Between My Ears

There is so much news of great import that could be addressed in this week’s blog! I couldn’t possibly limit myself to just one thing.

BP, after thirty-one years and ninety-odd days, has finally come up with a way to stem the flow of oil from the haphazardly constructed, profit above all else, devil-may-care well in the Gulf of Mexico. Besides being an ecological catastrophe and total public relations nightmare of epic proportions, don’t you get the impression that the BP folks want a pat on the back for their little engineering triumph?

You say you don’t understand the thirty-one year reference? Well, that’s because a similar oil platform accident happened back in 1979, so I figured BP and the rest of the oil companies had thirty-one years to find a satisfactory solution should a similar problem ever arise. Well one did, and they didn’t; fuck R&D when there’s money to be made and people to be exploited.

I could talk about the new Three Musketeers, with “One for One and Me for Me” being the revamped mantra. After all the hoopla and non-stop promoting by the Miami Heat, anything short of a NBA championship should be considered a total failure; except when considering the bottom line.

Showing that a little information can be dangerous in the wrong hands; Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack decides to go off half-cocked and asks USDA employee Shirley Sherrod to turn in her resignation because of an edited YouTube video posted by conservatives. It seems that those folks from the far right wanted to paint Ms. Sherrod in an unfavorable racial light. So they left out a very important segment of dialogue. A knee-jerk White House reaction has left several folks with egg on their faces. Whoops! Can you say “jerk-off” Mr. Vilsack? I bet you can.

Unemployment is still high, and Congress is mulling over stopping additional emergency unemployment benefits due to what it would do to our government’s already staggering debt. Odd, Congress doesn’t seem to mind dumping millions each month into an unwinable two-front war.

Home run production is down in Major League Baseball. Journalists rejoice and point to the elimination of steroids due to the tough stance by the Commissioner’s office. I say home runs are down because pitching is up. Just like the economy, pitching and hitting are cyclical. Open your history books sportswriters.

Now for something really earth-shattering! Since the first of June, we here in Florida are in what’s commonly referred to as “Hurricane Season.” Local newscasts gets great pleasure out of telling us this each night. The fear mongers can’t seem to overemphasize enough the importance of hurricane preparedness. They continually remind us to keep our guard up; a severe storm could be lurking just around the corner.

I wasn’t here to personally witness the devastation of Hurricane Andrew that hit in August of 1992. I did get to see a sample of the aftermath that October, and it wasn’t pretty. However, I got a taste of what a hurricane wrought in the summer of 1999, when Irene dumped many inches of rain on the area. The flood waters made their way to the last step before my front door.

2005 was a very busy hurricane season indeed. Katrina gave us a scare, Rita was intense, and Wilma did some serious damage. For both Rita and Wilma, we were without power for extended periods of time. Traffic lights were down for miles, making already horrible driving conditions (mostly due to the drivers and their inability to understand the intricacies of a four way stop) worse. All the shingles were blown off the roof, and both our cars sustained damage. I’m not thrilled at the prospect of having to deal with that kind of natural disaster anytime soon. So my wife and I prepared for the next big one.

We never have less than three cases of bottled water in the house at any given time. We dropped six-hundred dollars on a generator (never been used). We bought multiple five gallon gas cans. We bought fuel stabilizer. We bought hurricane shutters. We did not have our house wired to a generator system to the tune of about fifteen grand, that was a little over the top for me.

My guess is, if you have the money you do that sort of thing, why not. However, I picture the people who don’t have that kind of cash laying around but incur that expense anyway, are the same type of folks who would’ve put a bomb shelter in their back yard during the fifties. More power to ‘em.

Each year the news media give us a guesstimate of how many named storms we’ll have that season. Their accuracy leaves something to be desired. Granted, there may be named storms, but they float harmlessly off into the North Atlantic, unable to wreak havoc on the populace.

If a tropical disturbance that may become a tropical depression that has the potential to be a tropical storm and then perhaps a hurricane is on an anticipated track for South Florida, we stayed glued to our televisions like zombies waiting to see if this low pressure system gains strength, and the projected path will encompass our local area. The lead time is normally a week, leaving plenty of time for one to prepare.

I know the adage says “better safe than sorry.” I also know there is a segment of the population down here who refuse to heed any preparedness instructions. They have been lulled into a false sense of security since we haven’t had any hurricane activity in five years.

These are the people projected into living rooms around the country, making the rest of us look like douche bags to the nation. They stampede supermarkets. They get into fistfights over a place in line at the gas station. They keep little or no canned goods on hand, thinking instead that they’ll just “eat out,” blissfully unaware that if they are without power restaurants will be also.

When I lived in New Jersey, we never had a “hurricane season,” even though if a hurricane were to hit Jersey, it would be during the same months as in Florida. When winter came, we were never warned it was “blizzard season.” From what I can tell, a blizzard can be almost as devastating.

Roads become impassable; that’s similar to a hurricane. Trees fall during a blizzard, same with a hurricane. Power goes out, but after a blizzard, it never seemed as long as after a hurricane. Plus, with a blizzard, unless you have a fireplace, you freeze your ass off during and after a blizzard; unless of course you’ve prepared for a blizzard by buying a kerosene space heater. So the major difference is, as far as I can tell, is that buildings can get blown over in a hurricane, not so much with a blizzard. Also the flooding is immediate with a hurricane, while with a blizzard, the temperature has to go up drastically, or you wait for the spring thaw.

Each year since 2006 I have been tempted to sell my generator and gas cans. I know if I do, that will be the year a Category 5 (the most severe) decides to visit South Florida. So for the time being, my wife and I remain in the dwindling percentage of the population who are prepared if a hurricane hits. You won’t see us on TV.