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The short and short of it: Mrs. O's legs.

What a week. We saw another round of shouting over health care reform. The Scots let the only Lockerbie bombing prisoner go home because of cancer and the terrorist got a hero’s welcome in Libya. Locally, we had a freak tornado that hit Kohl’s, Wal-Mart and the Parkdale Mall. And of course, we had the First Lady’s legs.

Yes. As a “Time” magazine article proclaimed: “Michelle Obama and the Shorts Heard Round the World.” Yes. The golden rule of journalism is “Let no news hole go unfilled.” And fill it they did when the First Lady deplaned Air Force One in Arizona sporting a pair of shorts. Would the world have been anymore shocked had she walked down the steps of the presidential jet wearing a wet T-shirt and hot pants? Okay. We will just let that image hang for a minute.

The controversy was one mostly invented a bored White House media who had nothing better to do while following the First Family. I mean, I didn’t hear many REAL people who were up in arms about Michelle Obama’s legs.

“While nobody would make Mrs. O wear couture in Arizona in August, the truth is, she just didn’t look particularly good in shorts. Her arms are much admired. Her legs are just, you know, legs,” opined “Time’s” Belinda Luscombe in her piece about the shorts flap.

The criticisms of Michelle Obama incensed editors of the “Jamaica Observer” who saw racism as a possible motive why the media and Obama critics made her shorts such a big deal.

“That the US first lady created such a stir though is, in itself, quite remarkable and instructive.

For on reading through the streams of commentary, we couldn’t help detecting a rather nasty streak of something that bears a close resemblance to racism.”

Wow. Criticism and criticism about the criticism. All over a pair of shorts.

Although I  support the Obamas I must say that I rather admire the First Lady for being comfortable in her own skin. With that said, I am also a very big supporter of shorts, probably more than the average American.

I wear shorts — a lot. The mean annual temperature where I live is 72 degrees. Mean doesn’t mean it is 72 year-round. But it is comfortable enough down here on the upper Texas coast that I can and do wear shorts every month of the year. Shorts are my official pants even though blue jeans were once reserved for that title. If I am not working or at least if I am not working outside my abode, and if the weather isn’t too cold, you will likely find me in a pair of shorts.

My legs aren’t as shapley as Mrs. Obama’s, I must admit, even though the “Time” correspondent doesn’t seem taken with the First Lady legs. But I don’t care. I wear shorts for comfort not for style. And like Mrs. Obama — to paraphrase ZZ Top — I’ve … “got legs. I know how to use them.”

Quite simply, I walk on them — mostly wearing shorts.

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Talk about Favre will likely be football

It seems I write about Brett Favre at least once a year. That is mostly because of his waffling on whether he wants to retire and stay retired or play for some other NFL team.

Brett Favre with the NY Jets -- between the Packers and the Vikings.
Brett Favre with the NY Jets -- between the Packers and the Vikings.

My opinion, and we all know opinions are like a**holes, is that a really great sports star like Favre or a Michael Jordan or Emmett Smith should stay retired once they go out on top. This cuts the risk of their last years of a truly stellar career ending up a stinker. Likewise, I think the waffling appears a little too cute, like it is being manufactured by an agent and for greed. Also, as is in the case of football stars, they stand to get hurt really bad in any game so why push their luck at 39 or 40 years old?

With that said, I still like Favre. He’s a hell of a quarterback. He’s a Mississippi boy. And he was a Golden Eagle from the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, one of my favorite colleges I didn’t attend. I did have a great connection with the school though.

While stationed at Gulfport in the Navy I hung out some with my Mississippi cousin Teri who was going to college at Hattiesburg. Being a college town, Hattiesburg had some killer concerts during the mid-1970s. It was there I saw Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review with Joan Baez, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, future mystery novelist and Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman with his band, the Texas Jewboys, as well as others on the tour. I think Teri got me a dorm room to stay in when I saw the original Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant and the others. Later, I also watched Jimmy Buffett play at the school he attended where he would sing at the university commons and horrify public school teachers from the rural areas there for continuing ed classes by singing songs like “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?”

I digress, but I thank cousin Teri — the last I heard she was a nurse in Alaska — for turning me on to Southern Miss and the fact that Favre attended there makes him somewhat okay in my books.

Favre also had quite a back story before the pros. From his bio in Wikipedia — although you’ve got to take it any bio there with a bit of caution — it said Southern Miss was the only school to offer him a scholarship. He was signed as a defensive back but wanted to play quarterback and was something like seventh-string at first. He had quite a bit of his gut removed after a car wreck that almost killed him. But he ended up with a spectacular history at USM and graduated with an education degree before the NFL draft and a Hall of Fame career with the Green Bay Packers.

As for the waffling on retirement, that can be looked at differently as well. To paraphrase ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd — or so I believe it was him — the other day, Favre lives in a big house in the middle of nowhere. And after having seen the city lights, he gets bored. If he can still play, then why not?

Favre faces some possible concerns including a rotator cuff issue but, waffling aside and the rumors he wants revenge on Green Bay , at least with Favre all the talk will be about football. This unlike the new Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Mike Vick and his past prison stint for promoting dog fighting, or the Cowboys’ QB Tony Romo and whether he will get back with Jessica Simpson, or the latest melodrama involving Terrell Owens and his new team in Buffalo. With TO, there will definitely be some melodrama over something.

Perhaps Brett Favre’s return to football with the Minnesota Vikings will generate a buzz more centered around football than something way out in the periphery. That is, unless Favre gets abducted by aliens who give him a never-seen-before play that wins the Super Bowl for the Vikings. Then, we have a whole new ball game.

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Time to leave the right behind in hc reform?

It appears Team Obama is studying the abandonment of a bipartisan approach to health care reform. That is probably the wise choice although one wishes such a decision would have popped up before Congress recessed for the month which would have spared us all the right-wing histrionics and flat-out lies.

What also seems a step behind by the Obama camp is a concentrated effort to refute many of the more outrageous lies which have been spread such as that of Sarah Palin’s “death panels.” One has to wonder, though, whether efforts to set the record straight are just preaching to the choir no matter that the Obamanistas want their followers to spread the word. The fact that the answers to the numerous lies are documented on the pro-healthcare reform Web site and are pretty well spelled correctly would make one wonder if the folks who believe these lies would find such explanations as suspicious.

Many who buy the lies about proposed health care reform also accept some of the most outrageous and unfounded statements which the high-powered special interests are trying to foist upon the public. Such statements are what bring people to shrilly exclaim at townhall meetings before the TV cameras that: “I want my country back the way it was before it changed!”

Before it changed? Perhaps you want it back the way it was before a black guy was elected president. Or what about the way it was before white women was allowed the vote?

And socialism. Hell’s bells. Are those who are saying our nation is turning socialist the ones who support Medicare for themselves or their parents? Are they the ones who want jail sentences for those who are caught driving with no liability insurance? That is the state making one buy insurance for cars. But the nation will turn socialist if health care becomes universal. Go figure.

The Democrats of the House and Senate should go it alone on insurance reform. They will never be supported by their Republican opponents and the more the right does their bidding for the powerful special interests our civil discourse will even more be endangered of becoming a relic of bygone days.

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Apparent tornado strikes Beaumont

 We’ve had a bit of “weather” this afternoon as they call it in these parts.

 An apparent tornado struck the Dowlen Road shopping area of Beaumont where Wal-Mart, Parkdale Mall and all the other chain stores and restaurants reside. There have been injuries reported and reportedly a roof collapsed in the Kohl’s store, trapping some people. A Beaumont Enterprise photo I saw show several cars overturned in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Nasty stuff.

 The local media reported it happened about 2 p.m. That was about the time I got back downtown after returning from Lumberton, about 12 miles North. On the way back I stopped and paid my insurance at a place on Dowlen Road across from the mall. So I just missed it.

 I did notice a big ugly wall cloud with what appeared to be a funnel-like object hanging down a tiny bit when I got back to my office. The cloud was to my West. I looked at the KBTV weather radar when I got to the computer and saw what looked like a pretty stout thunderstorm cell just to the West of Beaumont. It was certainly nothing to write home about.

 There were no tornado watches per se and no warnings that I know of, although of the latter I wouldn’t know for sure. I say watches per se, there were watches issued for “tropical funnel clouds,” which describes the partial funnel that I saw. These are funnel clouds that develop and usually don’t make it to the ground. If they do, the warning I saw on the Weather Channel said, the can cause damage. Whether this was a tropical one, I don’t know. Just checking the Beaumont Enterprise Website comments it appears not everyone agrees it was a tornado but could have been straight-line winds.

 Speaking of tropical funnels I see what could be several-in-the-making outside my window at the bottom of a big black cloud. I can see rain pouring down on the Interstate, but not outside.

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Maybe no tropical problems, for now

 Maybe, just maybe, we have missed the three Atlantic-Gulf tropical systems that have been stirring around out there.

 Hurricane season over the past four years has taught me to never feel relieved about missing a hurricane or tropical system that could turn into a hurricane until it is gone and can’t jump back out into the ocean, re-form and strike once more.

 Weather forecasters had put Rita’s landfall in September 2005 at several places on the southern Texas coast including the area around Corpus Christi which is almost Mexico. (I’m sure Corpus Christians would be glad to hear that!) Instead Rita made landfall around Johnson’s Bayou, La., just east of the Texas border. It ended up wreaking havoc more than 100 miles inland.

 Something similar happened with Ike last year and Humberto in 2007 sneaked up on us kind of like the Tropical Storm Claudette did to Florida this morning.

 Here on the uppermost Texas coast we are supposedly under the influence of a tropical wave that allegedly was to bring us rain but I’ve yet to see anything more than a couple of drops.

 I know the local TV weather gods can’t be told anything but I wish someone with some clout — like their bosses — would tell them to stow their air of certainty when it comes to forecasting hurricanes. I have seen some weather geeks, probably not meteorologists, who take the three- and five-day cones the National Hurricane Center issues as the last word on storm tracks. Hey dips**t, it’s a cone, that means the hurricane models show the storm can end up anywhere within that cone, north or south. The storm might not even stay inside the cone.

 Even if I was the smartest man, weatherman, on Earth I would not say “we have nothing to worry about” until we truly have nothing to worry about.  I mean, what if some people were actually stupid enough to believe what the weather man says and he ends up getting caught flat-footed with the water “six feet high and rising?”