Monday Morning Musings

It was a brisk 30 degrees when I went for my walk this morning. Probably a warm spell for you folks north of the Mason Dixon Line, but for us in Texas that is cold, cold, cold. However not as cold as it was this weekend when temps dipped into the teens and we there were ice storms in West Texas that slammed into the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News

We were lucky here, 100 miles east, and only got a bit of ice that did not stay long and did not hamper driving.What it did was hamper our weekend performance of our holiday show, Calliope's Christmas. We had to cancel the Friday performance, but did manage to get Saturday and Sunday performances, and we had terrific audiences for both shows.

I was intrigued by today’s Google Doodle so I clicked on the link to go to the Time Magazine feed to see who that lady was sitting in front of what looked like the computers that did the data processing in the early years of data processing. It took a whole room full of large machines to do what many small processors are able to do now, and I remember going to where my husband worked and visiting the computer room. It was larger than my house and had rows of tall, metal machines that hummed and crackled with activity.

Today the doodle celebrates what would have been the 107th birthday of computer pioneer Grace Hopper (1906-1992) just in time for the “Hour of Code” kicking off Computer Science Education Week. Hopper created COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language,) the program that allows computers to communicate through language as well as numbers. That was the language my husband used as a programmer, and it has given way to far more sophisticated languages.

My book, One Small Victory, will be featured Tuesday at The Fussy Librarian, a new website that offers personalized ebook recommendations. Subscribers choose from 40 genres and indicate preferences about content and then the computers work their magic, sending recommendations for new reads. I joined a few months ago, and I really like getting information about new books. The whole idea is pretty cool, and you might want to check it out -  www.TheFussyLibrarian.com

Has the weather been kind to you this weekend?  Had you heard of Grace Hopper before? I will be honest and say I had not, but what an impressive resume she had. For those of you who have done computer programming you might be interested in how the term "bug" came about. She coined it. Check out the Time article for the details.

If you have a moment and want a bit of a humorous break to your day, join me at The Blood Red Pencil where I wrote about the joys of trying to work with little kids under foot and in your office.

A to Z Challenge - S is for STOP

 In honor of Earth Day, I am switching from my theatre theme to write about something that is of great environmental importance. Those of you who have read my blog for some time know that I have written frequently about the XL Keystone Pipeline and all the reasons it is bad for our country.

Even though the infrastructure for the north/south route of the pipeline - which will stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast - has been under construction for sometime, final approval by the U.S. State Department has not been given.

In an article in the Huffington Post, Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, listed several good reasons for why that approval should not be given. In the article, she described the process of mining for the tar sands oil that devastates areas as large as Chicago in Canada's boreal forest. It takes at least two tons of sand to get a single barrel of tar sands crude called bitumen, a low-grade, high-sulphur hydrocarbon that takes considerably more refining to be turned into fuel.

According to Beinecke, "Producing tar sands crude is so energy intensive that it generates up to 4.5 times more climate-changing carbon emissions as the production of conventional crude oil. In fact, producing, refining and burning tar sands the KXL pipeline would increase our carbon footprint as much as putting up to 4.3 million additional cars on the road, the Congressional Research Service reported last month."

That's even before considering the environmental impact of spills when pipes break, and they will, no doubt about that. It's already happened in Kalamazoo, MI, where the Kalamazoo river was contaminated when the Eastern leg of the pipeline has been in place for some time.

I first heard about the XL pipeline three years ago when several local landowners formed an action group STOP Tarsands Oil Pipeline to formulate a plan to lobby against the pipeline, which is coming through some of the prettiest land in East Texas. One landowner, who has natural springs on his property that feed a creek so clean you can drink directly from it, did not want the pipeline to come through because of the potential for contaminating the water.

One of the clear, clean pools in East Texas

That concern is magnified when you consider the pipeline is slated to cross the major water tables in the heartland of America, as well as aquifers in North and East Texas. A leak would contaminate those water systems for hundreds of years.

There is another issue at play here, and that is the use of Eminent Domain to acquire the land for the pipeline if owners refuse to sell. Eminent Domain is only supposed to be used if the property taken is somehow going to have a large enough benefit that it trumps ownership. Those in favor of the pipeline say that the tarsands oil will reduce the price of gasoline in the U.S. Wrong. The oil will go into foreign markets first.

If you would like to meet some of the East Texas people who have been impacted by this, here is a link to Land Owners Against Trans Canada Pipeline. If you would like to join the cause, there are links on that site for sending feedback to President Obama and others to ask them not to approve the pipeline.

And if you would like to celebrate Earth Day with something just for fun, you can check out the Google doodle for today. It is very clever.