We’re off the see the wizard… I have no idea why that seems to fit, but it’s probably best not to think about it too hard! We’re headed to Washington, D.C.
As of this post, comments are temporarily disabled so I don’t have to stress over how much spam is accumulating while I’m on vacation. Comments will be re-enabled when I return.
I celebrate new discoveries like the first living giant squid photographed (slideshow), but what I really love is that there are still mysteries in this world! Listen and then tell me, shouldn’t “Bloop!” be the word we use to describe anything that is beautifully peculiar and not yet understood? 
By the way, there are some word phrases that should never be used, even in a scientific setting, and the following paragraph contains a couple salient examples:
Octopi porn? Yikes… I wonder how they wrote up the research grant request for that one!
With just 4 hours to go until my prediction of rains in San Antonio expires, the weather outside is idyllic — partly cloudy, breezy and cool (low 70′s). Unfortunately, after a week of 99-102 degree temperatures, today is also forecast to meet/surpass the century mark.
With our luck, rains won’t come until Friday when we’re getting ourselves to the airport for our flight to Washington, D.C.! 
NON-RANT Section:
I wrote about him a couple times here on the Habitat. CBFTW was one of the more notable “soldier blogs,” chronicling the experiences of one American soldier in Iraq. His blog resulted in several high profile articles, and has now resulted in his writing a book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell, which you can pre-order on Amazon.com.
RANT:
Sadly, I discovered Colby’s book in a depressing and circuitous journey from Metafilter to an appalling amateur pornography website where soldiers are being offered free memberships by uploading photos of dead and dismembered Iraqis and Afghanis. A vocal detractor of the “war porn” site mentioned Colby (CBFTW)’s website as an example of a real soldier. I won’t share the URL to the location where the soldiers’ “war porn” is being shared in exchange for porn. I could have lived a full life without having seen any of the few images I did see. The website owner says he’s providing a service by allowing soldiers to give “an unedited look at the war from their point of view.” {Link NSFW=Not Safe For Work} And I’m sure he feels he’s helping morale, but I think we’ve seen enough evidence that further-sexualizing war is a really bad idea (Abu Ghraib).
Soldiers are conditioned to celebrate anything that hurts their enemy, I understand that. But if those corpses were of American service people, American civilian contractors, or our allies, these “war porn” posting soldiers would be tackling and detaining those who dared to photograph “their” dead… much less share it on a website in exchange for access to porn. And our U.S. military and the federal government? They would have had that website shut down a long time ago as a hate site, if not a site that was outright “supporting terrorists”.
And before someone cries that the photos are educational and actually serve as a useful anti-war message, you need to read the captions and discussions surrounding the images. It’s hardly a simple visual documentary of war…. {sigh}
This is why everyone still searching for shelter, or God forbid still trying to traverse the Texas highways and backroads, needs to get to safety before this evening and STAY PUT until the danger has passed:
The weather here in San Antonio remains characteristically sunny and hot with only a slight breeze that began in the past hour or so. The urgency we felt here in San Antonio about the storm’s likely impacts (flooding rains, tornadoes and high winds) has dissipated somewhat as Rita’s lumbered eastward, and now our official weather forecasts don’t even mention rain until Sunday. That said, I find it hard to believe with Rita as large and close to San Antonio as she is, that we will not see heavy rain showers earlier than Sunday. And what she brings for the next 5-7 days, I can only imagine.
So many of the computer models (I counted 8 or 10) show Rita after landfall veering westward and planting herself there for days. Some of our worst rain events in South Texas have been due to tropical storms and the extreme weather potential that summertime heat and humidity bring. I don’t think we’re in dire straits, and certainly believe those sheltering here in San Antonio are far safer than if they tried to ride out the storm in Galveston, low-lying areas of Houston or other coastal cities. But I wish our local weather forecasters would start preparing people for at least the potential for a heavy or drawn-out rain event here in San Antonio and the surrounding area, because the current weather is doing nothing to prepare folks.
Being married to a pilot, I know that weather forecasts even in the best of circumstances are really only good as far out as you can throw them. We never fly without Justin having monitored the weather the night before a flight, as well as through one or two forecast cycles in the morning before we head to the airport. Early on in his pursuit of aviation, I might have silently thought that was a bit of “planning paralysis”, but I can tell you we have seen wild weather changes in very short spans of time too many times to not justify this behavior. So what does this mean for the hurricane and San Antonio’s weather? It means I’ll believe the weather forecasts when I can see it outside… and not much further out than that. With the onset of the light breezy winds here in Northeast San Antonio, that indicates to me weather-maker Rita is finally within range of influencing our weather. Couple our extremely high temperatures with Rita’s energy and moisture content, and I expect rain to be here no later than early Saturday afternoon. What type and volume of rain is anyone’s guess, but I just can’t wrap my head around it not bringing moisture until Sunday.
