Month: August 2023

Guest Contributor – TomD – 29AUG2023 – Panhandle Pandemonium

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TomD

I’m way out of the way this time on the Panhandle. But we get our share.

Ivan in 2004 was a class 5 as it was approaching but hit as a 4. Damn near destroyed the area. A 20 something foot storm surge, It destroyed the multi-mile long I-10 bridge over Pensacola Bay and around 70% of the remaining buildings had blue tarp roofs for years.

I had a fishing boat that I kept on base at NAS Pensacola. I was over a month later before anyone could get on base. Going over the bridge to the base, we saw 100’s of boats just everywhere, beached, capsized, holed, sunken, I was pretty sure it insurance time. Got to the marina, which was also an RV storage yard, all junked at this point. I found my boat in the RV area still sorta attached to the trailer. It hadn’t drifted off to join the boat graveyard in the bay because the lower unit on one of the motors had jammed through and wedged in the wall of a big RV that had somehow stayed in place.

Another big one hit the following year but there was nothing other than the odd tropical storm until 2020 when one came through and destroyed a good portion of the Pensacola to Gulf Breeze bay bridge. Believe me, that was a BIG deal cutting the metro area in half for 1-1/2 years until they got a couple of lanes. Every one had to do a almost 40 mile detour.

Down here, it doesn’t have to be a hurricane or tropical storm. Spring 2014, we had 25 inches of rain in an 8 hour period. It was the freaking apocalypse. Damage was still being repaired in 2020.

 

Little Songs by Colter Wall – A Country Music Review by JT

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I’ve listen to ‘Little Songs’ a couple of times in the past few days. The first thing that I noticed was the audio improvement compared to his last album. My second takeaway after two listens was that I like all the songs and the flow of the album. I don’t recall a standout cut yet, which gives me the feeling that there may not be one, but I don’t care about hits when I listen to Colter. I like the laid back peaceful honesty in his originals, and his covers are always carefully selected and originally performed. I do miss his previous vocal style, that is what was partially responsible for my becoming a fan, but I respect the fact that he is the leading authority of his instrument and the minor changes he made don’t really affect my listening pleasure very much. He is one gifted vocalist to be sure. And songwriter extraordinaire!, especially in the almost extinct genre he has revived.
I’m a fan, I just ordered the vinyl version of this offering, and I’m looking forward to the next 20, something listens. Colter is the real deal, and has been big favorite of W.B Walkers Old Soul Radio Show for years now. W.B.knows a class act when he hears one, and I like to think sometimes I do too.

QTPOC and Coffee; A Heady Brew

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Here’s a first sample of a post that I find worth posting under my new mandate for relevance.  This guy Max Meyer is a midwesterner and there is a local coffee house trying to make a go of it in a small Iowan town.  He contrasts these sane normal entrepreneurs with the folks in Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland who see selling coffee as part of a revolutionary struggle in which employees, hopefully people of color and queer folk, confront the customer about white supremacy and the need to uproot and annihilate it.  And when this business plan is embraced, self-immolation and hilarity ensue.  Here are some highlights:

“One alleged instance of anti-blackness was that when a group of black teenagers stole the Mina’s World tip jar and customers ran after them to retrieve it, the owners didn’t defend… the thieves. Without a hint of irony, the employees also accused the owners of “wage theft.”

The radical accountability process came to an end in June 2022, when Egghart and Parikh agreed to the employee demands, including to turn Mina’s World into a co-operative that the employees would own as reparation. 

There was just one problem: Egghart’s mother, a Korean immigrant and successful accountant, and the owner of the building. She was having none of it and refused to subject herself to the struggle session. She put the building up for sale.”

And this one has so much karma to it:

“In Portland, Oregon — at the heart of the indy coffee movement — Coava Coffee Roasters shut down in May, citing criminal violence against employees. 

“The team members at this cafe have been on the front line enduring extreme violence and criminal activity on an almost daily basis for the last few years– crime and violence that is only increasing in frequency and severity,” wrote the owners.”

And of course no discussion of coffee in America can avoid the 800 lb gorilla, Starbucks:

“But what Starbucks actually did was begin punishing white employees. A white regional manager in New Jersey was ordered by company brass to fire a white district manager who had nothing to do with the arrests — on false pretenses.

Those pretenses: pay discrepancies between white and black employees. The regional manager, Shannon Phillips, knew these charges against the district manager to be false. She cried foul and accused the company of using the white district manager as a scapegoat. A month later, she was fired herself.

Phillips sued Starbucks, claiming that she was fired for being white. In June, she won over $25 million in punitive damages against Starbucks. A federal jury in New Jersey agreed with her claim that in response to the 2018 incident, Starbucks began discriminating against white employees to appease angry protesters.”

It’s a beautiful story of getting what you asked for.  Inspiring.

IT HAS ALL BEEN SAID

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I’ve looked over my output for the last year.  It’s all the same thing.  It’s all been said.  I can’t say it again.

At this point talking about what needs to be done has very little value.  So, I’ll talk about things that I find interesting.  Maybe it’ll be technology or science or photography or science fiction or maybe it’ll be some current event that I think is noteworthy.  I’ll try to keep the outrage over Biden’s atrocities to a minimum since we all know they’re coming and talking about them doesn’t really accomplish anything.

If I see something happening that is progress, that’ll be discussed.  For instance, the red state governors sending illegal aliens to sanctuary cities worked!  It struck a nerve, it discombobulated them.  It was successful and that is newsworthy and worth discussion.  And if someone has some original and thought-provoking theory on how the world will be changing in the future and I think it’s worth discussing I might link to it and put in my two cents.

As I get a chance to make some progress on my sf book, I’ll probably put a few chunks of it up for comment.  And I’ll start doing more reviews of movies and books.  But banging on the “something must be done” drum has gotten too dull.  I’m preaching to the choir and the choir will start heading for the doors soon.

Things will be changing but hopefully folks will still find stuff here that they find interesting and worthwhile.  So, my daily announcement that the sky is falling has been cancelled and instead I’ll leave something entertaining.

 

Is Tucker Carlson Going to Interview Vladimir Putin?

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Now that’s an interesting idea.  Next thing you know he’ll have a debate between Putin and Biden on his show.  Now that would be fun.