Lights out? Experts fear fireflies are dwindling

This confirms the nagging suspicion I've had all these years that something has happened to the firefly population. I used to see thousands of fireflies lighting up the summer evenings during my childhood in suburban Atlanta. (We used to call them "lightning bugs," and yes, I did collect them in a jar, but always released them the following morning.) Now, I'm lucky just to see one or two every summer, and usually they aren't flying around and flashing, but are instead crawling lethargically along a wall or fence.

P. Diddy to "Saudi Arabia brothers and sisters": Lower oil prices so I can fly on private jet

Oh, GOD!!!! [massive eye roll] Hey Diddy, you want a wheel of cheese with that magnum of WHINE?

Honoré: Preparedness is the answer, don't count on levees

As of this writing, Hurricane Gustav has been pounding the Gulf Shores for a few hours already and New Orleans has been 90% evacuated. In a CNN interview this weekend, LtGen. Russel Honoré, a Louisiana native who led the military response during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, warned that the levee network is not likely to hold against Gustav's onslaught. He had some very interesting things to say on preparedness in addition to the status of the levees.

Some highlights from his interview:

"The government decided that we're going to fix the levees that were broken. They have been repaired in the finest fashion. But don't think that we're going to have 100 percent protection [from the levees]. There's a limit to what you can do to protect yourself from flooding.

"People talk about the Dutch. But the Dutch don't get hurricanes. When you're dealing with a storm surge of 30 feet, you're talking about a whole different ballgame. We have over 300 miles of levees.

"I would not count on levees during a hurricane to save your life. Levees will give you early warning. If you're living behind a levee, you need to be prepared to evacuate at any time. That's Russel Honore's rule No. 1. If you live along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf Coast, rule No. 2 is: It's going to flood." ...

"We need to build a culture of preparedness. We need to assure that every kid who goes to school in America knows how to swim. The number of EMS teams and ambulances is not tracking with the growth in population. We need to teach more of our people first aid.

"The federal government ought to be there to back the states up, we need to build a culture of preparedness in each. Why are we sending people there to issue them ice and water? We should be empowering people to act locally. The key to hurricane preparation is family preparation. If families are prepared, we lose fewer lives.

"We need to create a national preparedness plan, with a local civil defense corps. We need dual trained teachers who can be disaster responders. We need to equip each high schools with satellite communications.

"We need drugstores with generators in each geographical area ... If you lose power, people can still get medicine. Gas stations along interstate highways need to have generators. We need cellphone towers that could be lowered before the storm and then raised after the storm.

For every dollar you spend in preparedness before the disaster you save $9 after the disaster."