Slog AM included this warning from Seattle Weather Blog: "[Today] winds will ramp up quickly between 1-2 pm in Seattle, with gusts near 60 mph possible all afternoon and into the evening. Power outages are likely! Charge your phones this morning!" I did charge my phones. Indeed, I charged everything I could get my hands on. No blackout (whether caused by the weather or domestic terrorists) is going to stop me. Hell no. But it's around 4 pm at the moment of writing this, and there is nothing like real wind happening yet. Maybe later. Maybe tonight. Howling over the house. Loose trees uprooting. Garbage cans disappearing forever. If all of this happens, even my rechargeable wine opener will be ready for action. 

I want to thank Seattle Weather Blog for replacing Cliff Mass and making web-based weather reporting cool again. Mass is, of course, a climate denier whose position on the political spectrum is as far to the right as you can go. I told you about this back in 2016. But people were like: "He is a scientist, you not."

Flooding is so bad in some parts of Western Washington, that jellyfish have been going up and down the street like it ain't no thing.

Headlines like this are meant to kill whatever buzz there is to life: "Former WSU football player Jeremey Williams tackles new leadership role at Bank of America."

Trying to get back home by air? Here is the bad news (and this bad news looks like the future, which will be dramatically changed by global warming): "Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s run of delays and cancellations continued Tuesday, with 84 departing and arriving flights canceled and 153 delayed, according to tracking website FlightAware." I took a long-distance flight in early December. It was the first such trip in three years, and I hated every moment of it: delays, delays, delays. My imagination does not have the kind of power to connect that horrible experience with the one holiday travelers are going through now. Unimaginable.

Only what the police found in a North Seattle house: Guns, guns, and more guns.

MAGA is doing to Tesla what it did to My Pillow. True, its stock is crashing for a number of reasons, but certainly, the whole Musky Twitter fiasco and the pro-MAGA sagas are making things much worse. One must remember that rural America is not buying this or any other electric car. For them, liberating carbon is as American as the right to kill a classroom of children with an AR-15. It's the predominantly blue voters of the suburbs and cities who are buying EVs. And so the crash of Tesla's market value continues because Musk is seemingly unstoppable. At this point, the company's stock could fall below $100. It reached $409.97 just over a year ago (November 04, 2021).  

What is real about George Santos, the Long Island Republican "who turned the blue district red"? And, yes, we are laughing at you, "northern Long Island and northeast Queens." The whole world is. This guy's glasses might be fake. And he might not even be gay or Jewish. Certainly he lied about his educational and employment credentials. He admitted that much. But the rest is up in the air. And where did he get his money from ("[he] lent his campaign more than $700,000")? And nothing is going to stop him from representing you, Long Island and Queens. All we can do, in the words of Fela Kuti, is: "Look and laugh."    

Word, Doug Henwood:

Want to know why Republicans now run the House (which means the Supreme Court's attack on reproductive rights can go unchecked)? It's city stories like this one by KING 5: "Downtown Seattle staple Piroshky Piroshky reopens after closing for 10 months due to crime concerns." What about the pandemic? It's just crime? Seattle, do not fall for this crap. If you do, you'll fall into the same hole that Long Island is in today.  

Far-right Supreme Court is, you know (or you should know by now), going to far-right its rulings. 

Did Putin kill the Russian Sausage King? Looks like it. From the BBC: "Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov has been found dead at an Indian hotel, two days after a friend died during the same trip... The millionaire's death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticised the war." There are few things as gangster as whacking a sausage king.

Let's end PM with a French tune, Lescop's "La Forêt”: