Another Halloween, but slapped hard by nature — there’s a few million US people who won’t be prowling the streets tonight seeking after treats.
The trick will be to crawl through Hurricane Sandy’s rubble and stay alive.

Warm and appears like it’s about to rain up here along northern California’s coastline, with the operative word here is ‘warm‘ as the last few days have appeared as ‘extreme weather,’ but in a good way — humid temperatures and sunshine.

(Illustration found here).

We did have a bit of terrible drama around here yesterday — another close call with nature:

A likely great white shark attack in Humboldt County left a group of surfers scrambling to save a man’s life.
The victim — a 25-year-old surfer whose name has not yet been released — is expected to survive.
He underwent surgery and was listed in fair condition this afternoon.
…
“I happened to be driving by as they were pulling him out of the water,” Gabriel said (local resident, Jason Gabriel).
The victim had about four 12-inch long gashes from his ribs to below his hips.
“It punctured all the way through. There were guts and meat hanging,” Gabriel said, adding that the victim appeared to be in shock.
“He was going ‘Oh my God, oh my God.'”

My son surfs, but he hasn’t been out for awhile, and great whites are normal in these waters — just a week ago, a surfer down in my own former stomping ground of Central California was killed by a great white.
We humans think we’re so incredible and smart, but get us out of our environment and we’re shit — one of those environs is the ocean; we’re low on the totem pole out there and sea life reigns supreme, whether you snagged by a crab or a great shark, we’re at their mercy.

Also at nature’s mercy is tonight — Halloween, one of the nastiest of holidays, ‘All Saints Eve,’ WTF.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is trying to pull some weight, tweeting: “If conditions are not safe on Wednesday for Trick or Treating, I will sign an Executive Order rescheduling #Halloween.”
Christie, a big GOPer in more ways than one, has already hit the news wire with his overwhelming thumbs up for President Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy, saying this ain’t the time for politics:

“The federal government response has been great.
I was on the phone at midnight again last night with the president personally,” he told NBC’s “Today” program.
“The president has been outstanding in this.
The folks at FEMA … have been excellent,” said Christie, once thought to be a contender for the White House this time around or possibly Romney’s vice presidential pick.
“I don’t give a damn about Election Day.
It doesn’t matter a lick to me at the moment,” Christie later told reporters in a press conference about the storm damage.
“I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

And what about big whopper Mitt Romney?

“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested.
I’ve got a job to do here in New Jersey that’s much bigger than presidential politics, and I could care less about any of that stuff,” he said.

He and Obama are scheduled to tour the storm-damaged Jersey shore today, which should be the top buzz feed this 24-hour news cycle — unless something more weird happens.

Nature and be cute, and nature can be ugly, and when nature is f*cked with it can be real shitty.
Sandy in a nutshell (via the Washington Post):

The storm was blamed for 51 deaths up and down the East Coast, according to the Associated Press.
The tempest played havoc with the power grid, knocking out electricity to 7.5 million people.
More than 16,000 airline flights have been canceled so far.
Eqecat, a firm that models the costs of catastrophes for insurance companies, estimated Sandy’s economic impact on the country at $10 billion to $20 billion.

And this is just a window into the future, but worse as times goes on — a innovative idea, since the result what we have, then call out the culprits.
This novel idea from Bill McKibben via BeyondChron, a San Francisco online daily:

The fossil fuel companies have played the biggest role in making sure we don’t slow global warming down.
They’ve funded climate denial propagandists and helped pack Congress with anti-environmental extremists, making sure that common sense steps to move toward renewable energy never happen.
So maybe it’s only right that we should honor their efforts by naming storms for them from now on.
At the very least it’s fun to imagine the newscasters: “Exxon is coming ashore across New Jersey, leaving havoc in her wake.”
“Chevron forces evacuation of 375,000.”

Ah, yes — trick or treat?