Month: April 2006

Officials in St. Bernard Parish, a suburban area of New Orleans, are considering former FEMA director Michael Brown as a consultant. The officials think Brown might use his expertise to guide the parish through federal red tape in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort.

We all remember Michael Brown don’t we? Heck-of-a-job-Brownie? The man who got his emergency management experience running a horse breeder’s organization? All I can say to those of St. Bernard Parish is lots of luck. I’m sure Brownie will do you a heck of a job. Just ask George W.

Xena: You can’t get to here from there.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the “tenth planet” which is being called “Xena,” for the warrior princess, no doubt. NASA says that Xena is only slightly larger than Pluto, has a longer tail than Mickey Mouse and talks only slightly more intelligible than Donald Duck. The space agency is not speaking about what they found up in Uranus.

Seriously though, Hubble showed Xena as having a diameter of 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles, which is about 70-some-odd miles more than Pluto. Xena, according to NASA, is about 10 billion miles from Earth with its diameter being about half the width of the United States. It is bright and thought by scientists to be one of the most reflective objects in the solar system. NASA said the bright reflectivity of Xena could be because of “fresh methane frost on its surface.” And you know what that means? Yep, cows have been there breaking wind. Which could have caused an ice age. Don’t ask me how because I just made that up.

Other interesting facts about Xena include:

On May 6, 1997, according to Wikipedia, Lucy Lawless who played Xena Warrior Princess exposed her breasts (resulting from a wardrobe malfunction–yeah, we’ve heard that one before) while singing the U.S. national anthem at a National Hockey League game in Anaheim, Calif. between the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and the Detroit Red Wings. Lawless later said in “Newsweek:” “I was mortified … It was quite a bit more exposure than I want.”

Speaking of interesting Xena facts, a nice woman I dated once named Marilyn Rucker has a great song called: “If I could be like Xena.”

“If I could be like Xena
A feisty warrior princess
I’d scream my ululations
While I slice and dice and minces”

When I say I dated her once, I mean one time. We were in Addison, Texas, and we went to see “Enemy Mine” at the movies. A summary of the 1985 movie starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett Jr.:

“A soldier from Earth crash-lands on an alien world after sustaining battle damage. Eventually he encounters another survivor, but from the enemy species he was fighting; they band together to survive on this hostile world. In the end the human finds himself caring for his enemy in a completely unexpected way.”

I can’t remember if they landed on Xena.

Marilyn, who now lives in Austin, reminded me by e-mail that we went to see some sci-fi movie. Then I later regained some of my memory and recalled it was “Enemy Mine.” As I was writing this, I was having trouble accessing Marilyn’s Web site. I have provided the link with the hope that you can check it out. She really writes some hysterically funny songs.

A former colleague once told me of a theory he heard about President George W. Bush. That theory was that perhaps Bush’s religious beliefs had led him to start the war in Iraq in order to hasten the apocalypse and, thus, the return of Christ. While it would not surprise me that some hold the view that should happen, I just couldn’t see GW harboring such a belief. But that was then and this is now.

It seems like every day another piece of the White House comes flying off in what seems like a never-ending s**tstorm surrounding George W. Bush. He reminds me of the “Peanuts” character Pigpen, except turmoil and potential disaster hovers around Bush instead of grime.

The latest revelations include Bush’s declassifying of intelligence documents which may have set the stage for outing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Scooter Libby, formerly the vice president’s chief of staff, stands indicted in connection with this outing. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has filed documents that indicate what has been repeatedly conjectured in the media, which is that the purposeful leaks from those intelligence documents were used for political purposes to get back at war critic Amb. Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband.

Then there is Seymour Hersh’s story in “The New Yorker” that says the Bush administration, over the objections of Pentagon leaders, has a war plan for Iran that includes deploying nuclear bunker-busting bombs.

Combine all of that with invading Iraq on shaky premises as well as allowing the government to spy on its own citizens without a warrant and you have one scary-ass goober in the White House.

Many pundits say the mid-term congressional elections will be a referendum on the Iraq war. Perhaps it should be a referendum on whether the congressional member seeking office has the spine to vote on articles of impeachment should they be drawn up. I still say impeachment of Bush sounds far-fetched. It’s just not as far as it once seemed. It’s like Nixon was reincarnated into a much more pleasant shell but one that is twice as sinister. Like John Fogerty said: “I see a bad moon a-rising.”

It had looked as if I could hit the snooze button all the way through tomorrow’s runoff elections here in Beaumont, Texas. But alas, something happened over the weekend to breathe life into the sole local campaign on the ballot and it happened right under my nose.

Around noon on Saturday I walked the three blocks down to the ATM machine on Broadway and found a flock of fire trucks on the next block. (What is it with fires in my neighborhood lately?) A long, thick, yellow hose, called a “supply line” by firefighters, lay in the street. I walked over to the next block, which is Liberty Avenue. I could see that a building — I thought it was a house — had received some damage from fire and smoke.

It wasn’t until I watched the news that evening that I learned the structure that burned was the office of attorney Marsha Normand. Normand is in the Democratic runoff election with former federal prosecutor John Stevens for Criminal District Court judge in Jefferson County. What’s more, even though arson had not been cited as a cause for the fire, Normand said she believes the fire is politically motivated. How exciting if that was the case! How embarrassing if it was not!

Where there’s smoke … there’s smoke.

Most likely I was preoccupied this morning with an overpowering aggravation that was set into motion by several phone calls to the local VA clinic. So that is why I probably didn’t hear the cacophony of sirens wailing that were from Beaumont Fire Department trucks. They responded to a fire about a block east of my place on North Street. I just happened to walk outside to stretch and found an actual hairy-legged happening was taking place just down the street.

The above photo was about all I got and what little smoke was left kind of obscures a firefighter. He incidentally looked at me like I was nuts because I was taking a photo. Or perhaps he looked at me like I was nuts because he is good judge of character. It’s got to be one or the other, or something else.

A neighbor across the street from the house that caught fire told me — while taking drags off a Swisher Sweet — that the occupant of the home left something on the stove and then went back to bed. That can’t be a good thing. Fortunately, she woke up and saw all the smoke then called for the fire department. I am sure it’s bad enough having a smoky house. In fact, I know it is. But the situation could’ve been so much worse.