Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

I can't even think of a title...

I live in the Dallas area.  Dallas, for those who don't know, is actually fairly far north for a major southern city.  It's only an hour's drive north before you get to, what most people consider, the heartland.

Most forecasts now have Hurricane Rita's outlying bands hitting Dallas as a Category 1 Hurricane.

A hurricane.  In Dallas.

What... the fuck.

Veronica's been talking about possible implications for Dallas for a couple of days now.

I'm not trying to be pedantic tree-hugging guy here, but, seriously, a hurricane is going to hit Dallas, and there are still people who think that global warming has nothing to do with it:

The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. "The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming."

Of course, there are already tragedies occurring before the hurricane even makes landfall:

An intercity passenger bus carrying elderly evacuees from Hurricane Rita was destroyed by fire on Interstate 45 in Wilmer early Friday. The Dallas County Medical Examiner's office was prepared to receive 24 bodies.

A Dallas County Sheriff's Department spokesman said the bus had been carrying 38 senior citizens and six care providers from the Brighton Gardens of Bellaire Nursing Home in Bellaire, Texas, a Houston suburb.

The article goes on to say that the oxygen tanks the seniors were using probably sparked the fire.

No Coordination

Christianne Amanpour, just now on CNN, reporting on her ridealong with officials who are part of the New Orleans rescue efforts:

He (a police officer) kicks in this door because he's told that there are people inside who need rescuing only to find that they had been pulled out yesterday.  How was he to know? There is still virtually no coordination.

Over a week later, and the rescue effort is still uncoordinated.

"The list goes on and on..."

Summer's right, there is just not much you can say about this statement by the mayor of New Orleans: a man left to the sorrowful duty of going on local television and detailing for his constiuents the damage done to their city.

Is it wrong...

... that, while I normally don't care about hurricane coverage, I was totally wrapped up in Hurricane Katrina, but then completely lost interest once the absolute and total destruction of an entire city was no longer likey?

Discovery

It was such a relief to see the shuttle get down safely, this morning.  With such intense scrutiny since the tragedy last time out, it was easy to overlook just how admirably these aging vehicles have performed.

It's probably an interesting generational distinction, but I wonder if people a generation older than me consider man's exploration of space as capsule-based, as they saw the birth of the space program utilize the Mercury and Apollo dewdrop capsules.

My generation was the shuttle generation.  It is a strange switch for me to think of the shuttle as aging and out of date.  Growing up, the shuttles were the most complicated and most awe-inspiring machines a young boy could imagine.  In fact, when I got older and devoured books on the space race, it was quite a change for me to imagine these tiny little capsules which were the equivalent of throwing a rock into space and then waiting for it to come down.  The shuttle isn't all that different, of course, but it sure didn't seem that way to a young boy who marveled at these "space planes."

They made me dream of a time that I might be able to get into one and travel into space.  It made me want to learn Morse Code (because I saw "Space Camp", in which I learned that Morse Code, a keen fashion sense, a robot, and Tom Skerritt was all you really needed if you got into trouble).

At any rate, it's just nice to see NASA, under such intense pressure, succeed once again, as they have at an incredible rate in the past.  It gives me hope that humans aren't done in space, and that I may get to see the next step in my lifetime.

Catholic School Teacher arrested for sleeping with male students

And while I could make the "This stuff never happened when I was in Catholic School" jokes, they sort of did.  Except in my case it was our priest principal getting caught in a gay park grabbing an undercover police officer's crotch.  But enough about my parochial school misadventures:

Geisel, an immensely popular English teacher before she was axed, got canned after police in Cohoes — a town adjacent to Colonie — responded to a resident’s call June 11 about a suspicious parked car.

A cop found a sex-rumpled Geisel and a 17-year-old student inside.

I really just wanted to blog about this article because it included the phrase "sex-rumpled" and that made me laugh.

Sick, Sick, Sick

The Colony is a small city a little north of Downtown Dallas.  Apparantly, their constable, who's run unopposed for many years, is a sexual deviant and a freak.

A person using the screen name freevacation_formoms contacted Marsha – the undercover officer's alias – through an online instant messaging service, according to the statement of probable cause released by the clerk's office of the Fremont County Combined Court.

The person identified himself as Rick from Oklahoma. He described himself as a "very real older male, clean, safe, discreet" with "a motor home so will travel," according to the document.

Rick asked about Marsha's 8-year-old daughter, Melissa. He "told me that he had no limits, none at all, other than moms rule," the officer wrote in the court document.

The officer's name was redacted in the court papers.

Rick told Marsha about explicit sexual acts he wanted to perform with her and her daughter, according to the document.

"He also told me that he had traveled two times before so far for this same thing," the officer wrote. "Rick told me that he was looking for one mom into this that he could visit and take on vacation several times a year."

By the way, his name is Larry Dale Floyd.  Isn't that just perfect?

Second London Blast

What a scary time to be a Londoner.

The End is Nigh! #14357

Landslides in California:

"The pipes started making funny noises and the toilet sounded like it was about to explode," said Carrie Joyce, a fire department office manager who lives in the neighborhood.

"I could see one house, huge, we call it the mausoleum, 5,000 square feet or more. It had buckled, the retaining wall in the front of it was cracked. It just looked like the whole house was going," she said.

True Stories of the Homeless

This is my favorite part about the blogosphere.  Sometimes, in the midst of swirling debate on the hot topics of the day and the endless echo chambers, you get posts like this one, which highlight with such clarity and passion a subject which no one was talking about before, but after reading it you can't believe that it isn't talked about more.

Here are two stories about the deaths of homeless people, stripped of stereotypes and preconceptions.  Beautifully written and tragic.

(via Fact-esque)