September 1, 2008

Various thoughts

Today's post is a hodge podge post of things thought while hanging out on Sunday afternoon watching the US Open with half my attention and now the evening news after their coverage ended.



I hate this commercial. It's painfully obvious that it's a Eurpoean commercial with the voices badly dubbed over in American accents. And the YouTube posting says that the box is photoshopped in as well, something that makes sense but that I hadn't thought about.



It was just over three years ago that I started this blog. A month after I began writing here, I wrote that New Orleans was in shambles and then that you should give. Much of what I know about the disaster there comes from my viewing of When the Levees Broke, and I've only been to the Big Easy once - a year after Katrina came through.

And now it looks like Gustav just might finish the job that Katrina started. I've been tracking the storm's approach on Stormpulse, and it looks like the eye of the storm will at least come ashore a bit to the west of the city, so the city may not be wiped entirely off the map, but they're likely not in for an easy time.



It's really interesting to see all the politicians anticipate the destruction of Gustav. From Nagin's pre-emptive threats toward any potential looters going straight to Angola to the RNC's plans to shorten the convention.

The fears of the politicians, hoping to avoid any possible appearance of not carrying is fascinating, and I can't decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. I understand that it's important that we learn from the clear mistakes of the past, I wonder how much of the pre-emptive work is being done merely so that they appear to care and to have their stuff together.



After we got back from the Canyon, I pointed out a virtual tour of the Canyon that showed a marvelous view of every step of the hike. Well, it looks like the photographer/tour guide has updated the site with photos of his hike from this spring.

They look great, and they're about as close as you're going to get to the Canyon's hikes without getting any dirt on your boots. Thanks to Gene Hanson for posting all the pics.

2 comments:

joey said...

holy crap stormpulse is sweet. if only they did that for regular Midwestern thunder/snow storms too...

if they do and im not seein it, please tell

PHSChemGuy said...

Oh, I wish we could track storms in our area in the same way. I'm thinking that the size of the storm makes a huge difference - cyclones and hurricanes are so massive that they have a momentum that we can somewhat track.

Smaller storms - like the tiny blip that caused some lightning over Cincy tonight but that didn't take up much on the radar screen - are just too random to track in the same way...

...yet.