View From the Bushes

Some of you may have noticed that the site was down for about 14 hours. My guess is that most of you did not. My friend who is kind enough to take care of my hosting turned off the name servers I was using without telling me. It took me a while to figure out that's what had happened because Comcast (cable modem provider) has been having lots of DNS problems as well, so initially I thought that's what it was. I guess if I had been more on the ball I would have figured it out last night. Anyway, there's actually a whole story of greed, corruption, lust and no small amount of PERL programming behind the name servers being shut down, but I'll have to save that for another time.

I just heard that they've selected a new pope. CNN says:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany was elected the 265th pontiff today by the College of Cardinals. He was announced as tens of thousands of people cheered in St. Peter's Square. Ratzinger has chosen the name Benedict XVI, the Vatican announced. The announcement came shortly after white smoke rose from the Vatican chimney and bells rang to announce that a new pope had been selected.

I have to confess to being disappointed that it didn't take longer. I was hoping for weeks of deadlock, mostly because it makes for a more interesting story, but I was also hoping that the Latin American delegation would put up a stronger fight. They had almost enough votes by themselves to block the selection of a new pope, and I was counting on a pope from either Latin America or Africa, but I guess after hundreds of years of Italian popes they're slowly working their way outward, though going from Poland to Germany seems like a step backwards. I find it interesting that he's 78. Barring phenomenal health, his papacy will be shorter than John Paul's; probably considerably shorter. My guess is that this indicates that he's designed to be a place holder rather than a revolutionary, though judging by how conservative he's been, there was never much of a danger of him being a revolutionary.

That's all for today. I'll leave you with a story on an asteroid which was suppossed to miss Earth but may get us after all.

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Ross