THE CAT’S PAWS

The National Arctic Refuge vicinity along Prudhue’s solid-ice bay being where it is and all, the oil industry’s surge of drilling activities are not really going to be really visible to anybody. Gradually, then more quickly, more and more rail cars and trailers will haul piping, beam, cable, pumps, generators, cutting tools, a zillioin fasteners…and our oil interdependence efforts will be off and running. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow!

I drove home from work thinking of an idea I had, and held onto it while we ate and went out for a bit.

I sat down to my keyboard and cranked a one act, two scene play that has four characters in it.

I didn’t pause, used colons in the right places and stuff, and I could tell it gave real feeling to me after only about a page or two. I think I ended up with nineteen pages–it’s still printing. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something definitely fishy here, and it reeks of oil companies.

The North American continent holds the planet’s largest reserves of natural gas–landfills create so much of it, too, that they blow off plumes of yellow/blue flame during the nights so as to get rid of it. There’s simply too much of it, and it’s been this way ever since the mighty Ozark Mountains hurled skyward amidst streaks and thunderclaps, two-or-so billion years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Renae had a short day today and I didn’t have to drive into St Louis, so we drove around and got some stuff done. It was rainy (one of the hurricanes’ remnant storms is blowing slowly through) and sort of nasty outside, but we got through with errands, then came home and flipped on the TV. Read the rest of this entry »

Rutherfurd’s a heavyweight author, and this is book two of a three-part series that began with The Princes of Ireland which chronicles Ireland’s beginnings. This one respectfully kicks the left-behind Druid past, noting how the modern church’s beginnings gently interweaves with reverence to the pagan past. Through admittedly hard-to-follow-at-times progression of fictional characters in the backdrop of the everyday walled city of Dublin, Rutherfurd takes us slowly forward to events and times that we Americans can actually recall learning about, or at least hearing about. There’s nothing difficult to read; readers need to acclimate to the British way of phrasing style and should have it down pat, oh, by page 50 or so. Finally, Rutherfurd’s the real mccoy–the use of Irish expression here intended–and tackles my favorite genre’, historical fiction (that’s ‘literature’ to all you Library of Congress fans) pretty darn well. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m barely old enough to remember how it used to be; George McGovern was on the radio a couple of weeks ago to share how pivital party conventions were. Essentially, the party bosses worked it all out on the floor, and primaries meant something, true, but the convention was for all the marbles. Sen (ret) McGovern was glad things all changed after his ‘72 bid against Nixon.

Partly from an enlightenment that befell American voters, and partly because of chaotic upheaval that showed it could usurp a party’s ‘coming out’ of it’s candidate by delaying nominations until well after prime time, primaries have permanently taken the role of party candidate selection. Ordinary folks, not back room deals, now had the voice. Read the rest of this entry »