Garcia Media Life

Hurricane Earl has just begun to weaken a bit , now a Category 3, but still huge; about 400 miles across with 75mph+ winds 90 miles from the eye. He has taken his expected slight northerly turn. North Carolina starts feeling it this afternoon and then really gets it tonight. The winds are expected to die down a bit over cooler water and then Earl is likely to speed up as he heads directly for an encounter with Cape Cod tomorrow night and into Saturday.

Looks like the 50 mph+ winds are definitely going to be felt along the shorelines and tropical storm winds may be felt pretty far inland.

This is what Paris Hilton tweeted on July 25th- along with the caption, “Love My New Chanel Purse I got Today. ” RadarOnline.com put 2 and 2 together as they compared this picture to video of her recent Las Vegas cocaine arrest in which a very, very similar purse was caught on tape. This is the purse Hilton told police she had “borrowed” from a friend. Still, you have to give her credit for thinking so fast and coming up with such a clever excuse. Busted by her own vanity?

My- what a brawl in Florida last night as the Nationals and Marlins went at it. It’s complicated. I will have to presume some basic knowledge of the situation but here it is in a nutshell.

Basically, the Nats have a Center Fielder in Nyger Morgan who’s become a bit unhinged lately. He ran into an opposing catcher last week who didn’t even have the ball. He’s been handed a 7-game suspension for throwing a ball into the stands in the direction of fans who were heckling him. Tuesday night in Florida, he was headed for home, looked like he could have slid, but instead, ran headlong into the Marlin’s catcher, separating his shoulder and knocking him out for the season.

So last night was all about the expected revenge the Marlins would take on Nyger. These are the customs and culture of baseball. So he gets plunked by a 92 mph fastball in the 4th inning wiith the Nats getting clobbered by ten runs and Nyger accepts his “punishment” and goes to first. Apparently, when you’re that far behind, baseball’s unwritten rules also dictate that you don’t steal bases. But Nyger has been a little edgy lately so he figured, screw it, I’m stealing second. And then third. And then he scored on a fly ball. For violating these unwritten rules, they didn’t hit him, they threw behind his head in the 7th inning. Nyger lost it, charged the mound, benches emptied, high drama.

Nat’s Manager Jim Riggleman, bless his heart, defended his crazy little guy and I tend to agree, at least on one point. Screw the customs and unwritten rules of baseball when it comes to stealing bases and scoring runs. It was the 4th inning. As it turns out, the Nats made a game of it. If they didn’t like what he was doing, the Marlins should have tried to throw him out. Also…the unwritten rules of baseball do not include trying to hit a guy twice.

Anyway, we’re not going to be seeing Nyger for awhile, I suspect. He’s already got a 7-game suspension plus whatever they add on for the little fight he started last night. Oh, and as one of his coaches was walking him off the field after the fight, he strutted, thumped his chest and jeered back at booing fans. That’s probably extra suspension time too. A class act; not exactly. A one-man baseball crime wave? Possibly. Starting CF for the Nationals next year….I don’t think so. But he certainly has made it a fun week to watch baseball.

By the way, the Marlins come into town next week. Should be a raucus good time.

As of mid-afternoon, Tuesday, 8/31/10, Hurricane Earl is a fairly ferocious Category 4 storm centered just northwest of Puerto Rico, with maximum sustained winds of 135 mph and moving WNW at 14 mph.

Storms like these are of particular interest when they come near the Northeast corridor, of course, since it’s the most densely populated area of the United States. Late afternoon, evening and overnight on Thursday, the western part of the hurricane may hit the North Carolina coast- folks on the Outer Banks are expecting to be evacuated in the next 48 hours.

The Maryland, Delaware and Jersey shores are next on the likely hit-list followed by a brush of Manhattan, a good swipe of Long Island and then by Friday night and into Saturday, a good chunk of what’s left of Earl may well go right over eastern Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine.

East Coast storms are not that unusual. Hatteras gets hit about once every three years. Atlantic City, New Jersey about once every 13 years and Cape Cod gets smacked about once a decade. New York City itself is long overdue while Long Island has been battered quite a bit over the last quarter of a century.

I have personal remembrances of three hurricanes, two that hit and one that came close.
Hurricane Donna in 1960 was quite destructive and even though I was just 4 years old, I remember me and my family having to get the heck out of Lavallette beach in Jersey. I can still recall the daring glimpse we took of the ocean as the waves and the churning sea presaged Donna’s arrival. And I remember a massive oak tree that fell across the driveway of a family friend’s house in Orange, NJ.

The remnants of Agnes passed over the Washington area in 1971 and that was really something. I remember water about one foot below Chain bridge, the C&O canal being completely submerged and the downed trees littering the Potomac shoreline for what seemed like years.

Hurricane Felix ruined a perfectly wonderful Outer Banks vacation back in 1995. It was a big Cat-4 with 140 mph winds lurking a few hundred miles offshore and acting very undecided in terms of its direction. The surf was dramatic and they made us leave but not before I filed for CBS News Radio from the deck of the beach house, made a few hundred bucks and earned a comp day. There was a 7-hour traffic jam crawling out of the Outer Banks all the way to friggin’ Norfolk.

At one point the tie-ups were so bad, cars just stopped and people got out and compared their tales of misery. One guy I was talking to actually recognized my voice from the report he had just heard on the CBS hourly news on his car radio. What I had just filed a couple of hours before from the beach house deck. That was weird.

Felix changed his mind and kept on trucking north after we evacuated and never made landfall anywhere. But it did have the distinction of becoming extratropical, last seen tracking toward Norway before finally dissipating.

I have friends who used to love keeping track of hurricanes on their little maps with grids on them (reading this, Bill?), entering latitudes and longitudes as they kept personal track of these storms, waiting breathlessly for the latest update from the National Weather Service. One of our producers at NPR is a hurricane nut and one of those old grid maps is still hanging on the wall in the newsroom. I’m guessing they’ve become obsolete now and if so, that’s too bad. Hurricanes are an amazing manifestation of the power of nature and plotting their course seemed like a perfectly reasonable way of trying to understand the vagaries of life.

Then God invented the Weather Channel.

Photo: AFP

They don’t have to win another game. They have already captured our hearts.

Did you see trading stop on the floor of the New York stock exchange as traders hugged one another? What was the reaction in your office? In mine, the joy was palpable.  High-fives and hugs everywhere as Landon Donovan kicked that rebound into the net in the 91st minute to beat Algeria 1-0 to take the U.S. into the round of 16 in the World Cup.

We are not supposed to care about soccer. But this is not just about a game. Having watched the match again last night, this time on Univision, the Spanish-speaking announcers hit the nail on the head. Noting the American team’s remarkable comeback from a 2-0 deficit against Slovenia in the previous game, the Univision play-by-play team could only talk about what closers the Americans are.

Here’s the rough translation as soon as the final whistle signaled the conclusion of Wednesday’s miracle in South Africa:

The United States, everyone’s team! The United States, the team of the stars and stripes! The United States keeps writing history in the world of futbol! If you are capable of dreaming it you’re capable of achieving it. More than ever the U.S. has shown what you can do when you lead with your heart…when your heart tells you yes while your mind and events seem to say no… in the 91st minute we were witness not just to Donovan’s goal…today we have seen a goal of faith, a goal of hope…we are reminded of the final stanza of the American national anthem…the home of the brave!

Never underestimate the hyperbole and emotion of Univision. But they got it right. This is all about heart; the U.S. squad’s heart and our hearts.  They had me at Goooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!

I don’t know what the weather’s like where you are, but here in Washington, DC…it is hot.  It is really, really, friggin’ hot.  So hot you realize asphalt has a liquid state.  So hot you break out in a sweat at 7:30am before you even head to work. 

Wait there’s more.   You should know I have outright stolen these from a web site that admitted it stole some of these from other web sites; and they’re all about Arizona but it all works for right here, right now.

     It is SO hot….

• you learn that a seat belt makes a pretty good branding iron.
• you can attend any function wearing shorts and a tank top.
• you discover that it takes only 2 fingers to drive your car.
• you notice the best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance.
• hot water now comes out of both taps.

True, not the funniest stuff in the world, but they get points for being  topical.

And now for the photo gallery portion of our presentation.  This picture needs no caption.  The dog is brilliant and lucky he can fit in there:

I thought at first this was a cat, but it’s another hot dog:

And I run this photo as a public service:

Oh- and one global warming question.  How come when it snows 30 feet in the winter-time, critics of global warming theories giggle and laugh and throw spitballs from the back of the classroom….but when it’s 99 degrees in June, heat-records are falling and August has arrived a full two months early, these critics are nowhere in sight?

Happy August.

Having had a small spat with a co-worker the other day, I decided to extend an olive branch.  That got me thinking.  Why is the olive branch a peace offering?  Can you plant them and they become olive trees?  What if the person to whom you’re giving the branch, doesn’t like olives?  Where does one find an olive branch?

You can google “olive branches” all day long and never really find out the exact origins of the connection between peace and this ancient agricultural product.  But the connection is real and widespread.

Governments, Bibles and Greek Mythology

Got a dollar handy?  Look at the back of the bill at the Great Seal of the United States.  That’s our mighty eagle there, clutching a batch of arrows in one talon and a branch in the other with thirteen olives and leaves.   The symbolism is inescapable.  We are a gentle, peaceful people who can crush you. 

There are a lot of olive branches in the Bible.  Noah, of Ark fame, was given great hope by a dove he had sent out on a scouting mission to check out if there was any dry land out there.  First time, the dove came back empty-beaked.  Not a good sign.  Flood waters still everywhere.  The second time, the dove comes back with a little something in its mouth; why it’s an olive leaf; signs of life and great hope for Noah and all the critters on the crowded ark.  Third time, the dove does not return, indicating things were dry enough now that the little bird had found a place to live.  But it was the olive leaf that heralded the promise of an end to the great flood.

Zeus liked olives too.  The Greek God wanted to give his new city named Athens to the one of his junior Gods who gave him the best gift.  You would think Poseidon would have been the front-runner having cast down a lightening bolt and brought forth a spring.  Water—hello?  But no.  Athena comes along (and frankly with that name you’d think she might have been disqualified from the contest) and creates the olive tree.  Not just one measly olive branch, mind you.  This is a tree full of them.  Guess who got Athens?

The Long-lived Olive Tree

As for growing olive trees (which is still the best way of finding actual olive branches), my investigation has revealed the following.  You cannot grow an olive tree from the seeds of store-bought olives.  The brine the olives are sitting in has killed the little seeds. 

But you can buy tiny little olive trees from nurseries and even grown them on your balcony.  If you want actual olives, you will have to wait about five years before the tree produces any.

It’s at this point, that I think I discovered what the big deal is about olive branches.  In Mediterranean climates, olive trees can live a thousand years.  A thousand years!  Ten centuries producing fruit and looking pretty.  Now that is one useful plant.  Is there absolutely anything else you can give someone that lasts that long? 

Well, actually there is.  You could give them a container of uranium which depending on whether its uranium 238 or uranium 235 has a half-life of 4.5 billion and 704 million years, respectively.  But giving someone a radioactive present is neither sensible nor appreciated.

In Conclusion

In review, we now know olive trees can live a thousand years.  We know a dove brought back an olive branch to Noah which tipped him off that the great flood was abating.  We know Athena actually invented the olive tree and got herself an entire city for her efforts.  We know the American eagle can either wipe us out with a slew of arrows or offer 13 olives and branches and nestle peacefully at our side.

But here is the true power of the olive branch.  My little office spat was, frankly, not big enough to merit the actual purchase of an olive tree and the attendant branches.  But it should be noted that my mere mention of wishing to offer an olive branch was enough to wipe away all tensions and start us off on a path toward a new era of goodwill and understanding. 

Olives are good in salads too.

AP/NASA satellite photo of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill taken Thursday 4/29

As the oil slick from the exploded BP offshore rig begins seeping its way into the Lousiana bayous and shoreline- the worst-case scenario is mind-boggling; four times the Exxon Valdez- per week.

This isn’t the contents of one oil tanker.  This is a well drawing oil on a continual basis.

Here’s a web site with an article that explains what could occur:

The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels –  or 210,000 gallons  per day.

If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate, perhaps up to 150,000 barrels — or more than 6 million gallons per day — based on government data showing daily production at another deepwater Gulf well.

By comparison, the ExxonValdez spill was 11 million gallons total. The Gulf spill could end up dumping the equivalent of four ExxonValdez spills per week.

“Typically, a very good well in the Gulf can produce 30,000 barrels a day, but that’s under control. I have no idea what an uncontrolled release could be,” said Stephen Sears, chairman of the petroleum engineering department at Louisiana State University.

In what is described as one of the worst ecological disasters in history, remnants of the Exxon Valdez spill are still being cleaned up and the accident occured on March 24,1989- more than 21 years ago.  Four times bigger, every week is a disaster of indescribably epic proportions that could affect the Gulf Coast for generations.

Again, this is the worst-case scenario.  There are wildly conflicting numbers right now on how big this spill is.  The days ahead will tell the tale.

Compared to the ecological damage already occuring, much less possible- the following point is minor.  But, really, imagine being the member of the Obama adminstration who convinced the President a couple of weeks ago to propose opening up more of the U.S. coastline for off-shore drilling?  As of this writing Friday at noon, Obama is still behind the proposal.  But it’s getting harder to sell by the minute.

UPDATE: The web site linked to above is now claiming there is a classified government document that was sent around Wednesday that mentions fears that this situation with the oil rig may well become an unchecked gusher. Here is their latest.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…it’s….a baby space shuttle launched Thursday night by the Air Force under a deep veil of secrecy. Meet the X-37B:

It reads like a cheesy techno-thriller. Developed by Boeing’s Phantom Works Division and under the operation of the Air Force Space Command’s 3rd Space Experimentation Squadron, the unmanned craft is a tiny version of the space shuttle. Only 29 feet long and with a wingspan of 14 feet, it will live in low-earth orbit for possibly 270 days before making an automated landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The location of Mission Control is unknown.

The government is not saying what it will do, what experiments will be conducted, what the ultimate point of the thing is, other than it appears to be the U.S. military’s first space plane.

Some speculate it’s an extension of predator technology; remote-controlled airborne vehicles that started out as surveillance tools but now carry weaponry and are employed regularly in attacks on terrorist targets along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. In other words, it’s a potential fast-response space vehicle fairly easily launched and landed. But this mission is said to be just a test of the viability of the craft for later operational programs.

Others speculate it’s a program that started decades ago that sort of gained its own bureaucratic momentum and couldn’t be stopped. A military space specialist interviewed by Space.com puts it this way:

The second explanation is that of bureaucratic inertia in military programs which is why the justifications and cost estimates are so obscure and mysterious. Once started, programs are difficult to kill especially when the proponents speak of marvelous capabilities analogous to aircraft style operation down the road.

It does have geo-political implications. The Chinese, for example, are likely to see it as the first efforts at U.S. militarization of space and take it as a threat and maybe even a challenge.

I’m not really sure what to make of it. A military space race is not necessarily a comforting prospect. On the other hand, presuming this isn’t some bureaucratic boondoggle- maybe it’s us just being really clever and sophisticated in developing the modern tools we need to beat the bad guys.

I am assuming, of course, that we will always be the good guys.

Disruptive as it’s been to international aviation, the Icelandic volcano is just a piker.  The ash has been up at around 30,000 to 40,000 feet- right where commercial jets fly.   The ash would have to reach much higher into the atmosphere to actually have an effect on the earth’s climate and much lower to the ground to impact people’s health.

The greatest volcanic eruption of modern times occurred on August 27^th, 1883 on the Pacific island of Krakatoa.   It was a monster.  After years of ocean quakes near the island and with tremblers and minor volcanic activity just a few weeks before, the mountain on Krakatoa finally erupted on that August day with four powerful blasts, the last one, a colossal explosion that emitted possibly the loudest sound that’s been heard on the planet Earth over the last 127 years.

Krakatoa Image- Discovery

For sailors unfortunate enough to have been on ships within a few miles of Krakatoa, many suffered broken ear drums.  The sound of the mighty explosion was heard on the British Island of Diego Garcia in an entirely other ocean (Indian), 2000 miles away. 

It also unleashed tsunamis, gigantic 120-foot waves that killed an estimated 36,000 people on nearby islands.

And there was lots of gruesome floating debris.  Pumice, chunks of solid lava, came down from the sky and landed in the ocean and on the decks of ships.  Some of the pumice, light enough to float atop the water, eventually made its way to east Africa, embedded with the skeletons of animals and humans.

The sheer amount of ash dispersed into the atmosphere created cooler summers for years.  It’s estimated there was a loss of 20-30% of direct solar radiation. 

The Krakotoa blast also created memorable sky conditions.  Accounts in Atlantic Monthly magazine from 1884 reported sea captains seeing green sunrises.  Sunsets around the world turned a vivid red for as much as three years after the Krakatoa eruption. 

Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines created similar climactic and visual effects in 1991.  Residents of the Philippines along with U.S. military personnel at American bases there were doubly ill-fated, for shortly after the Pinatubo eruption, a hurricane hit turning the falling ash into wind-swept balls of a mud-like substance that rained from the skies.

So the Iceland volcano has certainly made history for its impact on air travel for so many days.   But it comes nowhere close to Pinatubo and is not even in the same universe as Krakatoa.

You can’t fly in or out of England today. Or much of Europe for that matter. And maybe not for a few days, or even weeks.  No one’s sure right now.  What is certain is that it’s one of the most disruptive events in the recent history of air travel. 

So much ash is being dispersed into the atmosphere from a major volcanic eruption in the Eyjafjallajoekull region in Iceland that all major airports in Britain are shut tight this morning; Heathrow, Glasgow, Edinburgh,  Aberdeen, Newcastle and Belfast, Northern Ireland.  Airport shutdowns and cancellations have also spread into Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and France. 

Not only does the ash affect visibility, but tiny dust particles can work their way menacingly into jet engines.  How long the airport shutdowns last will be determined by the weather and wind patterns.

But Wait- There’s More; Balls of Fire!

Residents of the Midwest were startled to see and hear a rather ferocious fireball or meteor or something last night.   It appears to have triggered a sonic boom.  You can see a video loop of it as it explodes and the remnants appear to fall to earth here and here.  The first video was taken from a dashboard camera in a cop car in Iowa that happened to be pointed in the right direction.  The second one is from a University of Wisconsin-Madison webcam.  Residents of Missouri and Illinois also reported seeing it.

This statement was released by a Midwestern office of the National Weather Service:

 Just after 10 pm CDT Wednesday evening April 14th, a fireball or very bright meteor was observed streaking across the sky. The fireball was seen over the northern sky, moving from west to east. Well before it reached the horizon, it broke up into smaller pieces and was lost from sight. The fireball was seen across Northern Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Southern Wisconsin. Several reports of a prolonged sonic boom were received from areas north of Highway 20, along with shaking of homes, trees and various other objects including wind chimes. As of late Wednesday evening, it is unknown whether any portion of this meteorite hit the ground

Considering all the earthquakes and now volcanoes and meteors/fireballs that are affecting the planet in one form or another this week, as a public service, Garciamedialife remains on the lookout for any reports of massive swarms of insects headed toward Jerusalem.

I am considering repenting.

Sometimes our polarized political views on issues like global climate change don’t allow for grey areas. Well, here’s a big grey area- a scientist who thinks climate change is man-made, that pro-warming theorists are full of it, and that there’s not a hell of a lot we earthlings can do about it.

The BBC broadcast an interview this week with the 91-year-old scientist who developed the “Gaia” theory which posits that the entire earth is one, large living organism.

Professor James Lovelock believes, as the BBC puts it:

…the earth’s climate will not conveniently comply with the models of modern climate scientists. As the record winter cold testifies, he says, global temperatures move in “jerks and jumps”, and we cannot confidently predict what the future holds.

He also points out that a cottage industry has emerged of scientists who’ve staked their careers on the premise that they know how the earth’s climate will change:

Prof Lovelock does not pull his punches on the politicians and scientists who are set to gain from the idea that we can predict climate change and save the planet ourselves. Scientists, he says, have moved from investigating nature as a vocation, to being caught in a career path where it makes sense to “fudge the data”.

He also points out that our march to renewable energy sources is admirable and makes business sense, but is not based on “good practical engineering.”

So good luck trying to put a label on this guy.  In a nutshell:

♦ Liberals will applaud that he thinks global climate change is the result of human industrialization.
♦ Conservatives will cheer that he thinks many scientists have developed an agenda and try to twist the facts to defend their notions.
♦ Those in the moderate middle, like me, can agree with his argument that nobody really knows what’s happening out there and that no one can confidently predict the future.
♦ Cynics can nod their heads when he says humans are so insignificant and clueless and the earth so large and complex, that it’s presumptious for anyone to think we could actually “fix” or alter the earth’s climate.

There is, however, one thing Professor Lovelock believes that we can all agree on. He doesn’t know if Earth will adjust or fix itself from whatever we may have done to it, but, ultimately, he concludes that all we can do is:

 …enjoy life while you can.

Amen, Brother Lovelock.