Insomnia

Fox has dropped the lawsuit, so it's time to become unfair and not so balanced again.

I intended to get to sleep early tonight, but my chest is itching like mad, thanks to the healing sunburn, and I once again could not sleep. It's going to be a long night again. Thank goodness for Blogshares...

Our next door neighbor has been practicing the bagpipe in the evenings. I may be the only neighbor who adores the sound of it, even though the neighbor has been hitting a few sour notes. I love bagpipes.

Steve at Modulator speculates that if a heat wave like the one hitting France were to hit Seattle, the death toll would be just as high. From what little I've read about the problems in France, I think that unlikely. What seems to be missing from a lot of articles on the French death toll are the factors that contributed seriously to the problem. Lack of air conditioning is the biggest one, and Steve thinks that the same problem exists in Seattle. Except it doesn't. Yes, air conditioning in private homes is very rare here, but in businesses it is far more common. Apparently this is not the case in France. In Seattle, you would be hard-pressed to find even one hospital that doesn't have air conditioning. In France, virtually no hospitals had it, and that was why many people died even after they got medical help. When someone gets desperately hot in Seattle, they go to a mall or even a grocery store, which all have air conditioning. In France, even that is rare. While I would expect some deaths if Seattle was hit as hard by a heat wave as France was, I really doubt the deaths in Seattle would reach the hundreds, much less the thousands.

The autistic boy who was murdered by bible-thumping zealots was smothered to death. via Atrios