June is Busting Out All Over

No, this isn't about June, or busts, or anything rational. I can't think of a subject, so maybe I'll just vamp for a bit.

The California primary elections are over, and most of who/what I voted for lost. (Come on, folks - rejecting library bonds?) No one is sure about the hot Oakland mayoral race, though, because Alameda County went back to paper ballots (carefully marked by filling in the ovals with a black felt pen), and they've been counting for 24 hours now and they still have almost 40,000 absentee and provisional ballots to go. Ron Dellums thinks he's got it sewed up but with a margin of 125 votes past the line labeled "Runoff", it's not sewed very tight.

The "dangerous" date of 6-6-06 is over, and the English lady who rescheduled childbirth to protect her child from being born on that Satanic date (the birthdate of the Beast?) can sigh with relief. Based on the Chronicle's review of the remake of "Omen", I won't bother to see this one either.

The administration is getting weirder and weirder. The anti-gay marriage amendment never had the chance of a celluloid cat in Hell, but they shoved it through the Senate anyhow, so they could point at it and "energize the base" to turn out for the election. If your base is fanatical Christian theocrats, and some of theirs is, you end up doing some very odd things to make them happy.

And I can't find the reference, but I'm sure I heard some govmint authority on the radio the other day, confidently predicting that there will be a major terrorist attack in the continental U.S., sometime in the next year. Unstated but there: vote for us Republicans again in November, and we'll protect you, just like we did the last time. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile the FBI wants to subpoena all of columnist Jack Anderson's papers, now that he's dead - they never did this while he was alive - they say, to protect any classified documents that may have been leaked to him. I think, to find out what he really knew, especially about J. Edgar Hoover...

Finally, according to Scientific American, the world has 4 "super-volcano" locations. These are places that, when they blow, spit out 750 cubic kilometers of magma all at once, eliminating the landscape, anything living on it within a radius of about 300 KM, and the entire world climate for at least decades. Mt. St. Helens blew out less than .5 cubic KM. Think Bishop tuff, those of you who know California geology. And of these 4 places, 2 of them are in North America (Yellowstone National Park, and Long Valley in California); how do we rate? Actually I don't think I want to know the answer to that. Fortunately, they don't blow very often.