It’s only fit that this post should be on the 13th of December. The only thing that would be more fitting would be if the 13th of December was a Friday. In ancient times, the number 12 was considered to be a “complete” number. The twelve months of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac, twelve tribes, twelve hours on the clock, twelve disciples, twelve gods of Olympus, and such all represent the “completeness” of the number 12. The number 13, however, somehow transgresses the idea of completeness and because it’s also a prime number, it thus becomes irregular and unlucky.

For the incumbent (and generally well liked) mayor of Pocatello, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 was an unlucky day. He lost the election! And it all happened because of a dog named Balou.

It’s amazing how easy it is to roll a car. Earlier this year Nina and her niece Ashlyn were on their way to the fitness club on a morning where we had a little skiff of snow. Going down the hill, the car slid, Nina aimed it as best as possible at the hillside, and the car went up the hill and rolled over on the top. End of the Toyota Camry which led to the buying of another car. This time we decided to upgrade a bit. We really liked the Camry and decided to go up one model to an Avalon. We got a great deal, bought the car, and I swear it’s been jinxed every since. Three accidents later, it’ll be going back into the garage once again to get a part of the car replaced. Why is it that we can go years with no accidents, tickets, or car issues and within a few months we total a car, bang up the new(er) car, get rear-ended by an uninsured fraudster, and then get hit in a parking lot by someone who just drove off with no other information. Definitely strange.

We’ve been hearing about global warming and the rhetoric has been getting louder and more strident. That is, until a few weeks ago when somehow a bunch of emails from a European government-sponsored entity responsible for figuring out how warm things actually were in the year 1000 suddenly showed up on the Internet and were no longer private. They showed that not only were scientists cooking the temperature books (pun intended), but that the supposedly 2,000 scientists for whom global warming was a “foregone conclusions, end of debate,” was no where close to 2,000 and even most of those were in heated disagreement about the the data even before it was altered to better fit the hypothesis.

At question, of course, is whether the run-up in temperature in the past hundred years or so (even though the temperatures stopped going up a few years ago) is out of the normal high and low temperature ranges over the past two thousand years. The unaltered data suggests (although the data is very sparse) that our temperature profile is completely within the ranges experienced in the past. The truth always comes out. The strange part about all this is that the scientists thought they could get away with it.

Ta ta for now!