Is It Cold In Here?

Got up at 5:30ish this morning to pull on my spiffy new winter riding clothes. Headed out the door at 6:00ish and the temperature on the bike computer said it was 32 fricking degrees, which we all know is zero degrees celcius (or centigrade).

Went to the south Albertsons via Deadman's Curve (Curry), then to work via Clearview and Roop because I wanted to give the clothes and me a real workout. The verdict: the winter clothes worked. The insulted gloves and pants kept me quite warm, and the balaclava was perfect (still sounds like a Greek dessert to me). My chest and arms were not covered by synthetics and they froze, especially after I went into Albertsons and came out again (frozen sweat...yum). There were some of those shirts at Big 5.

Went to the gym for a shower and weighed myself first. WTF? That ain't right, so the darn thing must have been broken, I said to myself. I went into the shower to give the scale a chance to think about what it told me. Went back...and it said the same damn thing.

249.5 pounds.

That's the only scale I use, but damn thing must be broken because I've been stuck in the 250s forever (September, anyway). I choose to be in denial that I'm below 250. Much safer on one's sanity that way.

In regards to President Bush: the world (or the readers of this blog, anyway) knows I ain't a fan, but credit must be given when credit is due. There are people outside the United States who like him, such as Canadian columnist David Warren:

"There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course — I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail."

Here's the rest of the article. If the tone of this sounds familiar, that's because Gordon Sinclair wrote something similar in 1973. It gained wide recognition and circulation after 9/11/2001. Here's the text of Mr. Sinclair's article.

Bottom Line: we may have been slow in our Hurricane Katrina response, but we were there. And if something like this did happen to other nations, we'd be there, too (remember the tsunami?). In case you didn't know, America is the best country in the history of the world, warts and all. You heard it here first.

Heard a rumor that I gave good interview yesterday. Funny thing is I didn't even try. Maybe that makes all the difference in the world.