Back in good spirits...

Whatever immunity I ever had against idiocy in public life apparently went away after my prolonged news fast. Everywhere I turn, it seems the one word that keeps cropping to describe almost any economic news lately is "unexpected."

And what is in the news is almost uniformly worse than expected. (When I ask myself "expected by whom?" it's pretty apparent the parties doing the expecting are those politicians spoonfeeding "news bytes" to the media.)

And when folks like one of our current incumbents crow about having to overcome opposition to implement an expensive plan that later turned out to be a turkey of monumental proportions, I get a little quizzical (and queasy) when said incumbent dismisses criticism of the decision to adopt the plan by saying "Well, nobody could have foreseen that it wouldn't work as we expected."

I guess, what?... the folks who opposed the idea thought it would work fine but had other reasons for their opposition?

Ye gods, don't get me started.

* * *News fast aside, last night, we managed to catch an episode of Castle we hadn't seen the first time around this past season. During one of the commercial breaks, I was playing around with my Droid X and showed Galina the neat voice-to-text feature that eases the process of responding to emails. The example I demonstrated wasn't perfect, as the sentence I dictated came out as:

1 of the really cool things about this phone is that i can't dictate notes.

The numeral, miscapitalization, and the "can't dictate" (instead of "can dictate") are fixable relatively easily, but when Galina tried it out, she got:

Hello you watch castle or you a drank too much does the movie me

And we laughed so hard at the result, we forgot what she had tried to say in the first place. Ah, well...

* * *The rain come down around our house two nights ago with a vengeance. I looked out of the kitchen window in the middle of it and saw runoff that resembled video of rapids along the Colorado River, except physically smaller. When it was all done, there was enough hail on the verandah to make iceballs with, and the wind had blown so wildly, water was dripping from the ceiling over the verandah (suggesting water traveling upward in that vicinity).

After clearing up the issues surrounding yesterday's client call, I resumed editing, pausing around noon to drive out to Site Lima, which appears to have avoided the rain that soaked us. I found a handful of lobsters, but that was all. Shiloh had a good time, and we got back early enough for me to continue editing once more.

Cheers...