After the Fourth

Well, we got through another Fourth of July here in our little corner of paradise. We kind of lucked out this time, because it was sunny, clear and not blindingly hot. Of course the Phoenix version of "not blindingly hot" would cause widespread anxiety in most other parts of the country. We were actually a couple of degrees cooler than average - 104 degrees instead of 107 - but we will take any kind of "cooler" we can get. In most other parts of the country Independence Day sort of marks a half-way point through the summer season. But since we are graced with summertime temperatures through the first half of October, July 4th represents about one third down, two thirds yet to go.

We desert dwellers are now looking to the skies to bring us some relief in the form of the oft-promised but just as often missing-in-action monsoon storms. We get giddy with anticipation around midday as we watch the cumulus clouds pile up in massive, custard-like heaps in the northeast, hoping that later in the afternoon we will be treated to huge, torrential downpours and intense winds. In quite a few cases, all this drama and expectation is nothing but a big tease as storms pop all around us, but avoid the Valley of the Sun as if it were a big leper colony.

It's day 77 of the Gulf oil spill and the undersea well is still blowing oil into the water. It seems barely possible that this can continue for so long, and one wonders where all those millions and millions of gallons of crude oil are going. You can tell that news fatigue is starting to set in - the oil spill gets relegated to a spot on the news programs after the annual hot-dog eating contest and the latest professional athlete signing some preposterous, obscene gazillion-dollar contract.

By the way, is there anything as loathsome and disgusting as an eating contest? I am completely baffled why there is such interest in a bunch of repellent, gluttonous pigs cramming food down their gullets, like some kind of weird post-apocalyptic update of an ancient Roman food orgy. I can only hope that the participants come down with a terminal case of crapulence. Yes, there is such a word as "crapulence." It means "sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking." It's in the dictionary, check it out here. It's like the Word God made up a word as a gift for me. It's much classier than the more colloquial "craptacular." I plan on using words like "crapulent" and "flatulent" in conversation and correspondence as often as I can.

On the immigration front, we had someone named Barry Wong, who is a candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission, the governing body that controls utility rates, come up with a rather incredible idea of cutting off electrical power to illegal immigrants. This idea is breath-taking in its insanity and can probably make its own run for the most half-baked, ridiculous idea of the year. How this proposed law could implemented and enforced, Mr. Wong did not deign to explain, but in an area where the temperatures can reach 115 degrees or higher it this would be tantamount to murder. Also, you would have to know where all the illegal immigrants live before you can start cutting power, and most people here illegally go to a lot of trouble to keep that information from the authorities. I fail to see how the whole immigration debate is advanced by this kind of demented logic, but maybe it works as comic relief, in a pathetic kind of way.

Way to go, Cox Communications, for giving me a brand-new cable modem when my old one stopped working last Thursday night. Oh, I should point out that Cox decided they weren't going to support my old modem due to changes in their network, so when I called and complained about my high-speed internet service going away, they said it was my problem and I need to buy a new modem. They very graciously offered to sell me a new modem for the "discounted price of $39.99." I told them they can shove their discounted price up their discounted butts and started up the corporate ladder on Friday morning. After about an hour complaining they relented and delivered a shiny, brand-new Motorola modem to my house. So they get points for a good resolution but they also lose points because I had to force them to do the right thing. The lesson in all this, kids, is the squeaky wheel does indeed get the grease and don't give up when you know you're right. But it is kind of sad when you have to shame a big corporation into fixing a problem they themselves caused.

But hey, things are not that bad for me at all. I have a house full of happy rabbits and doves, lots of good friends, time to enjoy myself and get stuff done, and every reason to believe life will continue to be sweet and each day is to be savored and appreciated. I'm finding out that getting old kind of sucks, but with age comes a peace of mind and a level of contentment that just isn't possible when you are in your twenties or thirties. So I'm going to serve the bunnies their daily salad and think about the cooler days and nights which will surely come around again. In about 4 months.

Requiem for a Coastline

After forty-odd days of increasingly horrible news coming out of the spill area of the Gulf of Mexico, today brought the first real glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, engineers might be getting the upper hand in controlling the undersea gusher of crude oil left over from an oil rig explosion. Spewing many thousands of gallons of oil each day into the sea, the resultant oil plume has begun the slow-motion, agonizing destruction of one of the most unique and productive seashores in the entire world.

I think most people still don't understand the enormity of the unmitigated catastrophe unfolding in front of the world. The extremely painful videos and photographs of pelicans and sea birds saturated with thick, greasy, brown oil are so very hard to watch, but maybe that is what is needed to shock people into understanding the real tragedy and impact that the carelessness of humans has wrought on an epic scale.

Nor is there a lot of appreciation of the staggeringly difficult task that plugging the oil vent presents. All this is going on under nearly a mile of water, and there are very few environments on earth that are more hostile. The enormous water pressure, low temperature, currents and visibility issues all come together to make any activities especially difficult. Some idiots continue to say brainless things like, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we stop this leak?" Well, morons, putting a man on the moon was an incredibly difficult task, too. The lunar landing didn't just happen, it was the culmination of a decade of planning, engineering and just plain courage. Likewise, stopping this leak will entail a bit more than sending down a giant cork and hoping to be done by lunchtime.

Speaking of idiots, that intellectual pile of sludge known as Sarah Palin for some reason finds it necessary to open her big obnoxious yap about this subject, and predictably a torrent of stupidity rivaling the undersea oil leak blows out. She wrote some kind of incredibly dumb blather on Twitter addressed to "ExtremeGreenies," which I guess is her pet name for environmentalists, and tried to make the point that every time she stupidly repeated her dimwitted catchphrase "drill baby drill" over and over again like a retarded mynah bird she wasn't really yammering about drilling for oil offshore, but rather in places that she regards as environmentally safe drill areas like ANWR (Alaska National Wildlife Refuge). And somehow, she feels the Gulf oil spill proves she was right all along. Excuse me???

I guess this incredibly stupid, sad political hack thinks that an oil spill on pristine Alaskan tundra is preferable to an undersea oil spill. Sarah Palin is a gigantic, infected pimple on the ass of society and continues to redefine the outer boundaries of incompetence and stupidity with everything she bleats out in her annoying trailer-trash Barbie doll voice. Apparently at one point they tried to clog up the leaking oil pipes by stuffing it with cement and garbage like golf balls and shredded tires. What they should have done was stuffed the hole with Sarah Palin and BP executives. It just might have solved a lot of obnoxious problems at once.

It is so baffling trying to understand why that beautiful, serene part of the world is victimized repeatedly by disasters, both natural and man-made. A whole string of destructive hurricanes, topped by Katrina, have ravaged that area in recent years. Oil spills both large and small, continued pollution of the sea and air, the draining of natural wetlands to facilitate human development, and the construction over many years of a haphazard, crazy-quilt system of levees, dikes and dams have forever negatively altered the fragile interplay of sun, wind and ocean that make up the coast. Like watching a terminal cancer patient lose their battle with the disease, the death of the Louisiana coast is a supremely painful and unparalleled tragedy for America, made all the worse by the slow, inexorable and deliberate pace of its demise.