By Ian Punnett
Forecasters maintain that Hurricane Gustav will hit Louisiana at some point during the night with devastating effect, officials pleaded with Gulf Coast residents to flee. According to news reports, 95% have already. Because of the near-certainties of the storm, Republicans said they'd abbreviate the opening day of their national convention and create a mood of sobriety and charity.
The French Quarter is a ghost town but that’s no surprise. Even when there are people everywhere in the French Quarter, it has an eery, spectral feeling, layers of dank, fetid, Creole spiced history.
Still, I can’t imagine what it might be like to be walking in the French Quarter tonight.
Or what it would be like to be the Louisiana delegation to the RNC walking around the warm, breezy streets of St. Paul while the state that they love and the people they left behind are in harm’s way.
And then there is the flooding and the tornadoes that will be the likely by-product of such a well-fed, warm water air mass. Even when the Gulf Coast is out of the woods, it will still be looking for high ground.
Watching the skies tonight yourself? Don’t miss the amazing story of a piece of the sky that was missing in Florida the other night.
Take a look at this thought-provoking testimony:
I tend to notice the skies all the time, but in my 46 years, I have never seen anything like this. All clouds and haze abruptly broke off at the edges of this huge “wedge” of blue sky and were completely missing inside it. It was absolutely surreal.
My family and I were leaving a restaurant at about an hour before sunset, maybe 7:30 PM, and we just stood in the parking lot for quite a while, gazing at this and trying to understand what could possibly cause such an effect. My boys expected Dad to explain this like everything else, but this was completely unexplainable.
Read more on that story at this link:
http://oregonskywatch.com/bluesky/?p=814
There’s a report tonight out of Sacramento that another dad might have explained something entirely different to his son--that he was the Zodiac Killer. CBS 13 is reporting:
The Zodiac Killer attacked at least eight people, terrorizing the Bay Area and taunting police in the 60's and 70's. Thursday, the FBI confirmed to CBS13 they are now running laboratory tests on some items that may link a suspect to the killer.
The evidence was given to the FBI by a Pollock Pines man who also claims he recently found the disguise worn by the Zodiac Killer during one of his attacks.
"The identity of the Zodiac Killer is Jack Tarrance. He's my stepfather," says Dennis Kaufman.
Eight years of Dennis Kaufman's life has been consumed with attempting to prove the only father he's known since he was five-years-old is none other than the Zodiac Killer.
"This a handwriting comparison I did," says Kaufman, showing handwriting samples claiming to be his father's and the Zodiac Killer's, which bear a striking similarity. Kaufman says it's no coincidence.
"The composite is a dead ringer," says Kaufman, showing composite sketch of the killer next to his stepfather's -- a resemblance that is undeniable between pictures of Jack Tarrance and descriptions of the zodiac.
Kaufman also claims his stepfather, in a taped phone conversation, indirectly admitted being the zodiac killer.
Jack Tarrance died in 2006. Kaufman claims that while going through Tarrance's belongings, there were disturbing findings including a knife still covered with what could possibly be dried blood.
Jack also left behind rolls of undeveloped film. Kaufman plans to hand over the film to the FBI. On one of the rolls he did develop, there were numerous gruesome images.
"Appeared to be people who were murdered," he explains.
Just recently, Kaufman found something that may unmask the zodiac killer.
"It was a black hood with a zodiac on it," Kaufman explains.
It's similar to the hood worn during an early attack, which is the possible key evidence connecting his stepfather to the killings. He also believes there are dozens more victims which were never linked to the Zodiac, including Kaufman's own mother who, he claims, was suffocated.
Great work--and so nice to see the FBI stepping up to the plate for the family of the would-be Zodiac Killer.
But why wouldn’t they do that with the family of the man we believe was D.B. Cooper? The FBI has had fingerprints of William Gossett for weeks but still no confirmation or denial that the suspect found through this show is the most creative hijacker in US history.
Goes to show you, though, you just never know about some people. Bill Gossett was a law-abiding, tax-paying family man who was in the service, teaching and even serving a community as a priest but he had criminal secret that no one would have guessed.
If it’s true, same thing with this man being identified now as the Zodiac Killer.
And you might be shocked to learn, Roald Dahl, one of the most famous children’s books of all time, had a secret too. In an article in the Independent UK:
He is known to the world as the author of bestselling children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. Yet before he became a successful writer, Roald Dahl had a very different reputation – as the sexiest British spy in America.
A ribald portrait of Dahl’s second world war years as an undercover agent attached to the British embassy in Washington emerges from the pages of a new biography that credits the writer with a very special talent for the Anglo-American special relationship.
“Girls just fell at Roald’s feet,” declares Antoinette Marsh Haskell, the daughter of Dahl’s closest American friend.
His conquests included Millicent Rogers, the glamorous heiress to a Standard Oil fortune; and Clare Boothe Luce, the often times ultra-right-wing congresswoman and the sexually frisky wife of the publisher of Time magazine.
Dahl would later complain to friends that Boothe Luce, 13 years his senior, had left him saddle sore after three nights of bedroom capers.
Claire Booth Luce? Who knew! Who knew she was spelling her last name wrong . . .
Same thing goes with the author of “Enter the Past Tense,” Ronald Haas. Nobody knew he was CIA assassin and he was hiding in plain sight. Goes to show you, you can’t always trust what we see.
Which reminds me about that story at Physorg.com:
The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D. Now, a new study from a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: our ability to see through things.
Read more:
http://www.physorg.com/news139138581.html
How cool is that? We all have the potential for x-ray vision! Dang it. I knew I wasted my money on those X-Ray Specs I ordered from the back of Boy’s Life Magazine.
How weird is going to be if we all had x-ray vision though! That was supposed to be my super power over the super foxes of the 1970s. Real flying foxes might have an odd super power though:
Scientists are investigating whether flying foxes are involuntarily reacting to the loss of habitat in Queensland by spreading deadly viruses including Hendra.
A horse veterinarian died from the Hendra virus earlier this month and five horses were destroyed after an outbreak at the Redlands Veterinary Clinic in south-east Queensland.
Researchers are looking into a rising number of flying fox-related viral outbreaks in other parts of the world, including the deadly ebola virus in Africa and the 2003 SARS epidemic in southern China.
There is an emerging theory that the animals' immune systems are reacting to human interference.
Some people even propose that it's like a biological weapon protect their ecological niche. Only when humans try to destroy that balance that “the virus jumps out.”
A virus that just “jumps out” when the species is threatened by humans is the stuff of science fiction, isn’t it? How many space movies were predicated on the belief that aliens on some distant planet were just fine until we showed up and disrupted the local ecosystem? To the immune system of a population of flying foxes, WE ARE the virus that must be repelled. We are a bacteria on their owie. Hendra is their Bactine.
The same thing could be said about hurricanes. They don’t have brains, they don’t have a will, they are, to me, giant single-cell organisms, that can’t help themselves from killing.
That’s what makes them truly terrifying to me. As a human, I depend on my reason. Hurricanes cannot be reasoned with, they have no interest in bargains.
To me, hurricanes are like Frankenstein’s monster when he tossed that little girl in the lake because he ran out of flowers to float. Except that she didn’t float and she drowned and he just moved on without another thought.
Gustav is like that. He’s big and almost super naturally strong and doesn’t mean any harm but cannot stop himself from killing either.
The monster is on the loose and our best chance for survival will be respecting that raw power and not to get caught playing patty-cake with it on the shoreline.
Let's be careful out there.