Time My Dad
One time my dad said to me, I don’t
see why people complain about how hard they work
or how tired they are. Nobody works hard but
farmers, miners, lumberjacks and foundry workers.
This was before power tools, tractors, and such things, and all
the work was done by hand. When farmers in Upstate New York
left to get away from the stones, what
they found in Southern Michigan were: more stones.
As they cleared the land, the horses hauled the black walnut trees
and stumps to the side of the field and the farmers burned them.
Black walnut was no good to them, too hard to work.
Grandpa Conde, when he finally left the farm and moved
to Milan, got a job in the foundry and walked to work
and back, six days a week, 12 hours
a day, for 50 cents a day. He thought
he was sitting pretty. Whenever the noon whistle blew, people
would say, Well, Hell’s out for lunch. But he would sit
down in a cool place and eat his lunch.
Once, when she was a little girl, Aunt Ida
asked her father, who was working in his garden, why
he worked so hard and wasn’t he tired? Grandpa
straightened up from his hoeing and answered: I never get tired.
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.
This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.
The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.
Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.
Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.
The European Union is facing a revolt from poorer members over tough climate change targets at a time when the global economy is heading for recession.
Italy has teamed up with seven east and central European countries - Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia - to threaten a veto over Brussels legislation that implements an EU target to cut Europe's CO2 emissions 20 per cent by 2020.
Williamson, now in Jacksonville, said Wednesday he lost respect for his former coach last year and would like to "duke it out" with him when the Jaguars host the Vikings on Sunday.
"We can meet on the 50-yard line and we can go at it," Williamson said.
The 6-foot-1, 200-pound receiver said he liked his chances against Childress, too, especially with a few inches and at least 10 pounds on the coach. Williamson even said he would fight with both hands tied behind his back.
It's the birthday of a young man who became a best-selling author as a teenager, Christopher Paolini, born in California (1983) and raised near Paradise Valley, Montana. He was homeschooled, and when he finished high school at age 15, he had a lot of time on his hands, so he decided to write a fantasy novel. He began Eragon, finished it a year later, at age 16. He spent a second year revising that draft, and then gave it to his parents. They loved it, and in 2002 Eragon was self-published through the family company. The Paolini family embarked on an exhausting tour to promote Christopher's book. They went to 135 promotional events that first year, dressed in red and black medieval costumes. Paolini got offers from both Random House and Scholastic, and in August of 2003 — when Paolini was still 19 — the book was published by a division of Random House/Knopf.
The book went straight to the number three spot of the New York Times Bestseller List. Paolini has written two best-selling sequels to Eragon, and he is at work on a fourth book.
You know those days when you’ve eaten something that hasn’t agreed with you and you can’t be too far away from the bathroom? Well, this is the perfect companion for such occasions: The Toilet Golf. The package includes: a putter with articifial turf, a miniature club, golf balls and flag. It also comes with a very useful sign to hang on the bathroom door “Do Not Disturb: Golf Game in Progress”.
...
The Potty Putter is a true innovation in toilet entertainment and the perfect gift for the golf (or toilet) enthusiast in your life!
3
by John Berryman
Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me
against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me
to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain
my grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.
Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.
Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.
Unite my various soul,
sole watchman of the wide & single stars.
They lean on rakes.
It's late, it is evening
already inside their houses.
The children are gone.
Their wives are on the phone
talking softly to someone else.
This frost, this early Fall
upon their minds, a small
measure of patience and regard
as if the twilight world
in bright papery pieces
diminished so and thus.
Surely the reality is that the people who have lent all this money have been incredibly stupid.
Oh no, no...the reality is that what is stupid is that at some point somebody asked how much these houses are actually worth. I mean, if they hadn't asked that question everything would have gone on perfectly as normal.
Now some will say that this will lead to a financial melt-down. Can it be avoided?
It can be avoided provided the governments and central banks give us — the speculators and financial advisors — the money back that we've lost.
But...isn't that rewarding greed and stupidity?
No, it's rewarding what Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls "the ingenuity of the markets."
I see....
We don't want this money to spend on ourselves. We want this money to go into the market so we can carry on borrowing and lending money as if nothing had happened without thinking too much about it.
Well, if worst came to worst and you didn't get this money, what then?
Well then, the market would crash and I would say to you what people like me always say, "It's not us who will suffer, it's your pension fund."
