ANOTHER DISASTER

The pretty, chirpy weather girl announced yet another glorious day, warm and sunny. Know weigh ! She got it wrong. A glorious day here would call for clouds and lots of rain. It's been a month now here in Houston since we have had any rain. This area is in a severe drought situation. Much of Texas and some surrounding states are in an extreme drought. Much of the agriculture is in ruins. Cattle are being shipped off to slaughter to avoid dieing of thirst or hunger. As of today, this is considered the worst drought in 44 years and if it keeps up much longer it will be the worst ever. The Texas deer population, calculated at over 20 million, will mostly perish. The huge feral pig population may thrive, eating all the dead carcases. Huge forest fires are breaking out.Are we going to have a new dust bowl? So far, no water restrictions have been declared for Houston but it shouldn't be long. I already feel guilty when I water the lawn

STUPID COMMPUTER

The previous post was supposed to consist of 6 paragraphs. I cannot imagine why the machine does not do as I tell it. It seems to have a mind of it's own.

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

As you may recall, in 1986 in northern Eukrain the chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up with devastating effect lighting the sky a brilliant purple and laying waste to 1669 square miles, including the town of Pripyat. This area is now know as the exclusive zone, Just 25 years later strange things have happened. Flora and fauna have flourished. In only 25 years the forest has reclaimed the area. Enormous feral pigs, dogs, wolves, lynx, foxes, badgers, red and roe deer, elk, frogs and fish abound. It is like the garden of Edan, a paradise of wild life. But------ The birds are showing the first signs of the unstable DNA taking place, showing freakishly high levels of albinism. Some trees have taken on unusual forms. We may soon see evolution taking place at an unprecedented rate. This is probably what the world looked like before mankind altered the landscape and how it might look again when humans are gone. This is an abridged version ( mine ) of a much longer article by Henery Shuckman that first appeared in Outside Magazine and reprinted in The Week magazine of April 1, 2011.

FAMILY TREES

I was proud of my effort in making a fairly extensive family tree with over 300 family
members included and covering six generations.

At this time, Jean ( McAlister ) Brooks was also making a tree but hers, I am sorry to confess, makes my puny effort look bad. There are pictures galore and histories on almost everyone.
Most of my stuff is included in Jeans tree with well over 1000 individuals.

Access :Mar vista ancestry.com Go to bottom of first page displayed and click on ancestry.com. click on ancestry. com and look for Mar Vista

DID THE GOVERNMENT DO SOMETHING RIGHT /

One of our toilets developed a habit of leaking all of the time. I tried to fix it many times. No luck. A plumber came and charged a hundred bucks. It still leaked. Finally, in despair, I hied myself to Lowes and inspected the vast array of multicolored, shiny new comodes, priced from ninety nine bucks to over 1000. I selected a modest 250 dollar model on sale and got an additional 10% off due to my long ago military service. 8% sales tax and seventy five dollars installation and now we have a gleaming white one piece throne. Unbeknownse to me this is a modern toilet which flushes using almost no water. The government's intention in forcing us to put in these water saving devices was to save water and indeed they do.

Much criticesm about toilets that don't flush has proven to be untrue. Mine never fails. It was made in Mexico by American Standard

ENERGY

Our wonderful government seems indifferent or ignorant of the crisis facing the US. This need not have developed into a nearly insoluble situation. Basically, there are only a few players in the energy field: Coal, petroleum, natural gas, water power (Dams),nuclear, and to a lesser extent, wind and solar.

The environment lobby has a stranglehold on most of these .Coal, our principal source of energy is dirty. They don't like petroleum either.

Drilling is forbidden in most places Natural gas is being obtained by a process called fracting and now they are trying to tell us that it is ruining our ground water. Dams have already been placed everywhere so no ability to expand this. Nuclear looks to be our main hope and, to give credit to Obama, he is favoring this and already several plants are being constructed. The Japanese disaster has given the environmentalists more ammunition to try to put a stop to this.

I wonder where we go from here. It takes time to develop the petroleum and nuclear, assuming that we start working on this at once.

SINGULARITY

We received a Time magazine article from an anonymous source ( she surely wishes to remain unknown. We will just call her Julia. How embarrassing to have it known that one still reads The Lying Rag. That's my pet name for Time which I have not read in the last forty years )

Considering the source ( the magazine, not Julia ) it is a remarkable article which could well have appeared in a learned scientific journal. It's thesis is the rapidly advancing world of technology. From a relatively slow start many years ago it seems to be advancing exponentially, so much so that within a short time we can hardly imagine where this may take us.

It seems likely that computers will be able to pick our brains and perhaps even take them over and give them input. Diseases will become a thing of the past and old age will become a distant memory. Space travel will become commonplace. No problems will remain unsolved.

Try to imagine some point where there can be no more progress. Everything will be done. I don't know if the singularity people have gone that far.