Back Again

On the off-chance that I do still have the occasional reader or two, I thought I might try blogging again for a change.

Two stories caught my eye today, that I had some quick thoughts on.  First there's this one, about a dog in Kazakhstan who reportedly died while saving his owner's life by pulling him off the railroad tracks.  I am not trying to be insensitive in any way but this story (at least as it's written) makes absolutely no sense.  You have a guy passed out on the railroad tracks.  A train is coming, so the dog starts to pull the guy off of the tracks.  The story distinctly says that he dragged him (not pushed him) to safety and then was hit.  How does the dog safely drag the owner away yet still get hit by the train?  It just doesn't logistically work.  If the dog was dragging him, he should have been farther away from the train than the guy.  The only way it possibly makes sense is if there were two trains coming from opposite directions and the dog pulled the guy from one track into the middle, which then left the dog standing on the other tracks exposed.  That seems quite unlikely though.  I find it far more likely that the guy, who is described as being "suicidal" and "had passed out on the tracks after drinking a bottle of alcohol", simply fell asleep next to the tracks, left his dog unattended, and the dog was simply hit.  So rather than saying "yeah I'm an irresponsible drunken pet owner who just caused my dog's death" he decides to say "my heroic dog died saving my life."  Or maybe not.  Could be there's a very logical explanation for what happened and the dog really did die saving his owner.  I'm just saying that once again our wonderful media, in an effort to get a tear-jerking story out to the public as quickly as possible, has failed to provide us with an extremely basic level of information on what exactly happened.

On a somewhat lighter note, I saw the headline for this story: The Feds Can't Catch the Cartels' Cocaine-Filled Submarines and seriously thought that the story was about cartels deciding to smuggle drugs inside sandwiches.  I was both embarrassed and disappointed to discover that I was wrong.

On the political front, with the election less than 2 months away it's looking like the Romney campaign is on life support.  The overall national numbers look pretty comparable but he is behind in several key swing states, including Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin and the math is such that he basically needs all of them in order to win and that just seems unlikely.  Or rather, it seems unlikely that his campaign will have the ability to turn those numbers around on their own.  At this point, it will take another Lehman Brothers-like domestic disaster or a huge international incident to shake up this race.  Even so, the way this country is polarized right now I find it hard to believe that there are really a ton of undecided voters left out there.  Nor should there be; it isn't as if either of these candidates are mysteries to the public.  Both of them have pretty much been nationally campaigning non-stop for the last 6 years.  The only way you don't know about either of them is if you have willfully chosen to completely ignore politics over that entire period.  And if you have in fact done that, it is incredibly unlikely you'll suddenly start paying attention now in the last 50-some days.