Quick Roundup 367

What a morning! A thunderstorm has popped up out of nowhere, knocked the desktop off line (destroying what I had done in the process), and is forcing me to go on a half-depleted laptop battery. (It has caused the lights to momentarily go out or flicker at least six times in the past fifteen minutes.)

Pardon the rush job, but I'll have to see what I can slap together in about thirty minutes...

SNL Spoof Video

Reader Dismuke emailed about a hilarious Saturday Night Live skit that lampoons various figures in the "bailout" debacle, including Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, the Georges Bush and Soros, and Soros's pals, Herbert and Marion Sandler:

NBC keeps yanking it off the Internet every time it gets posted ... presumably under pressure from Soros or his friends .... NBC is also apparently deleting all mentions of the skit from its online message boards.

It is HILARIOUS. It also parodies Bush and Pelosi and they have both of their personalities down pat -- including just how utterly pathetic Bush has become. [minor edits, bold added]

I agree with that last paragraph!

The video, at least for now, is posted here. Michelle Malkin has also preemptively posted a transcript illustrated with stills from the skit.

Ship above Water

One of the funniest family photographs there is from my childhood is one of the older of my brothers and myself as toddlers making complete pills of ourselves on a family trip to Ship Island, off the Mississippi coast.

Mom and Dad took us to this neat island with an old fort on it and what did we do? We cried the whole time! The photo has us standing in an entrance to the fort looking hilariously pathetic!

My brother has been back several times since, but I never have, although I'd like to. So it was with some wistfulness and regret that I read an article in the New York Times about the destruction of the island -- which Hurricane Camille sawed in half decades ago -- by Gustav and Ike:

"I don't see Ship anywhere," said Asbury H. Sallenger, a [sic] oceanographer at the Geological Survey who was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat and had the best view. "On the map we see it, but all I see is breakers. There is just zip left of this thing."

Eventually, the scientists spotted the western part of Ship, but its eastern half had all but disappeared. A small patch of land and whitecaps breaking on underwater shoals were all that remained.

After I emailed him with the news, my brother replied by pointing to photos to the contrary, commenting, "I don't know what Asbury H. Sallenger's motive was ... probably wanted some of my money for his research."

Indeed. As the Times article states later:

Storms and climate change are partly to blame. But the region as a whole is subsiding. And in some areas, some critics contend, federal dredging projects are robbing islands of sand. [bold added]

Encouraged by my brother's good news, but bothered that the pictures were still taken before Ike, I found this article from a Biloxi paper which reports that the obituary for Ship Island was premature, and cites a scientist who politely, but pointedly noted that the flyovers cited by the Times were performed less than 48 hours after Ike made landfall -- while its massive storm surge, I surmise, still covered the islands.

Looks like my brother was right on both counts.

Gorgeous Photographs

Leading up to Hurricane Ike, I frequently went to the blog of the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger (aka, "SciGuy") for information on storm developments and how they could affect the Houston area.

I enjoy his blog, and still drop by from time to time. A recent visit treated me to the photograph at right, which Berger obtained from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day web site.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Made a correction and added a clarification to section on Ship Island.