America is in crisis. Much like the homo sapien citizen, our elephants have succumbed to too much TV and super-sized meals. And in that vein of thinking, Americans, as the world’s fitness experts, have done for our elephant brethren what we do for ourselves: buy exercise equipment. Yes, an elephant in Alaska now owns a treadmill. Here’s the story.

Now how long do you think it will be until visitors to the zoo walk by the elephant enclosure and see it being used as a clothes rack. I’m guessing 3 weeks.

Jim Lee is a cool guy. Here are two of his blogs:

The old site: GELATOMETTI
The new site: Sun of GELATOMETTI

He writes, draws, inks, and does whatever else a cool comic book needs. I got a recent set of his Batman comics. They were impressive.

Stan Lee, unfortunately, is not Korean, but he is also quite good. Let us mourn and rejoice at the same time.

Hurricane Katrina brought widespread devestation to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. Many have opined that a new better New Orleans will rise from the polluted waters of the city. Much like an episode of the 4400, there may be ripples…

Notice that Mike Brown has stepped down from FEMA due to everyone realizing that the emperor has no clothes. Could this be the first of many cronies to be removed from key government positions? Don’t get me wrong, I understand you have to try and get your friends and family a job, but one they are wholeheartedly unqualified for? This kind of stuff is ruining America.

NPR said today that there was a Plum book that is given to the president, which lists all the jobs that don’t require any kind of committee approval or congressional approval to appoint a person to. The people should take the opportunity and look through this book and find all of the other Mike Browns in government today.

President Bush recently suggested that the Pentagon should take over disaster relief efforts to avoid the “cluster f***” that was the response to Hurricane Katrina. I guess he got this idea while hanging out at NORCOM. Among all those screens and reports, he probably realized that, “Hey these guys know what they are doing.” Hell yeah they know what they are doing. So why don’t we saddle down an organization that has it’s act together with more unrelated responsibilites.

FEMA used to do a decent job before cronyism and lack of funding messed it up. Based on this same logic, we should continue to move away state and local responsibilites to the federal government in those cases where the federal government is responsible in the case of a national crisis. To this end, I propose we put the education department under the military. Also, driver’s licenses and testing should be done by the Pentagon. After all, the interstate system does run across states and it connects local roads to federal roads.

Hopefully, when this comes to Congress they will not try to pass the disaster relief buck to an already stretched thin military, but will solve the underlying issues. Homeland Security must fulfill its mission of coordinating information and capabilities to protect the lives and security of U.S. citizens. Whether the attack be by terrorists, weather, disease, or other threats, we need to have coordinated preparation and response. Not the finger pointing and buck-passing that has occurred as of late.

I’m allowing comments on this post for the next week or so.

I was looking through a copy of Real Simple the other day. Examining new options for cleaning my closet, reorganizing my life, and getting stains out of my delicates. I saw an article about exercising and it mentioned indoor rowing.

I was reminded about my days in college, rowing for the crew team. The many hours spent on the old Concept 2 Model C.

Apparently the new Model D is quieter, so you can hear yourself crying as you do a long row. That was pretty much impossible with the C. Nice work. It also has the ability to upload your data to a website so you can see how bad you stink compared to the rest of the world. I used to only get beat by the other people in my boat and team. Now I have a whole world of rowers!

I’m thinking I want one. Here’s the link: Concept2