Tribute to Rob Ford

What everybody wants to know, is "Why did you vote for him?".  We knew he was a jolly drunk, but every politician and businessman in Canada is like that.  It has always been that way.  We have long, cold winters, and a huge amount of male depression.  Drinking has been the traditional self-medication for that.  The alternative was being a mean and nasty non-drinker like Harper.

What we didn't know was that he had become an Uber-Drunk.  Ethanol, like all the self medications for depression becomes less effective as your body becomes totally pickled.  A happy drunk like the First Prime-minister merely drinks himself to sleep every night.  But even with that, the ethanol becomes ineffective for depression, but you can't live without it.  Enter cocaine and crack.  This stuff allows you to stay up way past your bedtime, and continue the party.  It's just a close relative to caffeine, after all.

Unfortunately, you become way more than merely pickled, and quickly die at a young age.  Everyday drunks can make it way past 60 before the liver fails.

Rob Ford, nevertheless, made an impact for his few months.  He scared the heck out of sleepy politicians and bureaucracy that supports them.  I have never seen such responsiveness, and probably will never again witness it.  There is question of whether this spurt caused more good than the later badness.  I won't go into that.

I lift up a drink in tribute to this fine old drunk, and warn all the others running the country - Stay away from that white powder.  :)

Toronto Liability Issue

I find that with poor Rob Ford gone, the city bureaucracy is less responsive.  They were terrified of him!  Here's something that I hope the next activist picks up.  All the rotund old men are sliding up and down this hill, inspired by the Rob Ford Situation (early death).

ps.  I gave it to the city, and invoked the ghost of Rob Ford who will blow crack at them.  :)

Oklahoma starts new intense earthquake phase

Allow me to be right once in a while.  We had a few weeks of deep earthquakes, and I detected a deep mantle shift, making the New Madrid strain gauges (tiny earthquakes) sing.  Then I said we would see the earthquakes starting to rise again.  I don't rely on the seismometers to tell how deep an earthquakes is, the error bars are ridiculous.  Instead, I simply note the magnitude and the surface intensity.  Deep earthquakes don't do much on the surface.

Thus, today, we have a heck of a lot of activity.  Note the last two.  One is very deep, only giving an intensity 1, and the other is shallow, giving a 5 for the same mag.  I think the next few weeks will be mostly shallow, probably giving some good 4's or 5's.

Eventually, we will have a big surface strain event which will again ring New Madrid.  Then the earthquakes will go deep again to the mantle, since the mantle is tying up the strain.  How many times can we do this submarine act before the Big Whoops?  I don't know .