Wildlife

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As if the people on Bolivar needed something else to worry about.

Texas authorities busy trying to clean up after Hurricane Ike have a new problem on their hands: There’s a tiger loose.

A county official said today that the animal somehow left its enclosure at an exotic pets center in Crystal Beach. Animal experts are coming in to try and catch the tiger.

Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough put it this way: “Turns out there’s a tiger, and I understand he’s hungry … so we’re staying away from him.”

Houston Chronicle

Fish in a fence

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Uhm…is what it says. Wow. From the chronicle.

FEMA

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These guys just can’t pull their head out of their asses…

Still, the Federal Emergency Management Agency struggled today to move supplies to distribution centers throughout Houston as nearly 5 million people across the region continued to live without power and access to clean drinking water.

More

Wow. Gets even better. FEMA has listed a telephone number for people to call for assistance, but when the lines get overwhelmed, it automatically disconnects would-be callers, advising them to go to the FEMA webpage – keeping in mind here that most people in the area have no electricity.

The recorded message says FEMA personnel are busy helping others, which is, no doubt, true. After advising callers to contact the agency via the Internet, it says: “We apologize for this inconvenience. Your call will now be disconnected.”

Still Standing

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For those looking for some actual information from this site, my parents and Rosie and Baxter (the dogs), made it back to Lake Jackson this evening to find the house is intact, all windows and trees accounted for (even the tree my dad was hoping would blow down because he doesn’t want to pay to have it cut down is still up). Looks like most of the town is ok, although still lacking electricity. Here’s hoping everyone else returns home to equally good fortune.

Holy Crap

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Wow. more from the Houston Chronicle here, here and here.

Ike

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So if you look at the storm track for Ike, the predicted track runs really close to my parent’s house. It should make landfall tonight and really at this point it’s a matter of whether it hits the west or east side of Galveston as a cat 2 or 3. The Saffir Simpson Scale is honestly a complete pile of crap, because while the wind are only going to be barely a Cat 3, the storm surge is looking pretty tremendous.

So, even though there are other things I should be concentrating on at work today, like planning and printing for self-aggrandizing-fluff events, I think I’m going to spend my day posting hurricane stuff and thinking-quasi-positive thoughts about the storm track veering into High Island.

Live Feeds
Looks like Houston station’s have switched to 24-hour coverage, although they’re hitting some bandwidth issues…

KRTK-Houston | KHOU- Houston | KPRC-Houston

(Yes I excluded the Fox station)

Surfside
Surfside is the island beach community near my parents house. Sometimes home to not the smartest of folks. From the Chronicle…

Two holdouts, Max and Diane Hall, and their 9-year-old dog Sissy, awoke to find the ocean in their yard. They walked out to higher ground, carrying supplies and belongings on a boogie board, seeking to be evacuated.

Diane Hall joked, “we are not the poster children for successful evacuation by any means.”

and a bit more morbid…

Smith said he did his best to convince residents to climb aboard his high-riding Mack truck, but authorities believe about six people are riding out the storm.

“We asked them to write their Social Security number on their arm for us,” Smith said.

Galveston
Looks like Galveston is already flooding, with 4′ of water over the main west side highway. The general consensus, from the evcauees is the Galveston mayor pulled a Ray Nagin and waited to long to evacuate the island. The only non-coastal route to the mainland is the I-45 causeway bridge. I’m sure the delay in the evacuation order had nothing to do with the Cruise ship in the harbor.

KPRC is showing video of a wanna-be Dan Rather standing on the edge of the sea wall while the waves are ripping chunks of asphault out of the road. I really want to see this dude go for an involuntary swim.

Saffir Simpson is Dumb
So now the meteorologist guys are calling for Category 2 winds but Category 4 storm surge. Houston area authorities call evacuation based on wind speed. This scale system is ludicrous. They’re calling for a 20′ surge in Galveston Bay, plus 15″ of rain.

Central Market
The fish guys at Central Market gave my parents a half-pound of boiled shrimp and romelade sauce for free at the evacuee discount. Pretty awesome.

Angry Folks

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If we keep Joe Biden and Keith Olberman juiced up on Starbucks for the next two months, we just might win this thing.

LHC Resources

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They’ve switched on the LHC today without destroying the planet (yet) or creating a new, large lake in Switzerland. Here’s a nice resource for checking the status fo the project (make sure to read the url). Or there’s CERN’s Twitter feed. Or this guy from the future who needs some money to prevent the LHC from ending the world.

LHC RAP

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The Higgs-Bosun Partical is dragging it’s ass according to this informative piece. Awesome. (via fancycanoe)

Parachute Fail

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Remember when NASA did cool things like put people in space, land on the moon, inspire a generation to engineering and science and in general, not suck?

Yeah, neither do I actually. Maybe my parents do, but I haven’t seen a lot to impress at this point.  Nor do I see a quick return to the glory days of old if this fine parachute design for the new Orion Capsule is any indication.

The sad part is, I really support the idea of the space program, the lofty goal of finding new places to explore and expanding the human frontier. But this is just yet another areo-space contractor design foul-up that probably just cost you, me and everyone else except John McCain (he doesn’t pay taxes because he’s actually Dick Chenny’s remote-control droid) $20 we really need to spend on gas.

NASA, in reality seems to be just one more lethargic component of the cold-war aparatus that we just don’t know what to do with, so it just goes on blithely fulfilling it’s purpose to build bigger missiles, I mean rockets, while the Europeans and everyone else pull ahead in physics in search of more elegant solutions. We can’t even make a capsule land on the ground with a parachute like they did in the 50’s. And you want to get to Mars? In that? Tell you what, lets put all the rockets away for a bit, adequately fund our schools for say 10 or 20 years, and see what kind of space ship designs you get out of that. Might suprise you.