Well it was really more ice/slush tubing. We found a hill by Kristen's house that was fun to slide down. I did manage to protect the beer. Everything has melted off...


Break was effectively extended a week by the ice storm. For those that are in places where ice and snow are regular things, in Texas if more than three flakes fall out of the sky everything shuts down. And you want it to, because you don't want to be driving with those idiots who've never seen ice and think that 70mph is still a reasonable speed on the highway when it is iced.

So I'm back to teaching A&P this semester. I was going to IA, Reservoir Ecology this semester, but no one signed up for the course. That's fine, it would have been nice to be teaching a graduate course, and I think we could have come up with a good class project. I can scare undergrads again. Only one section. The rest of my (lowly paid) time will be continuing work on the Amistad project. Other than that only one class this semester. Aquatic microbial ecology. I'm actually looking forward to it, since that is a bit of a hole in my knowledge. One of the groups of bacteria that the professor studies, are the main group that methylates mercury, although he doesn't look at the mercury aspect of the group.

I'm not into conspiracy theories, and I can poke holes in this all day long, but it is interesting. Was 9/11 an insurance scam? It's long. I hope not, because if it is, we're a lot more fucked than I'd like to hope we are. Not that we aren't being fucked by Bush & Co. already, but I refuse to believe that they really are that evil. I know that at EVERY step they have made wrong, self-serving, pigheaded decisions. Finally, even his own party is starting to distance themselves from the insanity. I'm more than a little tired of politicians and pundits refusing to acknowledge that it was the US that destabilized Iraq. Yeah, Saddam was a jackass. He was horrible to his own people. But he wasn't a threat to us. Never was going to be. If Shrub really wanted to effect the region, we would have stopped at Afghanistan, and would concentrate on that like we did Japan and Germany. If we could have taken the 10+ years to show that peoples lives were getting better in Afghanistan, people would start seeing through the fundamentalist lies. All the last 6 years have done is give fundamentalist Muslims an imperialist enemy to hate. At every step along the way, we play into their rhetoric, and do exactly what gets them more converts. The current Iraqi government is a sham. It's obvious that it is a puppet government. I hope that people in this country start seeing through the neo-con views, and begin to see that Bush & Co. are just as much fundamentalists as those in the middle east. Fundamentalism is wrong. The flavor doesn't matter. Fundamentalism breeds fascism.

So, if you follow cycling at all, the anti-doping crusaders are looking more and more rediculous. Now the French are trying to bust another for his asthma medicine. I still think they need to come up with the unlimited class. If you get caught doping, you get bumped into it permanently. I don't support doping, and I'm sure there are cyclists who do cheat, but I do think cycling has been unfairly targeted. I think track, baseball, football, soccer, etc. are all at least as dirty, if not more-so, but the press (at least the press I follow) concentrates on cycling. I'm not going to blindly support Lance, Floyd, Tyler, Jan, Ivan, or any of the others, but come on. The French are just pissy, since they haven't had a contender in the Tour for years. It wouldn't suprise me if it comes out that Floyd was framed. Oparacion Puerto is one of the most bungled investigations ever. I think that it is wrong that a lot of careers were derailed on speculation. Bust people if you have proof. Just because an athlete may have talked to a certain doctor is not reason to suspend them.

anyways, rant off for today....

J