Mostly sunny and a slight chance of yellow bunnies

While drinking my morning coffee, still slightly hung over from last nights’ shenanigans, my igoogle page loads and the headline from CNN World reads, “Syria, Car bomb kills 17 in Damascus.”  For those of you following any of this, my brother has been in Damascus since May and is returning to the U.S. shortly.  I immediately go on Facebook to see if he’s had a chance to assure everyone that he’s okay.  He has!  He writes, “I’m unharmed, thanks for asking.”  I then find an email from him explaining that he’s returning from Beruit today after some touristing there.  He’s okay!

The question left to me then is, do I tell my parents?  What are the chances that they’ll watch any news show long enough today to get to some sort of world news?  I don’t know, it seems like sometimes even the local news channels will mention these sorts of headlines.  I probably should have kept my mouth shut and just waited for them to call me if they HAD heard the news.  Instead I call my mom to tell her, “Before I tell you anything, I got an email from Brother and he’s okay, he wasn’t even in Damascus, but there was a car bombing there this morning.”  Big mistake.  I’m an idiot.  She immediately says, “Oh my God I’m calling him right now,” and hangs up on me.  She calls back to report that he’s fine (as I already told her) and that he had a great time touristing and is back in Damascus, but the trains are not running (due to the bombing?) and he’ll have to take a bus to get to the destination where he’ll fly home from (about 24 hour drive from where he’s at, but I’ll leave those details out for safety).

What she doesn’t know is that I’ve been hiding Middle-East news from her for a few months now and now I’m glad that I have been.  The US Embassy bombing in Yamen was a bit disturbing because it reminded me of what I’ve only read about the attack on the US Embassy in Damascus a few years ago.

Honestly though, none of this really bothers me.  I’m clearly desensitized.  It DOES make me wonder how those of you who aren’t numb to emotion and fear actually deal with having loved ones in the military living abroad.

I feel for the innocent who lost their lives today in Damascus and I wonder what exactly the car bombers were hoping to accomplish.  Here I will resist making some religious commentary that may offend anyone believing in the afterlife.  Okay, I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

Oh, I’ve finally figured out how to add links to the blogs that I read as well as some other fun pages I look at daily.  Check out the links at the right.  My brother has a new posting from a few days ago, check it out.

There’s a free Michael Moore movie you can watch online called Slacker Uprising.  I watched it last night and it was pretty good.  It’s about Michael Moore’s attempt to get the slackers who didn’t vote in 2000, to vote in 2004.  It takes you right back to the election of 2004, what we were thinking going into it, and the horrendous outcome.  It will get you thinking about where we are now, make you laugh, make you sad, make you wonder.

Also, if you’re not registered to vote, please check the deadline here and take care of it!  In Boulder this year, we’re having this new thing where you can vote early at the rec center on campus.  I have big plans to get every student on campus to vote early at the rec center.  I will share these plans with you later as they are put into motion.  Muahahaha!

So among my Netflix DVDs, Victoria’s Secret catalog, EOS, and information on where to vote this year, I get this random DVD in the mail today.  The cover reads “Obsession:  Radical Islam’s War Against the West” and there is a Muslim set against the backdrop of the remaining metal standing after the World Trade center collapsed.  Immediately I’m wondering who on earth sent this to me, hoping it’s from someone I know, I check the usual suspects and turns out it’s not from a friend.  So someone wants me to learn about radical Islam while my brother is living in Syria?  Thanks.  The negative thoughts go through my head, how did people get my name and address, etc. (Brother is in Beirut currently, haven’t heard from him in a few days.)

Then I open the cover and it says, “The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today.  But it’s a topic that neither the presidential candidates, nor the media are discussing openly.  It’s our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November.”   Um, okay?  So The Clarion Fund decided that I needed to know how to vote in November, so they sent me a free DVD to learn about radical Islam?  ::Sigh of relief:: This is voting spam!  Apparently I’m not the first person to receive this and frankly, if I were Muslim, I’d be pretty offended that it landed in my mailbox.

Apparently this went out to millions of Americans this week.  Like most propaganda, I’d encourage you not to watch it, yet I believe that you can’t become educated without knowing what you’re dealing with and looking at both sides.  If you watch it, use your critical mind.  I know I will!  Let the fear mongering begin!

Category 4 Typhoon Hagupit makes landfall in southern China today.

A true friend is one who will use their Googling skilz to look up Synoptic text books for you while their data is processing, rather than…

Thanks, friend!

After gazing through my youtube favorites, I found one that helps me explain why I just can’t bring myself to attend a CU football game (one going on as I write this).  As I walked home from work just an hour before the big Thursday night “blackout” game, I came across zero 3-story beer bongs.  For that reason and the following video, you just can’t beat Badger football games.

In case you needed a clarification on the last post.  😉

My apologies for the lack of postings, I’m doing really well on knocking out paper number 3 at work, so I’m trying to avoid my laptop at home to keep the mind fresh.  Stay tuned!

Summer is over in the northern hemisphere and around this time we get the reports of the melt that happened up until it stopped (mid-September).  Every summer, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melts and retreats.  In recent history the minimum area of sea ice left at the end of the summer has gotten smaller and smaller.  2007 set the all time record and 2008 has now gone on record as the second lowest since measurements began around the beginning of the satellite era ~1979.

From the National Snow and Ice Data Center here in Boulder:  “Despite overall cooler summer temperatures, the 2008 minimum extent is only 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), or 9.4%, more than the record-setting 2007 minimum. The 2008 minimum extent is 15.0% less than the next-lowest minimum extent set in 2005 and 33.1% less than the average minimum extent from 1979 to 2000.  This season further reinforces the long-term downward trend of sea ice extent.”

Also this month, on that island northwest of Greenland, “The floating tongues of ice attached to Ellesmere Island, which have lasted for thousands of years, have seen almost a quarter of their cover break away.  One of them, the 50 sq km (20 sq miles) Markham shelf, has completely broken off to become floating sea-ice.”

I’ll give you the report on Greenland, my baby, as it becomes available.  Last year was insane, we’ll see how it did this year.