Hurricane Katrina

Man, what a horrific disaster. My heart goes out to all those poor people in the south who are homeless and jobless now. And dude! New Orleans! Is totally fucked!!! I was just there last summer with my friend M, and the idea of it all being underwater? Scary.

Of course, we're going to get royally screwed at the gas pumps now. And this winter? Sure to be a record-breaking PG&E bill, since they'll take advantage of the opportunity to raise the rates. The thing that gets me with the gas stations & the electric companies: do you ever hear of prices going DOWN? They claim that gas prices will shoot up for a couple of months and then "normalize." What that means is that they'll just not rise as fast anymore. Gas prices won't drop below $3 ever again, not once they've got it over that hump. It will probably climb to about $4 and then maybe, if we're lucky, it will drop back down to $3.50 and stay there. But we won't see $2.50 again. Ever.

And hello? What's with all the freakin' insane weather anyway? Is this global warming finally taking effect in a dramatic way? Very, very scary, y'all. We thought last winter's Florida hurricanes were bad? This is much, much worse. And honestly, it's not looking like the weather is going to be normal ever again either. The "natural disasters" just keep on coming. Actually, now that I think about it...California is overdue for a devastating earthquake, isn't it? As long as we've got a big ol' chunk of the southern U.S. out of commission, why not crack off the coastline for a couple hundred miles and drop it into the ocean? Amazingly enough, we haven't even had any really devastating wildfires in California this year, despite the six months straight of rain we had last winter and the consistently hot, dry summer we're having. Knock on wood.