Saturday, June 27, 2009

Toasty

That's toasty not in the typical Ice-lingo way, but just plain hot. Here our thermometer at home recorded a high temperature of 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. That's 40.2 degrees Celsius for those of you who think otherwise. Allegedly today will be the last of the real heat before a cold front knocks the edge off the oven's blast. This isn't anything, though. I guess the summer I was born we had 60-some consecutive days over 100 F. On the way home from the hospital my folks stopped to pick up their share of one of my grandparents' cattle that had been butchered. I got a little break from the heat in the back of their un-air conditioned VW Rabbit when they piled the frozen meat packages in around me.

My PQ process has hit the almost inevitable snag of waiting upon the unnecessarily slow billing apparatus of the American health care system. Otherwise, I have all my tests and examinations complete and am ready to send everything off to RPSC. It will be great to finally get that all on its way and out of my hands.

I've been doing plenty of work outside, though have been bookending the heat of the day by getting an early start and then resuming in the evening after the heat abates. I had to do a third sweep of thistle in the pasture, as the purple menace keeps rearing its ugly, nodding head.

I wish more reporting were being done about the situation in Iran, instead of so much cult of personality worship around the death of a pop icon from decades past. I watched the "Neda" video, and totally felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. It isn't every day that something as important as this happens, unless you count the small ways most people meet adversity and injustice in their own lives. So, with the heat on here, and these thoughts of revolution, my mind (as it does often) takes me to the world of "Dune":

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
~The Apocrypha of Muad'Dib

2 comments:

Becky said...

Iran has been in the news for two weeks-with nothing much that most folks can do about it on an individual level. MJ, or any celebrity, can be both known and unknown, familiar and alien-and people all have their own memories of his music or life.
I can see where "another day of protests, oh well." has set in. As a nation America isn't going to send troops and NGOs couldn't get in, even journalists are being deported or arrested.
At least this time there is a whole lot of unfiltered immediate information available thanks to the digital age. The Iranian authorities can't expect to get away with anything.
And I hope it isn't as humid in Kansas as it is here-that would be hard times indeed. We had one summer with 13 days over 100 in a row (1995, I believe) and it was horrible. (From one person who likes the weather on the Ice to another.)

EthanG said...

Well, the story is not over by a long shot. I reckon we haven't heard the last of the situation in Iran, nor Iraq for that matter, now that U.S. troops are withdrawing from the urban areas.