Thoughts On A Sunday

As I mentioned in the previous post, we went to see Styx and Boston in concert last night. Both Skip of GraniteGrok and Bogie of Bogieblog were also in attendance.

BeezleBub said he enjoyed Styx more than Boston, though I liked both. Being a big Boston fan, I liked their set better, but they were both excellent!

Boston's new lead singer, Tommy DeCarlo, absolutely blew me away. They made the right decision asking him to join the band.

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We're still seeing this Florida weather cycle – sunny in the morning, cloudy with showers and thundershowers in the afternoon – and I'm getting pretty sick of it. The Weather Guys™ have been telling us it's being caused by a 'trapped' low pressure area in Canada steering the weather into this pattern. This has been going on since June.

So now we know the real cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Canadians!

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Here's more on MIT's electrolysis breakthrough I posted about earlier that will make residential solar and residential/commercial wind power far more practical and cheaper.

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Heard this weekend on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me (from memory):

Al Gore also admitted to being a space alien. His plans to cool our planet will allow his fellow aliens to colonize our frigid planet...

If it's true that Al Gore is a space alien, then a whole bunch of his Inconvenient Truth claims start to make sense.

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Bruce at No Looking Backwards lets us know what he really thinks about Nanci Pelosi, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, Barack Obama, and the Brady Center.

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It appears Obama is proposing the Europeanization of America by mandating that everyone here should learn Spanish, since so many people in Europe speak more than one language. As one commenter to the above linked post wrote, “Obama only speaks English - what a poseur.”

I have a number of problems with this idea. One of them is that Spanish wouldn't do us any good here in northern New England where the second language of choice is most often French due to the proximity of Quebec and the large number of residents of French Canadian descent. Another is that multi-lingual capability is necessary in Europe where one can drive through four countries in less eight hours while it would take days to drive from coast to coast in the US without ever needing to speak anything but English.

Somehow Obama seems to think multi-lingual ability equates to sophistication. I'm sure my late grandmother (from Finland) would find it amusing that she would be though of as sophisticated just because she could speak Finnish, Swedish, and English. Not bad for a former housekeeper!

Obama needs to be reminded that the United States is not in Europe. In a country this large, with a historically diverse ethnic population, language becomes a unifier. The fact that English is the one language spoken in a country of this size provides evidence of our independence and unity.

But Obama wants “change we can believe in!” I'm not sure I like his idea of “change”.

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The housing slump/foreclosure debacle has claimed another victim, this one close to home.

A neighbor and friend of ours, a single mother of two, lost her house to foreclosure when her mortgage rate reset and her payments rose beyond her ability to pay. Today she and her kids had to move out of the house, being ordered to vacate by Monday, August 4. I was over at her place helping her pack and putting boxes into her SUV. Later in the morning other friends and family arrived with a rental truck, some pickups, and a trailer to help her move her belongings to her new lodgings.

Ironically, the place she's renting is only a little smaller than her house, but she's paying almost $1000 per month less to rent it than she was paying for mortgage and taxes on the place she lost.

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I've noticed the number of homes for sale in his area has increased quite a bit over the past two months. More than a few of them are owned by seasonal residents, meaning the urgency of a sale isn't there since most seasonal home owners aren't under time constraints to sell quickly.

Another WP neighbor just listed her home for sale, but she's selling because she's building a new (and bigger) house than the one she has now, a small seasonal camp converted to a year round home.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where rock legends come to play, homes are falling on the auction block, and where BeezleBub and I will be spending Monday out on the lake.