Downstream, I noted that the CDC had totally hosed up the obesity death numbers, inflating them by a factor of four. Wrong, boyo — the factor was 14.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated today that packing on too many pounds accounts for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States. As recently as January, the CDC came up with an estimate 14 times higher: 365,000 deaths.

Jeepers. Bloody well brilliant, ain’t they? CG “Chuckles” Hill notes that this egregious error isn’t slowing them gummint scientists down, either:
Translation: “We’re going to keep beating this dead horse despite the fact that everyone knows it’s really a marmoset.” [giggle]

Long-time TFG favorite, Swen “Swen” Swenson is back posting after a year off — Coyote at the Dog Show. And he’s already bitching about the Casper newspaper again.

Thanks to Big Jim Rummel for the heads-up…

Return of the Metric System § Unqualified Offerings

Whether you compare month-over-month or annualized performance, there’s been not just stagnation but regression in both nationwide and Baghdad-specific electricity provision. Peak output for first-quarter 2005 averages about 3600 megawatts compared to about 3900 for first-quarter 2004. The most recent three months represent roughly a 500 MW jump over fourth-quarter 2004, but a 1000MW drop over third-quarter 2004. Brookings lists an estimated pre-war figure of 4400 megawatts. In the two postwar years for which we have figures the CPA/Ministry of Electricity has exceeded that number for only three months. The initial goal was to have been 6000 MW by July 2004. Baghdad averaged about 1050 MW peak production for 1Q2005, versus about 1250 a year ago. (Note: January 2004 data not available. That compares with prewar levels of 2500 MW. Average hours per day with electricity nationwide comes in around 10 hours for the first quarter this year, versus about 14 last year (January 2004 data missing again). Daily megawatt-hours production nationwide averages 85K for the last three months, about where it was a year ago. (Fourth quarter 2004 outperformed fourth-quarter 2003, though, by about 9000 megawatt hours.) Average prewar production, 95,000. Stated goal, 120,000.

Oiiiiiiiiiiillllllllllllll! as the hawks like to call it:

Iraq’s average monthly oil revenues have been essentially flat since March 2004, with occasional spikes above or below an income of $1.4-1.6bn per month. When you recall that oil prices have climbed $20 a barrel in that period (DOE table), you start to suspect that Iraqi oil production and export has regressed rather than progressed. Indeed, in March 2004, Iraq produced 2.4 million barrels of crude per day and exported 1.8 billion, while in March 2005 it produced only 2.1 mbpd and exported but 1.4. On the bright side, comparing first quarters of 2004 and 2005, domestic availability of gasoline is up 33-odd percent, and diesel and LPG by smaller but significan margins. (Kerosene availability is sharply down.)

I think this is where I say “Yeah, and Mussolini made the trains run on time”.

Lord knows I’ve not got the tools to mearure the progress of liberation or democracy. I put myself in the shoes of Joe Sixpack Iraqi, and I’d say that grand-scheme-of-things overall, I’m glad a poet-accountant wonk in Virginia has the opportunity to say how shitty it has turned out. That’s just me, though, never having suffered under a stone dictatorship. I’m basically just guessing. Much as I’d say this is just as big a guess: Bottom line: In terms of the numbers, there’s a lot of non-progress evident. Trains and all, after all.

Best Texas Musician*: Charlie Robison

Never seen him live, missed him by 15 minutes in San Antonio at a bookstore once. The guy just covers the waterfront — I hear him on all the country stations twixt el rancho and Far North Fookin’ Dallas. And he mixes in great Mexican conujunto and hayseed Irish stuff. I like to think I’d like to have a beer with him, but he almost seems too big, like he’d have a posse or something. Still, I love his music. He’s on my Winamp as much as the Gourds.

He did marry a Dixie Chick, but she was one of the hot ones I think, so I’ll give him some slack on that one. You can’t blame a man for marrying a hot Texas gal. Hell, high water — don’t matter. It’s kinda like being out in a storm on a lake…you reckon you can pull through just by force of will or the good graces of Kapok. But you can die in the blink of an eye, too.

* With the exception of our Poet Laureate thingy, Billy Joe Shaver.

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Gah. Forgot to blog this yesterday, for my not-Texan readers:

Texas forces win at San Jacinto

On this day in 1836, Texas forces won the battle of San Jacinto, the concluding military event of the Texas Revolution. Facing General Santa Anna’s Mexican army of some 1,200 men encamped in what is now southeastern Harris County, General Sam Houston disposed his forces in battle order about 3:30 p.m., during siesta time. The Texans’ movements were screened by trees and the rising ground, and evidently Santa Anna had no lookouts posted. The Texan line sprang forward on the run with the cries “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” The battle lasted but eighteen minutes. According to Houston’s official report, the casualties were 630 Mexicans killed and 730 taken prisoner. Against this, only nine of the 910 Texans were killed or mortally wounded and thirty were wounded less seriously.

You know, just to remind all yall that we were once a full-throttle country all our own, and we kicked Mexico’s ass. In 18 dang minutes. “Come and Take It”, indeed. That should be a state holiday, by my lights, with free Lone Star and Shiner and big beeves on spits.

Best writer in the universe:

That’s right, kiddies–the “K” in “KFC” once stood for a mythical place called “Kentucky”! I hope the test works out. There is nothing more depressing than ordering up a big tub of delicious chicken from KFC and trying to decide how best to dispose of the lamentable side dishes–the lifeless, twice-digested coleslaw, the macaroni salad fabricated with Elmer’s Glue, the One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich dinner roll, and the gloopy, joyless potato salad that would break your mother’s heart clean into two neat, bloodless, pathetic pieces

I’m severely missing Colby Cosh’s NHL Playoff roundup. Not his fault, of course. You might have heard that the NHL cancelled 2004-05 in favor of having $1000-suit/razor-haircut meetings that produce no results. No, nothing, not this week — not a durn thing you can crook a little finger around and try to hang on to. The lack of hockey has deeply disturbed my sport world this winter, and baseball just isn’t helping yet. I realize I’m one of the very, very few here in CONUS who feel that way. It’s almost like the NHL could vanish and I would be the only one in Texas who would notice the puck that didn’t drop. And I don’t even have season tickets, a single bit of Stars memorabilia, never even been to the new barn. It’s sure gonna be a tough sell around these parts when and if the suits get it together for 05 or 06.

I shudder to think what an Atlanta will be like…at least we’ve got a couple million transplanted Yankees to shoulder the ticket load here in Dallas.

Then go to Club Dada tonight for Colin Boyd. As you know, it takes a lot to get the Genius label out of me, but Colin is the deal, daddio.

Excellent booking by the Little Lady. I’d be there, but I’m at El Rancho Borracho to spend an evening with Mini-Me and my son-in-law.

I’ve gotta get some of these shirts ASAP:

No extra screening, no removing the shoes, no second glance, no nothing. My $30 purchase greased the skids at one of the tightest airports in the country; an airport that remained closed for months after September 11th, due to security concerns.

That’s a life-hack if I ever heard one…

Now they say it’s OK to be a Fat Guy:

About 112,000 deaths in 2000 were blamed on obesity, according to new estimates from scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

That is much lower than a highly publicized figure released in March 2004 when other CDC researchers estimated that about 400,000 deaths were associated with obesity, poor diet and inactivity. That number was later lowered to 365,000 when problems with the calculations were detected.

There’s a shocker - overestimated by a teensy 400%. Wanna bet they’re gonna ask for more tax money to figure out why? How about we do this: ignore all the freaking eggheads snarfing at the government trough, and we just use our damn common sense? It’s not likely that they’re going to shrink the trough, even if they’re wrong as hell most of the time, but isn’t this a great example of government idiocy?

Look, everybody knows it’s not good to be fat. Your knees hurt, your feet hurt, your back hurts, and you always have to buy new britches with expand-o-matic waist bands. But it’s quite obviously not the death sentence they said it was if you’re carrying a few extra pounds.

As Stryker says, though — “I thought the risk of death was still 100%”

You gotta love guys who love music this much:

This is just a brief posting to alert anyone who might be interested in (or curious about) the Delta blues that Stein’s 2002 documentary — which I hadn’t been aware of until I Tivo’d it off the Independent Film Channel — is a good one. Stein appears to have spent years visiting the Delta and getting to know such homegrown giants as Johnny Farmer, Asie Payton, T-Model Ford, Cedell Davis, Junior Kimbrough, and R.L. Burnside — all of them artists who make me want to say: Anybody who claims that American art is short on genuine greatness can KISS MY ASS. (Incidentally, not a considered critical judgment either, just a direct expression of how this music makes me feel.)

My dad was a big Delta blues man, so we had it around all the time growing up. Good, good stuff.

Two hours in a dental chair getting a deep scale to ward off periodontal disease that apparently totally ruins every other facet of your life, and needing three (!) shots of Novacaine to kill the shrieking pain from your stupid sensitive teeth.

So far, periodontal disease has ruined every other facet — can’t eat, can’t drink, head hurts massively, and my jaw feels like I took an Ali haymaker.

Brush your teefies, kiddo, thrice a day. And floss them, too - fifteen times a day probabaly wouldn’t be too much.

My apologies to everyone on my blogroll for not putting it up on my innernet page here for two dang months.

Here’s a new place for you: Oil Field Trash, Part 2.

I’m paying off a few loads of road base, so I helped my buddy set this up. I don’t know if he’ll let me keep posting privileges or not. Should be fun, no matter what…

I’m rapidly losing my mind and going insane. My next-door neighbor is putting up a new fence, so there are workmen banging hammers, running cross-cut saws, and shooting nail guns. Have been since 7:30 in the aye-emm. This makes the damn dog bark his fool head off constantly — you’d think his stupid throat would get sore, or his lungs would get tired, but no, he’s apparently nuclear-powered. I can’t concentrate on diddly-squat, and my head’s about to explode. This is the first week back in the office, after two on the road, so I’ve got a few, little lots of big things to do that are now impossible. Sometimes it seems like the world conspires to just absolutely ruin your life. Why couldn’t these bastards be here last week?

I cannot leave the city and the burbs soon enough, folks. I’ve had enough of ye, with your stockade fences, and your leaf blowers, and your idiotic Hummer H2s. I can get Starbuck’s by mail-order these days.

Never mind that it reminds me that *I* need to replace my damn fence. Christ almighty.

There were no questions on “big ol’”, “fixin’ to”, or “tump”, nor how to pronounce “ice tea”. I guess they’ve never been to Texas.

Found it at Cobb…