Last week I finally got to watch this strange movie “Grizzly Man” about Tim Treadwell, the ultimate bear nut. Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in Alaska literally among huge grizzly bears. In October 2003 Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie were killed and eaten in their camp in the park by one of the grizzly bears.

In the last five summers with the bears he took cameras along and filmed the bears, foxes and himself in the rough, beautiful Alaskan wilderness. The bears were so habituated to him that he got truly amazing footage standing just feet away from the grizzly bears. Werner Herzog, the famous German movie director, got access to the more than one hundred hours of Treadwell’s footage. He decided to use this material to create a documentary, as “in this material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth.” Herzog says. He added interviews with people who knew Treadwell, or who were knowledgeable about the bears in Alaska and wove all this into a fascinating tale “of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil.”

It is easy to dismiss Treadwell as a nutcase. He was a recovering addict who went native among the bears and increasingly cast the world of the humans as an adversary. He renounced the complexities of the human life for the simplicity and perceived perfection and harmony of the wilderness. Although Treadwell’s naive view of nature and the wilderness he was immersing himself in stands in stark contrast to Herzog’s view of a chaotic and merciless universe, Herzog does not judge Treadwell. “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a saviour.”

This is the tension that carries this film. It’s a compelling story of the desperate search of a human for a connection to life, nature through wilderness, through bears. Treadwell’s search for this connection is deeply human. To varying degrees, we all have this desire for this connection, I know I do. Did Treadwell take this desire and turn it into a quest that gave his life meaning? Or maybe it was just another escape from reality, just another self-destructive addiction, that eventualy killed him in an overdose, of sorts?

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not to try, even when you turn off the ominous soundtrack:

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

Careful with the Flickeur. You might just find yourself staring at it for hours … until it eats up all your computer’s memory and the poor thing goes belly-up.

After the panel discussion about biodiesel on Friday, I returned to CCCC in Pittsboro on Saturday morning for girl Mark’s biodiesel 101 class. The class was packed and Mark commented on how great the interest in biodiesel is in NC compared to other parts of the country. In the class we had a good cross-section of biodieselers from around the state: truckers, farm workers, students and engineer-types. Some were just biodiesel hobbyists who want to make a little biodiesel for their VW or Mercedes and some were business owners, who want to reduce operation cost for their diesel equipment by making their own fuel.

The class was great. Mark quickly established her authority in all things biodiesel and diesel technology by covering all the biodiesel basics and answering many very specific questions on Saturday morning. The class was a regular crash course in biodiesel making – no-frills and all nuts-and-bolts, mono-and-diglycerides, dewatering-and-titration. We spent some time in the classroom, more time in the lab, and on Sunday we took a field trip to the Piedmont Biofuels farm. We got to see their setup – the 500 gallon, double-jacketed, water heated mothership. Finally we spent several hours in the auto shop at CCCC and put together four appleseed reactors.
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This weekend was fun. Friday after work, I drove down to Pittsboro in Chatham County for a 2-hour discussion forum on biodiesel. And Saturday and Sunday the program was all-biodiesel, all-day, at girl Mark’s workshop at Chatham County Community College.

Both events were organized by the tireless folks at Piedmont Biofuels Coop. Friday’s discussion brought together a crowd of 75 – from curious biodiesel novices to seasoned brewers and activists from all over North Carolina. Biodiesel coops and biofuels-related organizations from all over the state were represented: Burlington Biodiesel, Blue Ridge Biofuels out of Asheboro, Cape Fear Biofuels from Wilmington, Appstate Biodiesel Boone, Bull City Biodiesel (yours truly :)) and Carolina Biodiesel (Mark’s new baby – still under the wings of the Forest Foundation) as well as the folks from Pritchard’s Mountain, from the Human Kindness Foundation and from Guilford Tech. Last, and most importantly, Piedmont Biofuels, the organizers of the event were well-represented.

The discussion covered a lot of ground, from from production issues to pricing and economics, to organizational questions. One suggestion that seemed to get some traction was the idea of forming a state-wide biodiesel council the coops could join. That would allow each member coop to honor memberships reciprocity. A brief discussion touched on the question of a tax holiday for biofuels in North Carolina. On Sunday in a smaller group, Lyle elaborated on some of his experiences, and frustrations, lobbying in Raleigh for this issue of a tax holiday for biofuels.
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The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader.

The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for external USB drives. It does that quite well: the first one I bought runs on the OEM firmware and reliably makes my 300GB main storage drive available on our little home network. When I read more about this clever $90-device, it became clear that I could replace two of the full-size PCs that normally run 24/7 in our basement to make printers available and run other processes.

So, I hooked up an old backup harddrive, and dug into the Linux system of my SLUG. The nslu2-linux.org site is extremely helpful and provides how-tos and documentation. I am not much of a Linux hacker, but this is a great opportunity to figure out some of this stuff. After some RTFM moments I got the web server and print server going. The only thing that bothers me about this setup is the noisy damn harddrive. I’ll see if I’ll get a new, quieter drive, or maybe run this setup off of a flash drive. In any case, I’ll have to redo the whole thing, since the uNSLUng process does move parts of the OS to the USB device and the additional packages are also installed on the USB device.

The reason is that the “quiet computer” aspect of this project is half the fascination. With a flash drive, or two, plugged into the SLUG, this is a quiet, low-power computer, smaller than a CD box-set and more powerful than my old Pentium I laptop. The processor is a 130 MHz ARM on an Intel board, which is apparently what Linksys usually does. The small built-in RAM disk can be supplemented with external storage, and when you add a paging file, this little box can be thoroughly souped up.

Finally, if you really want a “high-performance SLUG” you can overclock the CPU, or rather de-underclock it. The little box comes throttled down, and following the instructions, you can pop off a transistor and restore it to its full 266 MHz glory. That’ll be a project for another three-day weekend …

WOW – deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the – uh – intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what would happen:

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil–but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case – or should we say tank – also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.
Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil, by Frank Völkel, Tom’s Hardware, 9 Jan 2006

Oh boy – German engineering, oder was? They should really use recycled fryer oil instead of virgin oil. Makes more environmental sense.

Last night we did our post-solstice ritual and torched our christmas tree. The tree was still way too green – we should have let it dry out more. Still, it was quite a firework ….

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I am really torn when I ponder the pre-holiday sellout by Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder to Putin’s little racket Gazprom. Which is the bigger scandal? His cynical, middle-finger-in-your-face exit from the public arena? Or is it even worse that it is apparently perfectly legal to conduct foreign policy for the German people for seven years while netwoking your way into a lucrative job with an international company controlled by the Russian government? And I also want to know what Fischer knew about Schröder’s plans.

Clearly, politicians who retire from the public arena will often sell their experience and contacts to the highest bidder. That’s the reality, and we can probably live with that, as long as we can see clearly that official business is not too blatantly influenced by private economic interests. But the Gazprom job puts Schröder on the same level with Dick Cheney, who lets the U.S. energy industry write its own regulatory framework, and who is clearly in the pocket of companies that profit from the mess in Iraq. And his new job might put Schröder into the same executive suite with Putin, who is exploiting his elected office for his personal enrichment like a banana-republic potentate.

So the $50.000-question is this: when the interests of his employer are in conflict with the national economic interests, or maybe even security interests, of Germany, where will Schröder’s loyalties lie? Will the former chancellor of Germany condone, or even support corporate decisions against German interests? Or will he lobby for German interests at Gazprom? What will it be Herr Bundeskanzler a.D.? Krimsekt und Kaviar oder Riesling und Nordseekrabben?

What a year: Nature terrorized humans with hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Awareness rose of the threats of a global flu pandemic and global warming. Terrorists killed innocent people around the world. Human rights abuses, government secrecy and spying were uncovered in the U.S., in Europe and in many countries around the world. The new pope is German and the new German Chancellor is a woman. The president of Togo Gnassingbé Eyadema died and his son inherited the “family business.” Togo qualified for the World Cup! The last year saw a lot of hardship and tragedy for many people around he world. And sadly, again, far too little was done to help those in need.

For our little family, however, 2005 was not a bad year. We have a lot to be grateful for, and we did our best to share what we have with those in need. Most importantly, we’re all healthy and we made it through some pretty significant changes. Yet, we also lost some friends to illness, and last Friday my aunt passed away, after a long struggle with cancer.

In January ’05, Laura started her new job at One World Market and she has just completed her first holiday season at the store. Her first year in retail was very successful, and she really enjoys her work at the store. She has introduced new vendors to the store and new members to the board. And she has discovered a new, intense connection to the community where we live. Her job has vastly expanded our social network and our appreciation for our town. The store was founded by a very active, well-connected church group from Durham, and many of the volunteers and customers are very active in various neighborhoods and in the community.

In July, Jacob got is first taste of “real life” when he began Kindergarten. After the first four years of fun and games, he is now settling into public school and the harsh reality of mass-education. As he is a bit spoiled, and also a bit young (he only turned five after the end of the first quarter) his adjustment was not completely without bumps, but overall he did well. And since he spent a good part of his life in day-care and pre-school, he was socially quite adept and his immune system was up-to-speed. But it is the discipline that got to him. Being quiet, waiting your turn, following the rules and listening to the teacher are the things he struggles with. Yet, none of this is really bringing him down. He is still his happy, unfazed self. He is embracing life with gusto, and he is at this point where his five-year-old world is his oyster.

Julia started third grade, and for her, too, the pace picked up a bit, as this is the first end-of-year testing grade. They spend a huge amount of time on practice tests, cramming spelling words, math problems, reading and comprehension. And occasionally they even learn something, like when she did a report on Minerva, including a costume she made, complete with an owl and a Medusa head on her shield. Last January one of her paintings was selected for an art show at the art museum at the NC Central University, where the best student art of the Durham Public Schools was presented. During the rest of the year she was as creative and prolific a young artist as ever. Using whatever materials she can get, she created sculptures, pictures, games and “fun stuff” throughout the year. I should really scan some or take pictures to make an online gallery … She also got another “Terrific Kid” award and her teachers are generally gushing about how smart and mature a person she is.

Myself, oh well, I got into blogging, made my first few liters of biodiesel, started a biodiesel coop, and read a book. I am still at Duke messing with computers and rooting for Carolina. Right now I am very busy ripping out and re-building several servers at work, since this is a otherwise very quiet time at the office. I need to get working out more again.

As a family, we did some fun stuff this year: we visited Iceland and took a trip to Germany. We also met up with a guy from our family in Togo, who is studying in the US right now. Toward the end of the year, we met several of our neighbors, and our children started playing with some of the neighbor’s kids. That may seem trivial, but most of the properties here are several acres, and we’re right off the highway, so we don’t tend to run into our neighbors, unless we’re traipsing through the woods (or when the firemen are putting out fires).

So now it’s another year, full of excitement, adventures, dirty dishes, unfolded laundry, homework, debating politics, ranting about traffic, laughing about the antics of our chipmunk and moaning about the state of this world. We’ll do our best to keep our little family safe and wish a safe and happy year to you all.

I just watched Robert Greenwald’s new documentary Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price. Greenwald also did Outfoxed a great documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s attack on American journalism. Now Greenwald skewers the world’s largest retailer with a relentless mix of very individual stories of family businesses that were ruined, workers who were intimidated and harassed, and abuses and violations that were covered up by one of the most powerful corporations in the world. He ties those stories together with facts and stats on how this highly profitable company underpays its employees and exploits the government assistance to the tune of billions of dollars every year. He also shows the abhorrent conditions of workers in the sweatshops in China, Bangladesh and Central America that make the cheap stuff that Wal-Mart hawks in its concrete boxes.

This is a great documentary, very focused on the story, very focused on documenting Wal-Mart’s impact on individual families and communities. Greenwald is no Michael Moore – he doesn’t try to corner Lee Scott or any of the Walton billionaires to get them to say something stupid or revealing. He stays behind the camera and lets the people tell the story: community organizers, former employees, judges, folks put out of business by Wal-Mart, and workers at the Wal-Mart sweatshops. And he contrasts their stories with the ads, the corporate PR BS and Lee Scott’s pronouncements. All these facts and stories bring anyone with half a brain to an inescapable conclusion: Wal-Mart is bad for your community and bad for this country. Wal-Mart is bad for you!

Boycott Wal-Mart!

Looks like another South American country is taking a left turn: Bolivia seems to have handed a clear victory to Aymara Indian candidate Evo Morales, a socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez:

Several polls give him 42-45% of the vote ahead of his nearest challenger, former President Jorge Quiroga who, the polls say, got between 33-37%.

Mr Quiroga has now admitted defeat, offering his congratulations to his opponent and his party.

Mr Morales seems certain to become Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
Leftist set for Bolivia victory, BBC News, 19 December 2005, 01:21 GMT

And there might be more left turns in elections in various South American countries next year.

This is great news – especially for the family of Susanne Osthof:

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman abducted in Iraq three weeks ago is free, her brother told German n-tv television on Sunday.

Archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, 43, who spent more than a decade working on excavations in Iraq, disappeared with her driver on November 25.

Robert Osthoff, her brother, told German television: “My sister is free. We are all happy.”
German hostage in Iraq free, brother tells German TV, Sun Dec 18, 2005

I wonder how much ransom they paid …

Shark fin sup is considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark’s fin is “regarded as a tonic food and an aphrodisiac, the Chinese believe shark’s fin strengthens the internal organs and retard aging,” explains a recipe. The sharks that supply their trademark body parts to this dish are caught using longlines. Fishermen then cut off the desirable dorsal fin and toss the wounded shark back in the ocean.

In Mozambique and other parts of Africa, Asian business men offer poor local fishermen money for fins and so create a market for this very wasteful fishery. For hundreds of years these fishermen depended on the ocean to feed their families often utilizing sharks as a food source and had a low impact that was sustainable. Today traditional fishing is becoming unsustainable due to huge numbers of foreign flagged boats raping the coast lines of these poor countries to catch sharks for their fins as well as other threatened species such as billfish, turtles etc. The result is starving families not able to catch their daily meal whilst just a few miles offshore large numbers of sharks are stripped of their fins and dumped back into the ocean.

What is needed is a immediate ban on shark longlining off the South African coastline as well as the Mozambiquean coastline and declaring sharks a no take species. The future of sharks as well as other species hangs in the balance if rapid action is not taken. If South Africa and Mozambique lead the way and the benefits can be seen countries such as Tanzania, Namibia, Angola, Kenya and others will follow suit.
‘Air Jaws’ Photographers Make Desperate Plea for South Africa’s Dwindling Shark Population – Underwater Times, December 11, 2005

via divesouthafrica
Finning a shark is a cruel and wasteful practice per se. But these fishermen are also plundering a precious marine resources along the coast that has great potential. In South Africa, shark diving is a huge tourism industry. The reefs off of St. Lucia and Sodwana boast over a dozen species, and all day boats take divers out to encounter these fascinating creatures.

Interestingly the shark fin cartilage used in the soup has no taste whatsoever – itmerely supplies a supposedly interesting texture to the soup.

Boycott shark fin soup.

It’s getting chilly out in Durham and the chill gelled the juice in the juicebox, despite the 10 percent kerosene blend. Today at noon it was just below freezing, and the biodiesel/kerosene blend (B90) was solid in the mason jar net to the pump. The pump only managed to squeeze a few drops out of the juicebox.

So as soon as we can, we’re going to add more kerosene, and possibly some additives that should keep the juice flowing freely. In the meantime, we need to check the thermometer when we plan to fill up with biodiesel. Also, I topped off with couple of gallons of diesel on my way home tonight, because I want to be sure my car starts tomorrow morning …

Not your daddy’s diesel clunker: Audi is going to compete at the 24 hours of LeMans with the R10 race car, powered by a 5.5 liter 650 HP V12 diesel engine. According to Audi this engine put out 1100 Newton meters of torque (811 Lb Ft).

Audi claims this is the most powerful diesel engine – well for cars it may be. But check out this one!

The cold fact that Governor Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams was predictable and consistent with the cruel spirit of the death penalty. The practice in this country to terminate the lives of convicted murderers is irrespective of any subsequent redemption or repentance. It is thus quite remarkable that the Governator’s decision (pdf) was based on the lack of an apology from Williams:

Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do.
Statement of Decision (pdf)

So had Tookie said “sorry,” and admitted guilt, Schwarzenegger would have let him live? Hardly.

In the death penalty the state executes its patriarchal control over its subjects. In other societies where the state has the right to take a citizen’s life, like China, Swaziland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Libya, Iran, or Bangladesh, the power of the state to control a citizen’s life is much less questioned than in the U.S. While most Americans prefer the state to stay out of their lifes, most also agree that the state has the right to end the life of those among them who commit capital crimes.

But I believe for the average American this issue is not one of the state executing control over their life, but one of the state projecting the image of the strict (but just) father figure. Many in the American middle class want the state to wield this power to punish the “bad children” with the wrath of the God of Abraham and Moses. This is why to the fundamentalist Christian Americans anti-abortion and pro-death-penalty positions are NOT inconsistent. It’s all about submitting to the authority of the “Father.” This fundamentalist Christian absolutism is a moral framework that is popular across American mainstream society.

As popular as this moral absolutism is, most Americans are really pragmatists and the steadily eroding support for the death penalty shows this. Key is to show that using the death penalty the state projects strength at our expense. The death penalty is a social and moral burden to this country. It has no value as a deterrent, provides no “closure” or “comfort” to the victims, it is prohibitively expensive and it drags this country down morally. The death penalty bestows an absolute power over life and death onto the government and the judiciary that these all-to-human and error-prone institutions should not have. It is the beginning of a slippery slope of the government using more and more force to enforce its laws and impress upon its citizens its determination to do so. And in the end, no matter how rigorous the judicial process, the state will end up killing someone innocent. And in America, we are the state.

The Reverend Moon is at it again, promoting an idea so breathtakingly absurd that he should get a prize for it: a highway tunnel from Alaska to Siberia!

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion “Peace King Tunnel” dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God’s plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.
AlterNet: Neil Bush Meets the Messiah

So far, so crazy. But guess who is a featured speaker on Moon’s crusade for the Peace King Lunacy? The prezman’s younger brother Neil Bush. Yeah – the younger Bush is tagging along with the Moonies to promote this project, which is, according to the Moonie brochures, “God’s fervent desire,” dwarfing such past wonders as the Chunnel and heralding a “new era of automobile travel.”

Looking for a good laugh? Check out the video of Moon’s coronation as the worlds messiah and peace king at the Senate Office building (yes – the United States Senate!) last year.

Old Europe is in a tizzy over finding out more and more details of how the CIA used European airspace and airports to shuttle abducted terrorism suspects to and fro for “innovative interrogation” in what some call a “gulag-like” system of “black sites” – secret prisons. Well, the GULAG it ain’t, but a scandal it sure is.

Now it looks like the CIA had an interesting collaborator in Germany: former Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, as the Washington Post reports:

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. (…)

[Ambassador Daniel R.] Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake – Washington Post, December 4, 2005; Page A01

Otto Schily is an interesting figure in German politics. As a co-founder of the Green Party, he is a key figure of the German left. He later “defected” to the Social Democrats, and built a reputation as the one-man law-and-order wing of the German left.

The issue of the CIA planes transporting abducted suspects, many of whom were innocent, could be a huge problem for Germany and other European countries, because they may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. If the German government was aware of these flights and human rights violations were perpetrated on these planes in German airspace or on the ground, than Germany is also implicated in these violations. and unlike the U.S. government, the German government does not assume it can violate human rights with impunity by waving the “9-11 wand.”

Big promises, lots of talk today, and some quirky publicity, for World Aids Day. Anybody care to listen to the voices of those among us living with the dreaded disease? The stories of how the stigma, the ignorance, the silence kills millions? Anybody? Black Looks shares one of those stories, Rose’s story, with us:

R: The pressure he put on me to keep this secret was huge. And not being able to talk about it to my friends and family increased the huge shame he made me feel about what I had done. Because it also meant at the time that I could not have children. I became very frightened, depressed and isolated, loosing all confidence in myself and feeling very undeserving of everything. It was only thanks to the small women’s support group that I survived those early years but he eventually made me leave that when it (the group) became more public ally known in case I might be “spotted” there. It took me 10 years to get out of this abusive relationship because I always felt I had no option but to say as who would want a woman with HIV? Therefore I should just be thankful and put up with it.

It is very difficult to explain what it was like from one year to the next because so many people were dying and that is what we were told to expect. Every time I got the slightest sickness I thought this was it and of course every 3 months you had to go and get your bloods tested and wait the two weeks for the dreaded results.
Personal Story – Living with HIV – Black Looks, November 30, 2005

Thanks to “Rose” for coming forward and sharing her story and thanks to Black Looks for posting the interview (great blog, BTW, read it!) Only if more of those among us who live with HIV/AIDS get a chance to share their stories, get a voice, do we stand a chance to cure this world of AIDS.

As this year’s record-breaking hurricane season officially ends (tell that to Epsilon), the residents of the Canary Islands are picking up from the devastation caused by tropical storm Delta. Delta was the first tropical storm recorded to ever get anywhere near the Canary Islands, according to Jeff Masters. Although is was not officially classified as a tropical storm when it hit the islands, it caused the deaths of seven people, did significant damage and destroyed the landmark of Tenerife:

The emblematic rocky pinnacle known as El Dedo de Dios or God’s Finger, which had pointed skywards from the sea for millennia, a natural wonder and one of the must-see sights of the archipelago finally gave up the ghost after thousands of years and collapsed into the broiling sea. The news of the loss has left islanders in a state of shock.
Tenerife News English Local News from Tenerife Canary Islands

So now have 6 months to get ready for the next crazy hurricane season!?