Rainy day musings

So far, this month of May has been rainy, cold and very windy, with the infamous bise noire blowing ferociously on Tuesday, so ferociously in fact that I feared for the shutters.  It's been a good time to cocoon, attend to some neglected tasks and catch up on correspondence.   According to MeteoSuisse, tomorrow's weather does not look to be an improvement.  Sad sigh here.

Adding to the general gloom,  the volcano in Iceland continues to spew ash, closing airports in the UK and Ireland yesterday.  Although flights began again today, according to The Guardian newspaper (UK), It is anticipated that flights through that airspace, and perhaps even farther afield, will be disrupted throughout the summer.   Flying through London is usually one of the easiest routes for me.  British Airways has a direct flight from London to Baltimore with easy access to and from London from here.  Thurgood Marshall Airport (aka Baltimore-Washington International Airport or BWI) is one of the most user-friendly airports on the US East Coast, IMO, and has the added advantage of being about a 15-minute drive from our home in Maryland.

Voters in the UK are going to the polls today.  According to the polls, the outcome may be a cliffhanger.  If Labour does not win, as looks most likely, it also does not look likely that the Tories will win outright.  Between them, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have the majority of the electorate.  Given that those two parties are fairly natural allies, it looks as if a coalition government will be formed.  But who knows?  Election results can be surprising.  The Guardian provides a great interactive here.

I've been watching the news about the latest oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the resulting, potentially ecologically and economically catastrophic, oil spill.  I am one of the many with serious qualms about offshore oil drilling, especially when it is unregulated for proper safety valves as seems to have been the case with this particular rig ... and several others, if not all, in the Gulf.  It seems that we never learn.  The saddest thing of all is that those who should have learned from past experience with disastrous oil spills seem to have learned the least, as The Mudflats reports here, in inimitable Alaskan style.

The EU is gloomy these days, with the bad economic news from Greece.  While the EU will help bail Greece out, it is doing so grudgingly.  The Euro is also suffering.  For me, there is a tiny silver lining because my USD value has increased as a result.  Greece is not the only European economy in trouble and there is concern that the problems will get worse, perhaps even much worse, before they improve.  The Greeks, on the other hand, are themselves very unhappy about the austerity measures that must be imposed as a condition of the bailout.  Tragically, this unhappiness translated to riots and violence in which three people were killed in Athens yesterday.

To complete today's musings, scientists have discovered that there is a little Neanderthal in us all, whether we like it or not.  Apparently, some 60,000 years ago at least some early humans mated with Neanderthals.  Approximately four percent of our DNA today reflects those encounters.  But modern humans and Neanderthals also share 99.7 percent of their DNA, which was inherited from a common ancestor.  The way that scientists were able to determine this is absolutely fascinating in itself.  

There's always tomorrow.  And perhaps it will be a better day.