4 Days to Go

Preparation for the cruise is going pretty well. (Click on the above for the high resolution graphic which shows the ports, lat/long, time zones, etc.) It always feels like I'm "settling my affairs" (if that were only true) before these long trips, and this one is longer than most. I'm charging the camera batteries and weighing all those 3 oz shaving cream cans to see which one has the most stuff in it.

It looks like the weather here in Boulder and in Los Angeles and down the coast shouldn't be a factor for the start of the trip. Now, it's up to United Airlines, but I'm watching the TV about all the scary weather in the Gulf. I almost feel sorry for the 24 hour news networks having to fill up when their editors have decided that a slow moving storm is their only story.

I just heard one of the CNN reporters talk about “the center of the eye of the hurricane touching land.” Since the eye is a patch of no weather, he was talking about a geometric calculation rather than an actual thing or even an event. I guess it would have been awkward to say, “the moving mathematical point half way between the eye cloud walls will be calculated to be over the actual coastline”. At any rate, don’t the networks have waterproof cameras they can put out on the beach so that they don’t have to get people to stand in the rain and lose their hats?

The reporters are interviewing each other about their experiences covering hurricanes. Sometimes it’s multiple reporters interviewing multiple other reporters about multiple hurricanes. They also compliment each other a lot. It’s hard to love that 24/7 news. I miss the old 11 PM 15 minute newscasts I’d watch when I was a kid with an old print journalist reading the copy that he had worked on carefully for hours before the broadcast. The evening news usually was just the talking head with no graphics except for a short clip from a newsreel, usually of a “flood in China last week”. The only other person on the program was the weatherman who was as creepy as the newsman was serious. Or maybe it was just that the weatherman couldn’t hold his alcohol as well as the newsman.