Cats with headphones:

Barry White:

Bluegrass:

Hip-hop:

Heavy Metal:

Techno:

Stevie Wonder:

By Ian Punnett

As of last report:

Dean was expected to thrash Jamaica with 160 mph winds, or Category 5 intensity, up to 20 inches of rain, storm surge and large battering waves, just hours from now, on Sunday morning. The system, with hurricane-force winds extending 70 miles in a radius from its core, was to be directly over the small, densely populated nation by Sunday afternoon.

Also facing peril: the Cayman Islands, which are about 200 miles northwest of Jamaica and in Dean's path. The storm was expected to rumble over those resort islands on Monday while retaining its brute force and brush past Cuba with ferocity.

Dean has already killed three people, as it moved passed the tiny islands of St. Lucia and Martinique in the central Lesser Antilles on Friday as a Category 2 hurricane. It also caused severe damage to banana and sugar crops.

In the US, Texas is in this killer hurricane’s path. Three people are still missing because of last week’s flooding from Tropical Storm Erin's massive rainfall.

Six are still in that mine in Utah.

And of course, two men have yet to be recovered from the Mississippi still, all these weeks after the collapse of the 35W Bridge.

In Sunday’s New York Times:

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of "electronic surveillance," the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

For instance, the legislation would allow the government, under certain circumstances, to demand the business records of an American in Chicago without a warrant if it asserts that the search concerns its surveillance of a person who is in Paris, experts said.

It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess (As any kid knows, you never do your best work when you’re focused on recess), rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.

We should all be comforted to know that the White House promises not to exploit Congress’s mistake.

The government would never try to do anything just because they thought nobody was watching.  Right?

Here's the story from Physorg.com

Virgil Griffith's "Wikiscanner" points to Central Intelligence Agency computers as the sources of nearly 300 edits to subjects including Iran's president, the Argentine navy, and China's nuclear arsenal.

A CIA computer was the source of a whiny "Wahhhhh" inserted in a paragraph about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's plans for the office.

"While I cannot confirm whether any changes were made from CIA computers, the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly," CIA spokesman George Little said. Gotta like that. "CIA spokesman Little always makes sure that Little is said."

I’m pretty sure that the CIA changed my Wikipedia entry too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Punnett

Only the CIA could have known about those compromising pictures of me and Geico Gecko.  Well, the CIA and all those people at Lindsay Lohan's place at the time.

In my defense, I would just like to say that at the time, the Geico Gecko was drunk.  I was sober but he was hammered.

(CNNMoney.com) reported yesterday-- Wall Street got a break Friday when the Federal Reserve cut the discount rate - goosing market confidence.

Still, fears of mortgage industry collapse and extreme stock market volatility may keep everybody on edge for months.

As of Saturday, some Countrywide bank locations in California are still seeing lines of people withdrawing all their money and moving it somewhere else after the news this week that they were unable to get any money to loan.

Talk of a government bail-out of the home mortgage industry continues.

Speaking of bail-outs:

(Reuters) -- Hundreds of camels have died in Saudi Arabia this week from a mystery ailment.

The Agriculture Ministry has said 232 camels died in the space of four days in the Dawasir Valley, 250 miles south of Riyadh.

King Abdullah has promised compensation for camel owners, who say the real number of deaths is far higher.

Camels dying from a mystery ailment? Could it be, French Foreign Legionnaire’s Disease?

Or maybe the camels are getting cancer from smoking all those cigarettes. Could be lumps in their humps?

Found this article at a drug research website:

Researchers in Belgium have developed a new generation of drugs consisting of extremely small antibodies - called nanobodies - taken from camels that can target human tumor cells specifically and seem suitable for oral delivery.

The research team from the Flander Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (stupid "Flander") are using camel antibodies, which are much smaller than human antibodies, are very stable, soluble proteins that are much easier and less expensive to produce than conventional antibodies.

Could there be better years ahead for cancer sufferers though camel antibodies? Dare we call it, "Camelot?"

From the ABCnews.com website, camels might find the North Pole a friendlier place.

There was less sea ice in the Arctic on Friday than ever before on record, and the melting is continuing, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported.

A senior research scientist at the center said, "This is the least sea ice we've ever seen in the satellite record and we have another month left to go in the melt season this year."

Finally:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Chemical elements observed around a burned-out star known as a white dwarf offer evidence Earth-like planets once orbited it, suggesting that worlds like our own may not be rare in the cosmos, scientists said Thursday.

Researchers in LA and Germany figured out the chemical composition of a large asteroid that was ripped apart by gravitational forces as it approached this distant former sun known as a white dwarf, finding that the busted up asteroid was similar to the Earth's crust. The debris orbiting around the white dwarf was rich in iron and calcium and low in carbon (much like a breakfast cereal) except really hard like a rock (so, more like "Grape-Nuts"), the researchers said.

by Ian Punnett

It was back in 2017 that they found the last body, the last victim of the 35W Bridge collapse. 

You might remember how they had recovered and identified all the officially missing men and women that had gone into the Mississippi within a few months of the disaster when it happen in 2007.  It took a little time because of all the dangerous concrete and the rain that had fallen then but eventually they recoved the last person--a young man in his 20s, I think--just before construction of the new bridge began.  I remember at the time feeling relieved that so few families ended up having to mourn the loss of somebody and that everybody had their loved one to bury.

And then back 2017, they found that guy while they were dredging the river to help what few barges still used it.  His car had gotten a lot further down river than anybody had suspected and it had tumbled in the current into just such a place that invesigators never saw it.

Then, according to the Tribune-Pioneer before it stopped publishing on paper altogether, the winter ice floes moved the car, with all the windows rolled up and that poor man inside, down the Mississippi a little more every year until the Army Corps of Engineers hit it with that machine.

I don't remember his name now--Tom something--but I'll never forget that story of how he had left his job in the states to move to Canada and pursue his dream of living entirely off the land and being "off the grid" completely.

When he had mapped out his plan to the few family and friends that he had, this Tom guy showed how he was going to go west a ways before snaking his way up to Canada through Montana.  Nobody knew that he when he got in that car that day with all his stuff that he made a last second decision to "just get there" and he took I-35 North instead.

And when nobody ever heard from him again, those that knew him best weren't all that surprised.  They hoped that he was living out his days in the cabin that he had wanted to build with his own two hands with the plans he had drawn up and brought with him in his car that came off the 35W Bridge that day . . .

________________

Last night, Margery suggested that I blog on the occassion of the two weeks since the bridge collapse and this is what came out in the middle of the night.

What does it mean?  It's the answer that my soul is giving me to the question, "What should a 35W Bridge Collpase Memorial look like?"

With an artists's eye, I had been trying to picture it. Do you show the memorial image of 35W as it stood or as it fell?  As it stood, the 35W Bridge was an uninspiring, non-descript concrete structure.  As it fell, it became memorable, a rolling wreck that I will never forget.  In "life," the bridge got us across the Mississippi.  In "death," the bridge got across that it's time to pay more attention to our national infrastructure.

So, to me, a 35W Bridge Collapse Memorial should honor both the lives lost and the lives saved and that can only be understood fully by remembering the bridge as it fell.

And then as I imagined a bridge memorial further my mind's eye drifted to the part that listed the names of the dead and the missing.  I saw the inscription of the names on the memorial and then a blank space on the granite.

Which is why, as I dreamt, I kept going back to that blank space on that sad roll call and wondering why that would be necessary for a proper bridge memorial.

And my soul told me that story to remind me that we should be mindful to stand by everybody:  the dead, the missing and, like the Vietnam War Memorial, those that we don't even know are victims yet.