Friday, March 11, 2011

tsu tsu tsunami

If somebody happens by this idling site, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has a warning out for the Northern Marianas.

Their estimate is about 8:53 Zulu -- about 6:53 this evening. They say its magnitude was 7.9 with no reports of damage or waves... But that's bulletin one.

From Japan I'm hearing 8.8 with large waves and major damage. Check out Earthquake-Report.com. They claim it's the largest quake ever recorded in Japan.

Mo later.

Excerpted from bulletin #9:

SAIPAN US 15.2N 145.7E 0916Z 0.65M / 2.1FT 30MIN

So it looks like 2.1 feet at 7:16 pm

I wonder where the gauge is...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Chevy Goodenough is a good name

Okay, you'd have to read Gene Weingarten's piece in the Washington Post to get the joke.

Awhile back (quite a while) I ran off my reaction to a story about the planned Chevy Volt. I'm winging it, but I believe the original article said something about General Motors rolling the dice (and betting the firm) on it.

They lost, of course.

But hey, this is America and everyone gets a second chance, especially if they're Too Big To Fail. GM has almost bailed out their boat and it looks like the Volt might actually work out.

Not enough to get me out of my blogging snooze, except for a rare planetary alignment.

First, there was a reaction to his story from Powered by Coal which said, repetitiously: "Powered by Coal."

ha hahahahahaa. the whole article is a set up for that punch line. the american car industry: going backward to go forward


True enough, which got me thinking about the head of my current list of What's Wrong With This Country. That would be the Koch brothers, who seem to have become a liberal target also. When they're not suborning Justices or buying tea bags, they're funding lies about global warming.

I had to stretch to remember their names a couple of times, so I came up with Koch-coke-coal to deal with that mental burp. Weak, but it's my mnemonic and I'm keeping it.

That's the irony here. Even if you don't swallow some of the nonsense they've been enabling and buy an electric car, you're still filling their pockets.

So it's step forward and step back, but marginal progress nonetheless. Especially, as one of his readers astutely noted, because it's not much use if you don't have a secure place to plug it in.

If your power is expensive, Hello Saipan, not too practical and it's not much car for $36,000. Those are just quibbles, I think it a grand machine, even though I won't buy one soon. Finding a repair shop, I dunno.

Odds and ends

I'm a little rusty at this blogging, so there are a few danglers.

I mentioned that planetary alignment. His piece also included a cute quote that I vaguely remembered from way back, presented cutely:
This reminds me of Durwood Kirby. When he was warming up the audience for the Garry Moore show back in the 60s, he'd be asked from time to time what his real name was. He'd answer: If I weren't named Durwood Kirby do you think I'd ever call myself that?

Garry Moore was Garrison Morfit, Jr. By the way.

I am VERY old.
Also, just for closure, after the Koch bros. my WWWTC is headed by Rupert Murdoch and any one who has had any thing to do with Goldman Sachs. That last includes just about every national politician you've ever heard of and is one of the reasons for my blogger hiatus.

Sometimes you just throw your hands up and look at NASA's pretty pictures on the internet.

Meanwhile, the Volt really is just a Goodenough.