Let's Build an ARK...

I sorta phoned it in yesterday; Gomen nasai, ne? But it was, well…Sunday. And I had a lot of catching up to do. I’m also a bit surprised no one asked just how I was able to post the beer thing if the network went down and I subsequently rebooted 17 times trying to reestablish my connection. Usually, if you try to post and your connection goes away during the uploading process, your post vanishes into the ether, too. It’s happened to me more times than I’d like to admit. This time, however, I copied the HTML after the third “connection timed out” message and pasted it into a Word document, hoping I could re-use it when the ‘net came back up. It worked. And there’s the answer to a question you never asked.

I’m thinking about doing some serious googling for plans and a Bill of Materials for an ark. The rain continues unabated; yesterday it rained for over six hours straight, which is highly unusual for this part of the world. It was worse in Albuquerque, where there was serious flooding. Reader Reese suggests this is our “Summer of Seattle,” and I agree with him. The last time I saw this much rain was probably in the Philippines or perhaps Thailand…seriously. And it’s raining again as I write this morning.

Even though we’ve had three to four times our average amount of rain in the past week, we’re right at or slightly below our year-to-date precipitation average here in Roosevelt County. I found that just a bit surprising! I’m quite sure the current maps, as displayed this morning, do not include yesterday’s rainfall. It will be interesting to see what we look like by the end of today.

Saturday’s thunderstorms were just a bit too exciting, for more than one reason. The wind was violent, so violent, in fact, that it took a tree down in my neighbor’s yard and deposited it right across the road about 100 yards away from El Casa Móvil De Pennington, narrowly missing another neighbor’s parked cars. The tree was only about eight or ten inches in diameter, small as trees go, and not enough to stop my neighbors with the big-ass 4x4 pick ups who probably cackled out loud (Hey Burt! Watch me go right over this here tree!) as they motored across the thing. But it was enough of an obstacle to stop a Miata, however. Two hours later, after much chain-sawing and general hustle and bustle, the road was clear again. But that wind! It was enough to cause the RV to do some serious, and I mean serious, rocking and create serious apprehension in Yours Truly. After all, any resident of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, etc., knows trailer parks are tornado magnets. I prefer to do my flying in airplanes, not RVs, thank you.

Another thing I failed to mention this weekend, and should have, given my general dissatisfaction with my ISP/network situation, was some Very Good News: on Friday the fiber-optic cable contractors surveyed and marked beautiful La Hacienda Trailer Park for the fiber routes to all park spaces. Two gigabit service to the prem! By the end of the year! I’d have to buy a new network interface card (NIC) to take full advantage of the capabilities, as my current NIC only supports a 100 Mb connection. But, Hell…a 100Mb network connection is almost unimaginable and is certainly sufficient. But then again, wasn’t it Mr. Gates who said 640K of RAM was enough for anybody? “Too much” is just about enough in the IT Biz…

More (un)common sense in Britain… Muslim Labor MP Shahid Malik, writing in yesterday’s Sunday Times (UK):

I believe that as a Muslim there is no better place to live than Britain. That doesn’t mean that all in the garden is rosy; often Islamophobia is palpable. But my message is: whether you are white, Asian, black, Muslim, Christian or Jew, if you don’t like where you’re living you have two choices: either you live elsewhere, or you engage in the political process, attempt to create change and ultimately respect the will of the majority.

Mr. Malik’s comments were in response to a call from Muslim “leaders” for the implementation of sharia and granting of official Muslim holidays. Good news has been in short supply of late; it’s a good thing when a Muslim MP goes “on the record” for his society’s values. Yes!

Mark Steyn was good (as always) in his Sunday Chicago Sun-Times editorial:

Five years on, the United States seems to be back in the quagmire of perpetual interminable U.N.-brokered EU-led multilateral dithering, on Iran and much else. The administration that turned Musharraf in nothing flat now offers carrots to Ahmadinejad. After the Taliban fell, the region's autocrats and dictators wondered: Who's next? Now they figure it's a pretty safe bet that nobody is.

What's the difference between September 2001 and now? It's not that anyone "liked" America or that, as the Democrats like to suggest, the country had the world's "sympathy.'' Pakistani generals and the Kremlin don't cave to your demands because they "sympathize.'' They go along because you've succeeded in impressing upon them that they've no choice. Musharraf and Co. weren't scared by America's power but by the fact that America, in the rubble of 9/11, had belatedly found the will to use that power. It is notionally at least as powerful today, but in terms of will we're back to Sept. 10: Nobody thinks America is prepared to use its power. And so Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad and wannabe "strong horses" like Baby Assad cock their snooks with impunity.

It’s all about the will to prevail. In addition to taking the current administration to task, Mr. Steyn also makes the point, as so many others have, that it appears the Democrats are lacking in the “will to prevail” department. And that, to me, is the issue for the mid-term elections and the 2008 election. I simply do not trust the Democrat party with national security, based upon their words and deeds over the past four years. They just don’t get it.

I’ll leave you with that happy thought…