Tropical Depression Ten is still around, but not doing anything interesting.

The BBC reports that Nick Helm has won an award for the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Actually, his Dad wrote the joke and sent it to him.

The outer bands from Irene are already hitting South Carolina. It is going to be a long, nervous weekend on the Atlantic coast.

Update: I wanted to comment on the picture that Rick Perry is using in his campaign literature. It shows him standing on a ladder on the side of an aircraft. That is a bit disingenuous for people who don’t know much about the Air Force.

The picture is a standard thing for student pilots in the Air Force. The aircraft is a T-38 Talon training aircraft [if you look closely you will see the second canopy that is raised.] Perry actually flew C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft, and if he was competent he would have been the pilot for the last two years of his tour. There is nothing wrong with being a flying truck driver, cargo aircraft are vital to the mission of the US military, but the fact that he chooses to use a training photo, instead of a photo with the aircraft he actually commanded, would indicate that he doesn’t want people to know what he really did.

Perry attend Texas A&M, a land-grant school, and apparently had the Air Force pick up the tab, which is why he committed to a six-tour enlistment. He did nothing with the training and experience he received in the military, so claiming that it makes him more competent than Zero, is silly. The Shrubbery was an Air National Guard fighter pilot and he let Osama bin Laden jerk him around for seven years. Perry needs to move on and forget about claiming to be strong on ‘national defense’, because the Shrubbery pretty much destroyed that Repub talking point.

Position: 32.6N 76.9W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North-Northeast [020°] near 13 mph [20 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 100 mph [155 kph].
Wind Gusts: 130 mph [210 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 290 miles [465 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 90 miles [150 km].
Minimum central pressure: 951 mb ↑.

Currently about 195 miles [ 315 km] South-Southwest of Cape Hatteras, NC and 140 miles [225 km] South of Cape Lookout, NC.

A Hurricane Warning is in effect for the coast from Little River Inlet, North Carolina north to Sagamore Beach, Massachusetts.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the coast from Edisto Beach, South Carolina to Little River Inlet, North Carolina; Chesapeake Bay from Drum Point northward and the tidal Potomac; and north of Sagamore Beach to Merrimack River, Massachusetts.

A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for the Merrimack River, Massachusetts to Eastport, Maine.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Success?

Big deal!

[Editor: This picure of Froggy is the first from the new machine. While Froggy is more interested in something more to eat, everything except the camera is new/different in the process of getting it posted.]

Friday Ark