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We’re in the final countdown to Rita’s landfall and while I am here in sunny Northern California, a number of my friends are in the greater Houston area and - it seems, in for quite a few hours of rain.

I was originally slated to go to Austin this weekend, but as the city will be full of evacuees and cumulonimbus clouds, I decided to postpone for another week. Elle, being of the Southern California state of mind finds the prospect of facing a hurricane particularly scary (not that I can blame her after the Katrina coverage). I had to explain to her that, for me, facing a hurricane (or 2-5) a summer is just the way things were. Once I said that our hurricanes were like her earthquakes or wildfires, much worse owing to media coverage, she seemed a bit calmer. Nevertheless, we’ll be around these parts this weekend.

But it is certainly the seared after image of Katrina that has led many Houstonians to bail on the Bayou City. Not my dad, though. I think he’s right to stay at this point. The governor of the state and the mayor are certainly not going to jeopardize their political futures by not encouraging everyone – and we do mean everyone – to get out of town (and make sure they have no sob story to tell the drama-hungry 24-hour news eye. Houston’s highways are jam-packed, it’s taking 9 hours to get out town — you might as well stay as long as you’re not in the flood plain.

* [ That’s Neal Patrick Harris for those of you not in the posse ]

It’s time for the great old one to arise on the network of the Illuminati on “How I Met Your Mother”

Update: Having watched 2 shows, it’s pretty dumb.

In the spirit of overheardinnewyork.com I present something overheard at the Interpol concert:

“Doesn’t he [Paul Banks] look like Ellen DeGeneres a bit?”

To be fair, with his mop top freshly dried and kind of winging up at the end, there was some Ellen-itude in effect.

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Originally uploaded by sgharms.

Thursday night Elle and I went to visit lovely downtown San Jose to see avant-garde rock band Interpol play.

It was an excellent show in an intimate venue. Paul Banks’ powerful voice really belted out strong song after strong song. I was worried that I wasn’t going to hear “Roland” but they closed out the show with it. I was so pleased.

They also had a great lights show. Run, do not walk, to their site to see when they’re coming to a town near you.

The

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090902448.html

Jim continues his 2-0 record of book recommendations with his suggestion of The Historian. It was an excellent book in the DaVinci Code style of intrigue, research, museums, and early Christian history. Make no bones though, this is a much stronger book than dVC.

The book is told, like Dracula, through the presentation of diaries, journals, and letters. I find thin an interesting convention, but it wore on me after about 300 pages. I suddenly wanted there to be a spirit of action, of live action story telling. The only time this convention falls away is in a climactic battle and but a few chapters thereafter before the end of the work.

The main reason I really liked it was that much of the action was set in that strange part of Europe that haunts and dazzles the Occidental mind: the land link between western Asia Minor (Anatolian Turkey) and those south eastern Western outposts into Ottoman lands, The Austro-Hungarian holdings. While da Vinci and other books of this sort (Angels and Demons) are set firmly in Western traditions with capital cities of action like London, Paris, and Rome, The Historian weights to the Eastern Roman Empire: out of Catholocism and into the Orthodox with cities like Budapest, Sofia, and Constantinople.

It is the exploration of these worlds, of this Western / Eastern European dynamic that is the function and the work of The Historian, yet Kostova needs a way to wind that thread through. How would western Europeans come to that part of the world? How could they come there in past as so much of it was under the Iron Curtain? How do Westerners conceive this part of the Eurasian landmass?

The iconic Eastern interloper turns out to be her thread: Vlad Tepes, The Impaler, known as Dracula.

In searching the myths of Dracula from outposts in Oxford and the New World, the Western mind of the reader and the protagonists in put into the Eastern zone, and thus the study of dynamic that Kostova truly wanted to present is shown.

Full of Gothic conceits: bodices loosely clinging to freshly bitten necks, strong female characters, overwhelmed folklorists finding their grimoires of peasant fantasy coming to utility just in time, mists, unholy animals, and a reflection of our own cruelty in the “civilized world”, The Historian is a great way to learn more about the Ottoman / Orthodox borderlands, their ethic, and the mind of the citizen under the Soviet cloud.

I highly recommend the work.

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Pull out the asbestos suit for this one.

Condoleeza Rice:

“The Lord is going to come on time ? if we just wait,” she said (FoxNews.com)

Does that mean I don’t have to pay any more taxes if The Lord will be handling the work of running the land? Have we outsourced stewarding this planet back to sanity to the On High?

Most of Continental philosophy’s complaint against Christianity is that it discourages living in the now, for the promise of a hypothetical hereafter.

“Just you wait you rich people, I’ll get mine in the hereafter”

“Just you wait you thin people, I’m obese now, but in the hereafter I’ll be purty as a lark!

“Just you wait you smart people, I’m ignorant now, but God don’t care none!”

What sort of twisted slave morality is that? What sort of pathetic life model celebrates disease and weakness versus the passionate sturm und drang of a Romantic existence?

The terrible price for a beautiful existence is responsibility. Absolute beauty, passion, and existence come with the terrible weight of being responsible. Those who refuse responsibility by sending it off to the Host of Hosts in the Sky are the first who are looking for a way to countenance the inferior or evil deeds they have done.

I suppose that the Bush administration, which after 4 years of terrorist attack planning still can’t get critical service to impacted areas quickly, must be so pathetically lost that their only solution is to wait for The Lord to do the heavy lifting.

As we say in business: “Hope is not an effective strategy for success.”

…More of the signs that the people in the White House are waiting for a deus ex deus and not doing their real job.

He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down.

Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable.

…

The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “Welcome to the Monkey House”. As collected in: Welcome to the Monkey House

Click Read More for more…

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Grover Norquist (Liason between Bush administration and arch-conservative movements):

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” he says, “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Paul Krugman:

“The federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good.”

Result: Drowning people in a city shaped like a bathtub are wondering what would have happened if governmental resources had been halved.

I guess when you have an entrenched attitude of entitlement you can not but think about the poor with impunity. The president is a jackass who thought it more convenient to pitch his agenda after vacation than actually get his hands dirty (even symbolically) in the country he claims to run.

Do I fault the monkey president for the hurricane itself as some whack-jobs do? No. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the administration for not adopting the Kyoto protocol that would help level off global warming that fed the hurricane. I’m not sure there’s a direct causal chain there. What I am saying is that the situation called for a real leader, not a chimp that has 10 talking points from which he doesn’t deviate.

If you caught the speech he made in Mississippi he tried to get back to talking points and the incredulous leadership of that state gave him the “What the hell are you talking about” expression he richly deserved (both in terms of this issue as well as his horribly stewardship of the Iraq quagmire).

All not even starte on the topic that for a Christian president he looks like he really couldn’t care less.

If this president couldn’t handle a hurricane for which he had dozens of hours of warning, how the hell can we trust him or his lackeys to handle the situation when it’s a dirty bomb? It’s not like Zarqawi calls his strikes in days before and does a practice run on FLA to get the timing down.