Sunday afternoon random thoughts

So this past week we had a forecast for snow today. First it was going to be a dusting to an inch, while the Mid-Atlantic region would get hammered. As the week wore on, the forecast kept getting more and more dire. By the time I got home from work Saturday night, we were expecting as much as a foot of new snow. So what did we get?..... An inch. And the Mid-Atlantic got hammered. The weatherman should have quit while he was ahead.

Now, some random thoughts from this week's headlines.

First, Tiger. Basically, who cares? The man can play golf. The man can finagle a bunch of great advertising gigs. But that doesn't mean he was smart enough to figure out the first rule of survival: Don't piss off your wife!

And there are reports that he paid some of his partners in extra-curricular activities as much as $20k a month to keep quiet. Obviously, it wasn't enough.

Next, there was an item in last Sunday's Boston Globe about a principal who banned the word 'meep' from his high school. Apparently, the students were using it constantly, against the requests of faculty and staff, to the point of disrupting education. Well, obviously this principal never had kids of his own or he would have known that if he ever wanted to do anything to perpetuate the use of the word 'meep' (used in both the context of Beaker of Sesame Street and the Roadrunner of cartoon fame), banning the use of the word would do it. These are kids. It's in their genetic makeup to do things that annoy adults. And if they know it annoys them, all the better. Just ignore it and it will go away. Just like goldfish swallowing, DA haircuts, Beatle haircuts, Valley Girl speak and all the other silly things kids have been doing all their lives.

There was the story of a rescue effort in Oregon in the middle of the week. Some hikers were lost on Mount Hood and the body of one of them had been found. But conditions had worsened so that the search for the other two had to be put on hold. That got me to thinking. I know everyone has their own hobbies and some people need the challenge of overcoming great obstacles to feel fulfilled. But when that person's hobby starts to endanger the lives of others, I have to say, 'Wait a minute. What gives you the right?' The caring side of me wants to say I don't want to stand around and do nothing when someone is dying up there on that mountain. But the cynical side of me says, 'Well what do you expect? It's a mountain over 11,000' high in December in North America. If you decide to hike up it and things go wrong, why do you think a bunch of other people are gonna want to hike up looking for you?' I'm torn on this one. But I do hope the cost of the rescue effort is billed to 'em.

And my favorite headline this week: "22 million missing Bush White House e-mails found" Well, I'm shocked, SHOCKED that it is even possible that 22 million e-mails went missing. Of course, the spin doctors got to work on this right away, saying that the e-mails were found while Bush was still in office. That may be, since the law-suit that instigated the search for them was filed while he was in office, but it is just now being settled, which is why it is news now. But the best part of the story are some of the quotes from the article, which had me doing the proverbial ROTFLMAO:

'Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the Bush administration had been dismissive of congressional requests that the administration recover the e-mails. Leahy said it was "another example of the Bush administration's reflexive resistance to congressional oversight and the public's right to know." '

'Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said "many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records."'

' "We may never discover the full story of what happened here," said Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It seems like they just didn't want the e-mails preserved." '

'Sloan said the latest count of misplaced e-mails "gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no e-mails were missing." '

Every time I read those paragraphs, I want to say something. But nothing I can think of is any near as funny as the quotes themselves. All I can say is 'Congratulations to all us for surviving those eight years. It was tough, but we made it! Barely!'