I suppose I'm being cursed by those with slow internet connections at this point. The shots are off my back deck this beautiful Sunday afternoon, this is what spring looks like at this point in Minnesota. Canon Powershot S2 IS, 2592x1944 pixels, 14-bit color depth. 2.5MB each, which is what the slow connect folks will hate.
I've got WAY too much work work to do, and have been doing some, but I keep getting distracted, so thought I would take a break and write a blog from the deck. IBM Thinkpad T-40 with 1400-1050 resolution LCD, the brightness just isn't really there for comfortably working outside. Shaded, but it is still marginal, worth the hassle for an hour or so on a beautiful spring day, but not the way to maximum productivity.
The elbow keeps improving and the anesthetic is leaving my system. In general I feel fine, but I slept over 9 hours last night and yesterday PM I was only able to a 20 min workout at the health club rather than 40, but that is pretty good for a couple days after surgery I guess.
I finished up "Mighty Fitz", by Michael Schumacher. She went down in Nov of '75, and at that time of my life Lake Superior was one of the few natural wonders that I had ever seen, and ore boats were one of the few man-made wonders that I had been able to see on a couple family trips to Duluth and Superior.
It was my sophomore year of college, and I remember it well. It didn't seem possible that something that big could be taken down by a storm on Lake Superior. The Gordon Lightfoot song, being from the upper Midwest, the stage of life, an interest in technology, are all factors that make me a bit of a sucker for most things Fitzgerald.
They call it "The Titanic of the Great Lakes", and to me it is more than that since the Titanic was a bit before my time.
The basic answer to "how could a storm on Superior do that" is of course, "it didn't". The two prime theories are that she grounded on 6-mile shoal and was wounded. Slowly took on water, and when the freeboard got low enough, nose-dived when a big wave hit her.
Since she was over 700' long and the water depth is 550', most likely her bow hit the bottom while the stern was still on the surface. The violence of the impact tore the ship in two and virtually "vaporized" (small pieces) about 200' of ship. The stern is sticking straight up out of the bottom of the lake.
Two other theories involve a similar slow loss of freeboard due to improper latching or other problems with hatch covers, or a catastrophic hull failure caused by a keel problem that some have asserted that she had.
As anyone with a passing interest in the Fiz knows, the Arthur Anderson was shadowing her that day and was in constant radar and radio contact. Something went wrong with the Fitz in the vicinity of 6-mile shoal North of Caribou island. The Anderson thought the radar track of the Fitz was too close to the shoal, and shortly after they went through the area the Fitz radioed that they had a fence rail down, some damaged vents, a list, and had lost their radar.
The Anderson captain always felt that they must have hit bottom to cause that damage, and even though it didn't instantly take them down, this is the most likely reason that they eventually sank.
Not the greatest of books, but a subject that I have an interest in, and little things like finding out that one of the guys on the Fitz was from Iron River WI where I've snowmobiled, and he went down and visited his family for a few hours as the ship loaded connect it to places of familiarity even more.The museum at Whitefish point MI is now on my list of places that I'd like to see.
I continue to read along a bit in John McCain's book, "Character is Destiny". As Hugh Hewitt says, John is "a great American, and poor Senator, and a rotten Republican" ... BUT, to good Republicans, the great American has to continue to cut a lot more mustard than the other two, or we would be Democrats. I'm struck by a section of a guy that he sees as a hero of the Rwanda massacre. McCain takes personal blame, assigns blame to the US government and Democrats and Republicans alike for the cowardice of letting 800,000 to over a million people be brutally massacred, when a very small number of troops could have prevented it, but he NEVER mentions Bill Clinton.
I wonder if a Rwanda happened on the watch of Bush if the response would be the same? Maybe, Darfur in the Sudan has seen a lot of death, but we are also a bit more preoccupied than we were in the '90s.
It is an interesting question in my mind. In some respects, the MSM willingness to blame Bush for everything is really a compliment, they hate him, but they must think that at least some folks will see him as "potentially responsible". I'm not sure anyone really expected anything from Slick Willie but chasing women with big hair, and when that is just what he did, they didn't really see it as a disappointment.
If a million people happened to die while he was busy with "personal matters", that was fine with the MSM. That the people were black, well, Clinton was a Democrat, so he can't be racist, they are certain it wouldn't have bothered him to let some white folks die while he took care of his "needs" either, and that is the kind of President that they can strongly support.
It isn't like Bush and New Orleans. He was talking to some veterans in San Diego for part of that, and everyone KNOWS that he is racist, so he is clearly responsible for the worst combination of overt racism and incompetence that can be imagined.
By any technical measure, the Katrina response is the fastest and best hurricane response ever. The standards are just a little different in some reason.
Howie Dean-scream was down there this weekend still blathering about the lack of hurricane response. From a city that 7 months ago was supposed to be taken back to the 3rd world, and may never recover. It gets more and more difficult to see how one makes the claim that New Orleans is back, come on down ... and "nothing has been done", all at the same time.
Americans in general have VERY short memories, and for the left, consistency (or even coherence) is just not a consideration.
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