We're stuck again with a grey days spell of the kind Lee caught so well in one of her few photos at 'odessa street' (now among "places I go"). And the equally bleak prospect that, the way things have gone so far, the team currently in the White House may now be elected back in to scare the shit out of some of the rest of us for another four years.
Not that I've needed Rumsfeld and that crowd seriously to upset my tummy. Dr Yang, hater of Mondays and a hero of this log, finally gave me what's needed last night, we hope, because the state of my bowels over the past couple of weeks is really of no interest here!
The fellow also needed to vent spleen, in his wry and funny way, about recent Middle Eastern matters and media handling of them to a friendly ear, so much that (not for the first time) when we were done I had to sit outside until he'd seen his next patient to fetch paperwork we'd both forgotten.
A perhaps unreliable memory reminds me that in 1991, after the last Gulf war, the weather turned unpredictable and often foul for some months. Environmentalists were among those who raised the alarm before this latest one, reported a Washington post article back in March. Last time, wrote Eric Pianin:
"retreating Iraqi forces set fire to more than 600 Kuwaiti oil wells, creating toxic smoke that choked the atmosphere and blocked the sun. The Iraqis dumped 4 million barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf, tarring beaches, killing more than 25,000 birds and driving millions more away, according to data compiled by the World Resources Institute and other organizations that monitor the environment. Spills of 60 million barrels of oil in the desert formed huge oil lakes and percolated into aquifers.
"More than 80 percent of Kuwait's livestock perished during the war, and fisheries were heavily polluted, according to the monitoring groups. The burning oil fields released nearly a half-billion tons of carbon dioxide, an amount of greenhouse gas that many scientists say is the leading cause of the earth's rising temperature."
I don't know whether the fearsome tornadoes which just swept part of the American Midwest are related to global warming and will very likely be told that they aren't. But I'll feel much better when there's a team in Washington that takes an intelligent attitude to fossil fuels, if our kids are not going to live under the domes dreamed up by some science-fiction writers.
 While largely ignoring climate change is not just US policy of course, South Africa is the only country I've been to so far where a privately owned internal combustion engine is indispensable to daily city life. However, the appalling public transport system Johannesburg authorities are trying to change is a legacy of apartheid and not the outcome of urban "planning" where the motor car is god.
The mildly gory picture is 'borrowed' from an unlikely tale:
"In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.
Really.
'This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind,' says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. 'This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming.'
Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true."
Well, that's all right then: "600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into four billion barrels of light Texas crude each year," speculates Brad Lemley in the latest issue of Discover. The story is quite fascinating, but once you reach the end, it's clear that what they're dreaming about at Changing World Technologies could take a very long time coming.
Never mind. For now, we've got a fine trio installed to get Iraq's oil ministry up and running again for the "benefit of its owners: the Iraqi people." In George we trust! Oh, as for all those other chemicals that led America, in the first place, into its least well-disguised exercise in imperial management to date, columnist Gwynne Dyer brought me a smile:
"The favorite fantasy headline of British comedian Spike Milligan was: 'Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!' We are unlikely to see a similar headline in any American paper soon, but in the rest of the world the continued failure of the U.S. and British occupation forces in Iraq to find any of the 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) that were the alleged reason for their invasion is a diplomatic disaster and a joke in very bad taste."
(Thanks to Norm over at 'onegoodmove' for Dyer's diatribe).
Time for lunch. I intend to walk out to have it, not being particularly inclined to swallow yet more soup. And whether or not it stays down, I promise not to mention my insides again.
But I'd still like to know why the thermometer outside is doing a dance across, roughly, a 12°C spectrum on an almost midday to midday basis.
1:53:00 PM link 
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