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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, March 27, 2009

Don't Pay The Ransom, Honey; I Escaped 

...as it turns out, spending an unexpected week in the secluded technological desert otherwise known as the in-laws place on the central coast of Washington state, cut off from the usually comfortable tools afforded to the outside world by a host of grim circumstances too terrible to recount here, can be profoundly compounded by the too-late discovery that last summer's recovery from a tragic hard drive crash somehow failed to include installation of the modem drivers necessary to actually take advantage of a service like Budget Dialup. As one crawls back into the 21st Century, one learns certain things....

One learns that Mt. Redoubt has finally got around to obscuring Sarah Palin's view of Russia by erupting after several weeks of threatening rumbling. This is small potato news for lots of lots of people - such as Bobby Jindal, one would presume - but having gone through a few nearby volcanic eruptions of my own over the years and knowing what the whole idea of volcanic ash raining from the sky can mean, I have tremendous sympathy for those folks having to deal with this situation. One also learns that - for reasons that at first glance wouldn't seem to make sense from a simple hydrologic standpoint - the Red River is threatening to flood Fargo, North Dakota, even though the area is still gripped in a pretty realistic facsimile of a typically freezing cold North Dakota winter. The Red River is a special circumstance, however, being a river that flows north into Canada and, because of that unusual situation, results in rather frequent flooding as meltwater tries to move north into still frozen country...

And then, of course, one learns today that the University of Notre Dame, home of Touchdown Jesus and those Fighting Irish in South Bend, Indiana, is actually not anything much other than than a more historically prominent version of Bob Jones University when it comes to the question of whether it is appropriate to invite the President of the United States to speak at it's commencement ceremony. My old departed friend Paul Harvey would know the right thing to say in this particular case: "Closed circuit for the President; tell them to 'shove it'. Paul Harvey....Good Day!"...

OK, so there's a pretty good chance that he wouldn't actually say something like that, given the circumstances, but I choose to believe that my return to the 21st Century is a signal that anything could be possible....
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:17 PM 0 comments

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