TV News LIES

I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I can’t vote for Barack Obama. And it’s not because he’s not liberal enough for me. I gave up on the idea of a progressive president before I was old enough to vote. No … the reason I won’t vote for Obama is because he’s just slightly less murderous than George W. Bush. And a man with bloody hands doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So who will I vote for?  Who cares?

According to the rocket scientists at NASA (and I mean that in the good way), we are at a point in climate change due to global warming that they were predicting in the '80s we wouldn't reach until the end of the 21st century. Not only that, but a phenomenon has developed that they didn't foresee.

Unusual weather events like extreme drought (think Dust Bowl in the '30s, 500 year floods) things that used to be rare, events only occurring 1 in a 1000 times, these extreme weather events are now happening 1 out of 10 times. The odds are that as more heat becomes available to drive these weather patterns, this will only get worse.

It has seemed for some time now that the world is hellbent on making campaigns of conversions -- not involving religion or philosophy, but making sure all normal and usual events are taken and converted into gibberish, transmuted into the surreal, then sprayed back at us like transmogrified clouds of pesticides.

Case in point:  Clint Eastwood has come out for million dollar baby, Willard Romney, for President.

At first, I thought I'd accidentally tripped my bookmarked link for The Onion.  I double-checked the page logos and address bar:  Nope, the BBC.

The human species keeps experiencing threshold moments.  At times it seems everything's right on the brink.  This time, there's a nice change:  It's a good thing.  There's even a love story here, as sincere and big-hearted as space.

First, the news: Fans of sci-fi and science fact are coming up on a special moment:  knowing an object of human origin is about to move into interstellar space.

Nearly 35 years after launch, two Voyager spacecraft, sent aloft less than three weeks apart, in the summer of 1977, are thrumming along fine, and continue to send back intriguing accounts of their journeys.

When the bombs were dropped I was very happy. The war would be over now, they said, and I was very happy. The boys would be coming home very soon they said, and I was very happy. We showed ‘em, they said, and I was very happy. They told us that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, and I was very happy. But in August of 1945 I was only ten years old, and I was very, very happy.

The crew of the B-29 was so young and heroic, and in the photo they also looked very happy.  For some reason, I clearly remember the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets. Of course I remember the name of the plane, the Enola Gay.  And oh yes, I remember the name of the bomb.  It was called Little Boy. That made me smile.

You never know what will get the group's boxers and BVDs in a bundle.  Topics range pretty far and wide, like always, down at Hack's BBQ Shack, in our usual booth.

There was the usual chit-chat first -- checking the temp on club members' relationships, jabbering a drizzle of baseball, tallying injuries from any DIY jobs, and finding out where everyone else's job search was pegged for the week on the Barf-O-Meter.