5 Thoughts for October 24, 2015

1. Rubbing alcohol is good for a lot of stuff, but I realized today that being a degreaser, it should function extremely well as a kitchen grease cleaner -- and it did! When using, the fumes are overwhelming if you're not careful, but just cuts right through the grease and paper towels suck it all up. So simple, cheap and instantaneous, it's better than any of those commercial cleaners at the store. Of course, I haven't tried it on every surface, but in my short experience plastic, metal, or glass seems to work well -- just don't use it on lacquered wood. It even cleaned up the permanent ink marks someone once left in the elevator several months ago, which I cleaned up on my own.
2. One by one, each politically-driven witch hunt led by Republicans has failed. This week we saw the Benghazi "investigations" reach an anticlimactic 11 hour grilling of Hillary Clinton; and now we have confirmation that nothing nefarious occurred at the IRS, with Lois Lerner having been exonerated. It's not fake outrage, so much as it is biased thinking that leads people to eliminate natural skepticism.
3. At this moment, there are three hurricanes / typhoons in the Pacific at the same time, one for each region of the Pacific: Eastern (hurricane Patricia at one point had gusts in excess of 200 mph), Central (hurricane Olaf with wind gusts of 110 mph) and Western (typhoon Champi with wind gusts of 132 mph). Earlier this year there were three tropical depressions / hurricanes within 1000 miles of Hawaii at the same time. If climate change means that in 20 years, we'll see concurrent storms in the Pacific as a regular feature of the warmer climate, I'm not so sure that I'd want to retire in Hawaii.
4. Seattle Seahawks' defense showed off their old ways, by preventing SF from scoring a touchdown, and holding the 49ers to just 142 offensive yards. The communication in the secondary was vastly improved, preventing wide open receivers, deep. On offense, it felt like a mixed bag yet again. Russell Wilson threw two deep interceptions, neither of which should have been thrown, and while it shows that the offensive line has improved enough to allow him to throw the deep ball, he was still sacked 5 times. Rawls looked tough as usual, but Lynch, coming off injuries, showed why even Rawls can't yet replace Beast Mode.
5. KIC 8462852. It's what's driving scientists around the world to scramble and answer definitively, "Where's the Flux?" As with life, you don't know what you don't know, so people are searching to find out what it is that they don't know. At some 1500 light years away, unless someone's figured out wormhole travel, we're sort of stuck with observations with telescopes, imagining what happened at KIC 8462852, some 1500 years ago.