Pls. Pardon the Tardiness of My Reply

Note: This was an actual response (augmented herein with links) to an actual email from an actual friend. And with a bit of magical editing, it seems particularly apt for today.

Dear [Mysterious Unnamed Person]:

Not meaning to make my own point, but please forgive the tardiness of this reply, as the world has become molasses around my ankles: while writing the last blog, the computer slowed down to the point that it was taking forever just to save a file, etc.

It's been like that transition from running on solid ground to running on the beach. You're running just as hard, but only going half as fast. And that sinking with every step seems to exhaust you much faster than running had, before.

Various important projects are mired to the axles in "things that came up" and generally, it's been tough sledding. I can't imagine that it ISN'T what the sun's doing. Looking at the SOHO pictures for today, I have a sinking feeling that another Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) just blasted straight at us. When our early warning system works right, the astronauts working in the space station have enough warning to go to the shielded "shelter" until the CME has passed.

So, how come, with all the dime-store astrologers meaningfully staring at their navels and ruminating mysteriously about the fidgets of Chiron (which is barely more than a slush ball, for land sakes, and which virtually no astrologer has ever seen, since you need an astronomer and a pretty decent-sized telescope for that) but those self-same astrologers are willing to give breathless warnings about a cross-harmonic of the vibrations between the fourth and sixth orbits; but a Mars-Saturn square has GOT to be less important to the "astral weather" for that day than a giant cloud of radiative and radioactive gunk on the borderline between matter and energy is.

Frankly, the sun looks like it's going bugfuck karazeee.*

[NOTE, as a Zug public service, we have added a "solar weather" link to the left sidebar.]

And this is supposed to be solar MINIMUM! Solar maximum (on an eleven-year cycle) doesn't happen until 2012. Anyway, it's been generally toxic during the day, and not a lot better at night.

I don't see where it's too far out of line to think that perhaps the subtle circuitry of the brain is affected when the sun is blasting one of its periodic tantrums our way. Sort of an astral tsunami blasting in on the solar wind. It's as reasonable an explanation as any other bit of soothsaying.

Speaking of soothsaying we have the 'market oracles.' Thomas Carlyle said: "Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist."

And yes, the economy IS sucky, and it's a measure of how 1984-ish this all is that the "Dow" is at record levels. Has everybody forgotten that the Bushies rewrote the grading curve when they got into office so that they'd always get an "A" on their self-graded report cards?

The Ministry of Truth keeps dutifully grinding out those smiley-face, have-a-nice-day press releases. The better it sounds, the worse it is. The Russians at the end of the Empire (Brezhnev, not Czarist) had figured out how to make sense of the "anti-news" that Pravda (literally, in Russian, "truth") pumped out every day. And they became very sophisticated at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Too bad we haven't learned that one yet.

The dollar has devalued about 50% against the Euro, which has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. Energy prices have doubled and tripled. And gas prices aren't figured into the inflation figures. What? If you have a car to feed, there's nothing that sucks cash out of your pocketbook faster than gasoline. Which means that the "wild" purchases, the cool lighters, the magazines, the impulse buys that are often the profit margin in any small business, which all suffer. My wife does taxes (as do I, during season), and most of our yearly clients are small businesses, and right now they're ALL hurting.

But the government figures keep telling us how great the economy is.

And I feel like I'm running on the beach, but I notice that everybody seems to be running on that same beach, so perhaps you understand why this letter is so late.

And yes, it's good to laugh.

Bests,

Hart

Courage.

(D-Day + 63 ... years)