Put down the thesaurus, sir, and back away with your hands up. Last night's thunderstorms did more than just dump more rain, apparently:

Thunderstorms lambasted northern Missouri and sections of central Illinois producing 6- to 8-inch rain totals in a region still reeling from flooding and wet ground.

Unmentioned is the severe castigation delivered to southeast Iowa, and the blistering tongue-lashing given to Michigan.

M is for mammatus.

The money just ... vanishes. That's the only explanation I can come up with for this reasoning:

“I think there is a misconception in many communities that these [illegal] immigrants are taking American dollars and sending it all back home,” Eathington said. “This really isn’t the case, because these people still pay sales taxes, rent and buy food. In some towns, they make up a significant percent of revenue that goes back into the community.”

And if we somehow discouraged illegal immigrants from taking those jobs, apparently the money that would have been paid them just leaves the economy entirely, *poof*. 'Cause if you had paid it to a legal worker, instead of "pay[ing] sales taxes, rent and buy[ing] food", they would have just buried that money in a pickle jar in the back yard. Or burned it for heat, or something.

The same reasoning can be seen at work in a Travel Industry Association "study" that USA Today reported on last month: Consumers pick home over flying; avoided trips cost economy billions.

The more than 100,000 trips a day that don't happen because of the hassle factor cost the U.S. economy an estimated $26.5 billion in forgone travel spending, TIA President Roger Dow said Thursday.

I can relate – Moira and I were going to go to Oregon this summer, but then we thought about the packing hassle and the airport hassle and the tiny-seat-pitch hassle, so we took all the money we would have spent and mulched it into our garden (all those cotton fibers – great for the soil!).

Flying machines. Our little town is a dry island amidst the floodwaters, and as such attracted these people, who were flooded out of Iowa City and so spent an extra two days here. The skies are quiet now, but for four days the air buzzed with biplanes.

Despite the name, there wasn't any actual barnstorming going on, even though we have a plethora of barns laying about the area. What there was a lot of was old planes on display:

Each plane had a plaque that listed its specifications and individual history. Most were built, initially, in the late 20's or early 30's, but had undergone extensive renovations since then. (These histories were interesting, given that I had just read Donald Pittinger's comments on plane restoration.)

This gives you a pretty good idea of the age distribution in attendance.

Also, for a mere $50 per person, they offered the tantalizing opportunity to take a ride in one of the planes. We were sorely tempted, but did not give in, because we are cheap and dull people. Here is one of the Travel Air 4000's coming in to pick up new passengers:

And here's my only image of one of the planes in the air, as it comes in for a landing. (This image strained the abilities of our little 4.0 megapixel workhorse to the limit.)

One of my co-workers rode the biplane, so to speak, and said it was a lot of fun. Maybe someday...

As opposed to inapproprium. Malapropism of the day:

Some of the orientalists had great love for Middle Eastern cultures and at a time when it drew approprium brought the works of these cultures to the west.

From this comment on this article.

Whoops. As the blog emerges, bleary-eyed, from its late-spring doldrums, I must acknowledge that, contra past anguished existential musings, I have discovered at least one positive thing that this blog has accomplished.

During May's period of quiescence, I decided it was time to upgrade the trusty old home desktop system (built lovingly by my own hands back in ought-two) to the latest available version of OpenSUSE. I backed up /root, and /etc, and /home, ran the install, tweaked the wireless settings, restored the backed-up files, and was back in action in less than a day. (Having started messing with Linux back in the Slackware 1.0 days, when getting just about anything to work required substantial knowledge of your hardware, and getting things like a graphical interface to run required owner's manuals, careful study, and periods of fasting and repentance, the hardware detection abilities of modern Linux variants seem almost magic.^[1])

A day or two later, the urge to blog began to reassert itself, spurred by an item of Alan Sullivan's which I can no longer find. It had something to do with the the "Newseum", Big Media's monument in celebration of itself. We walked past it several times on our recent D.C. foray, though never entered, and I was thinking about the museums we did visit, specifically the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. It houses many, many air- and spacecraft, and I took a few pictures... let's see, I'll go find the uploaded pictures on disk, over in /usr/local/photos...
there followed that sinking sensation known to all computer users, when you realize you've done something you shouldn't have, and there's no way back. I'd never gotten around to burning the images to DVD, and when I installed the new OS, I reformatted and repartitioned the drive. Several hundred images, the total output of our trusty Canon A520? *Poof*. All gone. ^[2]

But! At least I uploaded about 200 of the images to Flickr, solely for the purpose of putting them up on this blog. So, even if it has accomplished nothing else in 3.5 years, this blog's existence has served to act as a partial safety net for my own stupidity...

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^[1]Windows and Mac users may now snort derisively.
^[2]Along with the urge to blog.

I *AM* going to post someting, dammit. During a recent bout of bloggerly navel-gazing, I noticed that the month of May is the deadest time around this almost-but-not-quite-moribund enterprise. Over the last 3.5 years, that merriest of months has clocked an average of three – yes, three! posts, giving us a scorching posting rate of one post every ten days. So I guess I have that as a pseudo-explanation for the quietness around here – it's a seasonal thing. (For those interested – and of course you're interested, right? Hey, wait, come back here! The single postingest month ever... well, not ever, because I'm not counting Inappropriate Response because I don't feel like it... was January 2005 (37 posts!), the inaugural month; the second-most prolific month was February 2005 (29 posts!) – sensing a trend here? – and we've never gone above 20 posts in a month since then.)

So that's what the data show; but what does it mean? Reading Reid Stott's post on the decline and fall of websites like, ummm, this one, Reid comments about his own site:

Today, you first want to choose a niche topic for your blog, stick solely to that topic, and pound out a dozen or more posts per day on that topic. You probably want to have more than one person contributing to “your” blog, for the sake of volume and so you can take a day off now and then. And when there is a breaking news story within your niche topic, you need to post a pithy 800 word column on it within an hour of it breaking. [There's that old bitch goddess blog-success raising her head again — Ed.]

Then you have me, the Anti-Blogger. I post about anything and everything that’s on my mind or going on in my life. The only other person you’ll ever see posting on this site is my wife … to tell you I cannot move my fingers to do so myself. And as for that “breaking news” bit, well, Mr. Zeldman posted his article last Sunday, and seven days later I’ve finally gotten around to writing about it.

I’m lucky if I make a dozen posts in a month, never mind a day. It wasn’t always that way. Five or six years ago I seemed to be a lot less busy with Real Life than I am today, and there were often multiple posts per day. Today, any late night energy I might have goes instead to ticking off another item on my nightmarish “To Do” list.

Preach it, brother! I find myself saying, as I so often do when reading Mr. Stott. (Except when he talks about the Falcons. Whatever.) For whatever reason, Real Life seems more pressing and important now. There's yardwork to be done, house maintenance to perform, paying work to be attended to, computer languages to learn, etc., and they all seem far more important now than the urge to Find Someone On The Internet Who Is Wrong, And Correct Them, delightful as that often is.