Observations from the Window 7.27

It was a beautiful night on the roof last night. A full moon, in a clear sky,blazing above the city with just a few wisps of clouds glowing beneath it. It seems like weeks since the sky has been without haze, the air cool and not humid at all. It was simply a stunning night and is just as gorgeous morning.

That being said, and with all due respect to Keith Olbermann, for the first time I’m going to play my own version of oddball. I start with MTV’s show “Jersey Shore” which starts it’s second season run Thursday night in, of all places, Miami. Shouldn’t it now be called Florida Shore or Miami Beach? I don’t get it at all. I also don’t get the Chamber of Commerce of Seaside Heights, NJ who didn’t want them back saying it was bad for the city’s image. I saw somebody say, I’m sorry I don’t remember who, that you can’t drop a house full of New Yorkers in a Jersey beach house and think that is the Jersey shore. Now there are few places I know better than the Jersey shore and in some spots that is exactly what it is. Especially north of Atlantic City which is exactly where Seaside Heights is.

A weird bit of trivia for you here. As Rehoboth is to DCers and gays Wildwood is to French Canadians. Don’t ask me why I think you should know that, I just think you should.

Next up is Tony Hayward, yes the BP CEO Tony Hayward. Seems the man got the ax at BP. You know he did want his life back after all, little did he know he was going to get it back in Siberia of all places. They fucking sent him to Siberia! You just have to love the poetic justice of it all. But how is he going to race his yacht on the frozen tundra or, for that matter, spend his pension? The pension is reportedly worth just short of a million dollars a year. That just makes me gag on my morning coffee. Rule over one of the greatest environmental disasters in history and you get off with a million a year. Pathetic.

Did you know BP has yet to pay a dime into that 20 billion dollar escrow account? They are still negotiating they say. Maybe if some of those Republican congressmen and, sadly, women had kept their oil coated mouths shut it would have been long paid. Meanwhile the unemployed in the gulf get by making a pittance cleaning the beaches.

I give you myself as the final oddball. I was reading some of what I guess you could call the ‘Afghan papers’ in the Times today. I had the totally not like me thought that maybe a Republican needs to win the next presidential election in 2012. Like Nixon going to China, you get a lot of history in art history, maybe only a Republican could just pull out of Afghanistan without getting the ‘cut and run’ label thrown at them. I think that’s all that works at this point. After all the money wasted and all the lives spent it’s time to just declare victory and come home. It’s time to end the longest war in American history any fucking way possible. I just hope we start pulling out next year as planned because I don’t want to have to come to grips with that Republican thought I had. It just scares the hell out of me.

My final thought is we send Tony Hayward and Snookie to Afghanistan on a good will tour. If that doesn’t end the war nothing i know of will.

As always life goes on.

Hollywood Undead - Young

Observations from the Window 6.16

A wet dreary day outside the window today and I really don’t feel like writing anything. Maybe the lull before I head home Friday and the shore Saturday. Looking forward to the house, ocean, and Fred’s but I can’t forget my sis, friends, and hopefully some special downtime. Oh and Stieg too!

Anyways, like I said, I don’t feel like writing much but I wanted to pass along some things I read over the last few days. Each one touched me a little differently whether mad, sad, or just plain pissed off. The end of the first actually brought a tear to my eyes. So when you have a minute, ok maybe thirty, take the time to check them out.

"MARJA, Afghanistan — The Marine had been shot in the skull. He was up ahead, at the edge of a field, where the rest of his patrol was fighting. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter flew above treetops toward him, banked and hovered dangerously before landing nearby ...."
'As Afghan Fighting Expands, U.S. Medics Plunge In' via The New York Times

"KEY LARGO, Fla. — When rigs first started drilling for oil off Louisiana’s coast in the 1940s, Floridians scanned their shoreline, with its resorts and talcum-white beaches, and said, No thanks. Go ahead and drill, they told other Gulf Coast states; we’ll stick with tourism ...."
'Florida Skips Offshore Oil Binge but Still Pays' via The New York Times

"Reports have been coming out of the Gulf for days about British Petroleum blocking access to beaches and animal-cleaning stations, in some instances using private Blackwater-style mercenaries to do so ...."
'Enough of This Crap' via truthout

And finally my tune for the day, and a first at that, country music. But fitting.

tuneage, Brad Paisley - Alcohol

Observations from the Window 6.5

The oil spill in the gulf, not to mention my last post, is all to depressing so i thought i would share some funnier comments. Hey you have to be able to laugh at what life throws you or you end up crying it away. Can't have that can we?

"In what may be the most positive news to date since the onset of the oil spill crisis, images taken by robotic underwater cameras revealed today that the broken oil pipe is the exact diameter of tween singing sensation Justin Bieber." Andy Borowitz

“The BP president said yesterday that the company would survive. That's like someone running over your dog and saying, 'Don't worry, my car is fine." Jimmy Fallon

"On Monday, British Petroleum promised to pay all necessary cleanup costs for this oil spill. And they said they will do it, no matter how much they have to raise gas prices." Jay Leno

"Have you been following the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Or as we call it now, the Dead Sea." David Letterman

“BP has put more birds in oil than KFC.” As seen on my brother’s Facebook page

And thanks for all the kool aid, arsenic, and other sundry poison tips I got from my last post. Much appreciated.

tuneage, Sonic Syndicate - Revolution, Baby

Obsevations from the Window 6.4

I sit mesmerized by the news as one of the great environmental disasters in history unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico. With 800,000 gallons of oil spilling a day, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every ten days, some now predict the slick will start to reach New York and New England as summer rolls along. My beach charcoals could have a whole new look this year.

I don’t know much about this stuff, I leave science to my brother and others, but I do know good quotes when I see them so I’ll pass on a handful. Leading off with Rush Limbaugh, yes the tard in chief ....

Here he implies the spill is just a liberal conspiracy to stop offshore drilling.
"What better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants, than by blowing up a rig? I'm just noting the timing here." And even better, "The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is."

Jackass! It literally terrifies me that some people actually believe what Rush says is true. You know what natural, arsenic is, let’s put that in the moron’s next meal and then see what he says about natural things. It’s natural for crude oil to be miles below the surface, not in the ocean. It’s just sad how some people are so damn ignorant.

From some other pretenders to the tard throne ….

"I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest." BP CEO Tony Hayward

"There's a good question today if you are standing on the Gulf, and that is: Where is the oil?" FOX News Brit Hume, scoffing at the BP oil spill disaster on May 16. Maybe he should go back and take another look.

“Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?” Sarah Palin via twitter. I got nothing to say here other than that she gives the term woman a bad name.

I want to finish with a passage from Henry Miller’s 'The Air-Conditioned Nightmare', it seems fitting.

"Whatever happens to this earth to-day is of man’s doing. Man has demonstrated that he is a master of everything–except his own nature. If yesterday he was a child of nature, to-day he is a responsible creature. He has reached a point of consciousness which permits him to lie to himself no longer. Destruction now is deliberate, voluntary, self-induced. We are at the node: we can go forward or relapse. We still have the power of choice. Tomorrow we may not. It is because we refuse to make the choice that we are ridden with guilt, all of us, those who are making war and those who are not. We are filled with murder. We loathe one another. We hate what we look like when we look into one another’s eyes.”

tuneage, Eddie Vedder - Society