Toxic Waste and Dancing with the Stars

I've been fulminating about the current economic disaster and the lack of Presidential and Congressional leadership to deal with it for a few days now, and so it's time to shift gears just a little bit. I'm so angry about the whole thing that it's probably better to back off for a day or two lest all my readers start to think that I'm obsessed or something. Even if I am.

Like many of you, I like to follow the statistics of visits to my blog. According to MyBlogLog, I have learned that my two most-read posts are "Don't Dig Here!" (1,951 hits) and "Helio Castroneves Wins Dancing with the Stars" (3,351 hits). "Don't Dig Here!" discussed the problem of how to craft warnings about toxic waste dump sites to civilizations tens of thousands of years in the future; the other, of course, was my summary of the last season of "Dancing with the Stars."

Speaking of toxic waste, and considering the speech presented by President Bush last night, you may enjoy this great editorial cartoon from Tom Toles of the Washington Post earlier this week:

Yucca Mountain, of course, is the yet-to-be-opened storage site for nuclear waste in the remote Nevada desert.

Speaking of "Dancing with the Stars," like most ballroom dancers I'm of two minds about the show. My friend lacegem, commenting on yesterday's post, said she'd stopped watching the show because "...Most of America only votes for the cute couple or the hot looking star or dancer & not necessarily the best dancer," and notes that she'd rather watch "real ballroom dancing on PBS." In one way, I agree with her. It's very frustrating to watch people with real talent like Sabrina Bryan
and Melanie Brown

get voted off while talentless losers like "Master P"

and talentless but entertaining losers like George Hamilton

and, this season, Cloris Leachman

keep coming back.

But nevertheless, I keep watching...it's sort of like the fascination that makes one want to gawk at a ghastly wreck on the highway. And who knows? It may be tacky and puffed up with Hollywood kitsch and fluff, but Dancing with the Stars is better than no dancing at all.

And someday, I will have my waltz with Edyta Sliwinska.


Have a good day. Hold on to your wallets...Congress is still working on the plan to save its favorite campaign contributors.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - If you have MS-Office installed on your computer, and would like to see a great (if somewhat crude) PowerPoint explanation of the subprime mortgage mess, e-mail me at bilbo_the_blogger (at) yahoo dot com and I'll send you a copy. You'll love it. Mike, I already sent it to you.

B.