The end of summer, at least for me

So just another week here. I'm afraid there's not lots happening to talk about, but I guess that's a good thing really. The saying no news is good news definitely applies. We spent several hours last week getting the boat ready for winter. Since the new sail won't be ready until at least October, we're not going to get any sailing in before then. So, we took off all the extraneous lines, the mainsail cover, etc. We'll still spend weekends on the boat but that will be it until next spring. So, for me it feels like summer is over at this point. Forget that it's still 80 degrees outside (at 8:45 at night) I'm officially ready for autumn.

I ran across a few things on the web that I felt I wanted to talk about. As most people probably know, it's the second anniversary of Katrina hitting New Orleans. There's been some rebuilding of the area, but there is still so much to be done. Bravenewfilms has a short film showing how much of the area is still a disaster area. It's pathetic that the supposedly wealthiest nation on the earth can't even rebuild one of its cities in a timely manner. $116 billion was allocated by the feds for rebuilding the area, and of that only 30% has ended up being directed towards long-term rebuilding projects. Less than half of that 30% has been spent so far. Why isn't rebuilding one of our major cities more of a priority?

So speaking of Katrina, apparently when Bush arrived at the airport and met Mayor Nagin, he felt compelled to rub the mayor's head head. Who is this guy pretending to be President of the US? No world leader should be rubbing the head of, well, anyone in public. It's just creepy.

So everyone has probably already heard of the problems of Senator Larry Craig. However, this video with various talking heads discussing the issue is particularly nauseating. Tucker Carlson, who on his best day is about the equivalent of pond scum, actually admits to gay bashing when he was in high school and is proud of it (it happens at about 2:50 into it). What kind of moron would be proud of assaulting another human being? Should someone who's proud of committing a hate crime be allowed to remain on TV, and why should anyone take this clown's opinion seriously? To make matters worse, after he was called on it Carlson changed his story saying that he didn't really assault anyone, he just held the guy in place until the police arrived. What's wrong with people today that they feel they can say anything and then just deny it when it causes a problem? Do these kinds of people think that the rest of us are stupid and that we don't realize what they've said, in this case 12 hours before? Silly question on my part...of course they think we're stupid.

But back to Larry Craig, it's interesting that the GOP is abandoning him by calling for an ethics committee investigation, pushing him out of his committee appointments, and calling for him to resign. He's apparently poison to the GOP all of a sudden. However, barely 6 weeks ago Senator David Vitter admitted having hired a prostitute after his name showed up on a madam's customer list in D.C. Prostitution and soliciting a prostitute are both illegal in D.C. and Vitter admitted to committing the crime. Yet where are the GOP calls for an investigation and resignation from Vitter? Apparently if you cheat on your wife and commit a crime but are straight, it's okay. If you cheat on your wife and commit a crime but are gay, it's a bad bad thing and you can't play in the GOP sandbox anymore. 

C had a very interesting thought today about coming up with a new name for guys like Craig. They want to have sex with men but they are definitely not part of the gay community and we should NOT welcome them in. They've gone out of their way to demonize gay men and lesbians, try to take away what rights we do have, and tried to write hate and discrimination against gays into law. We definitely don't want to own these guys so we need something else to call them. After all, Craig was very adamant about not being gay, so let's not call him gay.

I've uploaded some new pics onto the blog. You can get to the various galleries from the links on the right. If you're reading this through RSS sorry, you'll have to visit the page. I'll be uploading some more as I get around to. I'm trying to get more of these pics online so they are visible to more than just me sitting at my PC.