Summer Weather

Wasn't I talking about the weather just the other day?

No sooner than I talk about the blessings of the fine weather we've been having when a nice summer storm came rolling through Tuesday night. Rachel came home from her summer night wanderings soaking wet and that was just from dashing from the driveway to the garage. Nice lightning and rolling thunder, no threat of tornadoes. Next morning, Wednesday, light rain and low clouds and cool. A perfect day for staying in and looking outside and maybe sneaking in a nap.

Exactly two years ago, while we were on vacation, it rained for two weeks straight. We sweated things as we read about it in the news - we'd had a small leak in the roof and my temporary fix was to put a bucket under the source in the attic until we could get it repaired. Upon arrival home, we were relieved to find it only half full. But it just shows you, rainy days are still possible in June in Oklahoma. There are blessings to be had every day.

A Room With a View

Gaze upon the view from Instapundit's window and know envy:



(He's on vacation so don't get the idea he gets to see this every day. Still, it'd be nice, wouldn't it?)

Inspired, here's Ann Althouse's response:



(Althouse is guest-blogging at Instapundit so the joke makes more sense in context.)

A great idea for a post. I'll try to update later with a view of my own.

Update:

Here's a view from my room:



Note to self: Do all you can to get yourself to a place to have a view from your room like the Instapundit's.

You're Spending Twice as Much Time on Facebook

Is social media a fad? Probably so. But for now, social media is enjoying explosive growth:

Spending more time on social networks and blogs? You're not alone, with the latest figures showing the number of minutes spent on social networking sites in the United States has almost doubled over the past year.

Nielsen Online, which measures Web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 percent in April from the same month a year ago, but found users were quick to move on and sites could quickly fall from favor.

Nielsen Online spokesman Jon Gibs said a major trend had been the continuing popularity of Facebook, which has more than 200 million active members and has become so mainstream it now hosts Pope Benedict and a list of world leaders.

Ha! The Pope!

Surprisingly, Facebook exceeds MySpace in popularity; I thought it'd be the other way around but then what do I know? I'm not on either. This site and Twitter is about all I have time for.

It's an interesting time we live in. We have communication tools available to us that no one else in human history quite had. And though many see social media as a huge time waster, it's good to see people are using it to stay connected. Nothing beats face-to-face interaction and socialization - we are social animals, after all - but when that's not available, any of the various social media seems to work just fine.

Dylan's Profoundness

From The Best Of Theme Time Radio Hour, here's Bob Dylan on websites with strange names:

Look who created these. A lot of those computer guys used to be hippies. Though to be fair they aren't totally hippies. Because if they were totally hippies we'd be going on websites with names like Tapioca Sunshine... wait a second... that's not a bad idea for a name. While I'm playing this next song, I'm going to go and see how my bid is doing. I'm trying to get a thermos on eBay.

Plenty more of Bob at the link.

Mel Gibson: Wild Man

Is Mel Gibson perfect? Hardly. So why the hate?

I’ve never been the type to throw things at the television screen out of anger. But I’ll admit I did shout something nasty at my TV when I caught Mel Gibson yukking it up with Jay Leno and calling himself “Octo-Mel” since his pregnant girlfriend is carrying his eighth child.

My anger, of course, was directed at Gibson’s hypocrisy. Not so long ago, Gibson was the world’s best-known Traditionalist Catholic, talking about his preference for the old-style teachings of Vatican I (no divorce, no Russian girlfriends while still married). These days, he’s not yet divorced and living the kind of life he preached against. What’s worse is that Gibson seems unrepentant, to use church lingo. Even publicity mongers Jon and Kate Gosselin seemed more chastened when confronted with their alleged indiscretions. And that’s saying something.

I'm not here to defend Gibson; his behavior was inexcusable but then he's apologized for his earlier mis-deeds and has come across as genuinely repentant so what else do you want? His latest foibles - an extra-marital affair, an extra-marital fathering - are undeniably unacceptable but we haven't heard the whole story yet. Not that I believe he'll come up with something to justify his behavior but I do think he probably understands what he's done and will try to make amends for it. As a Christian, he knows he's not perfect.

I have no idea of the faith of the linked-to-article's writer but what I think really gets under his skin is Gibson's Christian faith. Except for Gibson's opposition to Vatican II, the writer never makes a direct link to Gibson's finger-wagging-at-others-but-not-himself kind of hypocrisy. Add to this, Gibson has committed the sin of making a successful film about the root of his faith. How terrible. (Gibson's a mad-talented film-maker, by the way. Don't think so after The Passion of The Christ? Take a look at Apocalypto and tell me what you think. Yeah.) No, it seems Christians fall harder than anyone in the world of celebrities. Profess no faith and, well, your transgressions are shrugged off.

Summer's With Us

Summer's not here yet, according to the calendar, but weather-wise, we'd do no harm if we all got together agreed it's arrived. Warm, but not unbearably so, with some threat of rain today. Haven't had rain for about a week or so and before that we'd had a good, steady supply. The rain is bound to trail off, as the season dictates it should, but for now we're enjoying a world of green. Get back to us in about six weeks and everything will change.

Twittering and Conservatism

Mary Katherin Hamm observes that Twittering, and other forms of social media, is conservative behavior:

In a way it's a quintessentially conservative formula: The extent to which you take personal responsibility for your actions dictates the risks and benefits of your online existence.

A lot of people who overshare their lives online learn the painful lesson that their actions have consequences. Better to share less, or just plain behave, than have the world learn all about your strange peccadilloes. Social media, though still in its early stages, may be the very mechanism that leads us to a more civil society.

Accounting and "Prelude" by Mark Helprin

The other day I posted some lines about accounting from The Bridge on The River Kwai and since I've also carried on about the beauty of Mark Helprin's prose, it seems only fair that I should post a paragraph by Helprin from his short story, "Prelude," about a task that, while not strictly having to do with accounting, seems an awful lot like it:

I work for United States Steel, at a steel desk. For the past six months I have been transferring data from tens of thousands of index cards to thick fifty-column ledgers. Someday they will have machines to do this, but now I am the machine that organizes the health records of a rolling mill in Ohio. For reasons that it did not share with me, the management has decreed that they be abstracted in a particular form. It is no secret that in tabularization and cross-tabularization many statistical operations are rendered possible, and although after my first day here in January I was bold enough to suggest that instead of using ledgers they put the data on punch cards for key-sorting, they, or rather, he Mr. herman Bleier, had not heard of key-sort, and Mr Herman Bleier said to me, "Ledgers will do."

Angels and Demons - Movie Review

The latest Dan Brown adaptation had less controversy about it than The DaVinci Code but, oddly enough, Angels and Demons is the better of the two. While both were chock-ful of eye-candy scenery - aside from the preposterous plots - Angels and Demons had the more conventional, and thus, less convoluted, plot of running against time to stop the deaths of many. Sure, Hanks had little to do other than run from one location to the next and spout off plot points, and his co-star had even littler to do than listen to Hanks spout off, but so what? It was an enjoyable ride for the most part, with little to offend if you didn't take things seriously - and I didn't - and a perfectly good way to spend a beautiful summer day indoors.

GOP Takes Aim at Barack and Michelle Obama's NYC Trip

This isn't wise:

The Republican National Committee slammed the outing in an "RNC Research Piece": "As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan’s theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills. ... Have a great Saturday evening – even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense. ... PUTTING ON A SHOW: Obamas Wing Into The City For An Evening Out While Another Iconic American Company Prepares For Bankruptcy."

The RNC's Gail Gitcho added: "If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn’t the Presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?”

Best to leave the criticism to the press. I know, I know, that ain't gonna happen, but for the Republican party to harp about makes the Republicans look like a bunch of scolds. Obama was wrong to criticize CEOs of companies receiving bailout money to take long-ago planned trips to Vegas and the like - whether those kinds of meetings can be profitable is the subject for another post but I'd be among those to defend them, or at least allow them and let stock holders decide if they should be allowed, not politicians - and it's wrong to criticize the President for trips like this.

The President likely has to shell out of his own pocket the expense for the tickets and dinner - if they weren't donated, and if they were, they'd have to be tallied and disclosed - while the rest of the expense of the trip was, yes, picked up by the taxpayer but then that's what happens any time a President goes anywhere or does anything. That's not unheard of. I had no problem with President Bush vacationing at this home in Crawford; I have no real problem with President Obama taking a day or two off to go to NYC.

Besides, there are real issues to criticize the President about. This isn't one of them.