Houston, we have a problem.....

Hurricane Ike. Just like Michael Myers in the movie Halloween, the more times you think this thing is dead, the more times it sits up and comes after you with evil intent. Jamie Lee Curtis, if you're in Houston right now, GET OUT! Even earlier today the computer models had this thing going anywhere from Brownsville to Louisiana, with Corpus Christi the likeliest target, but now it seems to be holding a bit further North. That means the cruise ship port of Galveston, and the inland city of Houston are in for a ride. There's no silver lining to be found here, if you're wondering.....this darn storm is just a mess, and has carved a horrendous wake in the Atlantic and Northern Caribbean. Cuba will be reeling for years behind this deadly hurricane, and of course with the current government we'll never get the true story of how badly they were hit. At least there is nothing trailing Ike at the moment. The Caribbean, Florida and tropical Atlantic have been hammered one after another rat-a-tat-tat, for weeks on end. As they say, you deserve a break today.

Thankfully, the Prez candidates have called a momentary truce while the Country remembers its fallen from 9/11. I was glad to see that politics, as muck-raking as they've been, can take a back seat to something truly memorable and important albeit for 24 hours (if we're lucky).

I remember the morning of 9/11/01 hours before its infamy....living in the Carolinas, we always brag about the Carolina Blue sky, and I remember walking to my car that morning on the way to work. Bright sunshine abounded, it was a nice comfortable temperature, and I can recall looking up and actually saying "that's the most beautiful sky I've ever seen." Little more than 2 hours later, it turned into the meanest and most despicable sky of all time. Sometimes irony is, well, ironic. I first heard the news when Allison Yezek spoke up from across the room, saying a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. In my mind's eye, I'm picturing a Cessna that lost control, and was hoping the single pilot got out ok. Within minutes, the world we live in changed forever. While zealots dreamt of their brand of heaven, expecting dozens of virgins to be waiting for them, I said a prayer asking that a new level of Hell be opened up, to accommodate the kind of gross inhumanity these sadists had created and rained down on the world. I won't know if that prayer was answered until I'm standing at the Gates, but it gives me a bit of calm in the name of justice, to think MAYBE it was.