“Wait, I thought I was supposed to blow the chauffeur on Yom Kippur?”

 

Gut Shabbos, fellow Glibs! It’s the run-up to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And you know what? I’m not sorry in the least. Do you know who else was not sorry in the least?

It’s the Ides of September, and of course that means it’s an auspicious day for anniversaries and birthdays. Following the Charles Whitman sampler at UT, shit-heel Lyndon Johnson made a formal call for gun control, because of fears of death coming from above. He then bombed the shit out of several Vietnamese cities over the next few days, killing tens of thousands. But that was OK because intentions. Harper’s Ferry was captured by the Confederates, Sandra Day O’Conner was approved for an inauspicious Supreme Court career, and the Nuremberg Laws were passed. In birthdays, Oskar Klein (of the Klein-Gordon equation), Murray Gell-Man (developer of quark theory), and Neil Bartlett (who showed that so-called inert gases could be made to form compounds). In deference to SP, I’ll also note Agatha Christie, who apparently wrote something or other.

News next.

The Most Horriblest Hurricane Ever rapidly downgraded to a tropical storm. Sadly, there were still a few casualties.

Among the fatalities so far is a person in Lenoir County who died while plugging in a generator, according to a news release from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper’s office.

Some people shouldn’t play with electricity. The OMG OMG GLOBAL WARMING!!!! pants-shitters haven’t commented yet. Of course, items like this do not feed into the narrative.

While we’re on the subject of Global Warming, please allow me to plug Roy Spencer’s new e-book on the subject. Dr. Spencer has been a rare voice of sanity, with an admirable, “We just don’t know” point of view. “The science is settled” is an infallible marker that you’re dealing with someone ignorant or dishonest. There is no third choice.

Now here’s a story that’s just fucking weird.

Cincinnati police and firefighter recruits are asked to describe their “most unusual sex act” in a questionnaire that can later become accessible to the public… “Not counting self-masturbation or legal sexual activity with a willing partner, what was your most unusual sex act?”

Is there a masturbation that isn’t “self-masturbation”? The other interesting thing to me is that all of this is part of a polygraph screening procedure for recruits. I hope that part of the screening also includes Tarot cards, astrological projections, and aura-reading, all of which are at least as accurate. I note that one of the driving reasons for me getting out of aerospace R&D was that I refused to subject myself and my reputation to polygraphy, which restricted me from being cleared into some key programs. Polygraphy has caught exactly as many spies as the TSA has caught terrorists, but in true government-incompetent manner, it’s still universally used.

Sausage Fest!

Bob Evans Farms is recalling nearly 47,000 pounds of pork sausage links because it might contain pieces of plastic, the Agriculture Department said.

Apparently, the aggregate plastic is the size of Texas. Or twice the size of Texas. There’s a soda straw joke somewhere in there as well.

Look, I’m just as much in favor of the Free Range Kids concept as anyone (perhaps to excess, IYKWIMAITYD), but this might be a bit over the line.

Police in Vallejo on Wednesday admitted to making a serious mistake when it took a half an hour Tuesday night for officers to respond to a call about two unattended toddlers on a second-story window ledge.

The voice of Marianne Kearney-Brown can be heard in video she recorded Tuesday evening from the window of her downtown Vallejo office. She took the clip when she saw a couple of toddlers in diapers outside the second-story window of a nearby loft.

I think the cops are being treated unfairly here. There’s priorities involved, and donuts are not going to eat themselves. Context for those not familiar with the area: Vallejo is the slummy asshole of Napa Valley.

When choo-choo boondoggles are not enough, double down!

“In California, with science under attack, in fact we’re under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing,” Brown told delegates assembled at Moscone Convention Center. “With science still under attack, we’re going to launch our own satellite, our own damn satellite, to figure out where the pollution is.”

Brown’s office said the satellite — to be developed in conjunction with the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company, Planet Labs, and launched by 2021 — will allow the state to track greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m sure that this will be a totally honest and graft-free effort, and that the contractor never donated any campaign or lobbying money.

Old Guy Music! This time, a Canadian import I knew in Austin whose work spanned folk, jazz, blues, and gospel. This is a live version of an upbeat lament. Yeah, I know, but it’s a great tune and she has a really fine voice.

 

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