Hurricane Charlie

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My mom’s parents, Harold and Arlene Ward, live in a nursing home in Fort Meyers, Florida — currently hurricane central.

Category 4 Hurricane Charley is working its way toward Orlando and Daytona Beach after whipping through west-central Florida on Friday, and its 145 mph winds and 10-foot wall of water is causing many people to evacuate.

There are reports of damage in Cape Coral, Sanibel Island and North Fort Myers.

[…]

Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Hurricane Charley may be providing “the nightmare scenario that we’ve been talking about for years,” adding it’s “going to be bad — real bad.”

[…]

Charley made landfall at 3:45 p.m. EDT on the barrier islands between Fort Myers and Punta Gorda, and about 160 miles southeast of the Tampa Bay area that includes Tampa and St. Petersburg. On Fort Myers Beach, sea water swamped the barrier island. A hotel operator described her resort as “going under.” She and her husband braced themselves, along with six hotel employees, in the center of the Pink Shell Beach Resort.

Almost 2 million tourists and residents were told to evacuate.

Yesterday, Mom forwarded on an e-mail from her Aunt Roberta (Grandma’s sister, if I’m remembering the family tree correctly…if not, mom or dad can correct me)…

About l0:00 o’clock Arline called and asked I e-mail you to let you know they have been told they will probably –even today–have to go to the hurricane shelter. They do not know too many particulars except they will be looked after and helped whenever they need attention. They were told to take clothes for two days. As you can guess Arline isnot too thrilled with the idea! Gotta go. Roberta

Prayers, kind thoughts, or good mojo of whatever sort are, of course, appreciated.

More Hurricane Charlie news.

Another e-mail from mom that I just found in my inbox:

I just called and Mom & Dad must still be in the garage/shelter (It’s 8:25 there now). I left a message for them.

From the satellite photos and news articles it appears that the brunt of the storm hit Port Charlotte, a community about 35 miles north of Ft. Myers. All reports stated, though, that storm winds cut a swathe extending 35-40 miles on each side of the eye.

I’ll keep my eye on the progress and post again before I go to bed for the night.

I’ll check my e-mail again before I head out of work tonight.

Unfortunately, after that I won’t be able to check back in until sometime Monday (at the latest), as Prairie and I are heading down to Woodland to visit her mom and sister and jaunt across the river to Portland to visit OMSI. I’ll see if I can grab a moment at a computer to check in at some point, though.

In the meantime, have a good weekend, everyone.

Update: G-and-G are back at Shell Point Village, safe and (mostly) sound. Here’s Mom again…

I just got off the phone with Mom. Hooray! The storm watch in the shelter is over. They got home about 9:00 pm Friday.

The hurricane made landfall at Port Charlotte, about 35 miles north of Ft. Myers, which was a bit of a surprise since the weather folks had said for hours and hours that it would hit at Ft. Myers.

The saga:

They were awakened at midnight (Thurs – Fri) and told to be ready to go at 2 a.m. It took another hour before it was their turn, so they left about 3 a.m. with their pillows and blankets. They rode a bus. Mom was worried about getting in and out, but since she’s home again, she must have been able to do so.

The shelter is a parking garage when not in use as a hurricane shelter. She said there was no feeling of being in a storm at all. The overriding feeling was of being in such a crowd of people. The cots were set up with barely room to walk between the rows. They had three meals served Friday. Mom lauded the planning and organization of the whole transfer and assistance while in the shelter.

The first worry was getting into the bus. The second worry was getting to & from whatever the bathroom facilities were. Mom seems also to have negotiated through that problem.

Dad, though, didn’t do as well. He fell [a couple of times, and when they got back home, was] taken to the Pavilion (the hospital). The nursing staff speculated the fall was a result of dehydration. Mom can’t maneuver sufficiently to have gone to the Pavilion, so she will call tomorrow to find out the actual diagnosis and treatment.

It was dark at the time they were taken back to King’s Crown, so she had no idea what damage had occurred. The Village is without electricity (as is most of southern Florida), but King’s Crown has a generator so there are lights and elevators and whatever else needs power.

The good news is they coped with the shelter experience; the bad news is dad’s at the Pavilion.

I’m thankful, along with Mom, for the wonderful planning of emergency services for Shell Point, and for their safety without having to evacuate their little island.

Now I’m going to eat pizza and watch Olympics.

I’m glad they’re both pretty much safe and sound — with any luck, Grampa’s fall was just a little dehydration, and he’ll be back up and about once he gets a few more fluids in his system.

In any case, it appears that all their excitement is over with. Time for me to shut this down and head out for my weekend adventures. Be back sometime Sunday night…

Iran planning to attack US forces

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If this is true, this could be very, very bad:

“The rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration has convinced Iran that military conflict is inevitable and rather than await an attack at a time and place of America’s choosing, the Iranians will try to inflict significant damage to U.S. forces on Iraqi soil by means of the Mahdi Army and other Shi’a groups,” an informed intelligence source told This Is Rumor Control. Senior officials of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency would not comment on these reports, but a former senior intelligence officer said that the conclusion was “a no brainer.” As he noted: “If you had U.S. troops on your doorstep and George Bush calling you a part of the axis of evil you would take steps to protect yourself. And it would be better to protect yourself on Iraqi soil than to have to do so on Iranian soil. That is what they are doing. Are we surprised? We shouldn’t be.”

As if we weren’t in a bad enough position already, now Bush’s incessant sabre-rattling has gone and apparently stirred up another hornet’s nest. We could be in a world of hurt soon, if this comes to pass.

When this was all getting started, there were a few satirical articles floating around (that I don’t have time to search out links for right now) taking all of the US’s stated reasons for invading Iraq and turning them around as if it were the US that was going to be invaded due to our stockpiles of WMD’s, propensity for invading sovereign nations, and so on. Things like this sometimes make me wonder if we might not be that far away from that actually happening (realistically, probably not — we’re still perceived as far too much of a superpower to be on the receiving end of an invasion — but we’re certainly not making any friends in the world right now).

Scary stuff.

(via Dave, BOP and The Republic of T)

iTunes: “Your Eyes are Like a Cup of Tea (Al Yunic Sharbouni Ate)” by Master Musicians of Jajouka from the album Brian Jones pres. the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka (1995, 10:34).

Crackrats!

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From the wonderfully zany world of IM conversations…

Prairie: (okay, I shouldn’t think this is funny, but it’s cracking me up): Studies find rats can get hooked on drugs\
Prairie: they fed crack to rats

Me: :laughs

Prairie: what did they think would happen?

Me: it’s a little hard to picture a rat with a monkey on its back…

Prairie: giggles\
Prairie: that’s part of what I think it funny about it

Me: crackrats

Prairie: laughs!\
Prairie: “Until now, scientists have been able to prove that rats will take drugs, even eagerly, but not that they’re actually addicted.”\
Prairie: that sentence keeps giving me giggles\
Prairie: and how are the rats getting the drugs?\
Prairie: the conservative, lovely scientists are pushing them

Me: I liked this one –

Me: \” In the French study, rats poked their pointy noses through holes in their cages to trigger injections of cocaine.”\
Me: I think it’s the”pointy\” adjective that does it for me

Prairie: giggles

Me: apparently, the rats with stumpy, blunted noses were less susceptible?

Prairie: haha–no, but they couldn’t get their noses through the bars to get the drugs

Me: or, are they contrasting that to poking their pointy tails through?\
Me: or other pointy bits?\
Me: (kinkycrackrats)

Prairie: laughs even harder\
Prairie: (and EEEW!)

Me: :laughs

iTunes: “Mine (Live)” by Webley, Jason from the album Halloween Special 2001 (2001, 3:04).

California nullified 4,000 marriages

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Sad news today from California — their state Supreme Court has decided that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom overstepped his authority, and declared nearly 4,000 same-sex marriages null and void.

The California Supreme Court on Thursday voided the nearly 4,000 same-sex marriages sanctioned in San Francisco this year and ruled unanimously that the mayor overstepped his authority by issuing licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

The court said the city illegally issued the certificates and performed the ceremonies, since state law defined marriage as a union between a man and woman.

The justices separately decided with a 5-2 vote to nullify the 3,995 marriages performed between February 12 and March 11, when the court halted the weddings. Their legality, Justice Joyce Kennard wrote, must wait until courts resolve the constitutionality of state laws that restrict marriages to opposite-sex couples.

There’s still hope that the California state constitution might be challenged and amended to remove the restrictive language and allow same-sex marriages again in the future, but that will probably be another long (and potentially fairly nasty) battle. We’ll just have to wait and see where it goes from here.

(via The Blogging of the President)

iTunes: “Trainspotting” by Primal Scream from the album Trainspotting (1996, 10:34).

Whoops – not that way!

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Today became a bit more adventuresome than I expected it to be, thanks to a slight change of schedule, and a few transportation-related goofs on my part.

Today was my first day of training at my new position. Thanks to some various scheduling conflicts that had to be worked out, I ended up being scheduled to work today, next Tuesday, and next Thursday at the new spot from 1pm-5pm, then bus out to my current store to close it down at 9pm, while working my normal 1pm-9pm shift at the current store on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The next two weeks after that I’ll be solely at my current store, covering for our other primary production operator while he’s on vacation. The week after that is my vacation in Anchorage, and then, once I’m back from vacation, I’ll actually start my new 8am-5pm schedule at the new spot.

Since the new spot is only a few blocks away from my apartment, I didn’t bother to grab my bus pass when I walked out the door to head off in the morning. Once my day finished at 5pm, though, I realized that that had been rather stupid of me — as I was supposed to be at my current store at 6pm, it would have been best if I could have just gone straight to the bus stop. Instead, I had to head back up the hill to the apartment, grab my bus pass, then head back down to catch the bus out to Georgetown.

By the time I’d made it back down to the bus stop, I’d missed my usual route, the 174. Not a terribly big deal, as the 135 came along shortly thereafter, and it’s my “backup bus” if I miss the 174 for any reason. Both of them head right down 4th Avenue out of downtown, and drop me off just a few blocks away from the store.

So, I hop on the 135, and settle in for the ride. Quickly, though, I realize that there’s one aspect of this plan that I hadn’t thought of before today: that of having to get from downtown Seattle to the Georgetown neighborhood right at the peak of rush hour. No quick trip this one, the few blocks through the downtown core was positively glacial. Still, I wasn’t terribly worried — it just meant that I’d be getting to work a bit closer to the 6pm mark than I had initially figured I would.

All seemed fine and dandy until rather than continuing on its normal route down 4th Avenue, the bus suddenly took a turn to the right and got onto the Alaskan Way Viaduct that runs beside the waterfront. Um…what’s going on here? I wasn’t too sure just where things were going to go from here, but I didn’t get too worried yet. I figured that it was possible that the bus took a jaunt along the Viaduct to avoid the worst of the downtown rush hour traffic, and hoped that it would hop back onto its normal route when it reached the end of the Viaduct.

No such luck, though, as soon we were merrily motoring our way across the West Seattle Bridge, with all hope of getting to Georgetown anywhere even remotely close to when I was supposed to be there rapidly receding into the distance.

Well, crud. As we approached the end of the bridge, I worked my way to the front of the bus, and asked the driver what the fastest way back across the bridge would be. He told me to get off at the next stop and take the next 135 back across the bridge, and I hopped off the bus to take stock of my situation.

Things weren’t looking too good: it was just slightly after 6pm, and rather than walking in the door of the store, I was standing at a bus stop in the shadow of the West Seattle Bridge off-ramps, and the next 135 back across the bridge wasn’t due to show up for another twenty minutes. Even worse, though, was that even once I did get on another bus to head back, it would most likely just take me back downtown, at which point I’d just have to wait for yet another bus — this time, one heading to where I actually wanted to go — and by then, I didn’t think that I’d be making it to work until 7:30pm at the earliest. Not promising at all.

Thankfully, though, here my luck finally started to turn around. There was a little diner just across the street, so since I had some time before the next bus arrived, I headed over to see if they had a public phone available. They did, and I called in to work to let them know that while I was trying to get there, I wasn’t terribly sure when I’d actually be able to get there. When I called, I was expecting my manager to be the only one left at the store, so he’d have to wait for me to show up, rather than leave the store unattended — as it turned out, though, a large job had kept one of the other employees there later than usual. My boss turned the store over to them, hopped in his car to come pick me up, and twenty minutes later I was finally at work — and only half an hour late.

The worst part about the whole thing? I just figured out what went wrong with taking my “backup bus”. It’s the 136 or the 137 that I’m supposed to take if I miss the 174, not the 135. Argh.

Chalk one up for stupidity. Oh, well.

Next Tuesday, though, my bus pass comes with me when I leave in the morning, and I stick to the routines that I know will get me where I need to go, when I need to be there. I’ve had enough adventuring for now!

iTunes: “Who Am I? (Animatrix Edit)” by Peace Orchestra from the album Animatrix: The Album (2003, 5:58).

DVD driver acquitted

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This originally just went into my linklog, but considering my previous rant, I wanted to follow up on this one. The Alaskan driver accused of killing two people due to watching a DVD while driving has been acquitted.

A man was acquitted Tuesday of charges he caused a fatal crash by taking his eyes off the road while watching a movie on a DVD player mounted on his truck dashboard.

Jurors acquitted Erwin Petterson Jr., 29, of two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of manslaughter. No law in Alaska prohibits operating a DVD player in view of a driver.

[…]

Stein argued that Petterson and his passenger Jonathan Douglas were watching a DVD movie when Petterson’s pickup truck crossed the center line, hitting the Weisers’ sport utility vehicle head-on. Petterson testified he was not watching a movie and that his truck strayed into oncoming traffic when he reached for a soda.

The Weisers died at the scene.

Marty Zoda, Douglas’ former wife, testified that her ex-husband told her the DVD was running when the accident happened, a claim Douglas denied.

If installed as recommended, DVD players will not work in an automobile unless the emergency brake is on or the vehicle is in park. Prosecutors said Petterson overrode those safety measures when he installed an entertainment system including a DVD player, speakers and a Sony PlayStation 2 in his pickup truck.

All my sympathies go out to the families of the people killed.

I stand by my previous rant, too. Pay attention to the road.

iTunes: “Dancing With Myself (Original 12″)\” by Generation X from the album Devolution: Alternative Rock Classics 1975-1985 (1981, 5:58).

Truth in advertising

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I don’t know for sure if this is a real ad or not, but if it is, whoever came up with it really needs a raise…

KY advertisement

(via Ryan)

iTunes: “Mambo Jambo” by Black Happy from the album Last Polka, The (1990, 5:11).

New CDC anti-condom guidelines

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Somehow I’d missed hearing about this until just now (the article is a few weeks old), but new regulations from the CDC threaten to yank federal funding from any HIV-prevention organization that fail to limit their efforts to promoting abstinence and refraining from promoting the use of condoms.

Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds — whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee). It’s all couched in arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration’s Big Stick — do exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the some 3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of HIV-prevention education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars. Without that money, they’d have to slash programs or even close their doors.

These new regs require the censoring of any “content” — including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and Web-based info. They require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or “obscene” — like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs — in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.

Flat-out-ridiculous, and not at all helpful to anyone. Yes, abstinence is a wonderful and nearly foolproof way to avoid many diseases and other sex-related side effects. It’s also naïvely optimistic, and is never going to be effectively practiced by the majority of people on this planet.

iTunes: “Real Life” by Tones on Tail from the album Night Music (1991, 5:07).

The mysterious H. John Heinz IV

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Of the various children and stepchildren of John Kerry and Teresa Heinz-Kerry, one has been conspicuously absent from all of the various political appearances and shenanigans: H. John Heinz IV, Teresa’s oldest child. As it turns out, he’s a very private man, doing his best to keep him and his family out of the limelight. A difficult task, I’m sure, especially with the current presidential campaign in full swing.

Still, a few details do surface from time to time, and I’ve got to say that not only does John sounds like an incredibly accomplished and very interesting individual, he apparently also has impeccable fashion sense.

What’s known is this: Heinz IV, 37, is an accomplished blacksmith who trained at Williamsburg, Va., and sometimes wears a workman’s kilt, called a “Utilikilt,” at his forge in rural Pennsylvania.

He fabricates custom-made historical arms and armor, tools and architectural hardware, 10 percent down.

He’s a Buddhist who teaches meditation and who practices the Zen martial art of Shim Gum Do.

He was the founder and funder of a school for teenagers “at risk of not succeeding in life,” as Heinz IV himself once described it. For several years, the school was situated on a 136-acre tract he owns in Upper Black Eddy, Pa.

He cared for his daughter, Astrid, now 4, while his nutritionist wife, Kristann, 34, attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.

An artist, he drew the portrait for medallions given to recipients of Heinz Awards, which are offered, along with a \$250,000 grant, in memory of his father, the late Sen. John Heinz III (R-Pa.).

And he sits on the board of the \$862-million Howard Heinz Endowment, chaired by his mother.

[…]

Heinz IV dubbed his made- to-order blacksmith business Herugrim, which in Old English means “fierce in war,” his Web site says. Heinz IV’s forge specializes in medieval-style helmets, cutting tools (swords, knives, axes and chisels), hinges, locks and nails. Most of the hardware he fabricates is for 18th century homes and buildings.

There is evidence that Heinz IV can be generous to a fault. When the Utilikilts team, based in Seattle, showed up for a Pennsylvania festival, they transported plenty of kilts, leather and otherwise, but they had no room for their tent or display racks.

Their Web site says “Utilikiltarian” Heinz IV came to the rescue, fabricating display racks in a four-hour session at his forge.

A festival photo shows Heinz IV smiling and playful in a mock chorus line, with everyone in kilts. For the camera, he coyly lifts his kilt to mid-thigh, far above his scuffed dark workboots and rolled-down socks.

A Utilikilts representative declined to comment, but the company Web site says Heinz IV and his wife “stepped up to take excellent care of us.”

Best of luck to John and his family in the coming months — but at the same time, I’ll keep hoping to see a guy in a kilt show up at some important presidental function eventually…

(via the Yahoo! Utilikilts Group)

iTunes: “White Whisper” by Deep Forest from the album Deep Forest (1992, 5:45).

Saft: Everything Safari should have, but doesn’t yet

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Thanks to a mention by Dori, I’ve just discovered Saft, a wonderful little add-on for Safari. While the headline on Saft’s site promotes full-screen browsing as its main feature — something that really doesn’t concern me all that much — there’s so much more packed into this little piece of software.

Head on over to Saft’s Usage page and check out everything it can do. If you spend any appreciable amount of time in Safari on a day-to-day basis, it’s well worth the download.

iTunes: “Strangers (Live)” by Portishead from the album Roseland NYC (2000, 5:20).