2013 Hurricane Season Post-Mortem

I’ve been slacking on my hurricane predictions follow-up - my last season wrap-up was for the 2011 season. The end of the hurricane season this year is getting some press because it has been so underwhelming; by one summary, it was the least intense season in thirty years. Yes, that’s the Atlantic season, but even the tragic Typhoon Haiyan in the Phillipines wasn’t the record-breaker it initially was represented to be: it was the fourth strongest typhoon ever, and the seventh strongest to hit the Philipines, though you don't see many follow-up stories correcting the earlier hype over it.


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Photoshop Fun

My nephew loves Photoshop now that I demonstrated what we can do with it:

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Possum Numero Quatro

This is, I believe, the fourth possum I've caught in the past year. This time on behalf of a neighbor whose tenants were scared to go out at night.

His little nose is raw from banging it on the cage. He's happy at the park along the river, with possum #3.

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Friday = Fun Sock Day!

Geeky ties are so passe! Today I’m wearing my new socks! -

Every law librarian needs a pair!

Avalable online at many sites, but I got mine at the SockShop in Monterey, California. It wasn’t even the first sock boutique we saw on that trip.

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An Honorary Semper Fi to Tom Clancy

   In the last pages of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, a 747 is crashed into the Capital Building just as the President addresses a joint session of Congress and nominates Jack Ryan to be his new Vice President. Ryan and his family barely escape being killed, but the president, most of Congress and the rest of the top level of the federal government die in the ensuing inferno. In the chaos that follows, the Secret Service addresses Ryan as “Mr. President” and he realizes he is now the new leader of the United States. Before he even begins to deal with the attack and his new responsibilities, his immediate concern is more personal:

   “What about my family?” he demanded, now seeing the orange pyre that had been the centerpiece of America’s government only four minutes earlier. “Oh, my God ...”
   “We’ll take them to... to...”
   “Take them to the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I streets. I want Marines around them now, okay?” Later, Ryan would remember that his first presidential order was something from his own past.

   Unlike the movies based on them, in Clancy’s books Ryan was a Marine Platoon Commander for a brief period before injuries cut his military career short. Clancy has said on several occasions that Ryan was his alter-ego, so I think its only fitting that we send him off into the great unknown with an honorary “Semper Fi!”
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