Saturday, January 20, 2007

so i guess when i forget to blog crazy things happen

I have few excuses for not blogging and you probably don't want to hear them anyway.

But it kinda seems that lots of crazy shit happens when I don't blog. This past week seemed to have some news that was just too much.


1. China space weapon test.



I really don't know what to think of this. It seems pretty scary that this capacity was tested but that fear is kinda mitigated by the fact that we have had this technology for years. But new tech on China's side isn't going to go unmatched by us. We will meet China's challenge to an space based pissing contest. Hell at least nuclear weapons are still prohibited from being used in space.

2. Iran.


What are we doing? So the article that the title above links to (click here if you didnt read the article yet)may have its fair share or propaganda in it but may not be that far off. I guess my biggest questions questions I have are: 1. If a perpetual war is what we are going for, don't we already have it? How often do we need new enemies? If the answer is often, how do we reconcile it with the survival? Is it worth it if we lose everything we have but still kill the enemies? Or do we just lose everything?
*I am indebted to Meghan for some of these links. She is officially my internet sleuth. I extend her a tip of the hat


3. Colbert <3 O'Reilly (?)



Wait what? I don't have access to TV here but I hear that they were on each other's show. Was there feedback like when you make a video of a video or when you put a microphone into a speaker? Anyway I will have to procure a copy of these episodes and watch them

4. Chavez got his enabling act.


The Enabling Act of 1933 gave Hitler the power to rule by decree in Nazi Germany. Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela now has similar power. The reason for him getting absolute power over Venezuela is very different than Hitler's (Chavez wants to nationalize industry in Venezuela) but its no less scary. I think we have learned that it doesn't matter where you fall on the political spectrum, having too much power is bad.

5. The Weather.



I don't think I need to tell anyone about the crazy weather because it has been weird on both sides of the Atlantic for the past few weeks. But just so you know there were storm with around 70MPH winds blowing through Budapest last week. Apparently this is an example of a European Windstorm you can read all about this one on Wikipedia.
Let me open a brief parenthesis. I remember sometime last year I was listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, the NPR news quiz and the section called "Bluff The Listener" (The celebrity contestants each tell the person who called in a news story, they are all random but only one is real. The call-in listener has to correctly guess which is real to receive Carl Kasell's voice on their home answering machine. Back to the parenthesis, so the time I am recalling the true crazy news story was about the Adopt-a-Vortex program. So basically its how European's make up for the fact that they do not have a set schedule for naming storms, nor do they have just one type of storm they get to name. The A-a-V program lets people name the weather after themselves, or loved ones or even enemies for €199. The one thing they do have on the rest of the world is that they do not just name low pressure vortices but also high pressure vortices. So you can name a bight sunny day across Europe, or a killer freak thunderstorm after yourself. The storm that went across Europe last week was named Kyrill, after a Bulgarian man who's family donated to the program. I wish we had something like that at home. End parenthesis.

Apparently these were the same type of storms they had last August where three were killed. They don't get storms here often and the line of storms we had last week traveled across Europe. It seemed like people here were pretty scared.


I guess the moral of the story is I will post more often. Maybe thing will stay quiet if I am sitting around waiting to give my two cents to it.

1 comment:

meg said...

no doubt. maybe a tip of the hat to your girlfriend for the articles? :P the colbert/o'reilly switch it up on youtube if you feel so inclined as well.