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It could be a great week for the East Coast

My niece in Virginia Beach, said a short while ago on Facebook: “Earthquake on Tuesday, hurricane on Saturday…this is shaping up to be a stellar week!” I’m glad of course that she is doing well as is her family and she can maintain her sense of humor.

The East Coast earthquake seems to be the topic of the afternoon. A fellow who works on my floor — our conversations have never ventured beyond small talk in the past couple of years I’ve known him — mentioned how weird the quake was. A man passing time listening to NPR while waiting on someone at the grocery store also made some mention of it. This fellow said he had lived in California and studied quakes. He said that when cool temperatures come up suddenly there tend to be more shaking.

Compared to the 80-degree nights we have been having in Southeast Texas, the last couple of nights in the area of the quake’s epicenter has been cool — in the upper 50s and 60s for lows, we’d take it — but hardly earth-shaking cold. Nonetheless, it was an interesting theory to listen to while putting the groceries in my auto.

This was the most powerful earthquake in the Eastern U.S. area in 100 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That is significant enough. But the fact that the quake was felt in Washington, New York City and Boston — the Megapolis (BosWash) — is another reason that this is such a big event even though the quake was nothing as severe as the 9.0 quake and tsunami that hit eastern Japan in March.

The fact is earthquakes happen all the time and all around the world. An earthquake can strike any location at any time, the USGS says. The last earthquake in Texas was 11:30 p.m., Aug. 6, about 6 miles west southwest of Dallas, this according to the “Last Earthquake in … “ page on the USGS Website. Pretty neat site, actually, as is individual state earthquake histories by that same agency. Included in the Texas earthquake history was a blurb of the series of shocks that hit in the mid-1960s in the area just north of where I was raised:

 “A series of moderate earthquakes in the Texas – Louisiana border region near Hemphill started on April 23, 1964. Epicenters were determined on April 23, 24, 27, and 28. There were numerous additional shocks reported felt at Pineland, Hemphill, and Milam. The only damage reported was from the magnitude 4.4 earthquake on April 28 – wall paper and plaster cracked at Hemphill (V). The magnitude of the other epicenters changed from 3.4 to 3.7. Shocks were also felt at Pineland on April 30 and May 7. On June 2, three more shocks were reported in the same area. The strongest was measured at magnitude 4.2; intensities did not exceed IV. Another moderate earthquake on August 16 awakened several people at Hemphill and there were some reports of cracked plaster (V). The shock was also felt at Bronson, Geneva, Milam, and Pineland.”

There was a lot of local interest in these shocks in my area, not because it was spread over the news or the Internet. It wasn’t. This was, after all, 1964 in the Pineywoods of East Texas.. All the talk, as I can remember, was by word of mouth. Much of the concern centered around Toledo Bend Reservoir, which spans the Texas-Louisiana border for 65 miles and is the largest man-made water body in the southern U.S. Toledo Bend was being built during that time so some dismissed the shaking as dynamite charges, used for what in building the huge lake I have no idea. Others still, worried about building a large dam holding almost 4.5 million acre feet of water — think 4.5 million x 1 acre of water that is 1 foot deep — being built on faults capable of producing seismic eruptions as those in 1964. But just as suddenly as the quakes came did they leave.

Everyone, it seems or at least in the U.S., has some sort of violent natural aspect for which to be concerned. Where I live it’s hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes (not recently though), lightning, forest fires, marsh fires, extreme heat and humidity,  disease-ridden mosquitoes, alligators, snakes, flesh-eating bacteria from the Gulf waters, and if you believe some, Bigfoot. Those are just some of the natural threats. Oh and earthquakes, we don’t have a big risk but remember what the USGS said. At least we don’t have mudslides, like California.

Hopefully, my niece and her family and my friends on the East Coast will escape Hurricane Irene. It is bad enough just surviving everyday life without earthquakes and tropical cyclones to worry about. If my loved ones can get through that storm and the earthquake with little or no problems, then perhaps those folks might just really have a stellar week. Let’s all hope they do.

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Have we ever seen a summer like this before?

The same hot day without rain over and over and over is beginning to get on my last nerve.

Some people get their emotions all out of whack when it is cloudy and cold and dark all the time. It’s called SAD, for Seasonal Affective Disorder. I may not be depressed from the temperature peaking near 100 degrees every day and “nary a clown in the sky” as someone used to say. One can be danged sure though that I am truly sick of, seemingly, the same high pressure center parking its hot rear end over my part of the world and seeing how long it can stay there.

I know folks around these parts who say they can’t remember a hot, dry spell like the one we have been having here in Southeast Texas. I can remember such spells but they were not exactly in this part of the state. Most recently I think of the Summer of 1998 while living in Waco. That summer was No. 4 on the all-time list of consecutive 100-degree days in that “Heart of Texas (HOT)” city with a total of 29 days in a row, according to the National Weather Service. This year is the new No. 1, with a string of 44 days when the temp was at least 100. That streak thankfully ended on Aug. 12.

Before that was the summer of 1980. I lived in Nacogdoches that year, about two hours to the north of where I now live. I worked then as a firefighter and was in between semesters in college. I remember it as plenty hot then as I lived in a little shotgun shack with an air conditioner that gave its all in a house surrounded by no trees. But we had nothing of a summer in comparison with Dallas and even Waco. That was the No. 2 Waco summer of consecutive 100-degree days with 42 in a row. Dallas had it much worse that 1980 summer as it was the all time number of consecutive and total days of 100-degree days. I remember a friend told me a story about being inside a Dallas bar at 10 p.m. during that summer and the deejay announced, to applause, that the temperature had fallen to 100 degrees.

But I don’t remember summers like that where I now live, which is basically within 60 miles of where I was raised.

And thus a little new history from this summer in nearby Houston:

…THE 100-DEGREE DAY RECORDS FOR SOUTHEAST TEXAS… …2011 NOW HAS MORE 100 DEGREE DAYS THAN ANY OTHER YEAR IN CITY OF HOUSTON WEATHER HISTORY… THE HIGH TEMPERATURE HAS ONCE AGAIN SOARED TO 101 DEGREES IN HOUSTON. THIS IS THE 22ND CONSECUTIVE DAY THAT THE MERCURY HAS CLIMBED TO THE CENTURY MARK. THIS IS ALSO THE 33RD TIME THIS YEAR THAT THE 100 DEGREE THRESHOLD HAS BEEN REACHED OR EXCEEDED. THIS BREAKS THE RECORD OF 32 ONE HUNDRED DEGREE DAYS ESTABLISHED IN 1980.

MOST CONSECUTIVE 100-DEGREE DAYS AT HOUSTON (DOWNTOWN/IAH): (RECORDS SINCE 1889)

1. 22 DAYS – ONGOING AS OF 8/22/2011

2. 14 DAYS – ENDING 7/19/1980

…

It is difficult to interpret all of our local weather records which come out of the National Weather Service office in Lake Charles, La., probably because they have a much smaller office there. However, the August maximum temperatures for Beaumont/Port Arthur show that, so far, no records seem to be broken as for temperature. I didn’t check the rainfall records because that would have really depressed me.

So yes, it is hotter than a million dollars worth of 2-dollar pistols here. Maybe we have never seen a summer like this one before although perhaps our ancestors did. When we start talking about possible culprits is where the real heat begins. I’m talking about the dreaded “GW” and no I’m not talking about Gee Dubya (W) Bush. I think even he expressed his belief in global warming, to which I refer.

It is getting impossible to have a civil discussion on global warming. The conservative propaganda machine, the best the world has known at least since that fun fellow Dr. Goebbels, has managed to make the GW into one of those controversies such as religion or abortion. If you are not on their side you are on the wrong side, no matter what.

After college is when I first began considering this global warming debate, some 25 years ago. I remember discussing the matter over several pitchers of beer one day with two friends, one with a Ph.D. in chemistry and another who now years later holds a doctorate in geology. I wasn’t really sold on global warming back then because of the obvious cyclical nature of weather. But today I do believe that, yes, we have global warming and that, yes, it is caused by humans. Despite the strides the neo-Goebbelist machine has made, most polls are reflective of this one conducted by Yale and George Mason universities which show a solid majority still believe global warming exists and is man made. A fact sheet from the National Geographic Society also is enlightening both on the subject itself and on the so-called “smoking gun” conservatives used to attempt discrediting major scientists who have researched extensively the topic.

That the right of the right-wing Republicans are so against what the majority of Americans see as a perfectly sensible scientific fact because primarily they have been led to do so in the name of big oil is particularly puzzling when you have big petrodollar people like GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman who acknowledge this “inconvenient truth.” Oh and by the way, the Huntsman Corp. bought Texaco’s chemical unit in Port Neches, in our county, for $850 million back in 1994. Did the Huntsmans contribute to global warming? Is Jon Huntsman Jr. running a Democratic Party campaign in the GOP as a way of saying “sorry” to places burning up by warming caused by his family’s business? I kind of doubt it.

Such a speculation is just that. But there is plenty of room for people to amicably argue about global warming without going nuts. Just make sure you have the air conditioner turned up to Warp Speed as well as your tower fan before doing so.

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I’ve been thinking too much lately lately, for sure

(Warning: Some of the links may contain vile, vulgar and objectionable language that is not safe for the office nor in the company of your parole officer.)

One must search diligently for quotes covering the subject of over-thinking. I did some researching and found nothing usable. Of course, I chose not to spend a great deal of time on the subject thus clearly not over-thinking the topic of a suitable quote.

The topic comes up from me singing the David Allan Coe country ballad in my head called “Lately I”ve Been Thinking Too Much Lately.“ A song in which English teachers everywhere would have wished he had added that he had also been a little too redundant lately, redundant lately.

Most of my friends and certainly a couple of my relatives — I ain’t saying which ones — know the name David Allen Coe. The name is familiar because he somehow lumped himself in with the “Texas Outlaw” music movement of the 70s, the likes of which included everyone from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Guy Clarke and the list goes on and on. Saying Coe, who was once known as the “Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy,” lumped himself in the bunch might be a little pretentious especially when talking about the Texas outlaws. His music certainly lends itself to the movement, one where many country artists were mostly fed up with the formulaic violins of Nashville country and western of the time. Many of Coe’s songs are more than imaginiative and have an edge sharper than a straight razor competition.

Still, some of those songs also made a point that the listener “better know right here and right now” that David Allan Coe is the original outlaw. “Yeah, Johnny Cash helped get me out of prison/Long before Rodriguez stole that goat,” he sings tongue-in-cheek “Longhaired Redneck.” But he makes you wonder if he is pushing things just a little too far in the same song when he adds: “They tell me I look like Merle Haggard. But I sound a lot like David Allen Coe.” This being some kind of reference to the fact that Coe does sound like his supposed once-incarcerated soul-mate Haggard.

The song stuck in my head, the one with the redundant title, tells one of those stories of a situation in which some of us may have found ourselves in at one point of our lives or the other. It is where we are snug as a bug in bed with our significant other, even though it feels much like one of us is missing and it sure the heck isn’t me.

That the story line tells something I will admit to having felt at one or perhaps more points in my life, it isn’t the song’s meaning which keeps dogging my all too willing mind. No, it’s that I’ve been thinking too much lately, redundant or not.

Coe has put out some very amazing songs in his career. One of my favorite although not written by Coe, “The Ride,” tells of the narrator’s imaginary encounter with Hank Williams Sr. while hitch-hiking.

Other songs by this so-called mysterious man — one who claimed with no real backup other than the fact he had actually served prison time that he was once on death row — will never see radio play and have been labeled as racist and misogynistic. His, more or less “standard” and a tune I have long enjoyed, “If That Ain’t Country (I’ll Kiss Your Ass),” is mild compared to some in these latter categories.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be sitting here ruminating over a tune with a redundant title had I have actually been in a fight that could have happened with this very singer during the one time I saw him at “Billy Bob’s Texas” in Fort Worth. As has thankfully been the case in these few of my lifetime experiences, I was the voice of sanity while a friend with more liquor inside him at the time than good judgment began yelling insults as the performers were beginning a break. I can’t remember every issue which surfaced in my friend’s mind but one of them was Coe’s scooter trash creds, which was in hindsight might or might not have been a legitimate line of query. Nonetheless, there is a time and place for all things and having a drunk friend arguing with someone who has — right or wrong — allegedly thrown a punch or two at a performance seemed neither timely nor “placely?”

So I have been thinking way too much lately, which phrased as I do doesn’t sound like a country song worth diddly,  about a song in which the next line Coe sings is: “Lately I’ve been staying kind of stoned.” Well, that will do it, by gosh. I mean, if you’ve been staying kind of stoned — not that I know anything about the subject — then you might have been lately thinking too much lately.

I rest my case.

 

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So I buried the lede

The post before, which ends with a rather significant opinion by the very rich money man Warren Buffett, comes at the end of a rather insignificant opinion by very not rich, not monied man, Dick of EFD. If it is “burying the ‘lede’,” as is charged so often by newspaper editors, so be it. I buried the lead intentionally. If you don’t understand it, I suppose I am sorry, but not really. But this I will say:

Today I met an old man who was getting out of his pickup truck in East Texas. He looked more than pretty weathered and his belly was even bigger than mine. He was wearing a hat bearing the insignia of the 82nd Airborne Division. If that was his division then he would have seen more than anyone would have had a right to experience at the Battle of the Bulge. But just being neighborly, I asked the old fellow after he emerged from his truck how he was doing.

“Fine,” said the old man. “But I expect I’ll get over that.”

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Being poor is okay, but …

But your new shoes are worn at the heels

and your suntan does rapidly peel

and your wise men don’t know how it feels

to be rich as a bitch. — With Apologies to Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), “Thick As a Brick,” — 1972

 

The term “bitch” has no meaning relating to our beloved female species, nor dogs, nor female dogs. Rather in this case, in a parody of Jetho Tull’s melodic tune which means, I have no idea, the word is just a superlative. Rich as a bitch. That person is really rich. Be he a he or she a she or he a she or she a he. Nevertheless, they are rich. Really, really rich. Rich. As a bitch.

This parody was born of a Navy roommate, a Maniac named Dell. Yes, he was a Maniac, as in, from Maine. No Mainer. No Downeaster. Maniac. Before he left to return to Maine for good as far as I know, he gave me this cool bumper sticker. I still have it somewhere. It said: “Made in Maine. By Maniacs.”

When Dell and I hung out, in his little pickup or my little Corolla heading to the bars or to friends off the beach in Gulfport, we were both so poor we couldn’t pay attention. Like so many of my interesting co-workers, roommates, shipmates or just plain mates from the Navy, I never saw Dell after he left for home after his “separation.” As usual, I will give you more than you need or want to know. Those of us who signed up for four years in the Navy were “separated” when those four years were up. Most, or best I can recall, all, of us actually agreed to six years of service. Four years were active duty and two years could either be active reserve or inactive reserve. There were and still are variations, especially if you wanted to just go the active reservist track.

With the two wars going on these days since the last, forever, many active reservist and even a number of inactive reserves have been called up. When I served in the late 1970s, we were told it would take a world war before we would be recalled as inactives. I spent my two years inactive never giving a thought to being recalled. This included the beginning of my first year of college on the GI Bill. Oh sure, there were wars going on then as well as various military actions. Remember the U.S. hostages taken by Iranian radicals?

I wasn’t particularly worried about going back to the military, not that there was anything to worry about in the first place. I worked as a firefighter at the time, even though a number of my co-workers knew that would not protect you from going war. Our department had no civil service protection, so during the Vietnam War firefighters were subject to the draft. The lieutenant with whom I served the longest and several other firemen served in the National Guard rather than go to the infantry in Phuc Yu. Another lieutenant I served with ended up in the Marines in the not-at-all-demilitarized DMZ, still another was a clerk but that didn’t stop shelling and rockets from being permanent parts of his memory thus causing him forever to jump at loud noises. Not the best set of circumstances when those fire bells went off at night, but we all lived as best we could.

It was unthinkable that I should get called up in the inactive reserve from 1979-80 and I wasn’t. One really hot day, in the same kind of summer we are in now, I walked up to the mailbox and pulled out a big manilla envelope from the Navy. Inside was a nice, big, framable certificate that said I was “Honorably Discharged.” I was thanked for my service. I said: “You’re welcome.”

Okay, I’ve gone on here. That is so because I wanted to talk about a very important and extremely expensive portion of the U.S. Government, that being the military, of which very many of my relatives and friends and I was a part.

The military fed me, housed me, paid me, washed my uniforms more or less, gave me a haircut whether I needed it or not, gave me free health care, mostly kept me out of trouble and gave me a path toward becoming an adult, if I was so inclined to start walking down said path. But we weren’t paid very much. I remember selling my blood in between paydays. When I was on a ship, this being after Mississipppi, I would have to borrow some bucks from a shipboard loan shark. But hey, everybody has to make a living.

Beer could be purchased out of a machine in the barracks for 30 cents — if you liked Schlitz, Old Milwaukee and Olympia. I did, pretty much. But we weren’t getting rich, digging a ditch, as the old Army song said.

So my buddy Dell and I cruised down Broad Avenue off the Seabee Base in Gulfport, Miss., headed for the beach, down past where the Chimes lounge and John’s Laundromat and Bar gave the hard-core drinker like some of the old “lifers” a place to indulge at 7 o’clock in the morning. This was the old Navy, back in the 70s. People aren’t even supposed to drink in today’s Navy. I’m joking of course although not much. But as we headed toward the beach, or the bar, or Dell’s girlfriend’s trailer, we’d ride along, broke but yet happy, singing although skewing the lyrics from Jethro Tull.

“And your wisemen don’t know how it fe-he-he-he-he-he … heels

to be rich as a bitch.”

Warren Buffett, you may have heard of him, does know how it feels.

So I thought I’d just pass this along.