JamesSavik

How Hurricane Harvey Became So Destructive By LISA FRIEDMAN and JOHN SCHWARTZAUG. 28, 2017 NYT Scientists say the effects of Hurricane Harvey, which has been stalled over the Texas Gulf Coast since Friday and dumped more than 20 inches of rain in some areas, were worsened by a lethal confluence of meteorological events: warm water in the Gulf of Mexico that intensified the rainfall, and a lack of winds in the upper atmosphere that could have steered Harvey away from land. Exacerbating the situation, said Hal Needham, a storm surge expert and founder of the private firm Marine Weather & Climate in Galveston, Tex., was that the storm surge elevated Galveston Bay, blocking drainage of the rain that pummeled coastal and inland areas. “A two- or three-foot storm surge alone would not have been catastrophic,” Mr. Needham said. “It was all these ingredients coming together.” And it’s not over. Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, said the driving rains would continue for another two or three days, pouring an additional 15 to 25 inches over parts of Southeast Texas. Some areas, he said, could see as much as 50 inches of rain. “This is unprecedented,” he said. Yet it does have some parallels. J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, said Harvey is very much like Allison, a tropical storm that flooded Houston badly in 2001 because it lingered over the city and dumped prodigious amounts of rain. “In some ways, I think this event is going to far surpass what we saw in Tropical Storm Allison,” Dr. Shepherd said. The atmosphere is not helping to push it anywhere else. “The steering currents that would normally lift it out of that region aren’t there,” he said. Hurricanes are essentially large weather engines fueled by the warm waters of the ocean below. The mind-boggling amount of rainfall during Harvey is a function of the storm sitting by the Gulf of Mexico and continuing to draw moisture directly from it. Because of the orientation of the storm, Dr. Shepherd said, “you’ve just got this stream of moisture firehosing into the Houston region,” as the moisture is constantly replenished by the gulf. “This could go down as the worst flood disaster in U.S. history.” Scientists are increasingly able to link some extreme weather events to climate change, but when it comes to hurricanes, many say there remain a number of unknowns. What is clear, though, is that rising global temperatures warm the oceans, which causes more water to evaporate into the atmosphere. The buildup of moisture in turn contributes to the global increase in extreme rainfall, Kenneth Kunkel, a researcher with the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, said. Even without climate change as a factor, Dr. Kunkel said, oceans are normally warm this time of year. But, he pointed out, the Gulf of Mexico has been warmer than average lately, most likely feeding into the deluge. Several scientists stressed that while the damage of Hurricane Harvey was unrelenting, it was not unexpected. Forecasters were anticipating a very wet storm to park over Houston for an extended period. “This, honestly, is playing out, unfortunately, exactly as we thought it would several days ago,” Dr. Shepherd said. He said he grew worried when he saw public statements of relief that the storm had been downgraded from Category 4 strength to a tropical storm. He said the change in technical terminology may have confused the public and led local officials to lose focus on the greater threat, a multiday rain event. “There was always a one-two punch with this particular storm, but we were always more concerned about the ‘two,’ the rainfall,” Dr. Shepherd said. “Once that subsided, people like me said, ‘O.K., we’re just getting started.’” Different models predict different aspects of storms. Rick Luettich is director of the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences and an internationally recognized expert on storm surge, and a principal developer of the ADCIRC computer programs, which can be used to predict storm surge. For Harvey, Friday’s calculations suggested a surge of eight to 10 feet in the coastal areas, with as much as 12 feet in some of the shallow coastal estuaries. The water threat that is getting the most attention with Harvey, however, is the intense rainfall predicted as the storm lingers over the Houston area. With storms growing wetter thanks to climate change, Mr. Luettich and his collaborators are trying to add rainfall calculations to the coastal surge forecasting model. “People don’t care, if they got wet or got drowned, whether their water was salty or fresh,” he said. _________________________

NASA Explores an Extreme Rover for Extreme Venus-- "No Spacecraft has survived its surface heat and sulfuric Acid for more than Two Hours" 27 AUG 2017 Daily Galaxy By avoiding electronics, a NASA rover might be able to better explore Venus. The planet's hellish atmosphere creates pressures that would crush most submarines. Its average surface temperature is 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius), high enough to melt lead. A good watch can take a beating and keep on ticking. With the right parts, can a rover do the same on a planet like Venus? A concept inspired by 'steampunk' clockwork computers and World War I tanks could one day help us find out. The design is being explored at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "When you think of something as extreme as Venus, you want to think really out there," said Evan Hilgemann, a JPL engineer working on high temperature designs for AREE. "It's an environment we don't know much about beyond what we've seen in Soviet-era images." The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) is funded for study by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. The program offers small grants to develop early stage technology, allowing engineers to work out their ideas. AREE was first proposed in 2015 by Jonathan Sauder, a mechatronics engineer at JPL. He was inspired by mechanical computers, which use levers and gears to make calculations rather than electronics. Mechanical computers have been used throughout history, most often as mathematical tools like adding machines. The most famous might be Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a 19th century invention for calculating algebraic equations. The oldest known is the Antikythera mechanism, a device used by ancient Greeks to predict astronomical phenomena like eclipses. Mechanical computers were also developed as works of art. For hundreds of years, clockwork mechanisms were used to create automatons for wealthy patrons. In the 1770s, a Swiss watchmaker named Pierre Jaquet-Droz created "The Writer," an automaton that could be programmed to write any combination of letters. Sauder said these analog technologies could help where electronics typically fail. In extreme environments like the surface of Venus, most electronics will melt in high temperatures or be corroded by sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. "Venus is too inhospitable for kind of complex control systems you have on a Mars rover," Sauder said. "But with a fully mechanical rover, you might be able to survive as long as a year." Wind turbines in the center of the rover would power these computers, allowing it to flip upside down and keep running. But the planet's environment would offer plenty of challenges. No spacecraft has survived the Venusian surface for more than a couple hours. Venus' last visitors were the Soviet Venera and Vega landers. In the 1970s and 1980s, they sent back a handful of images that revealed a craggy, gas-choked world. Sauder and Hilgemann are preparing to bake mechanical prototypes, allowing them to study how thermal expansion could affect their moving parts. Some components of the Soviet landers had actually been designed with this heat expansion in mind: their parts wouldn't work properly until they were heated to Venusian temperatures. Mobility is one challenge, considering there are so many unknowns about the Venusian surface. Sauder's original idea was inspired by the "Strandbeests" created by Dutch artist Theo Jansen. These spider-like structures have spindly legs that can carry their bulk across beaches, powered solely by wind. Ultimately, they seemed too unstable for rocky terrain. Sauder started looking at World War I tank treads as an alternative. These were built to roll over trenches and craters. Another problem will be communications. Without electronics, how would you transmit science data? Current plans are inspired by another age-old technology: Morse code. An orbiting spacecraft could ping the rover using radar. The rover would have a radar target, which if shaped correctly, would act like "stealth technology in reverse," Sauder said. Stealth planes have special shapes that disperse radar signals; Sauder is exploring how to shape these targets to brightly reflect signals instead. Adding a rotating shutter in front of the radar target would allow the rover to turn the bright, reflected spot on and off, communicating much like signal lamps on Navy ships. Now in its second phase of NIAC development, the JPL team is selecting parts of the AREE concept to be refined and prototyped. Team members hope to flesh out a rover concept that will eventually be able to study the geology of Venus and perhaps drill a few samples. The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL

Long-lost continent found submerged deep under Indian Ocean 31Jan2017 New Scientist Mauritius sits on part of an ancient continent KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/REX/Shutterstock By Alice Klein An ancient continent that was once sandwiched between India and Madagascar now lies scattered on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The first clues to the continent’s existence came when some parts of the Indian Ocean were found to have stronger gravitational fields than others, indicating thicker crusts. One theory was that chunks of land had sunk and become attached to the ocean crust below. Mauritius was one place with a powerful gravitational pull. In 2013, Lewis Ashwal at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues proposed that the volcanic island was sitting on a piece of old, sunken continent. Although Mauritius is only 8 million years old, some zircon crystals on the island’s beaches are almost 2 billion years old. Volcanic eruptions may have ejected the zircon from ancient rock below. Now, Ashwal and his team have found zircon crystals in Mauritius that are up to 3 billion years old. Through detailed analyses they have reconstructed the geological history of the lost continent, which they named Mauritia. The break-up Until about 85 million years ago, Mauritia was a small continent — about a quarter of the size of Madagascar — nestled between India and Madagascar, which were much closer than they are today. Then, India and Madagascar began to move apart, and Mauritia started to stretch and break up. “It’s like plasticine: when continents are stretched they become thinner and split apart,” says Martin Van Kranendonk at the University of New South Wales in Australia. “It’s these thin pieces that sink below the ocean.” There is evidence that other volcanic islands in the Indian Ocean, including the Cargados Carajos, Laccadive and Chagos islands, also sit on fragments of Mauritia. More and more remnants of other old continents are being uncovered, says Alan Collins at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Several pieces have recently been found off Western Australia and underneath Iceland, he says. “It’s only now as we explore more of the deep oceans that we’re finding all these bits of ancient continents around the place.” Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14086

World’s Largest Volcano Now Named TAMU 5 Sep 2013 Texas A&M Today Texas Aggies like to think their school is among the world’s biggest movers and shakers, and now science has confirmed it. An oceanographer has uncovered the world’s largest volcano in the Pacific Ocean ““ about the size of New Mexico ““ and has named it for Texas A&M University. William Sager, who spent 29 years working at Texas A&M in the College of Geosciences and was holder of the Jane and R. Ken Williams ’45 Chair in Ocean Drilling Science, Technology and Education, first began studying the volcano about 20 years ago. He named it Tamu Massif ““ Tamu for the abbreviation of Texas A&M University, while massif is the French word for “massive” and a scientific term for a large mountain mass. Will Sager (left of center, white polo shirt) lead author on the Nature Geoscience study confirming Tamu Massif as the world’s largest volcano, waits to inspect a core sample drilled on Integrated Ocean Drilling Program ship. (Photo courtesy of IODP) It is believed to be the largest single volcano ever discovered on Earth and may rival some of the giants found on Mars. Sager, who recently joined the faculty of the University of Houston, and team members from Oregon State, Yale, the University of Hawaii and the United Kingdom, have published their findings in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, both through direct grants and through its Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) that is headquartered at Texas A&M. Sager and the team examined a large underwater area in the northwest Pacific known as the Shatsky Rise, located about 1,000 miles east of Japan. Sager had found that the plateau contained three enormous mounds. “We got tired of referring to them as the one on the left, the one on the right and the big one,” Sager recalls. He dubbed the largest one Tamu after Texas A&M, and hence the school is now in the volcano business. “We knew it was big, but we had no idea it was one large volcano,” he adds. “Our final calculations have determined it is about 120,000 square miles in area, or about the size of the state of New Mexico, making it by far the largest ever discovered on Earth. It rivals in size some of the largest volcanoes in the solar system, such as Olympus Mons on Mars.” Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars, is so big that it can be seen with many common backyard telescopes. A 3-d map of the Tamu Massif formation. (Photo courtesy of IODP) The largest active volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which has erupted off and on for the past 700,000 years. But it is about 2,000 square miles in size, a tiny fraction of Tamu Massif. Tamu Massif is believed to be about 145 million years old, and it became inactive within a few million years after it was formed, Sager says. Its top lies about 6,500 feet below the ocean surface, while much of its base is believed to be in waters that are almost four miles deep. “What is unusual about the volcano is its slope ““ it’s not high, but very wide, so the flank slopes are very gradual,” Sager explains. “In fact, if you were standing on its flank, you would have trouble telling which way is downhill. We know that it is a single immense volcano constructed from massive lava flows that emanated from the center of the volcano to form a broad, shield-like shape. “Its shape is different from any other sub-marine volcano found on Earth, and it’s very possible it can give us some clues about how massive volcanoes can form. An immense amount of magma came from the center, and this magma had to have come from the Earth’s mantle. So this is important information for geologists trying to understand how the Earth’s interior works.” Tamu Massif follows a long line of locations named after Texas A&M or people associated with it. These include many topographic features in the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic seaboard, including Antoine Bank, named for Texas A&M researcher John Antoine; Geyer Mound and Geyer Bank, named for Texas A&M researcher Richard Geyer; McGrail Bank, named after Texas A&M oceanographer David McGrail; Tamu Basin, Tamu Bank and Tamu Dome, all named for the school; Bryant Canyon, named after oceanographer William Bryant; Rudder Basin and Reveille Basin, named for former president James Earl Rudder and the school’s collie mascot; Gyre Basin, named for a former Texas A&M research ship; and Applebaum Bank, named for Texas A&M researcher Bruce Applebaum. ### About Research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents total annual expenditures of more than $776 million. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. _______________ Aggie Geology ________________________________ The world's biggest volcano is a magnetic mix-up Five weeks of mapping at sea suggests two possible origins for the underwater Tamu Massif. ==> Nature

Ancient Earth's Hot Interior Created a Graveyard of 'Continental' Slabs 22 Aug2017 Science Daily Plate tectonics has shaped the Earth's surface for billions of years: Continents and oceanic crust have pushed and pulled on each other, continually rearranging the planet's façade. As two massive plates collide, one can give way and slide under the other in a process called subduction. The subducted slab then slips down through the Earth's viscous mantle, like a flat stone through a pool of honey. For the most part, today's subducting slabs can only sink so far, to about 670 kilometers below the surface, before the mantle's makeup turns from a honey-like consistency, to that of paste -- too dense for most slabs to penetrate further. Scientists have suspected that this density filter existed in the mantle for most of Earth's history. Now, however, geologists at MIT have found that this density boundary was much less pronounced in the ancient Earth's mantle, 3 billion years ago. In a paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the researchers note that the ancient Earth harbored a mantle that was as much as 200 degrees Celsius hotter than it is today -- temperatures that may have brewed up more uniform, less dense material throughout the entire mantle layer. The researchers also found that, compared with today's rocky material, the ancient crust was composed of much denser stuff, enriched in iron and magnesium. The combination of a hotter mantle and denser rocks likely caused subducting plates to sink all the way to the bottom of the mantle, 2,800 kilometers below the surface, forming a "graveyard" of slabs atop the Earth's core. Their results paint a very different picture of subduction than what occurs today, and suggests that the Earth's ancient mantle was much more efficient in drawing down pieces of the planet's crust. "We find that around 3 billion years ago, subducted slabs would have remained more dense than the surrounding mantle, even in the transition zone, and there's no reason from a buoyancy standpoint why slabs should get stuck there. Instead, they should always sink through, which is a much less common case today," says lead author Benjamin Klein, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "This seems to suggest there was a big change going back in Earth's history in terms of how mantle convection and plate tectonic processes would have happened." Klein's co-authors are Oliver Jagoutz, associate professor in EAPS, and Mark Behn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Temperature difference "There's this open question as to when plate tectonics really started in Earth's history," Klein says. "There's general consensus that it was probably going on back at least 3 billion years ago. This is also when most models suggest the Earth was at its hottest." Around 3 billion years ago, the mantle was probably about 150-200 C warmer than it is today. Klein, Jagoutz, and Behn investigated whether hotter temperatures in the Earth's interior made a difference in how tectonic plates, once subducted, were transported through the mantle. "Our work started as this thought experiment to say, if we know temperatures were much hotter, how might that have modulated what the tectonics looked like, without changing it wholesale?" Klein says. "Because the debate before was this binary argument: Either there was plate tectonics, or there wasn't, and we're suggesting there's more room in between." A "density flip" The team carried out its analysis, making the assumption that plate tectonics was indeed shaping the Earth's surface 3 billion years ago. They looked to compare the density of subducting slabs at that time with the density of the surrounding mantle, the difference of which would determine how far slabs would have sunk. To estimate the density of ancient slabs, Klein compiled a large dataset of more than 1,400 previously analyzed samples of both modern rocks and komatiites -- classic rock types that were around 3 billion years ago but are no longer produced today. These rocks contain a higher amount of dense iron and magnesium compared to today's oceanic crust. Klein used the composition of each rock sample to calculate the density of a typical subducting slab, for both the modern day and 3 billion years ago. He then estimated the average temperature of a modern versus an ancient subducting slab, relative to the temperature of the surrounding mantle. He reasoned that the distance a slab sinks depends on not only its density but also its temperature relative to the mantle: The colder an object is relative to its surroundings, the faster and further it should sink. The team used a thermodynamic model to determine the density profile of each subducting slab, or how its density changes as it sinks through the mantle, given the mantle's temperature, which they took from others' estimates and a model of the slab's temperature. From these calculations, they determined the depth at which each slab would become less dense than the surrounding mantle. At this point, they hypothesized that a "density flip" should occur, such that a slab should not be able to sink past this boundary. "There seems to be this critical filter and control on the movement of slabs and therefore convection of the mantle," Klein says. A final resting place The team found that their estimates for where this boundary occurs in the modern mantle -- about 670 kilometers below the surface -- agreed with actual measurements taken of this transition zone today, confirming that their method may also accurately estimate the ancient Earth. "Today, when slabs enter the mantle, they are denser than the ambient mantle in the upper and lower mantle, but in this transition zone, the densities flip," Klein says. "So within this small layer, the slabs are less dense than the mantle, and are happy to stay there, almost floating and stagnant." For the ancient Earth, 3 billion years ago, the researchers found that, because the ancient mantle was so much hotter than today, and the slabs much denser, a density flip would not have occurred. Instead, subducting slabs would have sunk straight to the bottom of the mantle, establishing their final resting place just above the Earth's core. Jagoutz says the results suggest that sometime between 3 billion years ago and today, as the Earth's interior cooled, the mantle switched from a one-layer convection system, in which slabs flowed freely from upper to lower layers of the mantle, to a two-layer configuration, where slabs had a harder time penetrating through to the lower mantle. "This shows that when a planet starts to cool down, this boundary, even though it's always there, becomes a significantly more profound density filter," Jagoutz says. "We don't know what will happen in the future, but in theory, it's possible the Earth goes from one dominant regime of one-layer convection, to two. And that's part of the evolution of the entire Earth." This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation. Story Source: Provided by MIT. Original written by Jennifer Chu. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Journal Reference: Benjamin Z. Klein, Oliver Jagoutz, Mark D. Behn. Archean crustal compositions promote full mantle convection. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2017; 474: 516 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2017.07.003

Earth History: How Continents Were Recycled 22 Aug 2017 Science Daily Researchers from Germany and Switzerland have used computer simulations to analyse how plate tectonics have evolved on Earth over the last three billion years. They show that tectonic processes have changed in the course of the time, and demonstrate how those changes contributed to the formation and destruction of continents. The model reconstructs how present-day continents, oceans and the atmosphere may have evolved. Priyadarshi Chowdhury and Prof Dr Sumit Chakraborty from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, together with Prof Dr Taras Gerya from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH), present their work in the journal Nature Geosciences. Hotly disputed: when did plate tectonics emerge? The Earth formed approximately four and a half billion years ago. There was a phase -- perhaps even several -- when it was mainly composed of molten rock. As it cooled, solid rock and the Earth's crust formed. Generally speaking, there are two types of crust on Earth: a lighter continental crust that is rich in silicon and constitutes the dry land above sea level, and a denser oceanic crust where water gathers in the form of large oceans. "These properties render the Earth habitable," says Sumit Chakraborty. "We haven't found anything comparable anywhere else in the universe." Even though the young Earth did have continents and oceans, there were initially perhaps no plates and, consequently, no plate tectonics. The question when they emerged is much disputed. The Earth's crust slowly assumed its present dynamic form: in some places the plates go into the mantle; in other places new plates form from the hot material that rises from the interior of the Earth. Also, the question when plate tectonics first emerged is not the only one that remains unanswered; it is also unclear whether that process has always been the same and whether continents last forever or are recycled. These are the questions that the German-Swiss research team investigated. Their new thermomechanical computer model supports the growing notion that perhaps plate tectonics was already operating approximately three billion years ago. More uniquely, the study demonstrates how the Earth's earliest continental crust -- richer in iron and magnesium -- was destroyed some two or three billion years ago and how the present continental crust -- richer in silicon -- formed from it. Continental recycling is the order of the day On the young Earth, continents were recycled all the time. Continental recycling still takes place today when two continents collide, but it progresses more slowly and in a different manner than it used to. "Over time, the continental crust became prone to preservation during continent-continent collision," says Priyadarshi Chowdhury. On the old, still hot Earth, thin layers peeled off from the Earth's crust whereas on the present-day Earth, chunks of the continental crust break off in the collision zones, i.e. in places where one plate moves under another. The researchers assume that the destruction of the early iron-magnesium rich continental crust was crucial for the formation of the silicon-rich continents and that it was the reason why these continents could rise above sea level to a larger extent. "These changes to the continental character might have contributed to the Great Oxygenation Event on Earth -- and, consequently, to the origin of life as we know it," suspects Chowdhury. Story Source: Provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum. Journal Reference: Priyadarshi Chowdhury, Taras Gerya, Sumit Chakraborty. Emergence of silicic continents as the lower crust peels off on a hot plate-tectonic Earth. Nature Geoscience, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo3010

Histories Largest Eruptions

The Scary State of Volcano Monitoring in the United States One of the most volcanically active countries in the world is not ready for a devastating eruption. Atlantic Monthly

The Massive Volcano that Scientists Can't Find It was the biggest eruption for 700 years but scientists still can't find the volcano responsible. BBC Future

Supernova’s messy birth casts doubt on reliability of astronomical yardstick Brightness of exploding stars may vary more than researchers realized. Article on Nature

Rumors Swell Over New Kind of Gravitational-Wave Sighting Gossip over colliding neutron stars has astronomers in a tizzy Article at Scientific American

Useful Links from the Tech & Science Geeks Club: National Weather Service National Hurricane Center Regional Satellite Maps Message me if you would like to join.

Tabby's Star Tabby's Star or KIC 8462852 Sky & Telescope: the Curious Case of Tabby's Star Astronomy Magazine: "Alien Megastructures" Star may be a Sign of Dying Worlds

Weather Links: Weather Channel Weather Channel Regional Satellite Uplink National Hurricane Center Weather Underground National Weather Service BBC Weather Weather Canada NOAA Pacific National Weather Service - Pacific Crown Weather Service- Eastern and Central Pacific Crown Weather Service- West Pac

Useful Links: USGS Volcano Hazards Program (CONUS) Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program USGS Latest Earthquakes (CONUS) USGS Global Earthquake Reporting Independent Earthquake Reporting (Global) Earthquake Track (Global, mapping) Earthquakes Canada (Canada) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center

We are the people that make the trains run on time. Not really. Some of us have never seen a passenger train. That's just a metaphor; another way of saying we make things work. People call us geeks or tekkies. They really have no idea how much they depend on us to keep all of their thingamajigs and whatsits online, working and not bursting into flames. This is our play ground: science, technology, our toys, our tricks and traps. Let us know about interesting science, new tech or useful software. If its shiny, fun or useful and catches your eye, post it here.

Jack is my twitter buddy. He's as nice as he is bright.

A few days ago President Trump made a statement condemning violence on both sides of the Charlottesville Charlie-Foxtrot. A lot of people were indignant that he might call out anyone on the left. So... let's compare and contrast: These sweethearts are Antifa. they wear masks they throw riots set things on fire carry weapons attack people accomplish nothing positive only create resentment they deny the rights of others For comparison purposes I give you the KKK- the evil, racist boogeymen that live in trailer parks. Guess what they do? they wear masks they throw riots set things on fire carry weapons attack people accomplish nothing positive only create resentment they deny the rights of others No one acting under a mask is up to any good. On the extreme ends of both the left and right exist a bunch of dangerous nut cases. All we need are some candied fruit and we can make a fruitcake. It is up to the sane people in the middle to JUST SAY NO TO EXTREMISTS OF EITHER STRIPE. Take care that in your zeal for a cause that you don't become what you despise. Those war memorials that so enrage some are not political statements. They are a warning from the past about the pain and loss of war. If we forget the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat them.

Jalapeno Corn Bread__________preheat oven to 4251 cup corn meal1 cup buttermilk1 tsp salt1/4 tsp baking soda1 egg1/2 cup shredded cheese (sharp cheddar best)1 onion (shred in food processor)1 jalapeno (shred in food processor)Mix all that up in a bowlheat skillet with cooking oilPour mixture into hot skilletCook in oven for 22-26 minutes.How it turns out depends on how hot the peppers are and how many peppercorns you keep in the mix. It's MUCH better than ordinary cornbread.I like to use colby/jack cheese. More cheese can be added. Yum. Experiment by adding red onion another pepper or by leaving in more peppercorns to spice it up. Serve with vegetables like butter beans, peas, corn, tomato. Good with salsa. You'll need a black iron skillet. Don't put in dishwasher. Instead clean by hand and keep it oiled (with cooking oil silly).

Audacious Aquarius The time of Aquarius lasts from the last week of January to the third week of February. This time found us on the road again. After the trial we decided that it might not be the smartest move to go back to Hattiesburg. Mom and Dad talked and decided it would be a really good time to visit some of our relatives in Texas. The winter weather in Texas was just as fickle as it was in Mississippi. It could be eighty one day and freezing the next.

Capricious Capricorn The time of Capricorn runs from the last week of December through the first three weeks of January. For my new family, it was another time of joy and trials. We piled into the Crenshaw’s massive GMC Yukon and headed out to Texas on my first ever road trip. If you ever want to get to know people, a ten hour road trip is just the ticket. Jeb and the twins Benny and Kenny occupied the back, I sat with Doug and Sarah in the middle and Mr

Cute, highly intelligent, massively talented... it was inevitable. We all knew he was one of us.

Pretty Spry (for an Old Guy) How’s it going Jamie? Saw-rite, saw-rite. How’s it going Jamie? Saw-rite, saw-rite. How’s it going Jamie? Saw-rite, saw-rite. All the cuties say I’m pretty spry For an old guy. You know it’s kinda hard Being alone today. But all you really gotta do Is fake it anyway. He may not be cut, He may not be in style If he lacks for anything He makes up being wild! So don’t delay, he ma

Welcome back. I was worried about you.

Seeing you back is the best birthday present I could get! *Hugs* Thanks to the rest of you for reminding me how old and cranky I am. Now. I think I'll have a nap.