The Short Summer, Erika, and Saddam

Usually I am especially glad to see the start of September, because it means my favorite season, the Fall, is here, and I am glad now, too. But because this past summer was so non-sweltering, compared to all the previous summers for a long while back, for a change I feel that it was much too short.

But that feeling is heavily influenced by the fact that tackling my firewood cutting is for the first time heavily on the daunting side, because the pain I feel in my right foot whenever I use it hasn't faded nearly enough.

--Like a lot of places, we need some rain, and another hurricane, Erika, is on the move, but, like the several hurricanes before it this year, this one is on a bad track that has it going north of Cuba instead of south, and that will cause Erika to bend sharply to the north before it can get close enough to the U.S. East Coast. All self-respecting hurricanes should slide into the Gulf of Mexico first, where that bowl of warm water can give them a good spin before they go on to other things.

--I've been looking at the HBO movie about the late Saddam Hussein and his family and confederates. It gives an interesting picture of how things looked from the Iraqi point of view.

But I'm a little disappointed in the actor who is playing Saddam. He doesn't look nearly enough like the dictator. And even worse, nothing is shown of Saddam's most characteristic physical aspect, which was that patented swagger, along with him holding up his open hand with his head slightly tilted.. You would think that any actor and director would have jumped at the chance to do that swagger. That should have been easy enough and impossible to exaggerate.

This film confirms what we already knew -- Saddam Hussein never saw a bad idea that he didn't like, and this shows the importance of having an opposition in every political system.

But in the case of those chronic naysayers, the Republicans, it's just that they take that concept way too far, and in so doing they constantly commit the crime of immoderation, and that is what makes them so attractive to the hate groups, in case any of them had been wondering