i want to live like an eco-celebrity too!

SondraK at Knowledge is Power says exactly what is on my mind regarding the whole eco-celeb issue. i know, gore and edwards have done more to destroy the environment in the last month than i have my entire life, but they are politicians. we expect our politicians to shit in our back yards, and then tax us to clean it up.
but the "eco-celebs"? they are just fookin' lame hypocrites.
a quote from the article SondraK tipped :

I have some sympathy for the concert organizers who, when confronted with inconvenient truths -- such as the fact that performers flew more than 400,000 carbon-belching kilometres to the various venues for a single day of performances -- gave a sort of you-have-to-break-some-eggs-to-make-omelettes response.

What I have real trouble with is preachy (and ill-informed) celebrities exhorting the rest of us to live like ecomonks in unlit, unheated sod hovels while they live the high life burning through more carbon-based fuels in a week than a platoon of army Humvees in a year.

I don't mind that Sir Gordon probably hopped a private jet after his concert Friday night at Chicago's Wrigley Field, so he could be at New Jersey's Giants Stadium in time for Saturday's "Concert for a Climate in Crisis."

What rankles more is that when it comes to driving ticket sales on his own tour -- when it comes to making Gordon Sumner money --he has no problem with hiring a fleet of big, diesel-powered, soot-spewing highway trucks to fill with such eco-necessities as 100,000-watt speakers.

go on, read the article for yourself. ask the same question i did.... do they really think we are THAT STUPID?

a nice way to blow a couple of hours: Ferry ride to San Francisco

As usual, click on picture for choice of sizes.

Di and i decided to play on Saturday. so we hopped the Vallejo ferry to San Francisco on the first boat out at 0830. it was a bit foggy, with the marine layer just starting to break up.Alcatraz Island in the morning fog
when we arrived at the SF ferry terminal, the area was surrounded by a farmers market, with a big "arts and crafts" gathering across the street.
we headed up towards North Beach, and finally decided on Cafe Delucchi for breakfast.
a leisurely wander back to the ferry terminal gave us time to enjoy San Francisco's finest in street people, bums, crazies, and multitudes of tourists.
Back at the Ferry terminal, we moseyed around the various vendors outside. Di bought a couple of sets of origami crane earrings that i thought were damned clever and neat looking to boot. there are some smart and talented folks out there, and artists, while many are nuttier than a jar of nutella, tend to be some kind of hooked up to the universe's smarts jar.
one of the great things about this time of year is the stone fruits are ripening, and the klondike white peaches were/are succulent and delicious. we should have bought more than a small bag!
one of my favorite visuals at the farmers market was now in san francisco, a relatively innocuous produce company name, albeit clever, can take on a whole range of meanings, almost all of them nasty!
we headed back on the 1410 (that's 2:10 PM for those of you that don't know how to tell time), and the ride was damned pleasant.


this is probably my favorite shot of the trip, with the Golden Gate bridge peeping out of the fog above Raccoon Straits.
one of the things i wanted to accomplish on this little jaunt was to get a picture of my boat's old home at berth 18 and 19 on Mare Island. boy, does this place look different.

one of the great things about being an empty nester is that we can just jump at the spur of the moment and boogie off for a quick trip to play
here's a link to the flickr set for our day.

just another example in a long line

of how our elected and appointed officials completely disregard need for prestige.
i know, what do you expect, right? honestly, i expect the folks that manage the monies collected from us to provide services and infrastructure actually be used for something necessary, for the "common good". our federal dollars have a mysterious habit of ending up being earmarked for things like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, or for farm subsidies, which when first offered helped the small farmer in dire straits, but now more likely than not are paid to a small percentage of farmers, mostly wealthy, that don't need them to survive.
kahleefornia is no exception. a little background before i get into the rant. i'm married to a nurse, and i work for a major university.
so what has my knickers knotted up today? monday, Dan Walters, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee wrote a piece about future spending by the University of California.

a few snips from the published article

"At last count, California had slightly more than 200,000 practicing lawyers and a slightly higher number of registered nurses....
The California Postsecondary Education Commission, in a critical report on the University of California's plans to establish a new law school at its Irvine campus, found that the state has no shortage of qualified attorneys."

"Nursing is another story. Even though there's been a significant increase in training programs in recent years, the state has an estimated 17,000 qualified nursing applicants on schools' waiting lists."

"Why is UC stubbornly plowing ahead with the new law school at Irvine? UC Provost Rory Hume provided one rather arrogant answer. "CPEC's view is there are enough lawyers in California," Hume told the regents. "Our view is there are not enough good lawyers in California."

So here's the situation in a nutshell, as if the events cited above were not self-evident: California has more than enough lawyers now and plenty of public and private law schools to supply whatever we may need in the way of legal beagles in the future, but UC wants to spend many millions of dollars to build a new law school at Irvine. Meanwhile, we have a large and growing shortage of nurses and desperately need more investment in nursing education to alleviate the shortfall."

"UC's regents and administrators want to establish a new law school at Irvine because it would, in their view, enhance the school's prestige and, by extension, their own, not to meet any true educational or societal need. It's the same syndrome that drives the state Senate to, as it did a few weeks ago, dump another $5.5 million in precious transportation funds down a bottomless pit called the North Coast Railroad Authority."

it seems that the prestige of having an unnecessary law school trumps funding a much needed nursing program. in "their" world, useless attorneys are much more important to the folks living here than training and certifying nurses.
the UC system has been in the cross hairs of several local papers for the last several years, with articles exposing unbelievable compensation packages and shady dealing by administrators that hold themselves unaccountable to those of us that pay their salaries.
wish i could get a job like that

another bubblehead blogging

found him today. huh, hiding out there in buffalo, didn't think we'd find him. only problem is, he used the phrase "reactor scram, rig ship for reduced electrical". cool what you can find if you use the right search words in dogpile....
so head on over and say howdy to brisket for chucklehead, a boat sailor turned engineer turned grilling fool. recipes. i want recipes, darn it!

Why are we in Iraq? find out here

Michael Yon is an independent type. he's over in Iraq covering the war without the backing of a major news corp. in other words, he's getting out of the comfy air conditioned hotel, and hitting the streets with the troops. and telling us what he sees.
want to know why we should stay in iraq, and kill every f**king al queda type we can find? kill them and wrap their bodies in pigskins before sending them home?
check out Yon's dispatch Bless the Beasts and the Children. if you have a weak stomach, steel yourself. but you owe it to yourself and the rest of us to actually get a grip on what we are up against.

email humor... new passport camera

i would have preferred the Taliban model, myself.