Be warned that “severe weather” in Middle Alabamaland, or a little bit of wind and rain, could knock out power and/or Net service today. Makes one wonder what Alabama Power, Charter and AT and T would do in the case of a real disaster, natural or otherwise. They want Congress to grant them immunity for spying on us. I want my money back for all the time they (we) are down…

Major storm for the eastern half of the U.S.

Meanwhile on the techno front, two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped Thursday, disrupting service across a swath of Asia and the Middle East. India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations, according to the AP and other news organizations and bloggers.

Cable Break Causes Wide Internet Outage

I should write a rap for this. Alas, the techno-geek input is already too great. Want to talk about multi-tasking feats?

As I write this blog post on a Blue and White Mac G3 and a high-speed cable connection, I am also recording today’s radio show from a tape onto the PC on my desktop in The Bunker - now that I finally have Sony’s Sound Forge program in my possession at home. Today’s radio show will be online in a little while, once I convert it to an mp3 file and dump it into the LocustFork.Net server and make a link on the radio page and blog about it.

I am also watching Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., on C-SPAN talk about the situation in Iraq as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. It just goes to show that you can cover Congress from just about anywhere.

I just finished updating the headlines on the news page after reading the AP A-wire and the Washington Post online.

To prevent the EMPs from rattling my bones, I am also lubricating with Yuengling and having a smoke, all while talking on the phone to a techno geek friend about spyware for Macs and earlier fielding a call from the Montgomery Advertiser, which plans to run a story on blogging in the Sunday newspaper.

Maybe they can explain it to the people of Alabama, who are just now figuring out how to send and receive e-mail and maybe join a listserv and search the Web with Google.

And some anonymous editor and blogger in New York tells me I will never be able to keep up? Right.

Bring it on, A-hole. My attorney has the e-mails and knows who you are…

As for the spammers and hackers, my boys in Knoxville may have lost the server a time or two recently, but they now seem to have a handle on the viscous attacks from those who do not honor the First Amendment and would try to silence this lone voice in the dot net dot wilderness.

Then, the true forces of evil in this land are on the run like stray dogs scalded with boiling bacon greese. And in my e-mail inbox, there is a note from Howard Dean saying the Democratic Party will no doubt take over both houses of Congress from the Republicans in 2006.

If he had provided any convincing data to prove that point, I would publish his letter here. But while we believe that would be best for the country, and perhaps lead to the impeachment of these oil barrons and war mongers in the White House, we will hold our bets for a little while longer.

Even under the scrutiny of a crack prosecutor like Pat Fitzgerald, Karl Rove is a force of political nature that you never want to count out and beaten - until you see him lying in the ditch with blood gushing out of his nostrils instead of air.

I should say thanks to the Rev. Jack Zylman - a true gentleman and scholar - for being our guest on the radio today. He may be the only person in Birmingham who remembers my investigative journalism on the environment in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the Gulf Coast.

They sing happy days will come again. One can only hope….

Just as I was about to shut down the computer for the night, I caught Tim Russert’s interview with historian David McCullough on MSNBC. He has a new book out, inspired to teach kids about history aftrer 9/11, called 1776: Washington’s War.

It’s not just about George Washington’s war against the British. It is how he played to the British before and after the war, and how he graciously agreed to give up the power he could have had as America’s king at that time, how he stepped aside and allowed others to take power and learn how to govern this new democratic republic.

It also details the role of others in the movement for a Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Paine.

If you are interested, The New Yorker review is now online - for free:

In the year 1776, character was destiny.

It is a hot August day here in the middle of Dog Days in Alabamaland, so forgive me if I move slowly and take an extra nap in the afternoon in the cool of The Bunker. We also took a few minutes today to vacuum out the inside of this five-year-old blue and white G3 to try and speed it up a bit.

Meanwhile back at the cable TV, the CNN “Inside the Blogs” babes are yet to mention us on the air, which is a bit confusing since we are not only one of the best blogs around with a fair share of traffic. One of the executive producers there is an old friend who used to work for Greenpeace and we know for sure he told the blog babes about us. But no matter. It’s like everything else around here. It will happen eventually, given time.

Meanwhile back at the blog ranch, several readers are now clamoring for more options to post new content more often on The Locust Fork weblog, blog for short. This is great news to us, except for one small matter. There are limits to our knowledge of computer programming - believe it or not.

We are exploring the options and preferences under the Dynamic Publishing setup of Moveable Type, hoping to make it easier for more authors to create their own blogs, like they do over at Daily Kos, Democrats.com, and Truthout (listed and linked down the right hand side of this page).

It ain’t going to happen overnight, folks. But as always, we are always working on making progress and moving forward to make this the best damn Web site in the universe. So hang in there with us and let’s make a real difference.

Podscope, a search engine that indexes the spoken audio content of podcasts, has announced that it plans to “cover all non-music audio and video podcasts by August 31, 2005.”

The search engine crawls the web, looking for podcasts, and creates an index against each spoken word, thereby making the contents searchable. The user can search on a term, generate a list of results ranked by a variety of methods to find the most relevant podcast and click to play or click to download.

Podscope says that it currently indexes more than 20,000 podcasts from more than 3,500 sites and is on track to cover every known podcaster by the end of August. Site owners can submit their sites for indexing at the Podscope site.

A podcast is an online broadcast, similar to a radio or TV show, recorded by the audio and video equivalent of a blogger, who tend to be more like online newspaper reporters or magazine writers.