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Much drama, yet it’s just another Friday storm

Dark clouds are gathering outside from the west. It really doesn’t matter from where the clouds are gathering if they happen to be gathering  somewhere inside. Holy moly! There’s a thunderstorm in the living room, Gladys! Whoops, your big ol’ pile of blue hair just went up into a cloud of smoke from that lightning strike.

Obviously it is better when the clouds stay in their place. So they come like angry neighbors ready to do battle over that fence your great-grandpa put up in ’08. That’s 1908.

It is 5:21 p.m. Central Standard Time and it looks like Dark-30 outside. I’ve been watching the Channel 11 KHOU-TV animated weather radar online and I can see a cluster of storms, one of which has just that teeniest-tiny area of violet inside, which can indicate a severe T-storm. This particular bunch is just a hair west of Beaumont. Right where I am at Ground Zero. Don’t you hate that term? The wind is whipping — whipping good — blowing rain and tree limbs to and fro. I am watching Channel 6 KFDM-TV in Beaumont on the tube, with the mute on I might add. It is nice to know I sit in a motel room only two buildings away the banality of the 5 o’clock show, which goes on with nary a hitch.

The real storm hasn’t arrived yet, according to the Houston radar which I just quickly flipped on for a look. Traffic looks kind of thick on the I-10 service road at 11th Street. I am glad I have nowhere to go.

Maybe this seems a bit dramatic, or perhaps I am making it a bit so. But it is just a spring storm in Southeast Texas on a Friday afternoon. Unless the storm, which the radar says is still just to the west of us, blows the roof off the place or some place else, all shall be just as it should be.

I really like, love even, the rain, the thunder, the lightning is even cool to watch. Especially since the drought is a non-hazardous storm welcome. Anything is cool as long as we can watch and don’t have to worry about seeking shelter.

Well, I think the storm is finally here. Happy weekend.

 

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Rock and roll obits: Dick Clark and Levon Helm

Obits today for a couple of “senior” dudes who were most influential to our rock ‘n’ roll world.

Dick Clark, yeah, he counted down the fall of the big New Year’s ball on Times Square, but he also showed the world its latest bands with the tunes “you can dance to.” Plus, he was the real life Peter Pan, at least, he looked as if he never grew old.

Levon Helm, who’s he you ask? Well, ever hear about the electric Dylan? The Hawks played as the backup band during the controversial Dylan musical conversion. Later known as The Band, Helm was drummer and provided the gritty voice for the band singing stories more than songs such as “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “The Weight” (Take a load off Fannie), or “The Shape I’m In.”

Helm, the son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, was the only Yank among this otherwise Canadian group. It was an act that probably was known more widely known after their classic “The Last Waltz,” which was a 1978 “rockumentary” of The Band’s last concert.

My favorite song sung by Helm — Up On Cripple Creek — tells of a miner’s memory of girl way down South even though that remembrance is somewhat fogged by “a drunkard’s dream.”

“When I get off this mountain/You know where I want to go/Straight down the Mississippi River/To the Gulf of Mexico/To Lake Charles, Louisiana/Little Bessie, girl I once knew/She told me to come on by/If there’s anything that she could do … “

Well, never mind it’s a bit out of the way going to Lake Charles from Colorado by way of the Mississippi and Gulf. The fact that Lake Charles was just across the county-parish line from where I grew up was enough for at least me to identify.

Rest in peace Dick and Levon. Rock on.

 

 

 

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Lucky me: One in a million (and a half)

The phrase “astronomical odds” is often used for occurrences such as winning the lottery, or being struck by lightning. Perhaps, in the very strict sense of the phrase, such odds are those applied for a direct hit to earth by a sizable meteorite. I tried searching a short while ago for a definition of just what were astronomical odds and couldn’t find an expounding which made any sense. So is 1 in 1.5 million astronomical? I don’t know but if you are talking about winning the lottery, I would take it if I happened to be the “1.”

As usual though, I am 1 in a million, actually 1 in 1.5 million, for something that sucks.

Bank of America sent me an “alert” e-mail this morning which warned “irregular debit card activity” had been detected in my account.  Oh no, that can’t be good. When dealing by phone with Bank of America — which the e-mail told me to do — it never is good. True to form, it wasn’t good.

The customer service person I finally got was somewhat vague in explaining this irregular activity on my card. She asked about three or four transactions I made and, sure enough, there was one charge for $125 at Kroger that was technically not mine. It had something to do with a $10 gasoline purchase which I had made. I don’t fully understand it, but I do know that such charges temporarily appear with gas charges sometime. I wish I could understand it better but as long as the charged disappears, well, out of sight, out off mind. In the end, no one was using my debit card. Not yet, at least.

But best I can tell, my card number was used. Where and when and how it did so without a charge showing up is now the question. Maybe the charge would have shown up had I not eventually gone down to the bank today to cancel my present card and obtain a temporary one until my new debit card arrives in the mail in about a week. Taking such action will presumably help prevent an unauthorized charge from happening.

Waiting on hold for Bank of America this morning put me past time to start work so I called my supervisor and told him I needed a couple of hours of leave after I explained what was going on. It turns out that he too had the same happen last week with his charge card. Alas, two in a million (and a half)!

While waiting for the bank to open I read a store about how hackers had recently stolen 1.5 million account numbers for Visa and Master Cards from a processor called Global Payments. Visa removed the company over the weekend from its list of hundreds of companies it uses as go-betweens for banks and merchants. It is the largest such single heist in the past two years, a time during which about 8 million account numbers had been stolen.

Whether the action taken by Bank of America is a solution or just a heads-up, I will have to wait and see. Knowing my luck, some punk using my account information and name is probably tooling around somewhere smoking blunts in a new, black Navigator and having a high ol’ time. But I hope not.

Perhaps my odds-breaking will have been stopped cold in its tracks. Then again, maybe not. After all, I am the “lucky” one, being one in 1.5 million.

 

 

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Let’s (don’t) play twister

It’s spring-time in the Alley. I’m talking about “Tornado Alley” and every other place around it where twister outbreaks may occur. The National Weather Service made some dire warnings last week about the possibility of deadly tornadoes in the Midwest which may have saved unknown numbers of lives. Sure enough, some bad-ass twisters happened. But it doesn’t take a big explosion of storms to cause damage, nor does it take a tornado. Severe thunderstorms, lightning and, yes, flooding — the deadliest of all in the U.S. — wreak havoc in this great but meteorologically diverse nation of ours. It’s a great time of year, but don’t mess around with a tornado. They’re not much fun.

This can ruin your day. NOAA photo
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Satellites or noses: Plenty of poo-poohing when it comes to finding penguins

Yes, it is true North Korea couldn’t launch rockets if its people’s lives depended on it. For that, we should be thankful.

But an even greater reason for joy is that scientists have discovered that twice as many emperor penguins exist in Antarctica. These scientists used satellites to track penguin guano. The latter term is what BBC refers to as “penguin poo.” The scientists from the UK, U.S. and Australia say about 600,000 of the flightless birds, which are the tallest and heaviest of the species, exist way down South.

The emperor has no clothes? Well, they seem pretty well dressed for life in a guano factory. Wikimedia Commons photo

 

The satellite tracking of the penguin crap will help scientists determine the health of the emperor population, which modeling indicates, could decline if warming starts melting the sea ice on the edges of Antarctica, the BBC report said.

It is good to know that hunting emperor scat from outer space is paying off in keeping watch over our melting planet. Is it a coincidence that spurs this headline today on Google News?

Auroras Seen on Uranus For First Time

Which inevitably raises the question — yes it’s childish as hell — “Is it Your ANUS or YOUR an us?”

To which is quickly answered: “Is its whose anus?”

But I really question whether satellites are needed at all to track Scatman Penguin. You see, I know for a fact that penguin feces smells, well, like s**t. I mean, it smells really, really foul. That’s foul, not fowl. I viewed a bunch of pigeons once when my friend Ross and I visited the Dallas World Aquarium a few years ago. No, I’m not sure what penguins have to do with aquariums either, especially when they are part of an outdoor exhibit. But, I mean, thank heavens they are outdoors. I would hate to be cooped up in a room with a bunch of penguin poo.

Well, that is it. I am confused but I started with penguin guano and end with penguin guano. Call it by whatever name one likes, it still smells like penguin s**t and at least for such a discovery, one needs no satellite, just a halfway decent schnoz.