12:33 – It’s a standard Saturday around here, if a bit brisker than expected for this time of year. Barbara just finished cleaning house, and I’m doing laundry interspersed with working on the biology lab book.
I also need to get the table in my office cleaned up and set up for tabletop photography. Many of the images for the book are shot through the microscope, but many more are standard tabletop shots. And at some point I’ll shoot the cover for the book, which’ll probably feature a microscope, Petri dishes, and other biology-related lab stuff. I’ll take some pains with illumination for the cover shot, but I’m hoping that I can get away with quick-and-dirty flash illumination for most of the table-top shots, using on-camera flash with one or two slave flashes for fill.
17:50 – It’s been a long time since I studied Greek, and even then it was classical rather than modern Greek. But today I realized that Google Translate probably supported Greek, so I entered the name of the Greek finance minister, Ευάγγελος Βενιζέλος, into Google Translate and asked it for an English translation. The English version was, and I am not making this up, “Joe Isuzu”.
Well, okay. I am making it up, but not by much. All politicians lie pretty much constantly, but Evangelos Venizelos makes most US politicians look like paragons of honesty. I was about to say, “like Honest Abe”, but the truth is that Abraham Lincoln was a lying weasel like the rest of them. But not as bad as Venizelos. I’ve noticed that none of the images I’ve seen of Venizelos is in profile, presumably because his nose is about 10 meters long by now.
His latest porkie? After meeting with the troika, Venizelos says that Greece has met all of their terms, and is absolutely certain to get the next tranche of the bailout. I’m sure that comes as a surprise to the troika auditors, since Greece has met literally none of their terms, nor even come close to doing so. Nor even tried to do so. As to any assurance that the next tranche will be approved, Venizelos may be right, but if he is it has nothing to do with Greece meeting the terms; it’s simply overwhelming fear on the part of the EU and the IMF that a Greek default will cause the euro to collapse almost overnight. And that fear is well-founded.
Well, we had us a grand total of maybe two days of sun and blue sky with no rain, and now we are back to the shit again. Heavy, steady rain, all day, all night, rivers cresting again, etc., etc. I think I’ve seen this movie.
It could only be Global Climate Warming Change, as explained by the noted and illustrious climatologist Algore, The Wizard of Hot Air. They keep changing their story pretty much in tune with whatever the weather is doing, but hey, they don’t need a Weatherman to tell them which way the wind is blowing; they have Algore, and also The Prophet, Barack Hussein, many blessings be upon his name, who apparently has never renounced his infatuation and admiration for those pesky little Weatherman rascals, Bill and Bernadine. Can U imagine being a shivering fly on the wall at a party with those three and the estimable Noam Chimpsky at Noam’s lovely house in tony Lexington, Maffachufetts?
>>cue Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFI3325EhwY
And I see that the word “weather” in my post above is now, somehow, a link, telling me that I just won a free IPad. Hey, no thanks! I have a Lenovo IdeaPad netbook running Ubuntu 11.04, AT&T Client, and BlueMail, for all my work-related stuff and don’t need no overpriced gimcracks and gee-gaws from the fortified proprietary garden that is Apple out in Kalifornia.
Flood warnings coming any second now up here…might as well just leave them open.
Yeah, that by itself was sufficient to convince me that Obama was reprehensible. I remember in college dealing with Jeffrey Carl Jones, whom I couldn’t stand. It was bad enough that he was Weather Underground, but he tried to steal my girlfriend. I almost shot him, literally, after he’d threatened to kill me. The only reason I didn’t pull the trigger was that I encountered him in the lobby of one of the women’s dorms and I was carrying a .44 Magnum at the time. I was afraid the bullet would pass through him and kill someone behind him. He did take off running when he saw me, though.
You would have done then nation a signal service, Robert. OTOH, maybe he has repented of his sins and seen the true light or something by now.
Uh-oh…nope…guess not. Shoulda pulled the trigger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jones_(activist)
Shouldn’t he be a tenured professor at a top school by now?
Well, RBT, I hope you learned your lesson: There is no such thing as all-purpose ammunition. If you’d been carrying .44 special rather than .44 magnum you could have shot his terrorist ass without concern. I suppose you could have pistol-whipped him into a bloody pile, but then you’d have gotten terrorist ick all over your pistol.
OFD wrote:
>>cue Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man>>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFI3325EhwY
Wonderful. I’ve loved that since I first heard it 30 years ago.
“It’s been a long time since I studied Greek, and even then it was classical rather than modern Greek. But today I realized that Google Translate probably supported Greek…”
Ya gotta be careful about using Ancient Greek words in a Modern context, and vice versa. I was told many years ago that the AG word for “I grasp” means “I caress” in MG.
“His latest porkie? After meeting with the troika, Venizelos says that Greece has met all of their terms, and is absolutely certain to get the next tranche of the bailout. I’m sure that comes as a surprise to the troika auditors, since Greece has met literally none of their terms, nor even come close to doing so. Nor even tried to do so. As to any assurance that the next tranche will be approved, Venizelos may be right, but if he is it has nothing to do with Greece meeting the terms; it’s simply overwhelming fear on the part of the EU and the IMF that a Greek default will cause the euro to collapse almost overnight.”
It’s a creative truth. Having said that Greece has met the conditions it *becomes* true. No one will dare call him on it.
That is the Bizarro World we live in now; simply saying something makes it so. We are very good at that here in this country, too.
Unfortunately for most people, there will be a very hard bump up against Reality World sooner than they think.
The cops have been macing and tasering the crowds in The Bagel and elsewhere, but what happens when the crowds keep getting bigger, shut down major areas of large cities, and start becoming more violent? How long before the cops start shooting? There are some very nervous people in high places right now.
They were crowing and braying like jackasses about the Arab Spring, which is gonna end up being more additions in those countries to the greater Caliphate, and to sharia law. Let’s hear their tune when American Spring kicks off here.
I see a vicious circle starting up of rebellion and repression.
As I’ve said, I believe the US will suffer, but not nearly to the extent of Europe. I don’t expect widespread rioting here, for example, but in Europe I think the people will take to the streets and we’re likely to see a violent revolution or two. One blessing is that the EU countries have punted their defense to the US ever since the introduction of NATO, so I think it’s unlikely we’ll see tanks rolling across borders. But then I may be too optimistic.
Expect Greece and Italy to burn, soon followed by Spain, France, and the rest. Expect the Bundeswehr and the armed forces of the other FANG nations, such as they are, to be concerned primarily with sealing their own borders and keeping out refugees. I wouldn’t want to be a German in Greece (or the converse, for that matter). Expect extreme nationalism to regain a foothold, and expect the foreign workers, particularly the islamics, to have a hard time of it. The EU is a broken reed, and even the national armed forces of most of these countries won’t be capable of dealing with the riots and other artifacts of the crash. In fact, in Greece and elsewhere, I’d expect mass desertions, with the officers unable to control the enlisted men, most of whom will head for home and join the rioters.
Fortunately, as I’ve said, I don’t expect anything like this in the US and the rest of the English-speaking world. We’ll pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get back to work. It’s what we do.
I hope you are right about North America, but fear you are right about Europe. They dug their own hole. We should have cut loose from them a long time ago, especially with regard to paying for, and maintaining their defense since The Good War.
I am a bit more pessimistic than you about the U.S., though; when store shelves go empty after three days and we have rolling power brownouts and blackouts and prices of gasoline, heating oil and groceries go through the roof, coupled with continued confiscatory and punitive taxation and political repression, the lid could blow off the pot, at least in the big cities.
I would not want to be living and working in the East Coast Megalopolis and currently am thinking we are too close to it here in northern Vermont, between Montreal to our north by a ninety-minute drive and Boston and the rest to our south for a thousand miles to Miami. Baffin Island here we come! And a hearty welcome to Global Climate Warming Change!