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Category Everyday Life Just for Fun
Central Florida news teams were positioned to cover what they thought would be the big news of the night—the election—and had to scramble when the weather took center stage.
Have you ever stood in the ocean and had a wave suddenly break over your head? Now imagine that the wave doesn't recede, but continues to pour over you for half an hour, and you have a picture of yesterday's rainstorm. If there's been a heavier downpour in all our 20-some years here, I don't remember it.I like weather, if I'm watching it from a safe position, and might have thoroughly enjoyed the experience if Janet had been home with me. Instead, I took the storm as a call to prayer, since she was out running errands. I'm sure I was almost as glad to hear the sound of the garage door opening as she was to be driving in. On the main highway, a truck (driving at all of maybe 35 mph) completely enveloped her little car with spray as it passed, blinding her for several seconds. Once in the neighborhood, the main street, even at the top of the hill, was flooded to the sidewalks, and visibility was nearly zero. Just after the storm passed over us, it turned vicious, spawning a tornado that divested some houses in Oviedo of their roofs.
I don't know what effect the storm might have had on the election, but I'm sure that many people driving home from work through the deluge decided not to bother to stop at the polls on the way. I had voted earlier in the day, my usual hodgepodge procedure of voting for whoever I like best, Republican or Democrat. I suppose you could say I "won," since the election went my way on about 2/3 of the issues. However, I'm not rejoicing, since I lost on the only issue I really cared about. Seminole County had the opportunity to authorize a very small ad valorem tax for the purpose of purchasing environmentally sensitive lands and developing recreational trails and pedestrian bridges, and it failed 51% to 49%. I'm guessing too many people voted reflexively anti-tax. Not that I blame them entirely, as that is my own tendency, but in this case the cost was small and the benefits enormous; we have lost a great opportunity.Permalink | Comments
Category Hurricanes and Such Politics Everyday Life
To Whom It May Concern:
If you need to reach us, try the good ol' telephone, or leave a comment here. For some bizarre reason our e-mail is down, even though our general Internet service is working fine. I've only been able to get a few e-mails all day, and none at all in recent hours,
It appears to work for sending, though I don't really know that, either. I'll have to remember to check when it comes back up and see if what I sent was actually received.
"When it comes back up." Soon, I hope. But at present the technicians have no projected duration of the outage....Permalink | Comments
Category Computing Everyday Life
Last night we heard the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra play Pierre Jalbert's deeply moving In Aeternum, which he wrote as a memorial to his niece who died at birth. Naturally, my thoughts were about Isaac as I listened, running a gamut of emotions, including anger during an intense part of the work with a heartbeat motif running through it—that brought back memories of the doctor who interrupted the family's last moments together to tell them Isaac's heart rate was slowing down.
I had the privilege of speaking briefly with Jalbert afterwards and was able to tell him (though not fully express) how much the music meant to me. You can hear an exerpt of In Aeternum here.
(Some readers of this blog will be interested to know that Jalbert is a native son of Manchester, New Hampshire!)
Having been set up by last night's experience, I was not prepared to handle this morning's news from the United Kingdom: The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology is recommending active euthanasia for severely disabled newborns.
In these days of extreme medical care, the right and wrong of a situation is often a messy shade of grey. I fully support the right of a family to bring a loved one—young, old, or in between—home to die in friendly, familiar, natural surroundings, even if medical intervention would extend that person's life. This has nothing to do with actively, purposefully killing a helpless, innocent human being whose existence has become difficult or expensive, and the two issues should not be conflated. That respected doctors should hold such a position does nothing to bolster my already-waning trust in the medical profession.
I have no doubt that financial considerations weighed heavily in this recommendation, and I am saddened and angry for the new parents who—at the moment of their greatest grief and heartache—will face pressure from the UK's National Health Service to allow their babies to be cheaply killed rather than run up expensive medical bills. Nor do I have any illusions that the trend will stop with newborns.
John Harris, a member of the official Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University, welcomed the college's submission. "We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term, but cannot kill a newborn," he told The Sunday Times. "What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it OK to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not the other?"
If conception is not enough of a momentous occurrence to mark the beginning of a life worthy of protection...if viability outside the womb is not...if the moment of birth is not...then we are left with nothing at all.
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Category Reviews Health Random Musings Everyday Life
