Being September 11th - three years, with a Leap Year tossed in having shifted it from a Tuesday to a Saturday - it's a good time to steer clear of the inevitable memorial pieces likely to be sprinkled through that frequent media misnomer "The News." Certainly, if one lost someone in the tragedies in New York, Western Pennsylvania or Washington, DC there's a point to personal memorials. My expectation is that there won't be many large events, however, that someone won't attempt to hijack for a political message.
Concerning the whole Bush, Texas Air National Guard memo fuss I cannot lay claim to having followed the most recent Verified! Forgery! Verified! Forgery! chain this past week's brought. For me, the issue was decided well ago by looking at it from enough distance to be more than reasonably sure that: Dubya was given special, shielding consideration in not only being put high on the list to get into what was an assured, safe tour of "duty" at the time, that being trained on an aircraft that no one who knew anything about anything thought had a chance of seeing modern combat in Viet Nam, and that he wandered off to do... something other than military service for weeks if not months on end during his term of service. The only thing this week's buzz has raised for me are concerns that if the documents showcased on 60 Minutes II and/or the recent assertions by Ben Barnes concerning pulling strings to get Dubya into the Guard turn out to be false it'll turn into a splash of whitewash over the entire matter. (The above Washington Times link isn't meant to be the best - it appears to lean to accomodate the Bush side of the story - but it was handy and provides a sweep of the issues.) Addition: Here's a piece by the Boston Globe covering some of the same points but leaning more heavily on the pros and cons of the documents themselves. The story continues.
I see that Hurricane Ivan's projected path appears set to hammer the Gulf coast - and nearly all of the rest - of Florida, primarily Tuesday through Wednesday. Best of luck to Handsome and the rest of the current Floridians with the latest in the series of hammering storms. Hopefully it'll weaken as it approaches the mainland, but I don't like the look of the current path as it shows the storm having its center over its fuel source - water - until it's set to pass through Northwest Florida.
I haven't followed up on it, but as pieces of information stick in my mind in passing I often find them coalescing into a fuller picture - the same as happens with each of you, I'm sure. One of these mental shoeboxes of mental media debris has me wondering about the high pressure area stalled over Canada, that's reported to have been the source of the moderate summer conditions in the midwest that have seen the farmers in particular and even the cattlemen glorying in the most favorable set of conditions in living memory. (An audio interview with a farmer in his 70's or so sticks in my head, where he said, well, what I just said.) What I'm wondering is how closely that warpage of the Gulf Stream, pumping cooling air over the nation's midsection, is tied to the path this still early season's hurricanes are taking.
Finally, feeling like a commercial message: With the first of my wall of 141 Heroclix auctions set to conclude in roughly twelve and a half hours there's some of that home stretch excitement growing. The last of them will end over five and a half days from now, though, so it's certainly a stretched out event for me. The bulk of the unique pieces were front-loaded among the auctions ending Saturday and Sunday nights, though, so that's doubly the point of focus for me now.
Today will be filled with errands for me and some on behalf of others, some chores around the house, and generally an attempt to do something productive so as to not fall into the eBay trap of toggling over and refreshing my listing page every five minutes...
Now... off into my day while it's still there.
Odds and Ends
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