Cloudy, damp early Thursday here on California’s north coast and more rain is expected today — we had a good splash yesterday, not anywhere near enough to replenish this dry state, but was welcomed nevertheless.

Ironic laugh relief — Sarah Palin’s eye-gouging, most-literary response to the GOP incestuous blowout in Mississippi this week. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire highlights:

“We’re going to be a bankrupt, fundamentally transformed country unless those who know what they’re doing, and aren’t going along just to get along with those in power, it being today the Democrats.”

Compel any English teacher to blow chunks.

(Illustration found here).

And in another fruit-toss to crazy, but it’s not the GOP — it’s the heat getting to us Californians.
This is not my idea, it must be urine, or maybe just recycled pee.
The drought in this state is really, really heating up with all of us in some level of it, and it’s not going away anytime soon. A lot of talk about desalination, but it’s expensive and now discussions of other ways to obtain precious water.
Yep, you read right. From CityLab:

Which brings us to the pee-drinking.
This year’s drought has motivated California to invest $1 billion in new money on water recycling efforts statewide, a much more cost-efficient way of increasing potable water supplies.
But reusing purified sewer water for brushing your teeth is not without its own set of issues.

“The problem with recycled water is purely psychological. Despite the fact the water is safe and sterile, the “yuck factor” is hard to get over, even if a person understands that the water poses no harm. In one often-cited experiment, researchers poured clean apple juice into a clean bedpan, and asked participants if they’d be comfortable drinking the apple juice afterwards. Very few of the participants agreed, even though there was nothing wrong with it. It’s forever associated with being “dirty,” just like recycled wastewater.”

While it’s not quite correct that every glass of water contains dinosaur pee, it is true that every source of fresh water on Earth (rainfall, lakes, rivers, and aquifers) is part of a planetary-scale water cycle that passes through every living thing at one point or another.
In a very real way, each and every day we are already drinking one another’s urine.
Earlier this year, the city of Portland, Oregon (in one of the most Portland-y moments in recent memory) nearly drained a local 38-million-gallon reservoir after a teen was caught urinating in it.
Slate’s Laura Helmuth made a brilliant calculation that the poor lad would have had to pee for 40 days straight to raise the reservoir’s nitrate levels above EPA-allowable limits and make the water unsafe to drink.
The good news is that this hurdle isn’t permanent.
Psychologists have found that when cities reintroduce purified municipal wastewater into natural aquifers, streams, or lakes for later withdrawal, public acceptance of the fact that yes-it-was-once-pee improves.
Since 2008, Orange County has recharged a local aquifer with billions of gallons of recycled sewage via the largest potable water reuse facility in the world.

About the only thing I can say is Pee-You!
Now, that’s krazy…