You could feel a giant sucking sound and fine, blame the third year of a drought …

Water, water, nowhere
and not a drop to drink …

You could feel a giant sucking sound and fine, blame the third year of a drought but all those showers and dishwashers and hotels doing laundry and too green golf courses in a desert … madness! I already knew that Las Vegas was a nightmare born of the Hoover Dam’s cheap electricity, but I hadn’t really considered where they got the water from. Or how much those asshats use. I thought there was some sort of water source but it turns out the palm trees were imported back in the early nineteen hundreds to trick people into thinking it was an oasis.

Makes Babbit seem more and more horrendous as a warning … a terrible novel but what it reveals of the attempt to build everywhere and have cities compete for business, as they do to this day with ludicrous special tax breaks and subsidized infrastructure. Always whining that without breaking zoning they can’t make a profit … and without cheap water it turns out people won’t use enough to make it profitable for the massive water authorities to sell because they rely on bulk to pay for the cost of infrastructure. While they literally drain lakes. And wouldn’t Russ Roberts sense my parched experience, and explain the full horror, just yesterday:

David Zetland on Water

EconTalk Episode with David Zetland

Hosted by Russ Roberts

David Zetland of Leiden University College in the Netherlands and author of Living with Water Scarcity talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the challenges of water management. Issues covered include the sustainability of water supplies, the affordability of water for the poor, the incentives water companies face, and the management of water systems in the poorest countries. Also discussed are the diamond and water paradox, campaigns to reduce water usage, and the role of prices in managing a water system.

And it all starts with a talk about California … where there are too many middle men having meetings, I am willing to bet, as all those authorities hold membership meetings and stay in hotels, using up precious resources while lecturing the rest of us, but not really meaning it. Who are these people? Babbits?

But sequing through Babbit to more cheerful atmospherical observations, my hubby spotted a rabbit, or as he really did say, a bunny, on our front walk the other evening. I think that is a much better indicator of spring than some crabby groundhog hauled out so cheesy politicians can have their ears bitten, on camera. But kudos to the snacking groundhog, and to our brave bunny, who took one heck of a winter on the chin. The more people behave like people, the more I enjoy the rest of the animal kingdom.

Somehow in our family we inherited a weird superstition that if you said rabbits as the very first word you spoke on the first day of the month you would have a lucky month. And here we have had an actually sighting! So rabbits to you all [all? hahahah, ed.] as we say around here to spread the karma, and in closing let me share a terrible pun/joke of my dad’s, about a rabbit who after a cold shower turned to his buddy and said: “I just washed my thing and I can’t do a hare with it!”

Have a tremendous Tuesday, and go bite your mayor on the ear!

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34 Responses to You could feel a giant sucking sound and fine, blame the third year of a drought …

  1. Dryocopus pileatus says:

  2. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    Parc national des Pingualuit

  3. xty says:

    Did someone say Pingu?

  4. xty says:

    Good morning. Sleepless in Ottawa would make an even worse movie. But good morning nonetheless.

  5. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    as it turns out i’m not actually out of money yet.

  6. xty says:

    I thought maybe Ed McMahon had come to your door. [That was the name of the Publishers’ Clearinghouse fellow right?]

  7. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    nope. but the Mormon missionaries rang the bell again today. same ones as last week, so i didn’t get caught. we get the Jehova’s Witnesses here also. as this town has declined economically, it seems like the door to door soul saving business has picked up. hope sells ya know. plus more people are home during the day now.

    hope you don’t mind my off topic posts. i have not been very cerebral this week. the water topic is a good one, so maybe i will contribute some thoughts later.

    that picture above is way far north in Quebec. it is a meteor impact crater. that lake contains some of the purest water in the world. so all they need is to legalize gambling and prostitution, then rename the place Les Prairies.

  8. xty says:

    They already have the enormous hydro-electric dams. And I think gambling and prostitution are legal in Quebec, at least in Montreal, where the Mafia made itself at home decades ago.

    And there really is no need to stick to topic … an eclectic menu is my cup of tea.

    And Good Morning.

  9. xty says:

    My cup of tea. And yes, the windows are that dirty. The other day I spazzed leaving the house and sprayed some tea from my travel mug onto the wall beside the front door and it froze before I could wipe it off. But somehow the windows are completely splattered with that omnipresent city dirt, my other cup of tea not having the reach. There has been endless construction around and about us, infills and repellant condo buildings and with it comes soot. Plan old-fashioned soot.

    But back to my cup of tea. And you can just make out the insult to injury where I had to make a window of duct tape and construction plastic after nitwits broke into our Pilot outside my mum’s retirement home, and found that one man’s trash was another man’s trash, and stole nothing. But what an incredible amount of glass that little window produced. The vehicle will just die one day, but we intended to take it cradle to grave and seem to have succeeded.

  10. xty says:

    Good late morning. Sometimes I really think I will wake up feeling better and then life just whacks me with a lead pie. But at least yoga has already really helped me with “making room for my heart” and straightening up my posture, even when lying down, and even when feeling crunched with pain.

    Here’s a weird story. We have a St Vincent’s just around the corner which I had managed to cure myself of going to but recently have started again, and I saw this pair of hiking boots that looked brand new and just my size (actually a tiny bit big but my feet are wide and hate being squished). I quickly surfed the web and while I couldn’t find the exact boot it was obviously an expensive German made boot, fit wonderfully and on line was clearly expensive, and they only wanted $18 tiny Canadian dollars.

    Got home and did a better search and I seem to be in possession of boots made for operation Desert Storm or whatever the attempt to control the heroin trade in Afghanistan was called. Bought by the Australians, Canadians, Brits and Americans, imagine that. I guess it really is an ill wind that blows no good, as the flute said to the bent oboe.

    Meindl Desert Fox, or should I say Myndl:

  11. xty says:

    I was making dinner and put on my endless playlist, and a number of songs got me feeling much more like a happy human, and the first one I really noticed affecting my mood was this. But I am often lyrically driven.

  12. Pete Maravich says:

  13. Pete Maravich says:

  14. Pete Maravich says:

    random input.
    weekend off.
    big family b’day party this weekend.
    gotta figure out how to get a dog into my home. ($’s and such)

    tune that keeps popping in my cranium, and samples from ol :mrgreen:

  15. Pete Maravich says:

  16. Pete Maravich says:

  17. Pete Maravich says:

    my contribution to the lyrical appreciation club.

  18. Pete Maravich says:

  19. Pete Maravich says:

    for some reason I’ve always believed that this was written for Owsley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley & his perfect acid.

    or maybe not.

  20. Pete Maravich says:

  21. Pete Maravich says:

  22. xty says:

    I had to fill out a questionnaire, actually four of them, online before my appointment at the cannabinoid clinic on Monday and it asked some questions that I felt compelled to answer honestly, or mostly honestly, about previous recreational drug use. And while I cannot imagine wanting to do acid again, it was most interesting.

  23. xty says:

    And just being a whiner but my leg and side have been putting on quite the show the last two days and my mind is scattered. It isn’t the quality of the pain, it is the relentless nature of it. But my activity level has crawled to a snail’s pace after getting a little too busy. Happens every time but I fail to recognize the lead up and think I am getting stronger and feeling better but the last two mornings have been a struggle.

    And I guess I will be breaking my schadenfreude rules, but March can’t help but make me think of Mr Fix and hope not springing eternal for so many because they choose to live in fear. I have been listening to a most immature podcast called My Brother My Brother and Me, and catching up on old episodes I heard them read a letter from Yahoo Answers about Obama cancelling the 2012 elections, and just yesterday Fred Eaglesmith’s Might Big Car played on my playlist and it always conjures up an image of Mr Fix and his big old car, sharp screwdriver at the ready to steal the gas from the sheeple’s modern cars, disabled by an EMP. And here we are, in March of 2015.

    Not saying it is all puppies and unicorns, just saying they didn’t take out 95% of the population … yet.

  24. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    and in keeping with the glass half full point of view, let me say that i believe the “winter from hell”, season II, has ended.

  25. xty says:

    No Russian troops in the streets, no intentional domestic nuclear attack by Obama … haven’t been eaten by Daystar. The problem, or a problem but a biggie, with conspiracy theorists is that they miss the actual mess going on right in front of them. Small erosions of liberty in the name of safety, and huge extensions of liberty to corporations under the guise of regulation, managing to give regulation a bad name in the process. And I do believe especially in the States that there has been a huge growth in those who receive some sort of government benefit, or worse have a government backed loan, either car or student or good old Fannie and Freddie, and the government uses that to grow its borg, sucking people up into it. So as the economy stutters, the response is to grow government. But there is no one size fits all solution and a return to a much more diverse and federalist landscape strikes me as essential.

    I am hesitant to introduce aspects of my personal life that involve close family members, but especially now that they have been fully funded, I thought I should link to this project. We do not always see eye to eye, but believing that Magna Carta and the ancient freedoms it enshrined lies at the core of the freedoms we currently enjoy, is certainly strong mutual ground.

  26. xty says:

    And my defence of liberty today will be to get on a bus to Toronto, which somewhat ironically I often refer to as the Big Smoke, to hopefully get access to semi-legal kush after what will be as much interrogation as doctoring I suspect, but I am absolutely a good candidate for legal weed, and apparently they will demonstrate various vaporizers, which does interest me, and help me sign up with a dispensary … although I really want to use these folks, for personal reasons:

    http://www.seatosky604.com

  27. Dryocopus pileatus says:

    do you remember what we talked about by private message (well, you know) over that last weekend over there in Turdville? do you remember who else i talked to? Pining, CalLawyer, JY896, Argentus, Green Lantern… hope those idiots see this.

    if you want to understand Fix, this is a good place to start. the guy has done so much damage that i don’t feel sorry for him, despite the fact that such people usually have suffered some major psychological trauma in childhood. so for the “common good” people like him need to be publicly humiliated, and their on-line horror shows exposed for what they are – a great big insatiable ego feeding farce.

    http://samvak.tripod.com/journal67.html

    Fix has some you tube videos out now that are enough by themselves to diagnose him as a delusional narcissistic nut job. “Turd” is piecemeal deleting the history of that site, so much of Fix’s best has gone missing, including most of what you mention above. (Turd surely must still be under advisement of the Stane, the internet master scammer and vanisher).

    well, i won’t dwell. that blog is finished anyway.

    i like the Magna Carta subject. i am super busy right now, but will expand on it if i get the time. maybe you could make this a new blog heading? i will just say that government in itself isn’t evil. it is a necessity. the problem is with unchecked power. Federalism is the right word. i like that.

    sorry for not polishing this up. you know how i am. gotta go.

  28. xty says:

    I saved what I considered Fix’s magnum opus, for posterity. But he would have a youtube channel. Does he actually show his face? Won’t that help the special forces hunt him down to silence him?

    And on a side note in the slow steps towards freedom that swim against the current tide, compassionate doctor in Toronto, prescription for the only medicine legal here made from marijuana, cesimet, which I have tried before and found unnoticable, but hey, I will be compliant, and also one for 2 gms per day, for the next 5 weeks as a trial, that I can order not from my pal in BC, sad to say, but from one of the growers licensed by Health Canada. But they are online and I signed up with one there and then, they sold me a vape because the reasonable doctor goal is to minimize the harm of drug delivery. The system needs to churn for a day or two, and then I can actually order to my door, from a limited but adequate menu. This is going to lower my anxiety.

    And good morning.

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