The sky hangs like a wet, grey blanket this morning - the poetic finale to three days of nimbus tumult. Miraculously tipped off, it seems, to the downturn of the weather, many commuters in the Cleveland area chose this week for vacation. At least that's how it appears: I drove to work and shared the road with virtually no one. It's like The Stand out there.

First thing this morning, the database wasn't connecting so I couldn't post - that in itself didn't make as much difference, as I've been rather busy.

Add that to fatigue attributed to last night's parade of thunderstorms (following yesterday's parade of thunderstorms), culminating in a 5:00 AM tornado warning and sighting - as well as a bothersome (formerly worrisome) eustachian tube congestion that is temporarily causing high-midrange harmonics to detune in my right ear a quarter tone sharp - and we can fairly well put together a blogger who is taking a sixteen-hour hiatus. I'm sure I'll have something to contribute this evening.

Combination spoiler and teaser: I love thunderstorms only slightly less than I love photographing cumulonimbus clouds. Over the past month I've accumulated a healthy amount of cloud shots from my eighth-floor balcony, at different times of day and with varying precise meteorological conditions; I began scanning this past weekend and hope to complete a new photoblog - think "uBlog Foto" - within the next couple of weeks. Yes, it will be lots and lots of clouds. But you can't say no to look-alike shots of Bespin, now can you?

UPDATE: Divine Providence is obviously investigating the adage that it's never advisable to have "Too much of a good thing." Radar images at 4:30 PM EDT show a gigantic, red blob - practically with its own bow echo - bearing down on the Cleveland area. For another evening, the State of Ohio becomes a watch-warning checkboard.

A sunny day, a happy office and our most important secular holiday in the wings makes for a charmingly disconcerted media and blogosphere. I just noticed on Drudge a blurb about a possible Iraqi weapons watershed; that should be an interesting development.

I've begun to push ahead again on the "freedom and culture" essay. Begun in February, I've slowly worked it up to around 9,000 words, and took a break several weeks ago to read up on historical accounts and perspectives to which I was beginning to become myopic - in other words, I felt I needed more research. Besides, the weapons debate has provided the perfect lead-in. I'm optimistic that I can, truly, have it completed to satisfaction soon. Soon.

The world's struggles and crises are running their course, no major points to comment on at the moment. Unemployment? My only question is whether or not those unemployed before the latest round of layoffs have been given disincentives to throw themselves back into work because of extended federal benefits. I've heard accounts of tough layoffs from trusted sources, many of them familial, and checks from the government were never a part of their plans. Ever.

Liberia: as I said on Pejmanesque, smashing dictators must become our business. Though this does seem out of order in the sense that free nations can do more damage to authoritarians by knocking out more powerful sowers of discord, fate will not hand us an orderly set of circumstances. Thus principle over practice. One caveat: we must enter Liberia with an intent to destroy the totalitarian and thuggish elements, then guide democratic reconstruction. "Peacekeeping" requires a peace to keep; it is not refereeing or playing objective sparring partner, which needlessly puts both civilian and military lives at risk while failing to solve the problem. The United Nations did that to feckless heights in the 1990s, a witless crime against humanity in itself.

Enjoy the sunshine if you have it. Cumulous-filled, humid days leading up to thunderstorms spells my summer of choice; if I didn't know any better I would think I had wings.

Over the past couple of weeks I've added a link here and there - not to mention moved a blog or two from one category to the other. My cousin, for instance, runs more of a personal, media-concerned blog than a political one. Hence, his induction into the non-aligned blogroll.

UPDATE: I've enacted an ideological reclassification, too. The first blogger, I must say, gave me a different impression from his unquestionably assertive introduction (at least to me, anyway) and has since become more clearly tentative on many issues. He even acknowledges it, I now see. That could have instructed me better in my response to a post of his a few days ago, in that the position would have surprised me far less. No insult (beyond a bone to pick with his referring to bloggers who choose to adhere to a policy rather than work as neutral arbiter ad finitum as a "mindless cheering section"). Alignment is profoundly important to me, second only to logical classification. The second blogger has admirably moved middle-of-the-road on several issues from the "higher education left" and thus is out of step with the sternly determined perspectives of those in the Minority Report.

God Bless.

I just witnessed the most wonderful thing. Here I am, printing out newsletters at the office, when from the window I heard the rising murmur of car horns - many of them, honking and honking. Behind the klaxons came a roar, a sharp, square roar that had me first looking to the sky for an answer on such a thundery, cloudy day.

Bikers. Thousands of them by my count, they rode past my building on US 10 - Center Ridge Road here in Rocky River - in twos and threes, honking at waving bystanders. The vast majority of the bikers rode Harleys; a few had sidecars and a handful rode crotch-rockets. Snarls from the engines bounced off the echo chamber created by the two buildings that enclose a parking lot by three sides as they sidle up obliquely to mine; the sound was incredible when I opened the window. Screams, shouts, hoots, hollers and hogs as the bikers rolled by in their endless procession.

My colleague in the Axis of Awesome, Danny O'Brien, is interning for the Plain Dealer. His father, incidentally, works for the paper's editorial page. Danny lobbied for James Lileks' columns - which, as far as I know, carry no fee for syndication - and, in the interests of serving the silent minority of conservatives and non-rabid liberals in Northeastern Ohio, the Plain Dealer agreed. Lileks ran today - and oh, it's a shiner on the Dems' ugly collective mug.

This is nothing short of miraculous. Keep in mind by whom and where James Lileks will be printed. This is the Plain Dealer which, yesterday, set as its headline, rather gleefully I'm sure, that the United States is LOSING THE PEACE (what a way to stay on board, crew). And the Plain Dealer is read by the city of Cleveland, the city who elects fraternal-twin demagogues Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and Dennis Kucinich, the latter reaffirmed by a 4-to-1 margin; Kucinich defaulted the city a couple of decades ago before he befriended people spreading Timothy Leary's ashes in space - the better to prevent weapons proliferation there, surely - and so apparently fits into the "He's our monster" category.

Danny was certain that there's a market to be had. I think he's right: whether you agree with Lileks or not, he writes impeccably and tirelessly. It's always a 750-word tilt-a-whirl.

Work takes me on a tour of the lovely state of Ohio; I'll be back tomorrow. Read my archives in the meantime.

Don't ever let anyone uninitiated with rock music (no, Top 40 doesn't count) hear your recordings: when you're finished playing a selection, they'll faintly smile, then grimace and protest, "It's okay, I guess, but I just can't understand the words."

Sorry. Never mind. Go back to Sting, or something.

UPDATE: Though I have to admit, certain persons incapable of appreciating rock certainly do have an interior decorator's flair. Okay. Back to sulking.

James Lileks puts words to the thoughts we muse and flick away like love-me-not petals:

It’s amusing, and slightly dismaying, to see teen girls in 2003 look like they did in 1973. Hip-huggers, tight shirts with strings that tied at the back, straight-part hair. It’s a look that makes me think of Boone’s Farm and Black Oak Arkansas.

[...]

When I was in high school, that sort of brazen hussyness was an arrow to the heart, because you knew it was all being wasted on a football player two grades ahead. Now it looks amusing. The Li’l Slut style is not as sophisticated as its practitioners believe. But they’ll figure it out eventually.

I go to work in a suit - button-down shirt, dress pants, dress jacket, polished boots and a tie. If I go to a community function in the evening or if I need to dash out quickly and haven't time to change, I keep the good clothes on. I wasn't always like this; high school saw me move out of half-hearted, pseudo-preppy attire into fun-loving, ironic t-shirts and jeans. It was in college that I slowly evolved into a formal-casual tradition with polo shirts and slacks. Ties came in heavy senior year. A year out of college, when I resolved to leave my hair alone and pull out my earrings, the look went straight from Hybrid Mod to City Gent. I haven't worn an untucked shirt [with any regularity] into public for at least two years. I haven't worn jeans for four or five.

To date, I've lost count as to how many compliments I receive from women about the apparent mix of cultural daring and throwback class in which I choose to parade around. Girls my age usually remain silent; if they give me the eye, it seems to be for other reasons; instead, the slick threads are particularly caught by elderly women, whose men of the day wouldn't leave the house with anything else.

Sometimes they reminisce sights I would have loved to have seen - every man and woman on a city street bedecked in respectable regalia, suit-hat-and-tie in arms with dress-purse-and-hat. "You know what they say about style: it always finds a way to come back." One woman cheerfully grinned at her adage; I did, too.

What if it did? Undershirts could be relegated to their rightful stature - collecting sweat. Would rock stars and punks take it with some difficulty? I'm sure; but Puff Daddy seems to have the right idea. It'll catch on.

UPDATE: Not that I'm under ethical accountability to reveal my dress code, but actually, when wearing dress-pant cut-offs, I'll usually leave the shirt untucked. Like today.

UPDATE: Over at the folks' house, and my dress-pant cut-offs got soaked. My father had jean shorts. Another first!