Whew. Hi all.

Hope you had a good weekend. Wanted to give you a quick update of what I did yesterday.

In Nevada there was National Clean Energy Summit 2.0. The lineup of participants was about as good as it gets with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Steven Chu (Energy Secretary), Harry Reid (Senate Majority Leader), Maria Cantwell, John D. Podesta (Clinton Chief of Staff) and good ole boy T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens of course is pretty well known as a Texas oil man from the 1980's, but he spent the entire summit promoting natural gas. Now getting past the fact that the man owns land sitting on one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world (also a bunch of empty land that allows him to possibly build a wind farm) and check out one of his proposals: changing all 6.5 million diesel engine 18-wheelers, which have engines that run almost 24-hours-a-day, to natural gas. This would cut the nearly 4.5 million barrels of oil the U.S. receives from OPEC in half. The plan led Cantwell to wrap things up by saying:

"When you have an oil man from Texas saying we need to get off of oil, you don't need a better mission statement than that."

I spent about 5-6 hours watching this event yesterday, in addition to the stuff I do on a normal day. The day started at about 830 and ended around 7 (long after the air conditioning had shut off. You're thinking 'yeah, who cares', but since all you Seattlites complained so much about your hot weather recently, I'll point out that it was 96 yesterday - and rained. Amazing thunderstorm last night. Hit 95 on Sunday and looks to stay in the high 80's and low 90's this week. This is D.C. weather.

Back to the Summit.

Gore gave several spirited speeches as he the 'father' of this movement and played the part well. He gave the quote that summed up the theme: "We need to not only change the lights and the windows, we need to change the laws and the policies."
Hmmm...didn't he used to work in the White House?

Clinton gave maybe the most technical speech I've ever seen him give - certainly not his normal charismatic style - but it was very good. I won't include it here, except to say that he said "Let's take what Nevada is doing and put it on steroids."

That took up the vast majority of the day and kept me in the office past 7 pm. Back at it today. At least it isn't 97 degrees.

Other links:

Pure comedy (the first half at least).

The Empire is back at its rightful place atop Major League Baseball (now if the M's can sweep them this weekend - for all you who question my hometown loyalty!)

Football is HERE! And Coach Sark is in full swing with his blog.

A new QB in Florida?

Pretty awesome list (with videos) of the great sports speeches. Comes to you by way of another good site.

Pay attention to this point-of-emphasis this season. Ironic that this comes from the Big-12, with it's dominant offenses now protected even more.

Yet another Washington Little League team is making a run.

An old warrior has returned to the Dawgs.

Southwest is looking to expand.

And some sad news:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, brother of a President and mother-in-law of the Governor of California (you may have heard of him) died yesterday.

Not life-threatening, but very sad: Brooks and Dunn are soon to be no more.

Stay Classy.