This from a sticker on someone’s back windshield yesterday captures the essence of my feelings today:
“My Don’t Give a Damn is broken“
Digits up
This afternoon I am boning up (pun intended)on hands. The primary reason is that a hand specialist (yes there are doctors who specialize in hands)told me that my ongoing thumb problem was a result of Stage 2 basal joint (thumb)arthritis. The tumble I took awhile back exacerbated the ongoing problems with pain, the doctor told me.
Like other osteoarthritic conditions this particular one is progressive and could eventually necessitate a joint replacement. Hopefully that is a ways away and right now I am wearing a nifty little thumb splint that was custom made by the bone and joint clinic.
I am unable to link at the moment but www.handuniversity.com (for real) has a lot of great information about hands and the like including great little pictures of joints with silicone joint replacements. So I guess if you get a basal joint replacement it’s called a “thumb job?” May be.
Once again, the Internet provides a great way to spend a Friday afternoon as I learn ever more about my infirmities. It sure beats sitting at home watching the “all-election-all-the-time” playing on cable. Why don’t we hold the elections on Labor Day and just get the damn thing over? I like politics as much as the next person but it just is getting to be a little too much.
Okay. That was my rant for the day.
I personally thank Rep. Poe (and pigs will fly)
My, not mine personally, congressional member Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Humble, Texas, sent me an e-mail today wanting my opinion about legislation he filed. Mind you, he wasn’t personally sending it to me personally no doubt because he is usually too busy with personally chasing off illegal Mexicans and appearing on Fox News and Lou Dobbs. And personally I wouldn’t want to seek the opinion of someone who uses personally more than once in a paragraph. But, hey he asked me.
Rep. Poe wanted to know how I felt about legislation he put in the hopper that would lift the moratorium on offshore drilling “and provide an incentive for coastal states by allowing them to share in the revenues from oil and gas leases off their shores.”
Now, technically speaking, he really didn’t ask my opinion because the only possible answers were:
“Yes”
“No, they will continue to depend on Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to do all the work.”
“Unsure”
Obviously Mr. Poe didn’t leave the possibility for an open-ended “no” nor even a “not no but hell no.” So really the congressman was asking a trick question even though my true opinion is a complexly-qualified “yes.”
I suggest that if the good congressman really wants his constituents’ opinions he will genuinely ask for them and not just ask questions with the answers he wants. But then again I am sure he is much too busy stirring up animosity over immigration on right-wing talk radio and TV to contemplate little old my opinion. So I suppose I should thank him for taking time to e-mail me, even though some staffer probably did or even some machine. So, thanks, personally.
Bob Novack smells of lawsuits
It’s a rainy Wednesday in B-town. (Beaumont, Texas and I know of no one who calls it B-Town) We are getting a “beneficial” effect of Hurricane Dolly while the folks in the Rio Grande Valley are getting an overabundance.
“Beneficial” has become quite the buzz word lately in everything from rainfall to cow manure. I don’t know when that happened, meaning the birth of that particular buzz word. I suppose I am guilty as the rest of using buzz words but I like to ridicule them too. But then some people think I am a narcissist.
Speaking of narcissist, check out the NY Daily News story here about conservative hack Bob Novack running over a D.C. pedestrian. I don’t see much humor in that as in, well, just sadness and I am sure the pedestrian didn’t see any humor in that. I guess that would make him a pedestrian pedestrian.
Pedestrian:
adjective
1. lacking wit or imagination; “a pedestrian movie plot”
noun
1. a person who travels by foot
Just shoot me.
Don T. Boone is not just tilting at windmills
For several weeks now I have seen TV commercials featuring Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens in which he is touting some kind of bold, new energy initiative involving wind power, natural gas and biofuel.
Today I finally took a look at the plan and must say I am impressed, but then, it doesn’t take much to impress me. The wind part is the most imaginative portion, to me at least. Pickens believes we can build a corridor of wind farms from Texas to North Dakota that could generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. The cost would be a mere $1 trillion plus another $200 billion to construct the capacity for transmission from the wind farms to the cities.
“That’s a lot of money,” says Pickens on his Web site, “but it’s a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it’s a bargain.”
You aren’t just whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that’s a lot of money.
The T. Boone, as I shall refer to him henceforth, also points to the use of natural gas as the automobile fuel of choice due to its more than adequate abundance in the U.S. and its ability to power up autos with some 23-30 percent less greenhouse gas than diesel and gasoline respectively.
I have to say that certain aspects of The T. Boone’s plan do sound enticing and certainly interesting. Like many others these days, I think that it is going to take some sort of dramatic, “Man to the Moon” kind of plan to free us from our expensive and dangerous foreign oil jones.
But also after seeing the Pickens Plan I sort of get a feeling like “Is this all there is?”
Since I think the phrase: “the devil’s in the details” is extremely trite, I shall ljust say for now about the initiative that the fight is in the dog or perhaps, the West Nile is in the ‘skeeter. Check out The T. Boone’s plan and see for your ownself.