Monday, August 30, 2010


Hurricane Earl is gonna have his day...



Discussion and 48-hour outlook
------------------------------
at 100 am AST...0500 UTC...the center of Hurricane Earl was located
near latitude 19.9 north...longitude 66.2 West. Earl is moving
toward the west-northwest near 14 mph...22 km/hr. This general
motion is expected to continue this morning...followed by a turn
toward the northwest later today. On the forecast track...the
center of Earl will pass well north of Puerto Rico this morning...
and pass east of the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday night and
Wednesday.

Maximum sustained winds are near 135 mph...215 km/hr...with higher
gusts. Earl is a category four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson
hurricane wind scale. Some fluctuations in strength are likely
over the next 24 to 48 hours.

Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 70 miles...110 km...from
the center...and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 200
miles...325 km.

The latest minimum central pressure reported by an Air Force Reserve
hurricane hunter aircraft is 933 mb...27.55 inches.

Up on top of the falls at Turner Fall State Park in Davis Oklahoma yesterday...



Should probably postpone the trip to San Juan for a few days...LOL...

HURRICANE EARL ADVISORY NUMBER 20
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL072010
500 AM AST MON AUG 30 2010

...EARL MOVING ACROSS THE NORTHERN LEEWARD ISLANDS...HURRICANE
WARNING ISSUED FOR THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS...


SUMMARY OF 500 AM AST...0900 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...18.3N 62.4W
ABOUT 50 MI...75 KM ENE OF ST. MARTIN
ABOUT 170 MI...275 KM E OF ST. THOMAS
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...105 MPH...165 KM/HR
PRESENT MOVEMENT...WNW OR 285 DEGREES AT 15 MPH...24 KM/HR
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...969 MB...28.61 INCHES


WATCHES AND WARNINGS
--------------------
CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY...

A HURRICANE WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS.

SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT...

A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* ANTIGUA...BARBUDA...MONTSERRAT...ST. KITTS...NEVIS...AND ANGUILLA
* SAINT MARTIN AND SAINT BARTHELEMY
* ST. MAARTEN...SABA...AND ST. EUSTATIUS
* BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
* U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

A HURRICANE WATCH IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* PUERTO RICO INCLUDING THE ISLANDS OF CULEBRA AND VIEQUES

A TROPICAL STORM WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR...
* PUERTO RICO INCLUDING THE ISLANDS OF CULEBRA AND VIEQUES

HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE HURRICANE WARNING
AREA...IN THIS CASE WITHIN THE NEXT 12 HOURS. PREPARATIONS
TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD HAVE ALREADY BEEN COMPLETED.

HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE WITHIN THE WATCH AREA...IN THIS
CASE WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

FOR STORM INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO YOUR AREA IN THE UNITED STATES
...INCLUDING POSSIBLE INLAND WATCHES AND WARNINGS...PLEASE MONITOR
PRODUCTS ISSUED BY YOUR LOCAL NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST
OFFICE. FOR STORM INFORMATION SPECIFIC TO YOUR AREA OUTSIDE THE
UNITED STATES...PLEASE MONITOR PRODUCTS ISSUED BY YOUR NATIONAL
METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE.


DISCUSSION AND 48-HOUR OUTLOOK
------------------------------
AT 500 AM AST...0900 UTC...THE CENTER OF HURRICANE EARL WAS LOCATED
NEAR LATITUDE 18.3 NORTH...LONGITUDE 62.4 WEST. EARL IS MOVING
TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 15 MPH...24 KM/HR. A TURN
TOWARD THE NORTHWEST IS EXPECTED ON TUESDAY. ON THE FORECAST
TRACK...THE CENTER OF EARL WILL PASS NEAR OR OVER THE NORTHERNMOST
LEEWARD ISLANDS THIS MORNING...AND NEAR THE VIRGIN ISLANDS THIS
AFTERNOON AND THIS EVENING.

MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS HAVE INCREASED TO NEAR 105 MPH...165 KM/HR
...WITH HIGHER GUSTS. EARL IS A CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE ON THE
SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE. ADDITIONAL STRENGTHENING IS FORECAST...AND
EARL IS EXPECTED TO BECOME A MAJOR HURRICANE BY TONIGHT OR EARLY
TUESDAY.

HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 50 MILES...85 KM...FROM
THE CENTER...AND TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 175
MILES...280 KM.

THE ESTIMATED MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE IS 969 MB...28.61 INCHES.


HAZARDS AFFECTING LAND
----------------------
WIND...HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE NOW SPREADING INTO THE NORTHERN
LEEWARD ISLANDS...AND WILL SPREAD WESTWARD INTO THE VIRGIN ISLANDS
LATER TODAY. TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO SPREAD OVER
PUERTO RICO TODAY...WITH HURRICANE CONDITIONS POSSIBLE THIS EVENING
AND TONIGHT.

STORM SURGE...STORM SURGE WILL RAISE WATER LEVELS BY AS MUCH AS 2 TO
4 FEET ABOVE GROUND LEVEL PRIMARILY NEAR THE COAST IN AREAS OF
ONSHORE WIND WITHIN THE HURRICANE WARNING AREA...AND 1 TO 3 FEET IN
THE TROPICAL STORM WARNING AREA. THE SURGE WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY
LARGE AND DANGEROUS BATTERING WAVES.

RAINFALL...EARL IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE TOTAL RAINFALL ACCUMULATIONS
OF 4 TO 8 INCHES OVER THE LEEWARD ISLANDS...THE VIRGIN ISLANDS AND
PUERTO RICO...WITH POSSIBLE ISOLATED MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF 12 INCHES...
ESPECIALLY OVER HIGHER ELEVATIONS. THESE RAINS COULD CAUSE
LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS AND MUDSLIDES.


NEXT ADVISORY
-------------
NEXT INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY...800 AM AST.
NEXT COMPLETE ADVISORY...1100 AM AST.

$$
FORECASTER BRENNAN


Saturday, August 28, 2010


Found in the basement of MPAC, McKinney TX


Thursday, August 26, 2010


Rockin the low light at Lee Harvey's...


Tuesday, August 24, 2010


Tioga!...



Newest Panoramic...corner of Louisiana and Tennessee...

Posted for fair use...

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/what-i-did-on-summer-vacation.html

What I Did On Summer Vacation


Oh what a mighty spewage of vinyl weighs heavy on this land!

A dark mood spread through the body politic like a septic infection last week in response to bad numbers in employment, housing, and commerce, not to mention unease about the now complete takeover of the stock market by robot traders. But I left it all behind to trip across New England from the Vermont border to Maine and back, and many a strange thing did I see....

New Hampshire's got their state motto on the license plate wrong: Live Free or Die. It ought to read Live Free and Die. Just north of Concord on I-89 there's a highway rest stop. The primary retail outlet there is... the state liquor store! Yes, for some reason the New Hampshire government controls the sale of liquor. Puritan guilt? Creeping socialism? Who knows. Apparently some brilliant state wonk got the idea that they could maximize revenue by selling liquor to motorists. Now, granted, not everybody motoring up I-89 is an alcoholic, but surely some of them are. Maybe it's a scheme to kill off the Boston Irish -- but at some risk to the citizens of The Granite State. Note: there was no coffee shop on the premises. I kid you not.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire's little wedge of seacoast has been completely coated in vinyl, as if some angry god decoupaged the darn thing after eating a bad clam roll. The world has never before seen an array of seaside cottages so uniquely hideous as the ones we passed from Seabrook to Portsmouth. The owners had managed to try every proportioning system and every color scheme known to man -- except the right ones. They made your eyeballs wobble in their sockets just motoring by them on US Route 1-A -- and we were not unaware, of course, that our presence on the road, along with ten thousand other pleasure-seeking tourists, only made these houses seem worse by dint of the highway's toxic proximity.

We stopped for lunch in a clam bar, naturally. The dining room was populated by a new race of humanoid behemoths, great lumbering brutes the size (and shape) of giant sloths, only dressed in the raiment of clowns, downing heaps of battered fried things, purportedly of-the-sea -- except I honestly don't see how there can be anything alive left to catch out there with the industrial-strength trawlers scraping the ocean floor as if they were Zamboni machines grooming the rink at the Boston Garden. I would like to tell you that we ordered cucumber sandwiches but it would be a lie. We got the clam strips -- that is, clam rolls minus the rolls. For all I know, someone in the kitchen is shredding old Michelin inner tubes for the Fry-o-later, but it's all about the cocktail sauce anyway.

There were more giant sloths wading curiously in the surf (still hungry perhaps?) as we crossed the border into Maine, where you really want to weep for your nation. Is there any way to fuck up a landscape that has not been tried there, short of all-out war (which might actually have the benefit of`clearing a lot of muck away)? Maine is where the oil fields of Texas crawled off to die, and left their remains in a thousand miniature golf courses, giant plastic signs shaped like lighthouses, lobsters, schooners, whales, fisher-folk and other ghost-like entities no longer of this world, and enough asphaltic free parking to accommodate the automobile club of the hosts of hell.

The awful cavalcade prompted me to remember that it's all over for this stuff and the pattern of culture it represents. What you are seeing is the residue of an economy that no longer exists. I doubt we will build any more of it. You're just left wondering what becomes of it all now that we slouch toward oil depletion, climate change hijinks, the vanishing of capital, penury, and possibly starvation. In the years ahead there will be fewer and fewer vehicle miles recorded on these inevitably disintegrating highways -- with the sharp sea air gnawing away at every I-beam and truss in the overpasses and bridges, and the government too broke to do anything about them -- and the American middle class with their quaint touristic habits will join the codfish, sperm whales, and great auk in the Atlantic Ocean's extinction Hall of Fame. The Long Emergency can't come soon enough.

The long agony of motoring up the coast brought us eventually to Mt. Desert Isle where Mr. John D Rockefeller, Jr. had the foresight to capture most of the acreage and hand it over to the National Park Service before it could be turned into another clam roll empire. The majesty of Acadia National Park is a rebuke to all the tragic hucksterism that destroyed the coastline everywhere else in New England through the miserable 20th century. We hiked the rocky scree trails around the summit of Cadillac Mountain and the path along Otter Cliff, which smelled like Christmas and chowder, and didn't see too many people away from the motor roads. Here and there the bell of a lonely buoy sounded distantly through the creeping fog making the frantic absurdity of daily life in America seem like a mere bad memory. Then we had to leave.

We took a different route home, more northerly, across a rural Maine region largely un-molested by the toils of tourism, but stunningly poor. Some of it looked like Arkansas -- not the part where WalMart lives, either. At long intervals we passed through mill towns where the mills are now silent and the only visible business was the tattoo trade. Even there in the New England backwaters, the toxic superhero-thug culture of Hollywood rules and the idle grandsons of mill-workers glowered in death-metal regalia at passing strangers as if they were auditioning for parts in the next Road Warrior movie. Not a few of them seemed to have lopsided heads. Does crystal meth do that?

Everywhere along the route, shovel-ready highway improvement projects from the late stimulus crusade were now underway, and you wondered exactly what kind of future they were intended to serve -- or was it all a kind of weird national potlatch ceremony in which we were literally throwing away our wealth to memorialize what seemed normal the day before yesterday and never will be again.

Compared to the ominous vastness of Maine, northern New Hampshire was a blur. Somewhere in the White Mountains, punch-drunk with motoring fatigue, we stopped at the only available venue for coffee in one little burg, a McDonalds as chance would have it, apparently staffed by client-workers supplied by the ARC -- and I'm not trying to be funny mentioning that. You wondered how much such an agency was creaming off their minimum wage salaries. This is what it's come to now in the Home of the Brave: corporate wickedness knows no bottom.

The last weird display we encountered was the mystery of highway cones in Vermont. The orange rubber cones were deployed along the center line of I-91 for scores of miles, with absolutely no sign that any project -- shovel-ready or otherwise -- was underway, leading us to suspect that the project of cone deployment for its own sake was a kind of rogue stimulus program. Just cones, cones, and more cones, as baffling as crop circles. No heavy equipment, no men in hard hats. Just mile after mile of cones. Whatever it signified, it was at least equally unproductive as high frequency trading -- the other half of what's left of the US economy.
Home again and suddenly fall is in the air. Or is it the distant sound of falling knives?

Saturday, August 21, 2010


Remember that the "Echo" show can be viewed at both Laura Moore Fine Art and the basement of MPAC till early September...Its a great show! Lots of wonderful art!


Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Police Identify Suspect In McKinney Shooting

Shooter Identified As Patrick Gray Sharp

Compiled From Staff Reports
McKINNEY (CBS/AP) ― Police have identified the suspect who opened fire on a North Texas police station Tuesday morning. McKinney Police Chief Doug Kowalski said that 29-year-old Patrick Gray Sharp is the person who set his parked truck on fire and then began shooting at the McKinney Public Safety Building.

Police said that Sharp may have been trying to draw people out of the building to then blow up a trailer loaded with explosives. Kowalski said that Sharp fired more than 100 rounds before he died.

"He had a plan," Kowalski told CBS 11 News. "He was activating his plan and he was heavily armed. It looked like he knew just what he wanted to do."

During a morning news conference, McKinney Police Deputy Chief Scott Brewer confirmed that, around 9:00 a.m. Tuesday, a man driving a Ford F-150 truck drove up on south side of the Public Safety Building pulling a trailer. The building houses both the McKinney Police and Fire Departments.

Immediately after Sharp exited the vehicle, it became engulfed in flames. Police believe that there was ammunition inside the pickup. "Subsequently, the fire itself set off that ammunition, causing rounds to be dispersed in the immediate area," explained Brewer.

Sharp, wearing a military-style vest, began yelling something toward the building as he opened fire. Officers in and outside of the building began searching for Sharp before exchanging gunfire.

Many people in the area heard the noise, but were unaware of what was taking place. "I heard helicopters and fire trucks, but at the time I wasn't sure what was going on," said nearby resident Becky Mose, whose home is only a few hundred yards from where Sharp was found.

Sharp was heavily armed when he was found. He had an assault rifle and two other guns.

"We don't know, at this time, what his motives were, how in-depth his thoughts were. But I assure you, we intend to find that out through a thorough investigation," Brewer said. "We're just grateful that none of our personnel were injured."

Matt Payne and his family were driving by the building when they saw smoke. Payne grabbed his cell phone and began capturing video. "It's a very scary thing to think I was 30 to 50 feet from a man with a gun shooting at, what appeared to be, random people."

Sharp was a resident of Anna and, less than an hour after the shooting, Collin County Sheriff's Deputies were waiting outside of his rural home. Deputies had to wait for a search warrant before going inside.

The Plano Bomb Squad and McKinney Police Department were at the house by late afternoon. After searching the home for just under two hours, they left around 7:00 p.m. Tuesday night. There has been no word on any explosives being removed from Sharp's home, but nearly a dozen guns were taken by police as evidence.

Neighbors said that Sharp was a gun hobbyist, and was known to celebrate holidays by firing his gun into the air from his yard. "I know he was shooting on Christmas," said neighbor Zeppy Benavides. "He would shoot on Christmas and on the Fourth of July."

Sharp died near the Collin County Community College's Central Park Campus, putting more than 300 students and staffers at some risk.

In response to the gunshots, the campus was placed on lockdown. Students and staff were made aware of the shooting when the college sent a text alert message that read: "CougarAlert: Shots fired @ Central Park Campus. Campus on lockdown. Cops on scene."

Those on campus heard an emergency alert from speaker systems in every building. "Immediately, once the gunfire, all the information went over the voice-over IP protocol. It's like a personalized alarm system," explained Collin County Community College President Cary Israel.

There were no injuries on the campus. Classes were not in session, but people were on campus for school registration.

Chopper 11 shot video over the scene showing the burned out pickup truck, with an attached trailer loaded with a material with a soil-like consistency. Police said that the trailer contained wood chips, road flares, gasoline and ammonium nitrate. It failed to ignite.

Sharp's roommate, Eric McClellan, told The Associated Press by phone that he was on vacation outside of Texas when he received calls from state troopers and his stepfather, telling him what happened.

McClellan said he was "still in shock," and that there was nothing about Sharp that would lead anyone to believe that he would try to attack police. "He was fine and dandy when I left Texas two days ago. And, all of a sudden, I get a phone call," McClellan said. "There's nothing I can say. He was a great guy, a good friend."

McClellan said that he was questioned about Sharp by police and could not provide them with much information.

McClellan said that he and Sharp kept guns in their residence because they like sports shooting. "We're Texans," he said. "We have the right to bear arms."

McClellan said that he was doing contract work for building wire manufacturer Encore Wire Corp. six years ago when he met Sharp, who was an employee of the company. They had been roommates for four years, he said.

Sharp now worked part-time at Powell Tree and Plant Farm, a landscaping business in Anna. The business is owned by Bobby Cox, McClellan's stepfather. Cox told CBS 11 News that Sharp was a nice, "quiet" person. "He was an angel. He was just a great guy. He was like a son to us," said Cox. "He was an excellent worker, and I would often get phone calls from customers praising Patrick's work that he had done in their yards."

Cox said that he was surprised by the shooting. "He was probably one of the nicest men I've ever known. I can't remember him saying anything or gave any indication that he would harm anybody."

McKinney police said that, at no point, did Sharp ever enter the Public Safety Building.

There were some teachers and staff at several McKinney Independent School District facilities located near the Public Safety Building, but no students. Still, one facility, Vega Elementary School, was placed on lockdown for about 30 minutes.

The Collin County Sheriff's Department, Department of Public Safety, Texas Rangers, Collin College Campus Police, Plano Bomb Squad, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and FBI are all assisting with the on-going investigation.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

http://cbs11tv.com/local/Collin.County.Collin.2.1864290.html

Shooter dead in McKinney Public Safety Building shootout

Published: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:04 PM CDT
McKinney police have confirmed that the shooter who prompted a lockdown of the Collin College campus died in a shootout with police.
The unidentified shooter died sometime after 9 a.m. Tuesday in an area south of the McKinney Public Safety building on Taylor-Burk Drive and north of the Collin College campus on West University Drive, McKinney Deputy Chief Scott Brewer said.

The shooter drove a Ford F150 filled with ammunition into an area south of the public safety building and set the vehicle on fire. The heat from the fire ignited the ammunition and rallied police to the area. The shooter then opened fire, Brewer said.

Officers set up a perimeter around the area and located the shooter. The encounter prompted a brief standoff and the shooter died in an area approximately 150 yards south of the public safety building during the "small exchange of gunfire," Brewer said.

No officers were injured as a result of the incident, despite earlier reports to the contrary.

More at the link...

from the archives...4th of July...


Monday, August 16, 2010


More scenes from the "Echo" show...The count I read earlier was that 450+ visited Laura's gallery, and that can't be right cause downtown was flooded with sheeple out there spending money like it grows on trees and enjoying themselves...just not on art! As I moved back and forth between Laura's main gallery and the "echo" gallery at MPAC I could see nothing but people...and it remained fairly congested at both locations till late in the evening...the bars, restaurants, and clubs in downtown were pretty busy as well...I'm guessing people think there is a "recovery" in the air, and they are more willing to part with their cash, now if we can just get them to BUY ART things will be fine!! Artists need to eat too ya know!! What I am saying here is that if you want an energetic, vivacious art scene here in McKinney and Collin County in general then you have to be willing to help support that art community by helping to make it possible for them to continue to make art, and hopefully enrich each of our lives in some way...just sayin'...



When I got to The Pub around 10ish it was crowded as well...

The Queasy Season by James Howard Kunstler

Fair use applies...
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/08/the...ason.html#more
The Queasy Season
by James Howard Kunstler

on August 9, 2010 9:07 AM

A scarlet tinge colors the Virginia creeper, the Canada geese grow restless out on the fairways, an ominous canapé fatigue spreads through the Hamptons, and cyclonic weather blobs march west across the Atlantic - you know that time of the year has arrived. Fall approaches on busy feet. The name itself suggests slippage. Though many government numbers lie, a dark reality still penetrates the fog of econometrics. Visions of tumbling indexes wither the spinal fluxes of nervous day traders praying to their little effigies of Jim Cramer that it's all just in their heads. Sometimes it seems as though the universe itself grows tired of suspense and yields to the zeitgeist. A cosmic groan fills the air from sea to shining sea as all eyes turn skyward. Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?

Peak pretending now joins peak oil, peak credit, peak rare earths, and all the other peaks visible to us humble valley dwellers. Pretending bought America two years of respite from the ravages of fraud and mismanagement, but now the true condition of this society reveals itself like the disfigured ghoul in the sewer lowering his mask. Further pretending is unnecessary now. We're even beyond the "modified limited hang-out" stance, as a long-ago presidential counselor once put his PR strategy in the face of crumbling public credulity. When nothing is believable, what's the point in even pretending?

Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century. That you can't get something for nothing, and attempts to do so always end in tears. That massive expenditures of energy produce equivalent globs of entropy - which you can translate to "bad ju-ju" or the tendency of whatever can go wrong to go wrong. That because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us. That America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters. That what has been economics is about to turn dangerously political.

The greatest loss of the last decade was not in 401-Ks or manufacturing jobs or foreclosed houses, but the rule of law. Without genuine rule of law, anything goes and nothing matters. As a consequence of that, finally, everything goes. The rule of law is what kept foreigners buying our debt all these years (the fumes we've been running on). They kept buying because they believed, when all was said and done, that Americans would enforce contracts and regulate behavior in the direction of fair dealing - not for it's own sake but because it made things work better. But when the rule of law goes here, the rest of the world will notice its absence. They'll stop believing in our money and our future. They'll cash out and we'll wash out. Then, as human tribes are wont, they may just turn around and kick our a$$ because we're down.

The comprehensive failure of leadership deepens every week, as does the gulf between what people like Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell say and what is really happening on-the-ground in the arena of everyday life. Storyline: last week, Mr. Obama hailed the revival of the automobile industry with the debut of Chevrolet's new electric car, the Volt. Reality: at $41,000 retail, nobody outside lower Manhattan, Hollywood, or K Street will have enough money to buy one. Storyline: Mitch McConnell inveighs against a bill to require corporations to take responsibility on camera for their political advertisements; he says it will lead to job losses. Reality: the Senate Minority Leader is shilling for corporations that want to run massive, unlimited ad campaigns in support of corporate agendas - such as off-shoring jobs.

The failure of leadership extends through government to the news media to business to the universities to the courts. All authorities are suspect. All are dishonest and cowardly. When the attempt to enforce some basic rules of decency in banking ends up in legislation that runs two-thousand pages, the rule of law is dishonored. Anyway, adding that much unneeded complexity to a system that is already too excessively complex to function anymore must be an obviously bad move. The Glass-Steagall act was under forty pages. Why not just correct the mistake we made eleven years ago and vote it back into existence? Somebody must know where it is - in some back filing cabinet of the Library of Congress.

In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality. The public becomes a mob and democracy turns into a kangaroo court, which is to say: a mockery of the rule of law. I suspect we'll see a correlation of turbulence in politics and markets as the weeks pound forward toward Halloween. By election day, democracy itself will be in disrepute and the streets will run with mad dogs. When this sucker goes down (to paraphrase a past president) it's going to be like a fire in a circus tent. Don't expect much from the clowns' bucket brigade. We'll be lucky if they don't toss gasoline into the grandstands.

I doubt I'm the only one who senses something in the air - and not just the impressive heat and humidity. Anyway, I'm going off for a few days' vacation this week to do no more than walk around in the salt air beside the ghost-filled ocean.

Sunday, August 15, 2010


Scenes from the Echo show ...


Saturday, August 14, 2010


"Echo" opens tonight in downtown McKinney...

http://www.ntxe-news.com/artman/publish/article_63659.shtml


Tuesday, August 10, 2010

For those who wanna follow along...the building at Black Rock City has begun!

Things are happening on the Playa...Burning Man is in the air!

http://blog.burningman.com/eventshappenings/8-9-10/

Monday, August 09, 2010

ECHO

Opening Night
Saturday, August 14th 7-10pm

at Laura Moore Fine Art Studios and
echoing into a 2nd location
the gallery at MPAC (the old courthouse in the middle of the square).

Please join us as we present our annual call to artists juried exhibition. Over 100 works of art will be on display from 45 local and regional artists who are presenting a visual interpretation of the Echo theme.

Echo will be on display in both locations from August 14th - September 8th. Opening night will occur in both locations. Both galleries will be open Mon-Sat 1-5pm or by appointment through September 8th.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010


ZCZC MIATWOAT ALL
TTAA00 KNHC DDHHMM
TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
200 PM EDT WED AUG 4 2010

FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC...CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO...

1. REPORTS FROM AN AIR FORCE RESERVE HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT
INVESTIGATING THE REMNANTS OF TROPICAL STORM COLIN INDICATE THAT
THE SYSTEM DOES NOT HAVE A CLOSED SURFACE CIRCULATION. HOWEVER...
THE AIRCRAFT FOUND WINDS OF TROPICAL-STORM FORCE IN THE
NORTHEASTERN PORTION OF THE SYSTEM. UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE
CURRENTLY NOT CONDUCIVE FOR DEVELOPMENT...AND THERE IS A LOW
CHANCE...20 PERCENT...OF THIS SYSTEM BECOMING A TROPICAL CYCLONE
AGAIN DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS AS IT MOVES WEST-NORTHWESTWARD AT 20
TO 25 MPH. REGARDLESS OF DEVELOPMENT...LOCALLY HEAVY RAINS AND
STRONG GUSTY WINDS ARE POSSIBLE OVER PORTIONS OF THE LEEWARD AND
VIRGIN ISLANDS ISLANDS TODAY AND TONIGHT.

2. CLOUDINESS...SHOWERS...AND THUNDERSTORMS OVER THE CENTRAL AND
SOUTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN SEA ARE ASSOCIATED WITH A TROPICAL WAVE.
THIS SYSTEM HAS CHANGED LITTLE IN ORGANIZATION DURING THE PAST
SEVERAL HOURS. SLOW DEVELOPMENT OF THIS DISTURBANCE IS POSSIBLE
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS AS IT MOVES GENERALLY WESTWARD AT 15 TO 20
MPH. THERE IS A LOW CHANCE...20 PERCENT...OF THIS SYSTEM BECOMING
A TROPICAL CYCLONE DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.

ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE
NEXT 48 HOURS.

$$
FORECASTER BEVEN


Sunday, August 01, 2010


New Invest 91..(remnants of old 90L)