Good Monday morning and happy first day of summer. One of the weather people this morning took a dismal view of the summer solstice--he dreads the coming of winter. Me--I ams looking forward to tomatoes soon. At least three of the plants I started have little tomatoes on them. I say 'at least' because the tomatoes like to play 'hide and seek.' I found these when I pruned the plants a bit yesterday. I also found the first blossoms on the asparagus beans and noted buds on the violas and ichiban eggplants.

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It is now Tuesday and, as you can see, I didn't have much to say yesterday. It is wet today and we may have some more summer like storms later on. That means that I won't get anything done outside. However, we have one of our annual chores on tap: cleaning out the freezer and taking an inventory of what is there. It shouldn't take very long because we always time it so that we have a low inventory.

Part of the reason I haven't had anything to say is that nothing much has changed. Our political process is stalled, the BP situation doesn't really change, and the economy is either in delicate recovery or still stalled depending on your point of view. This unchanging morass allows my untidy little mind to drift into some interesting pathways.

For the last week or so, my thoughts keep drifting back to a line in a movie I rather like. About halfway through "Category 6: Day of Destruction" a sociopathic little would-be thug 'accidentally' shoots his former girlfriend. While he protests he didn't mean it, the girl's mother tells him "Threatening people with a loaded gun is no accident." That sums up much of the BP "accident." It was an accident ONLY in the sense that no one actually intended the spill to happen. Just like the boy in the movie, he never INTENDED to shoot--simply to get his way by threatening to shoot. And he never intended to shoot the girl he was trying to win back. But, he chose to carry the gun, he chose to threaten people with the gun, and anyone who wasn't a self-centered ass could have foreseen the possible outcome. If the news stories are accurate (and the investigation into the causes of the incident are still on going) various BP employees made a series of decisions that shaved costs and time but all of which carried risks. At the time they balanced those risks against the potential profits and decided in favor of the profits. Like the young idiot in the movie, they did not really consider the possibility of disaster. But, you say, they had a 'disaster plan?' And what a cookie cutter joke that was. Every other oil company had an almost verbatim copy of the same plan with the same out dated or inapplicable information and the same emphasis on managing the news spin. They never INTENDED to cause a spill; but, every decision they made to cut corners and costs ensured that when it happened it would be a doozy.

I found this article on the Oil Drum this morning that had a comedy sketch with Jon Stewart and a nice analysis which points to another reason why we are not likely to be as hard on BP as perhaps we should. The author points out that the U.S. domestic production peaked around 1970 at which time our oil consumption was about twice our production. Since that time production has declined to half of the 1970 level while our consumption has almost doubled. That is one big hole to dig ourselves out of.

I saw this article on my new alert this morning and both of us here gave a hurrah when I read it aloud. I do hope that the New York House confirms the New York Senate's vote. Basically, the law, if it goes all the way through and is signed, would assign ALL of New York's Electoral College votes to which ever candidate wins the NATIONAL popular vote. So far, according to the article, five states have approved similar laws. They note that George Bush would never have become president if enough states had had this law on the books. I can think of another benefit--we wouldn't have the national news media calling the election before the West Coast polls close.