WeatherGirl’s Station

To find out how US tax payers may be asked to pay twice for their weather information go here.

Seems about par for the course.

So the question remains, what happened to the Republican ideal of defending the tax payer from being bilked?

Throw the louts out!

Current temperature 36F/2C (windchill 23F/-5C)

Since I posted Madness in the Mid West letters have continued to be published in the Morris Sun Tribune. I’ve added links to them in my original post. I’ll keep doing this as long as they continue to turn up. It has been reassuring to see the public opposition to this act from across the community. The instigators of this affair are still no where to be seen.

Current temperature 34F/1C (windchill 21F/-6C)

Utter despair is my current state. Read more about a day that will live in infamy.

MUFC in the hands of a tycoon who knows nothing about football? Recipe for disaster.

Current temperature 34F/1C (windchill 21F/-6C)

Having discovered cyclingfans.com I’ve been visiting every day and using their links to follow the 2005 Giro.

Today they added a live feed to Italian TV coverage of today’s stage. The picture wasn’t the greatest but when combined with the Eurosport audio feed it was a definite step up.

Cheers to cyclingfans.com for helping provide me with my daily Giro fix!!!

Current temperature 34F/1C (windchill 21F/-6C)

… those who love the grand tours thought their fairy godmother had come in the shape of OLN. There was wall to wall coverage of the Giro, the Tour and the Vuelta. We were in seventh heaven. I fell in love the Vuelta, not so flashy as the Tour but much more likely to go down to the wire.

Then, after the 2004 Tour, it all went south. OLN dumped the the 2004 Vuelta and is currently covering only the weekend stages of the 2005 Giro. Their behaviour is bizarre. With the success of Lance Armstrong, and the depth of their coverage, they had built up a really hardcore following. The potential audience was huge. All it needed was nuturing and instead they blow the whole thing out of the water.

To my rescue has come the web site cyclingfans.com Here you can find all the differnet ways it is possible to follow the Giro. So now I’m listening to the live audio feed of the Eurosport tv channel and reading the ticker at cyclingnews.com. Then later in the day I can watch the web feed of Itallian tv coverage of the day’s stage. (I can’t use the OLN web feed of live pictures as I’m a Mac user.)

No Paul, Phil or Bob fix until the weekend.

What ever happened to pleasing the customer?

Current temperature 55F/13C

I have a message for Mr. Bush - Shrub variety. (My apologies for shouting but I feel the need.)

SOCIAL SECURITY IS NOT BROKEN. IT DOES NOT NEED FIXING.

There seem to be many who don’t realise social security is NOT an investment program, IT’S A SAFETY NET. It’s goal is to ensure that those who are retired are not left destitute. It is a very successful program with a very moral goal.

All Shrub seems to be doing is rewarding those rich family friends he’s beholden to. Or, perhaps, this his grab for historical immortality? Infamy, more like. And he’s doing it with my money. Arggghhhhh.

If you don’t like universal benefits and think there isn’t enough money to go around why not, as a first step, have an income limit of, say, $50,000. (Purely arbitrary figure I just plucked out of the air. Can’t be any worse than the analysis Shrub is using.)

Boondoggles abound with this administration.

Current temperature 66F/19C

For an indepth review of the results check out this page at the Beeb.

My home seat is a safe labour seat so not much to report on that front. The labour candidate got 50% of the vote which was only a few points down on the last election.

My one prediction proved true, though I must say I didn’t expect Howard to announce his upcoming resignation.

It looks like Labour will have a majority in the mid-sixties. Perhaps this will encourage some of those back bench labour MPs to be a little more aggressive in opposing things like ID cards. (The biggest waste of money on the horizon.)

Current temperature 66F/19C

Trash. Feels like an amalgam of several other movies cobbled together in the faint hope we won’t notice the joins. They even rip off Thunderheart, one of my all time favourites. Arghhhhhh!!!! Matthew McConaughey has zero screen chemistry with Penelope Cruz and somehow gets lost in the scenery. (Not what I expected from the man who blazed on the screen in Lone Star and Frailty and he wasn’t even the lead in those two movies!)

Hokey plot without the compensation of stunning visuals or gasp inducing action set pieces.

Steve Zahn rocks as the side kick yet again and saved this from being a wasted two hours! Great African sounds but I could have done with much much more.

As usual the bad guys and annoying characters were mainly played by Brits. Sigh. Can’t someone give them jobs as the good guys or the interesting side kick or, perhaps, shock horror, an interesting well drawn human being? Ah, but then we’d need a decent script writer, and a producer who can see beyond national stereotypes, for that.

Current temperature 63F/17C

One of the things I love about British elections is how fast they go. (One of the advantages of not working with fixed terms.) It only seems like yesterday when I heard my first party election broadcast on Five Live. It was for the Conservatives and my immediate reaction was ‘no way on earth would I vote for a party that talks to me like that’.

If you’d like to know more about what’s going on check out this page at the Beeb.

I have no read on what will happen, your guess is as good as mine. My only prediction - Michael Howard will not be Prime Minister. (Of course, I’d have sworn blind that the people of the US would have the sense not to reelect Shrub, so what do I know.)

Current temperature 59F/15C

Visually stunning but …

Okay, I’ll admit I was pretty bowled over by the look of this movie with its highly stylised comic book setting. But why oh why do we have to have the middle aged male heros, who look their age, getting it on with young nubile young women? Almost all the women in this movie are half naked, sexually available to who ever and under the age of 30. The writer’s personally fantasy perhaps? Strong interesting women do not have to be unclothed, sixteen and gagging for it!

As for the rest of the content it’s so far over the top, it’s half way round the globe and incredibly disturbing at the same time. A serious case of the hebee geebees.

When will hell freeze over? When we see middle aged men write sympathetically, for screen or comics, about strong middle-aged women who are their equals? Current temperature 34F/1C (windchill 29F/-2C)