Blair's Blog

The part of southern Alberta where we live is quite prone to “lively” summer weather – thunderstorms are common from June through September.  Many of the thunderstorms are accompanied by hail – I’d guess that we are hit with hail 4 or 5 times in an average year.   Most of the time the hail is small and relatively soft, causing little damage.  Sometimes it’s not; yesterday we got hit with a pretty good hailstorm, it lasted about 20 minutes with some hail the size of a grape (although most was in the pea-sized range).

This storm really messed up the gardens, adding injury to the insult of a poor growing season.  Most of our annuals had just barely established themselves – this has been one of the poorest growing seasons in a long while.

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The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. ... it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that August 8.

I don’t generally spend much time (certainly not as much as I should) paying attention to international affairs, but a colleague at work sent me a copy of the article that is quoted above on the Stratfor site. I thought it was pretty interesting and certainly conveys more depth than the TV news is able to provide.

Update (6 Sept 2008): Apparently the content on the Stratfor site becomes available only to subscribers after a few weeks. The link in the quote above now points to a PDF copy of the article.

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