It's been a while since I have felt like putting anything on here...partly because I have been pretty sick with bronchitis, partly because work's been a mixture of busy and stressful (waaahhh, no pity for me, thanks, we're all busy and stressed out), partly because I have been busy with outdoorsy things like playing with dogs, working in the yard, hanging with SHG, tooling around in the Triumph, and partly because, well, I have not had anything to say.
So, here are some thoughts:
- The Village Voice is joining publishing mini-glomerate New Times Media, a top alternative media publisher in the U.S. is actually, in my opinion, somewhat exciting. OK, OK, the VV may lose some of its edgy, kooky character, etc., but I would argue it began losing it a long, long, time ago, anyway, while I still lived outside NYC.
- The naming of Ben Bernake to succeed Alan Greenspan is relatively reassuring non-news.
- I think Shrub House has an ugly couple of days ahead with results of the Valerie Wilson leak investigation coming up. Good.
- The coming class action lawsuits regarding the failure of berms and levies in NOLA post-Katrina are going to make a motherfucking mess out of the Louisiana legal system, and in my opinion it will be difficult to constrain and contain the blame properly to assign liability.
- Houston's all a-twitter over the Astros being in the World Series, Game-3 is tonight.
- Houston has tons of trees, that is one of the things you notice when you are just a few stories up. Well apparently...
there are 663 million trees in the 8-county Houston region valued at over $205 billion... [t]hat's just in the landscaping [value]. [There's]$456 million of annual environmental benefits, that's a big number... the trees store $721 million worth of carbon and remove over 60,000 tons of air pollution every year.
Wow. Now I love trees but tend to be more of a water-conserver... I always shiver at one having to be cut down, let alone one just for an icky tract home, but that is really, really impressive.
- Lately I have been taking the pups out on the bayou behind my house in Stepford so they can run loose, but I still walk them on the street as well. Usually, it's dark when we go on the street. Well, something more disturbing than usual has begun to proliferate in Stepford... Halloween lights. What?! What is up with that crap? Orange and purple lights on bushes, poorly-distributed on door frames, chasing, blinking, etc. What the fuck? Some houses have some awesome, creative displays of faux cobwebs, spiders, gravestones, and one neighbor somehow has a skeleton crawling out of the ground. But ugly, chasing, orange, lights???? UGH.
- It is Christmas Time at Target, Walmart, etc.. It is two months away today. Did you know that you are now exposed to Christmas for fully 25% of your life, with all the marketing and commercialism that starts as early as September? What ever happened to stuff appearing after Halloween at the earliest? Watch this space over the next two months for all sorts of rants about how, in my opinion, a holiday important to Christians, positioned in the celestial calendar to accommodate more earthy beliefs, and whatever you believe is really supposed to be a time of year for reflection and good will, has been mutated into a big competitive shopping fest. UGH.
- But HEY! Autumn has arrived in Houston! The weather is great! Last night I turned the heat on (OK, I had the windows open for fresh air and it made it cold).
- Tomorrow it's off to San Francisco for a few days for work and then hanging with old friends and SHG for the weekend. It will be nice to get away. I am already thinking about all the great food there...!
