I can’t explain why, but I’ve been eagerly anticipating this day - a verifible sighting live giant squid.

Some climate scientists [1][2] are saying that stronger hurricanes may be the result of global warming.  Assume for a minute that this is the case (too early to call), and hurricanes continue to pound the bulk of US refineries (which tend to be near the coast, or so I am told).  In that case, energy prices will continue to rise.  I can only assume that there is some price point that people will avoid driving unless it is necessary, look at more fuel efficient vehicals, and they may even use mass transit or start carpooling (I know I’m reaching here).

In that case, emisions would begin to go down, and the rate of global warming would decrease (could reverse, but I doubt petroleum consumption accounts for enough CO2 emisions).  Thus, mother nature addresses the problem of global warming by forcing humans to change their habits.^*

^{* No, I don’t think this would really happen.}

Hurricane (Marga)Rita is a no win situation for Bush.  In the aftermath of Katrina, many people were claiming that the slow response was racially motivated while others thought it was more proof of the president’s incompetence.  Now hurricane Rita is barrelling toward his home state of Texas.  If the government responds quickly to whatever damage it causes, it will add weight to the argument that Katrina’s slow response was racially motivated (Galveston is pretty upscale and from what I remember of Houston, predominately white) .  If the response to the disaster is slow, it shows that Bush doesn’t learn from his mistakes.

I guess there is a chance that Rita won’t cause near the damage or miss the densely populated areas, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Last night the Blue Jersey Devils didn’t lose.  We had a 9:40 game against the second worst team in the B-league.  The game before us was ten minutes behind schedule - not sure why.  They were at a 5 - 5 tie with 20 seconds left when the away team scored a goal.  I put on my helmet and started moving toward the bench, knowing that I game would probably start with little or no warm up time.  As soon as I put on my helmet, the lights went out.  We skated around the rink warming up for twenty minutes before they finally cancelled the game.  They warned us that the makeup game will either be obnoxiously late or on a different day, but at least we didn’t lose last night.

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We went to the Balloon Glow on Friday night - the night before the big balloon race they fill up all of the hot air balloons, when the use the burners to heat the air, the balloons glow.  One of the balloons was blown up right next to where we were sitting, so the kids thought that was pretty cool.  We managed to beat the rush on both sides, getting down their around 6:15 and leaving while the balloons were still glowing.

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Saturday I BBQ’d some ribs.  Diana suggested adding brown sugar to the dry rub I coat the ribs with.  When we made ribs at the lake a few weeks ago, she said that brown sugar and keeping the ribs wet was the key.  So I coated up the ribs, browned them over reasonably high heat, then slow cooked them for a couple of hours.  Every twenty minutes I bathed the ribs in a pan of water solution with the ingredients I use for my dry rud.  I had the pan of water sitting over the heat as well.The ribs were amazing, with or without Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce.

Blue Jersey Devils lost again last night.  We have no business being in a B-league.  B-Movie, maybe, but not B-league hockey league.  The other team had one guy who could skate, pass, and shoot.  That one guy was enough - I think he had 6 or 7 goals.

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My entire day of work consisted of trying to delete a file.  Sounds like fun doesn’t it.

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I still haven’t finished reading Eldest, but I would suspect that the religious groups will be coming out against it very soon (I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that the Religious Right will hate the entire Elven race and will probably demand that Christopher Paolini kill them off in his next book.).Note to self - send an email to Pharyngula telling him to read the book.

From a blog somewhere - “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”

I’m midway through the book Eldest (book 2 of the inheritence trilogy) when I ran into a problem.  The war between the elves and dragons that is talked about in Eragon, was started when an elf hunter killed a dragon as food, not realizing it was an intelligent being.  In Eldest, all elves are vegetarians(bordering on Vegans) because they meditate and their magic allows them to get a deeper understanding of all living things.  Did the Vegetarian thing happen after the truce between the dragons and elves?  Or is it just an OOPS, didn’t think that through when I was writing the book.

BTW, early on in Eldest, the Roran story line  is better than the Eragon story line.  All of the story lines are pretty good by the 1/2 to 2/3 mark.