Good morning. If you're reading this online with a decent wifi connection, you're luckier than a few thousand Bay area residents, half a million people who live on Florida's east coast, and all of Haiti. There was a lot of love and hope and help going out yesterday, let's keep that perspective and do what we can.
Florida spent Thursday prepping and panicking in equal measure. Locally, some folks thought the closing of Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco County schools on Friday was a bit much, given Matthew's track. Polk and Pinellas hotels filled up with those who came west to avoid the worst of it, and despite reassurances to the contrary, gas began to get scarce in Polk County yesterday.
Saturday's UF/LSU game got postponed, bumming out tons of folks who peaked in college.
Oh, and Fox News's Shep Smith turned into The Harbinger from Cabin in The Woods, rasping away on national television about how Matthew was coming for your children. What a fearmongering donkey's taint.
Moving away from the storm surge, the CEO of massive online classifieds site backpage.com was arrested for pimping, pimping of a minor and other charges. I wonder how much juice you have to have in order for people to continue responding to your emails after you've been publicly associated with the words "human trafficking." Ugh.
And finally, archaeologists in China discovered a 2,400-year-old skeleton buried with a shroud of cannabis plants. Consider that for 15 minutes that feel more like two hours, then we'll talk about why we don't call a present that we gave someone in the past a past.