My fab new iPad!!!!!

I am typing this from my new iPad.
I am only in love with my leaf blower more!!!!
Posting will start in earnest soon!

Project Runway Snooze

Bubba and I were watching P.R. last night and I nearly fell asleep watching it. Andy's collection while very feminine lacked any pop. He turned off his edge way too much. And for all his talk about his hertitage - nothing said Laos much less SE Asia. It literally looked like breezy fashion in a Seattle-kind-of-state palatte.
Mondo's legs were a mess - literally. His collection was fun but rather muted as well. The looks were very paired down. For every fun piece, there was usually a few messy pieces from him. And that was his collection - an unfocused mess.
Heidi's love for Mondo was not enough though to save him from his fate. 2nd place to the Irina redux.
The Gretchen.
There is a person I work with occasionally who is incapable of seeing anything beyond themselves. Me me me. Gretchen took what was Irina's really irritating personal style (Irina won a few seasons back) and made it much more front-and-center. Whereas Irina just stared at people with intense contempt and relished being "the bitch who made great clothes", Gretchen felt it was much easier just to be the bossy 5-year old girl who makes great clothes - Gretchen was Vesuvian in her projection of views regarding everyone about everything. An Etna-esque sputtering of some venom is fun but week after week of managing to talk about everyone else's stuff and STILL manage to start each sentence with "I" was just grating.

With no Top Chef and no Project Runway and our first freeze last night - looks like it is time to start reading and blogging again.

Inland Hurricane

What a beauty of a low pressure!
Pressue in Duluth is around 28.7 in Hg and pressure here is headed back up - still at 29.4
The windstorm here was pretty bad. Trees down around town. There hasn't been alot of rain lately, so the ground is pretty hard. If soils had been soft, things might have looked different. Winds were steady in the 30mph in town and some gusts probably took it above 45mph.

Windstorm!!!

Today: A 50 percent chance of showers before 10am. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 57. Very windy, with a west wind between 28 and 36 mph, with gusts as high as 60 mph. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch possible.

Tonight: Partly cloudy, with a low around 39. Windy, with a west southwest wind between 17 and 22 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph.

Wednesday: Partly sunny, with a high near 50. Windy, with a west wind 18 to 21 mph increasing to between 29 and 32 mph. Winds could gust as high as 45 mph.

The satellite image shows the beginning of the classic comma shaped formation of a big low pressure. The pressure in Des Moines is currently 29.04 in of Hg (which is about an inch lower than normal).

Fantasy F-up

Wow - on a very off day in the NFL yesterday, I made a HUGE error in the RB slot. I had my boy Peyton (who is pictured above) Hillis run up some points. Knowshown Moreno popped back up off my injured list and put down some solid points. Ahmad Bradshaw plays tonight - he is always money.

And then there was Darren McFadden. Yup - I sat him out this week. And did I ever F-up.

16 carries + 165 yeards + 3 TDs = 46 fantasy points.

And he says he is only 70% healthy. At least I am scheduled to win this week's match and the rest of the league tied for first genearlly took a beating - so I should be tied for first with Team Bollard on Tuesday morning. She has the point advantage but I have a fierce team name - Team Spirit Fingers".

And we both picked our players based upon looks. All the straight guys who had a plan? In the dumpster.

Fall finally arrives

We've been having truly beautiful weather in the Midwest of late. Highs in the upper 60s and 70s with lows in the 50s. Sunny weather with no wind and very little rain has made for a very colorful October.
Well that is going to end in the next 18 hours with the arrival of a massive low. Said low is traversing the Rockies today (see picture above) and will pass by us in Iowa and proceed to create a mini-hurricane. The pressure here is already low - 29.5 in of Hg - and Bubba's ankles (the house barometer) are already tender. The low is expected to drop down to somewhere around 28.5 in of Hg which is basically hurricane pressure. The pressure gradient will be tight - so winds are going to be fierce.
The expectation is for winds to howl out of the west-northwest for at least two days wat ~25 mphs with gusts in the 40s.
Any pretty leaves on the trees will be gone and by Friday when everything calms back down - we should see bare trees. Oh and the time will change. Delightful!

Fantasy football

I've gotten addicted to something completely unexpected. That is fantasy football.
My lab has a league and they had an uneven number of people so I said that I would join - but I expected to just pay 10 bucks and get beat each week.
So I am tied for first at the start of week 7 AND I found two wonderful nuggets with a systematic drafting system. Each week I take a look at who isn't performing (obviously) but then I go out and look for free agents on teams where there is clearly a transition going on. With the revolving door at Denver - I placed a bet on Brandon Lloyd that has paid off HUGE. With Cleveland - the split between Delhomme and Wallace meant that the running game would have to be used alot - the receivers are going to have a hard time working between those two. And Peyton Hillis popped out. I knew that Collie was good from last season - so I picked him up in the first round - however, with his hand injury, I am needing a clutch receiver. I'm hot for Danny Woodhead to give me some points - with Randy Moss gone and New England needing to get out in front of the Jets - I think that Danny will my mid-season points stud!

The web turns into a cocoon

Was reading the paper this morning on my fabulous new deck and having a cup of coffee.

There was a lengthy interview with Eric Schmidt - CEO of Google - and his views on various things.I thought this should be interesting - in fact, it was strange.

I've been hearing lots of chatter these past few weeks about privacy and the web - which seems a bit odd since nothing of note has really sparked it. Well kind of.

I forgot that Verizon and Google - aka don't be evil - decided to compromise on net neutrality, only for the wired world. So Google will side with bandwith limits on wireless - that is interesting.
But what is more interesting is the thought that E. Schmidt is under the impression that search will become obsolete. Now when your business model is predicated on search (well its really advertising from search) - that sends an interesting message.
Search is going away and guess what is coming - the web customized for you. All that cookie stuff that the WSJ has been foaming at the mouth over during the previous two weeks - well it would appear that the web will be able to anticipate our every need in the future. Using what we have done - it will tell us what we will want next. Plus no need to look for anything - the web will do all the work for you.

Now I don't think search is going to die - but there is a certain creepiness regarding the fact that currently you can basically be identified (with fairly good precision) by your search history and cookie crumbs.

Facebook pretty much already has a beta version of this - everything and everywhere you go in facebook creates the meta-data they need to give you what you want. Not by asking you - just by scanning what you are doing.

Snooki(e) tax

I'm kinda fixated on Snooki(e) in a similar fashion to the way I was fixated on Nene on the R.H. of Atlanta. Too horrified to confront the underlying reasons for my own weakness for trashy, needy, self-centered bitch/sluts, I just throw myself into the moment and go along for the ride.
I do feel horrible later - but its like a hangover. It goes away. Fast enough that you are guaranteed to do it again soon.

In any case, Snooki(e) somehow lives on despite having absolutely no meaningful value in an accidental case of the US Senate via the tanning tax and ObamaCare. Now accidents do happen - but when an august publication like the Wall Street Journal has Snooki(e) in an op-ed piece BY THE EDITORS.

Things have gone a little bit too far. Is Rupert Murdoch secretly infusing the paper with his signature dross (think anything Fox)???

Now many don't like ObamaCare and the tanning tax is silly but when Republicans start invoking Snooki(e) and her penchant for tanning as a rebuttal to the president's policies - I start to wonder if nothing is now sacred...

Pop culture has become simply insidious - I mean it just seems I cannot get away from Lady Gaga - no matter how hard I try, she is on TV, radio, the web, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Economist, every drag show has several Gagettes, the gay bars have her on endless loops.

It seems that the only place I haven't seen her is in Foreign Affairs (and very interestingly - she never makes it to the tabloids, I've yet to see her on the cover of any of the lowest forms of mass media) - but she'll probably show up soon enough. Just because it is out there and the masses like it - that does not mean one has to discuss it.

I just wish there was a firewall in serious publications and media sources to prevent pop culture contamination.

Back in the saddle again

Been awhile. Ready to blog.