Outside this early Tuesday on California’s north coast, I can hear the wind picking up and a definite chill-factor rolling across the area — we’re suppose to catch a major winter storm today and tomorrow, but who’s to know.

And weather 76 years ago apparently helped prepare the German dirigible, the Hindenburg, for a bad landing in New Jersey — yesterday, researchers released details of a report on the well-known disaster.
Via Reuters: The explosion that destroyed the Hindenburg was caused by static electricity and a buildup of hydrogen after the dirigible flew through a thunderstorm, according to a team of experts…

Thirty-six people died in the May 1937 incident, but the Hindenburg crash really killed the Zeppelin era for well and good.

(Illustration found here).

Apparently, human hands was the tie that bound the disaster: British aeronautical engineer Jem Stansfield and a team of researchers based in San Antonio, Texas, concluded that the airship ignited when the ground crew ran to take the landing ropes, effectively earthing the ship and causing a spark…
The goal of this research was to squash rumors of bombs on board or of explosive properties in the Hindenburg’s paint. A little thunderstorm and a human touch…

Humanity is also creaking under the weight of just-how-awful the spark is between asshole factions in Washington, DC, and the rest of the worldwide population. This sequester bullshit is rolling with the tide, and the tide is washing out to sea.

How in the world could the two-word phrase, “common sense,” be used in regards to the bottle-neck, ass-crunch which our elected officials currently have placed on this country — a bowel-block. The lede in this LA Times piece from yesterday tells the whole story: President Obama has been phoning Republican senators in recent days in search of what he called a “common sense” caucus on budget issues, even as House Republicans unveiled legislation Monday to lock in the “sequester” cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year.
Nit-twit GOPers, however, will continue to end-run Obama, doing as they did yesterday to take the ‘…roughest edges off across-the-board spending cuts…’ and appease the public while keeping steadfast on their dumb-assness.
There’s no sense, common or otherwise, with them.

This sequester thing will in time impact a shitload of stuff — yesterday legal groups got into the fray, charging the budget cuts will damage justice, of what there is nowadays.
Via Legal Times:

The leaders of three legal organizations warned Monday that the safety of judges and courthouse staffs could be imperiled by state funding reductions and looming federal budget cuts, which reduce federal court security funding.
In a statement asking Congress to better fund the courts, the American Bar Association American, the Association for Justice and DRI — The Voice of the Defense Bar said that the cuts that went into effect March 1, called sequestration, will close courthouses and deny access to courts.
“The federal judiciary and every individual and business that depends on our courts will bear the burden for congressional deadlock through costly delays,” the statement says.
The groups also point to recent episodes of gun violence on courthouse grounds in several states – such as Alabama, Delaware, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas – to say the cuts “put court petitioners, staff and judges in physical jeopardy.”

And what’s with all the space rocks lately?
In December, there was the close-call, and another one in a so-called ‘cosmic coincidence’ last month with a huge blow-out over Russia and sightings of space rocks from Cuba and Miami to San Francisco to right up here along our coastline — is the “oh, humanity” cry coming from the darkness above?
So yesterday morning another close call with a short-time window of discovery.
Via GeekOSystem:

While you were sleeping, an asteroid that was just discovered two days ago made a close pass by Earth at 2:35 a.m. ET.
How close?
Within lunar orbit close.
There was nothing to worry about, as it was clear this asteroid — roughly the size of the object that recently exploded over Russia — had no chance of hitting the Earth.
Though it is a little unsettling that it was discovered with so little time before its near miss, the bright side is that we discovered it at all.
Every asteroid, it seems, has a silver lining.

They quote Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project off a Google+ Hangout: That we are finding all these asteroids recently does not mean that we are being visited by more asteroids, just that our ability to detect them has gotten so much better. Our technology has improved a lot over the past decades.

And the geeks reach a philosophical conclusion:

The pessimistic view of this is that an asteroid came without the distance of the Moon, and we only knew it existed two days before that happened, but an optimist would say that we had a whole two days we would not have had just a few years ago.
Sure, there’s still really nothing we can do within two days to stop an asteroid about to hit Earth, but at least we’d have two days to say goodbye.

Added to the fire of heavenly objects — a huge comet will get real-close to the planet Mars in about October 2014, and there’s a chance it might smash into the Red Planet, and if it does, the encounter should ‘…yield a blast equivalent to that of a billion megatons of TNT.’
Shit-ness!

Meanwhile, here on solid earth the special effect is to survive falling downward:

“I fall … really, really far,” 4-year-old Dylan Hayes said in an interview after miraculously surviving a three story drop during which the child somersaulted twice before landing on his feet.
Local Denver CBS affiliate KCNC reports that young Dylan was standing on the living room couch trying to talk to his downstairs neighbors when he fell through.
“I was terrified,” his mother Jessica Hayes told the station.
“I didn’t know what I was going to see when I got down to the ground floor.”
…
Despite landing on his feet, Dylan was taken to a local hospital and kept under observation for 20 hours.
Doctors placed a brace on his neck as a precaution but said he appears to not have suffered any serious physical injuries.
Even more amazing, Dylan landed on a bed of rocks.
The ordeal led to one news outlet referring to Dylan as a “superboy,” for his miraculous luck.
“There had to have been angels watching over him,” Dylan’s grandmother Kelli Hayes told the station.

Indeed, Dylan’s fate is beyond humanity’s grasp.