True three years ago, true today. Every day we burn as much oil as it took nature 5,000 years to “create.” Of course, those that believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old will have a problem with this math.

Here is an enlightening quote from Dick Cheney from 1994, where he said on CNN that if you take out the government of Iraq, the pieces could fly off and it would be a quagmire. I can’t believe I am going to say this: Dick Cheney was right!
Dick Cheney was right!

Just yesterday at the airport in San Jose I bought a bread bowl with clam chowder and I wanted something to drink. I grabbed a bottle of water – I was thirsty. When I got only six dollars back for change to my twenty, I was surprised and looked at the receipt. I had paid $3.50 for a bottle of water.

I can go to Target and buy a 24-pack for $3.80 or so. This is insane.

And it is possible only because I am willing to pay. We all need to stop buying bottled water.

God is a Jester!

A good train of thought on the political system in the United States.

Here is a delightful summary of why parents should not text. Ever.
Oops, I am a parent. What am I saying?

Some wisdom today from David Brin. Things we ought to do anway…

For the birders amongst my readers: Here is the tale of Rita and Rocco, a pair of gulls, and their babies.

We are still pounding on Obama and Clinton for how they handled Benghazi. Supposedly our government was incompetent. O’Reilly suggested today that Clinton was negligent because she was not present in the Oval Office when Obama was briefed on the attack. This reminded me of this post I wrote over a year ago. It is as true and authentic today as it was then.

A friend highly recommended this book. As I always do, I downloaded the sample first and read that. If I can’t make it through the sample of a book, I don’t buy it and I save my money.

Gaiman is a good storyteller. The first few chapters, those included in the sample, set up the story very nicely and I happily bought the book.

As soon as I really started reading, however, the plot deteriorated into a Steven King-esque recitation of childhood fears and nightmares of a seven-year-old boy, as the narrator reminisced about his childhood. Don’t get me wrong here. Steven King is great at this, and his books like It, The Talisman and a number of others are powerful, engaging novels of this type. But Gaiman does not seem to have the same knack.

There were monsters, shady figures of some universal underworld, vast good and evil powers that mess with our world, and a powerful family of three generations of women, the Hempstocks, basically “witches” who have made it the quest of their lives to fight the evil in the world – and in the little boy’s life. But all the weird stuff never really came together into a story that engaged me, a story that made some sense.

I kept reading, hoping there would be some substance I cared about later, but it just never happened. The story just meandered on from one gross and macabre scene to the next, without a coherent thread. I kept asking myself why I was reading this useless junk, and I kept answering myself that I believed I might be missing out on a masterpiece.

The masterpiece never came. When I was finally done with the book, I realized that I would quickly forget all about it. There was absolutely nothing worthwhile for me here. This read like it was written by a junior high school student as a “far out” project.

Just pointless telling of a story I could not relate to in any way. A complete waste of time.

Rating: zero

 

The current population of Shanghai is estimated to be about 23.9 million people.

Contrast this with the population of the Scandinavian countries, including Norway (5.0), Sweden (9.6), Finland (5.4) and Denmark (5.6), making a total of 25.6 million.

This means that the city of Shanghai has about as many people as all of Scandinavia combined.

Came across a 6-year-old post of mine on “emotional time travel.” If you ever want to go on a journey to your youth, here is the recipe.

These guys have nerves of steel.