Doubts (Mostly) Removed

Today should clear out most, if not all, the if's and maybe's that have dominated our life over the last several months. Debbie is in her third day at her new job, we will sign the lease papers for our apartment this afternoon (we decided to save money and stick with the 2 bedroom that was on special), tomorrow I start the process of switching everything over to our new address, and on Sunday, Debbie takes me to the airport for the flight back to New Hampshire. If everything goes according to plan, I'll start the drive down to Florida on Wednesday, arrive on Friday and get everything dumped into the apartment over the weekend. While I'm gone, the apartment will be more like a monk's cell than a typical living space, but it's only for a week and will save us the cost of a second week in the extended stay hotel we are currently camped out in.

In short: We have A Plan. At least until the next bump in the road blows holes in it. We will both be very glad when August 2010 is over.

In other news, having solved all the other problems in the world, we are now trying to imprison fire-breathing bartenders as terrorists. I know I wake up in a cold sweat every night thinking of the danger to our civilization posed by bartenders performing a millennia-old parlor trick. The evil bastards.

Pelosi once again calls for the investigation of anyone who questions The One. Kings used to recognize the usefulness of the court jester as a check to their egos. The fact that the current occupant of our Imperial City seems unable to endure the slightest disagreement probably says a great deal about him. So does the recent fracas in California where people's driveways were roped off, roads closed, and even walking was disallowed due to a Royal Visit. If there was ever any doubt, the subjects of California now have a crystal clear notion of where they stand in relation to the current White House occupant.

While the flow of oil into the Gulf has stopped, problems continue to plague the final shut-down of the well. I'm certainly no expert on stopping up an out-of-control oil well located under a mile of ocean, but it seems all the half-measures to make it look like BP was "doing something" while the relief well was being drilled have just made things worse.

Japan has long used its large number of centenarians as proof of its superior diet and culture. Now it turns out most of those people are dead, some for decades. The primary factor seems to be pension fraud combined with just not caring when Grandpa wanders away from home and never comes back. I love the sound popular myths make when they explode.

One of the primary features of a modern economy is a central bank; the Federal Reserve here in the United States. Is the Fed, and with it the concept of central banking, in decline? Like many of the things of recent vintage that we in the West like to assume have always been and will always be, the Fed is a recent innovation with no guarantee of being a permanent institution.

Well, I'm off to try to find where I can watch the new episodes of The Guild. MSN is supposed to have them, but they are doing a good job of hiding them. Bing simply dumps me back to The Guild's website where the blog informs me that the new episodes are available on MSN and Bing. I must be stupid or something. They are showing up slowly on The Guild website; episode one of season four is there to watch, but not two, three, four and five. Are the creators of the show forbidden from even linking to their own content? Holy crap; I finally managed to find them, but it wasn't anything like obvious how to get there from MSN's main page, nor is it obvious to me why Bing seems to be completely unaware of videos linked by www.bing.com. This is exactly why Google has nothing to fear from Redmond. Holy. Crap.

And thanks to all the readers of The Archdruid Report for making August 17, 2010 one of the busiest days this blog has seen in a long time.