Of fire flies, bird chirps and distant thunder.

When I was a little boy, I loved visiting my grandmother’s house in Sand Springs, Oklahoma.   Oh, for the usual reasons you can imagine, but one of my fondest memories was venturing into the field across the street from grandma’s house next to the Frisco train tracks to catch fire flies in a jar.   In the evening, right as the sun would go down, we would be delighted to the blinking lights in the field, we saw fire flies by the millions, or so it seemed.   We would catch jars full and keep them on grandma’s screened in front porch until she made us go to bed.   We would always let the “lightning bugs” go so we could catch them again tomorrow.

I have not noticed fire flies for years, they just don’t seem to exist around our part of north Texas.   I missed them, until this week.   Tonight was an exceptional night around the Lake of the Ozarks.   I went for my walk with the girls, and there on every hill, around ever twist of the road, along every shore of the lake I saw twinkling lights, little flashes from those “lightning bugs” that delighted me as a boy.   Fire flies are alive and well here.   Such a joy!

As we wandered up and down the snake of a road that follows our lake neighborhood, the birds would chirp providing a symphony for the light show choreographed by the fire flies, and in the distance you could hear the low rumble of thunder rolling across the lake to accompany another light show high in the sky.

My new exercise regimen could not be getting a more pleasant start.   I know my mind will wander back to this moment when I return home and gear up my walks on the treadmill at gym.   Great motivation to keep my pledge.

Diet on Vacation? It is possible!

The restaurants are so enticing and easy around Lake of The Ozarks, but they are also very difficult to manage on a diet.   Most of the food around here is loaded with fat grams, sugar and fried.  Yes it is lake food and taste sooo good, but 3 strikes and you are out!   So, in an effort to keep my pledge to lose 66.5 pounds, we hit the grocery store and we are doing a lot of cooking at home.   Viola!  No only did I rediscover Lyn is a great cook (we go to so many restaurants it is easy to forget), not only can we control the fat, cholesterol and sugar, but Lyn and my girls are helping me control portion size.

We had to do quite a bit of clean up at the house because of the storms, lots of tree limbs, piles of leaves and damage to the dock, but that is good for some heavy duty exercise and sweat.   The scales here are no too accurate, but best I can tell I am down 3 pounds over a span of 5 days.  Not a pound a day, but I am making progress.

Thanks to those of you who have written with encouragement and suggestions.   I need all the help on this project I can get.

Anchor Weight.

Okay, I get it. I can see in the mirror, I feel the tightness in my clothes and I hear the comments from many of you, friends and foe alike, that the girth has got to go. I get it! Full disclosure here, I weighed in at 256 lbs this morning, the heaviest I have ever been in my life. Enough!

I am launching this new personal campaign to lose this excess weight for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my desire to be around for many years to see my little girls grow up and enjoy many grand children yet to come my way.

I am going to track my progress daily for you here on the Open Mic, partially to put pressure on myself to perform and hopefully to gain your support and encouragement to get down to 190 pounds. I hope you will hold my feet to the fire on this weight loss campaign.

I will be first taking a very simple approach, cutting each meal in half, purposely leaving half of what I used to eat on the plate. I am going to avoid the fried stuff, breads and pastas I love. I am going to be drinking buckets of water. And the big part of the lower caloric intake equation is to burn more than I take in by walking, 5 miles a day is my initial goal. My father-in-law does twice that distance a day, I can surely do half his effort to start.

My goal is to lose a pound a day for 66 days. I know that will be more than a challenge, but it will give me motivation when I feel the need to slip a little bit.

I will be on vacation for 2 weeks, a good time to get this program in gear. I will have my laptop with me, so stay tuned for progress and comments on other things.

Gasoline Prices, Anger reaches Critical Mass.

I suspected this wound happen.  We are not at riot stage yet, but gasoline prices are getting high enough, raising blood pressure high enough and raising the tempers of many Americans enough to cause outrage loud enough to scare Congress.   There is actually serious talk going on in Washington right now to let lift the ban on drilling for oil off shore, in the Rocky Mountain Shales in the Green River Basin and in ANWR.

There are still those who argue the high price of gasoline is ultimately good for us, forcing Americans to demand rapid development of alternative fuels for our trains, planes and automobiles.   But, those wishing for that paradigm underestimated the American publics stomach for paying $4 plus for a gallon of gasoline.    Just the act of releasing federal lands for drilling, that alone according the many analyst, will put immediate and downward “speculator” pressure on oil prices, long before an additional drop is pumped from those new wells.

Lets get on with it.   But, I think we need a more robust plan:

• Specifically, take the federal government’s 15% of the price of each gallon of gasoline and dedicate that entire amount, billions upon billions, into a “Manhattan Project” type research program to fully develop a hydrogen power alternative for our cars and trucks.
• Fast track development of hundreds of nuclear power plants, the cleanest, cheapest and most effective way to generate electricity in the long haul.
• We have so much coal, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal.   We have something like a 300 year supply readily available.  Fast track construction of hundreds of environmentally advanced coal plants (yes the technology exists) for electric generation.  Those plants can be up in something like 2 years, the nukes take about 7 on a fast track.
• Provide tax incentives to automobile and truck manufacturers to developer higher millage  convention and  alternative fuel  vehicles, and make a race out  of it.

I want clean air and water as much as the next guy, but I also don’t want environmentalist hardliners to push our economy into a deep depression in the name of developing alternative fuels.   Lets get these immediate sources of fuel on line quickly, and put our investment into future at the same time.

Medical Breakthrough on Muscular Dystrophy

I am doing research, getting ready for the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon and came across two (2) new studies concerning human trials of a compound called “antisense.”    This ground breaking research, being done in the Netherlands, offers some of the most promising approaches to solving ALS and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.   Click the link above to read more.

The experimental drug, called “antisense” is a compound that works by canceling out the effects of certain genetic mutations.   These type drugs are not just being studied to treat muscular dystrophy, researchers in the Netherlands, and elsewhere, say they are also promising for treating cancer, heart disease, infections and other illnesses.   The New England Journal of Medicine report on antisense drugs, say they act on RNA, a molecule that helps cells make needed proteins.  RNA is similar to the DNA that makes up genes, and helps carry out the instructions encoded in DNA.  Antisense drugs are actually a synthetic, chemically altered form of RNA that sticks to the real RNA and blocks parts of it from working.

Eric Hoffman, director of the research center for genetic medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, says this study “might herald the dawn of personalized molecular medicine” if the drug can be given systemically and made in different versions that can be designed to treat the hundreds of mutations that cause the disease.

For those of us who have worked with the MDA for a long time, this is exciting stuff.   Read the research for yourself, and see if you are not likewise excited.

Tim Russert is gone, never to be forgotten.

The world of journalism and politics lost a great one today.   Tim Russert suffered a heart attack and passed away at work in Washington, D.C. this morning.     He was just 58 years old.    Why do the good ones often go young?   Click here to see NBC’s story about Tim.

I had the very good fortune of meeting and working near Russert a number of times over the past 28 years here at NBC-5.   I rubbed elbows with Tim during the major political conventions and events I covered for this television station over the past two decades.

He was always holding court in hallways, in our NBC trailers, literally anywhere people wanted to chat up  politics. He always had time for your questions, no matter how far down the food chain you lived at NBC,  and he always wanted to know what you thought.

He was a great man, we will miss him just as greatly.

Higher prices or smaller products? Try Honesty.

The soaring prices of gasoline, diesel and corn (also used for ethanol gasoline) are making the price of almost everything we use go up.   When the cost of raw materials go up, manufacturers traditionally faced a decision; either raise the price of their product or eat the cost and live with a smaller profit or no profit at all.

But now, some manufacturers have come up with another option; shrink the portion size of their product, so it cost less per unit to make, but charge the same price as the larger portion, and (oh by the way) don’t go out of your way to tell the consumer they are getting less.

That may be a reasonable way to cost control, and it may even be a good way to train consumers to get by with using less, but by any measure it is a price hike.   Some consumer advocates call it dishonest, a hidden price hike.

I think consumers are pretty savvy these days, they realize the cost of making things is going up as the cost of raw materials and transportation go up.   I think most people are willing to pay what it cost to make the things they want so companies and products don’t go away.

Hubble Telescope’s close encounter of the “cluster” kind.

I love looking at pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.   Looking into the heavens and seeing such wonders gives me comfort that our problems here on Earth are really pretty small stuff.

NASA just released the latest picture of the Coma Cluster, one of the most dense collections of galaxies found to date. Here is the latest from the Hubble.

Go check out the site offered up here, you simply zoom in on the Hubble Space Telescope’s latest picture.   This is pretty amazing stuff, enjoy.

Drill our own, now! We’ve got the oil, but can’t go get it.

How are you alternative energy promoters liking those gasoline prices now? $5 dollars a gallon by the 4th of July looking good to you? How arrogant the claim by a leading environmentalist on the BBC yesterday saying these high prices are necessary to force us to develop alternative energy sources.

Look, I have said many times I am all for alternative sources to power my car, I personally favor the idea of hydrogen power, it is the most plentiful, powerful and clean source of motivating 4 wheels down the road. But, best estimates from the numerous experts I have read and talked to say we are at least 10 years away from large scale production of cars powered by hydrogen. We must find a way to bridge the time gap between now and the future, before high gasoline and diesel prices push us all into the poor house.

Sooo, what to do in the interim, while we wait for our hydrogen cars? Drill our own oil reserves under our own land here in the good old USA! I have written extensively about the ANWR and off shore reserves we can now drill in an environmentally safe way. Now, let me add to that mounting stack of evidence another pool of our own oil that environmental protectionists refuse to let us tap and some members of the US Congress are attempting to shutter.

This pool is called oil shale. Buried deep under the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming are massive deposits of oil shale, oil locked up in a greasy rock. We are talking about an enormous amount of oil down there, some estimates put the shale oil reserves at 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, that is 5 times all of the reserves in Saudi Arabia. Check out this report for yourself.

We have harvested this gold mine before, and now Shell Oil company has developed an advanced method of extraction that makes shale oil competitive to harvest at $40 a barrel. $40 a barrel? If we can do that, what is wrong with this picture, oil prices at $136 per barrel and rising fast.

We can drill our own now, start flooding the market with our own oil, lower the cost of gasoline and diesel, create thousands upon thousands of well paid jobs and use the prosperity to follow to fund “Manhattan Project” approach to rapidly develop hydrogen and other alternative fuel sources.

By the way, members of Congress pushing an excess profits tax on the oil industry need to be reined in. Taxes approved by Congress and collected by our Federal government amount to 15% of the cost of every gallon of gasoline, the oil companies make 4% per gallon. Congress gets that money for doing nothing! It took no risk, poked no holes in the ground, did not refine a drop of crude, did not employ one person on a drilling rig or refinery, yet collects 15%. The oil companies put up all the risk, all the liability and collect only 4%, who is being unfair to whom?

Add to that, guess who buys the cars for members of Congress and who puts the gasoline in those cars, why it is us! Taxpayers are getting double dipped by those in Congress who can’t seem to get a grip on reality. And now those same members of Congress want to prevent the shale oil development in the Rocky Mountain west. What is wrong with that picture?

Trouble! Controversy! Dallas City Council just can’t help itself.

Dallas City council is expected to pick a new name for Industrial Boulevard today. Promoters of the Trinity River project wanted to change the name to be more reflective of the new doorstep being constructed for downtown along the banks of the Trinity River. In their desire to avoid a controversy, council members thought it would be a great idea to ask citizens to suggest a new name for Industrial, and then invited them to vote in a popularity poll to identify the favorite.

Be careful what you ask for, be very careful. Citizens did exactly as city council asked (even though this was not a scientific poll), and the name that surfaced as their top choice for renaming Industrial was Cesar Chavez Boulevard, more than 2 to 1. Oops! That is apparently not the favorite choice of Deputy Mayor Pro-Tem Dwain Caraway and several other council members.

Some now say this was a stacked deal, that there was a concentrated back channel campaign to load up the phone and computer poll with votes for Chavez. Others say council just set itself up for a fall by not taking responsibility up front and picking the new name for Industrial.

Caraway says he wanted a name that would be more reflective of the Trinity Project of new bridges, lakes and parks, something like Waterfront Boulevard or Riverfront Boulevard. I personally agree with him. But, why didn’t the project managers and council just do that, instead of asking for suggestions and then dissing the public choice?

The way this is now going to work out will produce hurt feelings and taint the new name of Industrial Boulevard. There is a way out, however. Leave the name alone, let the historic name of Industrial Boulevard be a lightning rod of entrepreneurship on the banks of the new Trinity project. Legendary Dallas Developer John Stemmons, who built the area, would have loved that idea.