I had an odd experience yesterday.
I’d gone out in the afternoon for a quiet drink in a local pub, and ended up with a front row seat at a rock concert.
It was sunny and so I’d headed for a pub with a shady courtyard. There were usually only about 5 people in the courtyard, and plenty of seats. But when I arrived with a beer there were 100 people in it, maybe more, and a band setting up under an awning at one end.
I thought I was going to have to stand, like most people were, but squeezing my way to the front I found a couple of empty chairs, and sat down in one. And more or less as soon as I’d sat down, the band started playing, mostly old standards like Stand By Me. As I listened I realised that they were pretty ambitious in their choice of music. Playing Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love required the lead guitarist to play like Eric Clapton, and he seemed perfectly capable of doing it. He was probably as old as Eric Clapton as well. Even more ambitious, in some ways, was the Wailers’ Stir It Up, and I watched the seated bass guitarist’s fingers picking out the notes, as the girls came out and started energetically dancing on the cobblestones in front of the band, and I wondered if they were the right notes.
I wondered whether anyone would be smoking, given it was so crowded. But the guy sat beside me lit up, and then the guy on the other side lit up too.
“Shame about the weather,” the lead guitarist said, as the sun blazed down, and he launched into Walk On The Wild Side, and ended with Teenage Kicks.
When I got home I listened to Stir It Up again. The bass player had indeed been playing the right notes.
…
Shame about the weather in Houston, Texas too. Hurricane Harvey seems to have pretty much come to a halt over the city, and is unloading 12 inches of water onto it every day, and has done so for three days, and looks set to carry on for several more days. Flood waters are 15 feet deep in places.
The Republican Governor of Texas was recommending that the city be evacuated before the storm arrived, but the Democratic Mayor of Houston disagreed, so most of (greater) Houston’s 10 million or so inhabitants are presumably still in the city.
How do you evacuate 10 million people from a city? The Governor had said there were 200 buses available. But if a bus can carry 50 people, it wouldn’t need 200 buses: it would need 200,000 buses. Are there that many buses in the USA? And where would they go? And wouldn’t they empty all the gas stations along the route out? And end up motionless in traffic jams in the waters rising on the roads?
So what do you do if you can’t evacuate? It seemed to me that the only thing to do would be to head for high ground or tall buildings in the city. There doesn’t seem to be any high ground in Houston, but there seem to be plenty of tall buildings in the centre of the city. Do any cities have plans for where people should go to find high ground or tall buildings?
The power is out over most of Houston as well, so that will mean freezers and fridges defrosting, and maybe no way to heat food or boil water for lots of people.
And ants and alligators and snakes have also been on the move. I saw a video of a huge ball of fire ants drifting in the flood waters. It can’t help much to have your house invaded by fire ants, and have alligators coming in through the windows.
This could get very, very bad. It can only be hours or days before either Climate Change or Donald Trump are blamed for it all.
…
Oh, and..
North Korea fired a missile that flew over Japan and landed in waters off the northern region of Hokkaido early on Tuesday, marking a sharp escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula…
Frank Davis 
There was just such a ‘do’ at the Erect Hamster across the market place from where I am the other afternoon. The pub has a huge courtyard with pic-nic tables & benches out front where the bands set up. From what I could hear (every bloody note) the band was of surprisingly good quality, knocking out passable covers of all the Oldies, even hitting The Darkness’ high notes, and judging by the white noise of people talking and glasses clinking, the pub may have gotten more out of the afternoon than just a Noise Abatement Order.
3 pubs still in the town centre here and the Erect Hamster has made a thing of live music. The Nelson’s Knee Trembler Inn, next door, has gone gastro and coffee. The Smack Dealers Arms has made a thing of Sky and pool. All well and good and they will probably limp on for a few more years yet (that’s the other thing about smoking ban people don’t always realise, it is a slow acting poison). But anyone wanting a ‘quiet pint’…..
Why do musicians have to sound like those that originally recorded a song?
Individual interpretation is one of the joys of good music listening.
Texas voted for Trump; so, some are blaming that for ‘Harvy’.
However, Houston’s general area voted for Hillary and maybe that is why they have had the greatest destruction.
I love that song Teenage Kicks. If you haven’t seen it I recommend the film “Good Vibrations” which chronicles the rise of the Belfast music scene in the seventies.
It used to be DJ John Peel’s favourite track:
Teenage Kicks is one of John Peel’s Desert Island Discs:
I didn’t realise he’d done Desert Island Discs. Nice find, Frank, I’ll check it out later. His taste in music was eclectic, to put it mildly, but he did promote some good bands who would otherwise have slid (that doesn’t look right to me – slidden?) into obscurity. I always had a soft spot for him, despite (or perhaps because of) his musical eccentricities.
You can certainly bet yer bupkis that Anthropogenic Global Warming and Manmade Climate Change will be blamed to high heaven for Hurricane Harvey.
BUT…
If you catch anyone doing that, just remind them that TWELVE YEARS AGO we were listening to The Warmers tell us that Hurricane Katrina was just the first kiss of death due to climate change, and that EVERY YEAR FROM THEN ONWARD the US would be doomed to be hit with hurricane disasters of steadily increasing intensity because we had dared to ignore the PSA commercials showing the sweet little blond girl dreadfully killed by secondhand smo… er… I mean, by a speeding train! (Sorry, hard to keep the propagandists straight. They all sound kinda alike, y’know?)
So how many Katrinas and Harveys have we had since 2005? The predicted ten or twenty or thirty? Hmm… odd… I can’t think of a half dozen. Not even sure there have been ANY!
Convenient how blithely they ignore their past predictions when they don’t turn out, eh? Anti-whatevers remind me of the scammers who’ll start with a population of 1,000 people and tell half of them:
“I’VE GOT A *SECRET METHOD* OF PREDICTING STOCKS! I’ll even PROVE it to you: See this stock over here? It will go UP in the next week. Invest in it!”
Of course they tell the other half it will go down.
They then repeat the game with the 500 folks who stick around after seeing the first prediction work, and then again with the remaining 250.
THEN… they start demanding to be paid a “reasonable” fee for their next prediction, and a larger fee for the next prediction for the audience of 62 or 63 still with them, and maybe demand a million dollars for their final prediction with the thirty that are left!
The only way they can lose is if the stock stays absolutely the same. Heck, if the scammer is good enough they’ll even retain some of the losers from the first two or three rounds by using the loss as PROOF that IT’S NOT A SCAM! LOL! They’ll “sadly” admit that their secret method has a 5% failure rate, but 19 times out of 20 it’s a winner. They’ll be admired for their honesty and the rubes will simply invest MORE money next time so that they can “make up” for that rare and unlucky loss.
The smoke and climate scammers are the same: They make their claims, flaunt the ones that they get good evidence for and “forget” the ones that didn’t work out. They then go on to use the flaunted ones as a base for demanding more money from taxpayers and grants.
I’d say at least half of them oughta be jailed.
– MJM, who highly recommends reading Michael Crighton’s “State Of Fear.” Before reading that book my sympathies were largely, though moderately, with the Warmers. I just wish Crichton had stayed alive long enough to write a similar novel about secondary smoke and the Antismokers! See his thoughts at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoZ-b1OaW4
Thanks, I will check out “State of Fear”! I had heard of it but never got around to reading it.
Tho I admire Crichton and he makes a good case in State of Fear, be prepared that as a novel, it’s lousy–the fictional part created as an excuse for the exegesis, the plot less than probable and the characters one-dimensional. It was, however, an effort to engage the general public, through fiction, in a lesson on the facts they wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to.
as a novel, it’s lousy
That was the problem I had with it. And why I couldn’t read it. So haven’t read it.
Wellll…. It’s not one of Crichton’s best, that’s for sure. I still enjoyed it though. It’s definitely more “action oriented” than a lot of his work, and it clearly was meant to serve as a platform for his argument. BUT… compared to the usual presentation of such ideas, it stands out and I’d recommend it.
– MJM, who’ll admit that he may have been swayed a bit by dreams that Crichton had done if for our issue instead…
I finished it and I actually really enjoyed it. I was prepared for the lack of character development, and I thought the story was fairly gripping. That cannibalism scene, yikes! Also, I noticed Crichton did get in a dig about secondhand smoke and smoking bans near the end somewhere.
(Sorry, hard to keep the propagandists straight. They all sound kinda alike, y’know?)
Don’t they just?
Of course it was only hours. The BBC has spoken:
Five thousand words of ‘however’ follow. Roger Harrabin, Environment Analyst explains:
Never heard of a new branch of knowledge called attribution science? A Google search sheds light on it. It is a variation on climate modelling which exists only in connection with climate change and was developed for the purpose of “the Warsaw international mechanism on loss and damage associated with climate change impacts”, part of the Paris climate accord.
Or, in plain language, “climate scientists” think they have found a way of blaming every new weather disaster on emissions and hope to bankrupt industry with demands for compensation.
Or, in plain language, “climate scientists” think they have found a way of blaming every new weather disaster on emissions and hope to bankrupt industry with demands for compensation.
Just as the “health scientists” are preparing the same for the food industry and tobacco control “scientists” are spear-heading the law suites against the tobacco industry.
At the same time the British government is investing into electric cars. The dumb politicians believe that we have enough lithium for the next 300+ years. (Providing energy use does not increase… That bit the lobby didn’t tell. Just as the wind farm lobbyists didn’t tell about Neodymium and what happens around the mining sites of it)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution
Since our planet does what it always has done (for instance, wobble, throw some magna on the surface, switch poles, gets hit by asteroids etc.etc), one fine day the population of this planet will realize they have been had by the climate change industry, tobacco control industry, the health industry – and our planet.
Just remembered, isn’t the Yellowstone super volcano long overdue to erupt?
Why does it always need a mega disaster to bring back common sense?
There might be one on the way…
Oh, and..
North Korea fired a missile that flew over Japan and landed in waters off the northern region of Hokkaido early on Tuesday, marking a sharp escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula…
There comes the day when panicking politicians will tell tobacco control, climate change control, life style control etc. etc
: “Fuck off, we’ve now got REAL problems!!!”
Just curious, did climate change control, tobacco control, life style control get a foot into North Korea’s door?
Fwiw–(nothing to the True Believers) I heard a meteorologist today say temperature had nothing to do with it. The reason for the prolonged ferocity and endless rain is the freak occurence of two high pressure areas on either side of the storm that are acting as pincers–or think of a pressure cooker–and concentrating the action, not allowing it to dissipate or move away.
OTOH, that reminds me of Tom Bearden’s writings of scalar electromagnetic weapons, weather engineering, steering hurricanes, but Google’s “site: search” seems to be being decommissioned now, and so on a brief look remembering, hard to find references.
This http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/080409.htm
and this general heading maybe, but it’s not what I was looking for…
Nor in the books… http://cheniere.org/books/index.html
But if you occasionally enjoy a conspiracy theory with your coffee and croissant,
(& cigar?) (just enjoying the “c” words there!)
you might find some relevant material within… start at the top, drill down… lots of it!
An external force creating those pincers, directed… just another operation?
Only two links per comment, so I won’t go on, except if I find more relevant I might add.
Erm, cigarette, not cigar! What was I thinking!
I’d sat down, the band started playing, mostly old standards like Stand By Me. As I listened I realised that they were pretty ambitious in their choice of music. Playing Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love required the lead guitarist to play like Eric Clapton, and he seemed perfectly capable of doing it. He was probably as old as Eric Clapton as well. Even more ambitious, in some ways, was the Wailers’ Stir It Up, and I watched the seated bass guitarist’s fingers picking out the notes, as the girls came out and started energetically dancing on the cobblestones in front of the band, and I wondered if they were the right notes.
All for free, no entrance fee??? *WOW*!!!
And they played
Just curious, what was the name of the band?
“Shame about the weather,” the lead guitarist said, as the sun blazed down
Nice one! It usually rains when Glastonbury is on.
I wondered whether anyone would be smoking, given it was so crowded. But the guy sat beside me lit up, and then the guy on the other side lit up too.
Did someone moan and do the anti-smoker *cough-cough* and fell into apoplectic screeching: “HELP!!! SOMEONE IS SMOKING!!!!” whilst hurrying away?
Just curious, what was the name of the band?
Jason and the Astronauts.
Did someone moan and do the anti-smoker *cough-cough*
No. People don’t do that round here.
Here’s them playing Stir It Up, with the bass line I mentioned coming through strongly (they seem to be minus the drums and keyboards they had yesterday):
They are good! Yep, the bass player takes no shortcuts!!!
I would have enjoyed that gig!
Did someone moan and do the anti-smoker *cough-cough*
No. People don’t do that round here.
Same up here. I guess, I’m walking proof that we are being lied to.