Medary.com

More gorillas:

The new census tallied more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas in two adjacent areas in the northern part of the country, covering an area of 18,000 square miles (47,000 square kilometers). Previous estimates from the 1980s placed the entire population of western lowland gorillas, which occur in seven Central African nations, at less than 100,000. Since then, however, scientists had believed that this number had at least halved, due to hunting and disease.

Gorillas in the mist . . . bushes . . . trees . . . ravines . . . rocks . . . low shrubs . . . swamps . . .

If you're in Kansas City, you have two main outlets for conservative/rightie talk radio:  710 KCMO, and 980 KMBZ.  Those are the two stations I listen to most of the time.  When I get bored with them, there's the two sports talk stations, 810 WHB and  610 KCSP (of which the sports talk hosts on 810 tend to be better, but 610 has the Royals and the Jayhawks play-by-play that I prefer).  Music, I go to 105.1 "Jack FM" most of the time I'm not hitting my iPod.

With that out of the way, here's my usual day's radio talk show listening schedule, when I'm within earshot of a radio:

5 am-9 am:  KCMO Morning Show with Chris Stigall vs. the Kansas City Morning News on KMBZ:  Overall, I find Stigall's show much more entertaining than the more hard-news program on KMBZ.  Stigall is a big-league talk host talent, I think.  He's guest-hosted the national Rusty Humphries show on occasion, and is pretty smooth all the way around.  Stigall seems to have the knack of disagreeing without being too disagreeable--a rare gift nowadays--although he seems to take very few positions that I strenuously disagree with.

9 am-11 am:  Glenn Beck on KMBZ dukes it out with Laura Ingraham on KCMO:  There's no clear winner in this slot as far as I'm concerned.  I can listen to them both.  Beck is at his best when his show is slightly out of control, and at his worst when he's getting ultra-mega-serious.  Ingraham has an unfortunate tendency to shout down guests she disagrees with (see above "disagreeing without being disagreeable", but when she avoids that she's very listenable, too.

11 am-2 pm:  Rush Limbaugh on KMBZ, vs. Dave Ramsey on KCMO:  Rush is THE master of the medium, but when you're not in the mood for incessant liberal-bashing, Ramsey's show is a welcome alternative.  Rush gets around the whole issue of arguing with guests by simply not having any who disagree with him.  The show is, after all, about what HE thinks.  He's best when he's talking about people lifting themselves up and personal responsibility and the like--a message not at all dissimilar to Ramsey's.

2 pm-4 pm:  Bill O'Reilly on KMBZ vs. Sean Hannity on KCMO:  battle of the Fox News heavylightweights!  Well, after either Rush or Ramsey, these guys come off sounding pretty light-weight.  You've got Rush-Lite personified by Hannity, versus the squishy, populist, O'Reilly.  Hannity loves shout-fests for some reason I can not completely understand.  O'Reilly just likes to hear himself talk.  I usually wind up on sports talk after Rush goes off the air, but of the two, I find O'Reilly is generally more listenable than Hannity on a regular basis, even though his aggressive populism scares me every once in a while.  No winner in this time slot.

4 pm-7 pm:  Local hosts Shanin and Parks on KMBZ, vs. Hannity (until 5 pm) and Michael Savage on KCMO:  I find "The Savage Nation" utterly unlistenable.  Sometimes I tune into Shanin & Parks, but they're rarely interesting enough for me to stay for an entire show.  This time slot again winds up being sports talk radio, or more often Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 re-runs on the SciFi Channel followed by local TV news, while making and consuming supper.

Evenings:  Darla Jaye, local on KMBZ vs. Savage (until 8) and Rusty Humphries (8-11 pm) KCMO.  I don't listen often, except occasionally catching the end of Rusty's show while getting ready for bed.  Recently I tuned in for a while to Jaye's show, and it was . . . awful.

Overnight:  Coast to Coast AM on KCMO vs. Mark Levin (10 pm-midnight) and the Rush replay (midnight-4 a.m.) on KMBZ.  Levin is, I suppose an acquired taste that I have so far failed to acquire.  Coast to Coast can be amusing, unless they get too apocalyptic and/or paranoid.  Which, come to think of it, is more and more often since Art Bell retired again.   Sleep wins out over radio, I'm afraid.

So, the winners:
Chris Stigall, KCMO
Beck & Ingraham (tie)
Limbaugh, KMBZ
none-of-the-above
Shanin & Parks, KMBZ
Rusty Humphries, KCMO
Coast to Coast AM, KCMO

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 9-- below (or at the "read more").

May 16 (Friday, Day 20, Southampton, England) –

We ate the Holiday Inn Express continental breakfast which included three kinds of individually wrapped “good” cheese as well as normal American continental breakfast foods.  We arranged for a cab to pick us up at 11:45 AM and we zipped through the Queen Mary 2’s embarkation process and got to our stateroom by 12:20. 

Within 20 minutes of being on the ship, we knew that this cruise was going to be MUCH better than the Royal Caribbean one.  Our 248 square foot stateroom with balcony was quite a bit smaller than the one on our prior cruise but was extremely clean and well designed.  And, a half bottle of chilled sparkling wine was waiting for us along with a plate of canapés.  There was even a pen and free postcards. 

Our QM2 stateroom:

 

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 8-- below (or at the "read more").

May 12 (Monday, Day 16, Barcelona, Spain to Stuttgart, Germany) –

We had decided that if it wasn’t raining we would take the public bus to the airport for $6 each rather than a cab for $40.  This meant walking with our three rolling suitcases and one duffel bag four blocks to the bus stop but since there was a McDonald’s between us and the bus, we decided to stop there for breakfast at 8:30 AM.  (Nothing else is open in Barcelona at that time of day so we HAD to go to McDonald’s.)  The breakfast menu consisted of the fruit and yogurt parfait, muffins and coffee along with all of their normal hamburger items.  Filbert ordered a cheeseburger and Snookums had the fruit and yogurt parfait which was ½ the size as the ones that we get in the U.S. and it was twice the cost. 

Over the Alps

This month, sometime, I'll be upgrading my various sites (Medary.com, SDSUFans.com and the SDSUFans.com Forum) to the newest versions of the software.  As a part of that upgrade, I've been considering changing the look and feel (the "skin" in the jargon) of the sites to be somewhat less . . . formal.

I've also been seriously considering dropping the nom-de-blog of "Filbert," coming out of the Internet-pseudonym closet, and blogging and, um, webbing under my real name.  Now, my secret identity is not that terribly secret . . . any sufficiently enterprising and Internet-knowledgable person can easily suss out exactly who I am.  That's not the real point.

The point is that there comes a time when a guy needs to step up and own their words . . . both in a copyright sense and in a moral sense.  As I progress (ever so slowly and painfully) towards becoming what I hope will be, someday, an honest-to-goodness published author, I'll be doing it under my own name.  It makes sense to me to write on the Internet using my own name, too.  It seems to work for John Scalzi, Glenn Reynolds, and numerous others.

Well, I'm thinking about it, anyway.

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 7-- below (or at the "read more").

May 10 (Saturday, Day 14, Barcelona, Spain) –

We went to the restaurant for a leisurely sit-down breakfast but the only thing that looked appealing to Snookums was Raisin Bran.  That kind of summed up our experience on this ship.  The food on Royal Caribbean really was uninspired and by this time, we couldn’t wait to get off the ship.  Disembarkation in Spain, was (surprisingly) easy.  We got our luggage off of an airport-style baggage carousel (very convenient) and got in line for a taxi to our hotel.  It was raining but we were under an awning most of the time so it was okay.  There was NO sign of any Spanish customs or immigration officials anywhere.  In fact, we saw two Royal Caribbean folks and that was it as far as people in any kind of uniform.  There weren’t even any police or security for the 3,000 people getting off the ship!  Getting into Europe is obviously easier than getting into the good ol' U.S.A.  It was the easiest disembarkation we had ever had on any cruise, and by far the best thing that happened to us on this cruise.

We got to our hotel, the Le Méridien Barcelona on La Rambla (THE street in Barcelona) around 9 AM and they had a room ready for us.  We unpacked a little bit for our two-night stay and then decided to head out in the rain and see Barcelona.  We used the good hotel umbrellas.  Except for the Rain in Spain, it wasn’t too bad.  The temperature was probably in the mid-60s F. and we had proper outerwear so we were fine.  We went to one of the open-air food markets and saw the rest of Barcelona buying their food for the week.  There were meat stalls, cheese stalls, produce stalls and lots of fish stalls.  Snookums LOVES food markets.  We also saw one stall that had three chairs at the counter and three guys were sitting there drinking red wine and eating olives at 10 AM.  Ah, Europe.  There were also a couple of restaurant stalls and we saw people eating fried eggs served on sautéed/boiled calamari.  (It was breakfast time after all.) 

Around 12:30 PM we got hungry and decided to find a restaurant.  We found a hole in the wall place a few blocks off the beaten path and we ordered two combination plates.  The special was paella and a ½ liter of sangria but we didn’t order that.  Snookums had stewed chicken, French fries, salad and bottled water and Filbert had fried white fish, fried calamari, French fries and salad and a beer.  We were the only people in the restaurant at the beginning but when we left there were two others there.  We ate earlier than the Spanish siesta time of 2 PM which was why the restaurant was empty.  On our way back to the hotel we got a little lost, but that just meant more wandering so it didn’t really matter. 

While lost we found this market

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 6


May 9 (Friday, Day 13, Cartagena, Spain) –

We got off the ship and walked around Cartagena.  It is a nice city, still partially surrounded by its original city wall.  We found an ATM to get our Euros.  Since it was around 9 AM none of the stores were open.   Eventually we found an open grocery store.  We bought two cans of soda and a plain looking sugar topped roll (for Snookums) for 1 euro (about $1.50).  She only ate half of it since it had a bunch of anise in it. By the time we walked back to the ship around noon the stores were open but since we didn’t need clothes or electronics or drugstore items, we didn’t go shopping.

Welcome to Cartagena

Cartagena

Tonight was when the tips were handed out.  We charged our tips to our shipboard account and then Royal Caribbean gave out specifically printed vouchers that the passengers were to give to their various servers.  At dinner Filbert was already saying that he didn’t want to give the tip to the assistant waiter (and Filbert knew we already paid for it)--and that was before the assistant waiter spilled wine on the table—again.  This is the same assistant waiter that had spilled wine every night at least once.  This time, the waiter managed to get wine on Filbert's camera.  Once again, Filbert's normally tolerant amusement of service screwups finally tipped over into the red zone of extreme irritation, and Filbert told the now-quivering guy to find the maitre d’.  Filbert explained the sloppy wine service to the matre d'.  Anyway, the camera wasn’t hurt at all (it’s an underwater camera, after all) and the assistant waiter did in fact get his tip.  However, we never saw the assistant waiter or the waiter at the end of the meal to hand them their tips so the people at the table just left the envelopes on the tables.  Other tables were hugging their waiters but not our table!

The “gala” parade

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 5-- below (or at the "read more").

May 8 (Thursday, Day 12, At sea) –

Our phone rang around 10:30 AM and it was the Guest Services Manager just checking on us and making sure we were happy which, for the moment, we were.  We guessed that we will receive a call tomorrow morning from her, too.

Filbert at sea

With the recent drivel in some circles about how "The Surge" had nothing whatsoever to do with the current improvement in the situation in Iraq, perhaps we should note that the Defense Department is now institutionalizing the underlying counter-insurgency philosophy (written largely, by the way, by Gen Petreaus):

The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills acquired in Iraq and Afghanistan within a defense community heavily skewed in favor of expensive conventional and strategic modernization programs.

Your homework assignment:  go and read Petreaus' book.  Then go read the new National Defense Policy (both PDF's).  Then you will understand that "The Surge" was about much more than just throwing 30,000 more troops at the Iraq mess.  It was about understanding, adapting, and winning the trust of the local population.  Which, in Iraq, we have largely now done.  Now it's required to maintain that trust--by leaving, if that's what they want.  But from all reports, that's not really what they want, although some Iraqis will say so for perfectly understandable politcal reasons.

Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 4-- below (or at the "read more").


May 6 (Tuesday, Day 10, Azores) –

Off the topic of cruising, Snookums and Filbert received an email from their subdivision’s Board of Directors informing them that the annual garage sale would be delayed one week in order to handle the crowds associated with American Idol.  That’s right folks, there was an American Idol contestant in our subdivision.  David Cook’s mother and stepfather lived in our subdivision and American Idol was going to film David in his surroundings that upcoming weekend.  So, to accommodate the press and hordes of people, the annual garage sale was moved to May 15 – 17.  (By the way, Snookums stopped selling her rebate items at the garage sale two years ago and  instead donates the drug store items to the local battered women’s shelter at a rate of about $8,000/year.)  Now back to cruising…

The Azores