Stephen Taylor

At 5:04 this morning, the US National Hurricane Centre measured Ernesto’s winds at 75 MPH (121 km/h) making it the first hurricane of 2006.

At this time last year hurricane Katrina had New Orleans in its sites and was the 5th hurricane and eleventh named storm of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.

2005 turned out to be the worst hurricane season on record in damages and in number of named storms. Pundits predicted that 2006 could be on par or even worse than 2006.

While Ernesto’s status has been upgraded to the first hurricane of the season, it is the fifth named storm. Clearly, the 2006 hurricane season has so far been much less active than forecast/projected/predicted/prophesized.

I note that from the Blogging Tories Stephen Harper days-in-office counter that today is the Prime Minister’s 200th day in office.

My pal Danielle Smith wrote about one of those pet-liberty topics (healthcare reform). Rondi swooped in hours later and bumped her from the top Brookstreet spot, kneecapping conversation. Let’s get a healthcare discussion going.

I was on Dave Rutherford’s show yesterday around lunchtime talking about the CBC on-air regret. The conversation evolved to blogging in general. You can listen to the segment here. There were some humourous audio problems at the end (gotta love live radio). To pre-empt any questions, yes… I asked permission to re-broadcast the interview on this blog 😉

The Blogging Tories aggregator has been acting a little funny lately. I think we’ve hit a certain threshold of input blogs and now the aggregator only posts the latest posts by members (and omits the older ones). The exception to the rule, for some reason is PTBC’s feed. It’s added a new quirk to Blogging Tories and I can’t figure out if I prefer it to the old system. We’re still figuring out all of the bugs in order to bring you a worthwhile website.

There’s a new Blogging Tories video blog that ties in with our BT-TV plug-in. It’ll host the archived material that has appeared on BT-TV in the past. Also, it may feature other video that’ll interest the small c conservative community. I’m also considering making it a group blog for BT members that have contributed video in the past. I’m looking in your direction BBS, Damian, Brandon and the others (you know who you are)…

The books section is again featured on Blogging Tories because I finally updated it with Mark Milke’s book (satisfying an overdue promise to Mark). Please feel free to suggest books that should appear on the list. Also, if any BT member has reviewed a book that is on (or should be on) the list, I will link to it from the page.

Take one Internet meme (link fixed), mix in the blogosphere’s bust of the Reuters fauxtography scandal and you get this:

Well done Jawa!

Disclaimer: while the blogosphere is venting over recent MSM scandals, I will say that a good number of journalists are doing a great job and report the news to the professional standards that we all expect. Unfortunately, we don’t tend to emphasize this work as often as we should. I hope that the blogosphere continues to rout out all of the yellow journalism that unfairly tarnishes the profession.