Today – October 1st, 2013 – Google is celebrating Yosemite National Park’s 123rd birthday with a Doodle.
Also today Yosemite (and other national parks) are closed due to the government shutdown.
The federal government partially shut down at midnight on Tuesday because of the continuing zany antics of the most hate-filled and divisive President and the Senate democrats (the Senate has the lowest approval rating of all time right now … go figure), who can’t pass a budget and who think that raising a debt ceiling is how you balance the books. If you raise the debt ceiling you don’t run out of money, right?
As Jay Leno put it a few weeks ago: “The government will run out of money in just 3 weeks. I’m no financial whiz, but we’re 16 Trillion Dollars in debt. Doesn’t that mean we already ran out of money? Like 16 Trillion Dollars ago?”
Because of 536 inept elected officials, over 800,000 government employees can’t work and our national parks, monuments, and museums are closed.
As the Boy Scouts – an organization that I have long admired – trundles down a path that I believe is going to end up tearing the organization apart, a new group – Trail Life USA – has emerged. The faith-based group believes that they are set to become a premiere organization for boys and young men.
Their stated goal is to “counter the ‘moral free-fall’ of the nation, and ‘raise a generation of faithful husbands, fathers, citizens and leaders.'” As they become more and more public, the group has captured attention because of their open competition with the BSA. Their mission is to “provide a robust alternative to the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).”
The name of the group was chosen to avoid any political or controversial undertones.
Actor Peter Capaldi has been announced as the new star of BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who.
So the The U.S. Department of Energy has just released an online tool that allows you to see what the amount of electricity necessary to drive an average electric car as far as a gallon of gasoline would cost where you live. They call this the ‘eGallon’, and the U.S. average is $1.14. It goes as low as $0.83 in North-Dakota and as high as $3.69 in Hawaii where electricity is most expensive.