Way Beyond Drought-Free

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The San Antonio Express-News reports that this is the first time in fifty years that no part of Texas is in a drought. They also note unnecessarily that you can have too much of a good thing. The skies actually look fairly clear this morning, which is a little cheering, but I'm afraid we still have more of a 'good thing' coming to us, at least for a little while.

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Way Beyond Drought-Free

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The San Antonio Express-News reports that this is the first time in fifty years that no part of Texas is in a drought. They also note unnecessarily that you can have too much of a good thing. The skies actually look fairly clear this morning, which is a little cheering, but I'm afraid we still have more of a 'good thing' coming to us, at least for a little while.

xXx

Market Tremors

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Stock prices tumbled on Wall Street and across much of the rest of the world yesterday. They were driven sharply lower by worries over slowing economic growth in the United States and worsening borrowing conditions that could make everything from huge corporate buyouts to buying a new home more difficult.

It was the worst one-day decline on Wall Street since markets plunged worldwide in late February after an investing scare in Shanghai, and it occurred amid the biggest volume of trading on the New York Stock Exchange in five years. Losses were comparable throughout Europe, and larger in many developing countries.

-- Floyd Norris and Vikas Bajaj for The New York Times

The stock markets have taken a hit, and since our resident economist, Paul Krugman, has written it up in user-friendly terms, we'll get it down for our own record. His liberal edge also makes the discussion a little pointed.

( Krugman )

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Market Tremors

♠
Stock prices tumbled on Wall Street and across much of the rest of the world yesterday. They were driven sharply lower by worries over slowing economic growth in the United States and worsening borrowing conditions that could make everything from huge corporate buyouts to buying a new home more difficult.

It was the worst one-day decline on Wall Street since markets plunged worldwide in late February after an investing scare in Shanghai, and it occurred amid the biggest volume of trading on the New York Stock Exchange in five years. Losses were comparable throughout Europe, and larger in many developing countries.

-- Floyd Norris and Vikas Bajaj for The New York Times

The stock markets have taken a hit, and since our resident economist, Paul Krugman, has written it up in user-friendly terms, we'll get it down for our own record. His liberal edge also makes the discussion a little pointed.

( Krugman )

xXx

The Sky Is Blue?

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Oh my, is that a vanilla sky? Such white, fluffy-cottony clouds against a cerulean sky of breathtaking blue. Beautiful! For so long it has been a flat slate of sooty-greys and black.

Give me a week of this and I should actually be able to reclaim the lawn again as well as give Bo a good washing.

It feels so human!

However, there is a bit of a dark tint at the bottom of a lot of these clouds, like a hint of anger that yet remains, and I am still expecting that we will get hit again over the weekend, but what a heavenly respite, perhaps a sign of things to come, soon, if we can just hold out a little longer.

xXx

The Sky Is Blue?

♠
Oh my, is that a vanilla sky? Such white, fluffy-cottony clouds against a cerulean sky of breathtaking blue. Beautiful! For so long it has been a flat slate of sooty-greys and black.

Give me a week of this and I should actually be able to reclaim the lawn again as well as give Bo a good washing.

It feels so human!

However, there is a bit of a dark tint at the bottom of a lot of these clouds, like a hint of anger that yet remains, and I am still expecting that we will get hit again over the weekend, but what a heavenly respite, perhaps a sign of things to come, soon, if we can just hold out a little longer.

xXx

Harold Bloom on the Harry Potter Mania

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Andrew Sullivan has pointed the way to an old review by Harold Bloom of the first Harry Potter book, and his discussion of the Potter mania then seems timely to the recent wave of fanfare over the final book in the series. I'm a Harold Bloom fan and consider him to be perhaps the number one reader of all readers and book lovers, and I thought it would be worth getting his review down for my own record.

( Harold Bloom )

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Harold Bloom on the Harry Potter Mania

♠
Andrew Sullivan has pointed the way to an old review by Harold Bloom of the first Harry Potter book, and his discussion of the Potter mania then seems timely to the recent wave of fanfare over the final book in the series. I'm a Harold Bloom fan and consider him to be perhaps the number one reader of all readers and book lovers, and I thought it would be worth getting his review down for my own record.

( Harold Bloom )

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