You know as I was putting together my lunch to take into work today I was thinking just how oppressively hot it was outside yesterday afternoon. I remember marveling at one point because the temperature in Floyd, Va was only two degrees lower than the temperature in Houston, Tx. Then I noticed the humidity in both places…Houston was at 69% and Floyd was in the mid 40’s. And there in a nutshell is the difference in how it feels. Every morning here starts out about 80° with a humidity hovering almost at the 100% mark. By afternoon the temperature will have climbed into the 90’s and the humidity will drop down into the 65 – 80% range and the weather prognosticators will inform us (sometimes, it appears, with glee) that the “feels like” temperature is 100° or higher. Yesterday it “felt like” 102° or so they say. Last week we were hitting over 110° regularly.

I’ll be glad when the “feels like” temperature is closer to 50° with the wind chill factored in. But for that I’ll have to wait.

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Leave it to Garrison to pass on trivia I am sure I could live without. I’ll probably get more mileage out of this tidbit than I ever did the show itself…

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

It was on this day in 2000 that 51 million Americans sat in front of their television sets to watch the final two-hour episode of a strange new game show called Survivor. It was the second most watched television broadcast that year, coming in second only to the Super Bowl.The show took 16 ethnically and demographically diverse Americans and put them on a deserted tropical island, where they had to live in the rough, compete as teams for privileges and prizes, and vote one person off the island each week. The last person remaining would get $1 million.

The show caught on in part because of the backstabbing intrigue between the contestants. Everything they did or said was filmed by one of eight cameras. Each one-hour episode of the show was edited down from more than 100 hours of video. So viewers of the program got to watch as the residents on the island became friends with each other, then formed alliances, and then slowly double-crossed and betrayed each other down to the last person standing.

On the final episode, viewers were horrified when the show’s most treacherous and seemingly heartless contestant, the man who had orchestrated many of the conspiracies and lies, Richard Hatch, won the prize.

And to think, I wasn’t one of the 51 million and it’s been seven years and I still haven’t tuned in once. Reality TV has never held an interest for me. Not “America’s Funniest Home Video”, not “Big Brother”, and especially not “Survivor”. I held out hope for the “Greatest Race” but it only took a couple of episodes that first season to show me the error of my ways. I suppose if I had cable or satellite I could watch our elected officials scheming on the floors of Congress…How much more reality do you need?

You want reality…Put cameras in the White House….Tack a wireless webcam onto all of those Blackberries…Talk about open government, now there’s an idea, totally transparent government. Watch anytime you have a few minutes. See who has the President’s ear at this very moment. Check out the romance by the copy machine…Or are they spies distracting us with the smooching as they copy top secret documents? Think about it…”The Reality of the West Wing”. How quick do you think it would be canceled? Would we get a special election to replace the cast? Would the public vote out one “cast member” a week or would we let the other “cast members” cast them out? OK Hollywood, you saw it here first…All I want is creative credit.

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Yesterday morning Fred First emailed me a link to a fix discussion page for a problem we had been having with images and spacing on our blog pages. That link alone caused me  to kill an hour following the discussion and the example links to other pages. I needed to kill an hour when I should have been coming up with something convoluted to put here on these pages. But I really did enjoy the lessons and I added the link and a few others to my Blogging Tools Bookmarks to refer to. While the original link was in reference to the specific theme we both use I think I’ll drop it here in case anyone else would care to learn a little (more) about css…

• Image Handling With Cutline
• Pearonified

Looks like I have some more learning to do…And you all know the story about old dogs and new tricks…

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It’s time for the rubber to meet the road. Catch ya’ll on the other side…