WhimsyLand

In case you're curious what the color "Happenstance" looks like, it looks like that slate blue in my bathroom.  The fish watercolors I got in Hawaii, by the way.  The one on the top is a Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, about which Rachel once wrote a poem.

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... And, in case you haven't heard, there's two bit of news about BP, the oil giant: 

The first is that their second-quarter profits exceeded $7 billion, a record for BP and in the top 5 profitable quarters for any company on the planet in the history of the world (all the rest were oil companies, too). 

Second, apparently not enough of those profits have been used over the years to maintain their 30-year old pipelines in Prudhoe Bay, a facility that was never engineered to last even this long.  As a result, the largest source of US crude production will be shut down for weeks (or months, nobody knows yet).  Crude oil futures jumped another $2 a barrel, rewarding BP for their behavior.

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Ricki Lee Jones, whom I love to pieces, participated in a recording for Blue America.

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Happy birthday to Ron, who started his 7th decade on Saturday.  In another story, the universe has been lying about its age again.

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Almost every institution with whom I share a financial relationship is online:  banks, credit card companies, insurance firms, mortgage companies.  The only one that isn't is the IRS.  Why can't we log in and print out return from 4 years ago, or see how we're doing on the payment plan they accepted for last year's tax bill, or even get a link to our current standing in Social Security?

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I was looking for poker on Dish, and ran across an entertainment segment mentioning that Ric Ocasek, the most-time vocalist and songwriter for the Cars, had been married to supermodel Paulina Porizkova for 20 years.  I was about to load the car live into the DVD player, by wild coincidence.  It was shot in 1979 in Germany and even without the studio effects is seriously bad.  Ric's most recent appearance on national TV was on The Colbert Report when he "volunteered to lead a commando mission to rescue Stephen Jr., the baby eagle at the San Francisco Zoo named after Stephen Colbert."  Der had to listen to Heartbeat City all the way through Nebraska on our last drive to Columbia College.  There are worst things to endure.

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I got an email today announcing "the biggest literary event in 2006", which of course caught my eye.  It's the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour, stopping in 50 cities, which means it might actually get near the culture-starved Rockies.  I saw that Adam Clay is participating, and the website states that (gasp) Dean Young, Richard Siken, Arthur Sze, Matthew Rohrer, Noelle Kocot, Cole Swensen, James Tate and many other poets are in the mix.  The venues include "bookstores, galleries, clubs, prisons and schools".  Prisons.  Shades of Johnny Cash.

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The Oregon Republican Party has a plank in their party platform that would strip US-born children of citizenship if their parents are non-citizen immigrants, even legal immigrants.  It was a really keen idea, and probably would have taken off like anti-gay marriage initiatives, except that it violates the 14th Amendment.

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The role of the Executive Branch is to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." It has the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Republican Party and on America.  The law has been changed in such a way that the Executive Branch actions are not subject to judicial review. Jurist Harriet Miers stated, "As long as the [Executive Branch] ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally." The Executive Branch is specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally can sue the state to conform to laws.  The power of the Executive Branch most open to misuse is "protective custody" — a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in concentration camps.

This is from the original Wikipedia article, except that I changed the tense and substituted "Executive Branch" for "Gestapo", "Republican" for "Nazi", "America" for "Germany", and "Harriet Miers" for "Dr. Werner Best".