Categories
Web

Not typical

The Missouri State Attorney General has filed suit against the holder of web sites such as katrinafamilies.com for not disclosing that the person, Frank Weltner, is a known white supremacist.

In fact, you may remember Weltner from another site he owns: jewwatch.com.

He is not typical of Missouri, but we sure seem to attract them here. It is a good warning, though, to be careful about who you give money to. Since I didn’t have a category that fit this person, I created a new one: scuzzbucket.

Categories
People

My annual Dear Jan letter

Everyone should have a Jan Sundberg.

A nice bit of normalcy did rear it’s head — I’ve had my annual, “F**k you!” from Jan Sundberg. Ever since I first published my four-part articles on the giant squid and cryptozoology and mentioned his rather, shall we say, ‘dubious’ adventures, I’ve had an email once a year, regular as clock work with barely coherent English telling me to go to hell. Or worse.

A bit of humor with this year’s email: he signed it Frida and made it sound like a supporter of his was sending it. Too bad no one ever told him that his name is in the ‘reply-to’ section of the email.

This is a nice break: do a search engine lookup on Jan Sundberg and then sit back and enjoy the results. Just be aware that not all Jan Sundbergs are alike.

I love the cryptozoologists — they are never boring.

Categories
Environment

Double Crescent

It seemed a bit cooler this evening. When the roommate got home with the car, I hauled my butt down to Powder to go for a walk. The air quality is so bad that it appeared as smudges against the sky, with only a bit of true cloud showing through — touched with red gold from a burnt orange blaze of sun in the sky.

At the park, two mothers with their four new babies were frisking about — I wonder how many generations I’ve seen now?

You could smell the green of the trees, and they almost filtered out the acrid sting of the air. I have become more aware of smell lately; when coming back from Branson a century or two ago, I could actually smell rain while driving along with the window down. I remember my nose going into the air as I sniffed the scent, like a bear or a dog. A few minutes later, it started to rain. It was a great smell.

I visited both libraries on the way home from the park and made a good haul on books — my first Clive Cussler, and a couple of history books as well as an old and familiar Anne McCaffrey. When heading back to my car from the city library, I looked up in the sky at the crescent moon, colored rust-gold. Instead of one moon, though, there were two: the original and a faint replica in front of it. Somehow the thick air had created a light shadow of the moon against the dark sky. Is this a premonition? What does a double crescent moon mean?

At home I unloaded groceries from the store and stepped out to pick up my books from the car when a yellow truck with blinking white and yellow lights started coming down our street, spraying all the trees and bushes for mosquitoes. I ducked back inside to avoid the dousing, only venturing out again when the mist had settled.

If I can see a double moon, I have to wonder at the wisdom of shooting yet more toxins into the air. I hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak of West Nile. After I grabbed the books, I did what all good internet children do–came inside and searched on St. Louis and West Nile. I found one suspected death and one confirmed West Nile illness in the last month in the St. Louis area. I wonder, though, how many more people were affected by breathing air thick enough to bounce the image of the moon back at itself?