Holy crap, it has been powerful hot lately, consistently. Hot, humid weather is usually dotted with relieving thunder showers, but except for the sprinkling (tee hee) we got yesterday, it has been pretty unrelenting the past few weeks. Make it stop! The rest of the week is supposed to be a heat lamp. The forecast is calling for storms later today, but those have failed in the past so I won't be surprised if it's all a ruse.

How about that oil mess in the gulf? It is going to be a long time before that is straightened out. Everyone seems to think that once the leak is cut off that it will just be a matter of mopping off a few pelicans and getting back to life as normal. Let's be honest: it's going to be years before any cleanup effort makes any progress, and those can't go anywhere until the leaking is fixed permanently. Alaska is still recovering from the Exxon Valdez spill, and that was a small one compared to this. The industries based out of the gulf are SOL for the forseeable future. Worse yet, if the well is compromised upstream from the BOP and the relief wells don't work, stopping the leak altogether might be impossible. In that case... game over, man, game over. We'll be telling our kids what oysters tasted like.

Video games! After about 12 game hours of power levelling in Final Fantasy XII I had enough firepower to level that optional boss and cleaned some serious clock. Now I'm a few areas later in the game, after being in that one dungeon for a long time. I did breeze through quite a bit of those areas, seeing as I was about ten levels ahead of the curve, and armed with the bonus weapon I got for hustling that boss.

Portably, I'm at the end of Chrono Trigger DS, or what I can assume is the end. I'm banging out side quests to buff my dudes up so the last boss doesn't bend me over and have a friendly rape. My long history of having not played the game will be over soon.

E3 is behind us now, and I have to say, I'm not enthralled but I'm not entirely disappointed. I'm partially disappointed by things like the new Zelda. Ok, great, I get it, having a controller that you swing around the room gets the people that have never played video games before to feel included and gets them to play games like Dance Your Ass Off and Wii Bowling, but for Christ's sake, if you're going to make a REAL game (like Zelda), give those of us who are competent with a gamepad the ability to play with a real controller as an option. I was hoping futilely for a blurb about Demon's Souls 2 (if it even exists, which it may not) or Gradius VI, which of course was a pipedream. It does bother me that "Gradius Arc" seems to be something that exists that no one knows about. That alone is awesome, but the bothering part is that "Arc" was apparently at one time a nickname for what became the Playstation Move, leading to speculation that there is some kind of a tie-in. I swear to God and all that is holy: if a new Gradius game comes out but it has motion control, I will smash things.

After a fun string of good market choices, the past two weeks has seen the stock market toy with my emotions. Several long-standing sell orders were getting within a dollar of closing before everyone panicked and blamed BP for destroying the economy and the thing tanked and now my portfolio is as it was a month ago. Oh well. I am nothing if not patient.

That's enough for now.