A minor ritual, with small but well-meant power, and well known among those who know: turning the audio setting from bluetooth to terrestrial FM on the way home from work, that last day before your weekend, because you don't have to listen to the traffic from whichever mapping system you use, as well as your streaming tunes.

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Barry looks like a suckerpunch, a switchblade in a bar fight kind of storm. And it will be. Not our storm, but I'll be keeping an eye out for the aftermath, where we can help. Because I've family there, sure, but also because it's always our storm, in one way or another. This particular one, I'll be looking for senior living spaces, community centers, dialysis centers, homes for the disabled, those sorts of places. The places where poverty, medical need, and age can all meet.

Those are the places where people can't get out, no matter how much they might otherwise want to. They're stuck there, until the waters come. And the water always comes. We'll see it, at least a few of them, with stretchers and helicopters or boats and the desperate.

They'll need help on the other side. After Harvey, for example, one of the local retirement homes took more than a year to get its permit back, because of the unexpected flooding. In the meantime, the folks that lived there were at sea in a world even more unknown than they'd been.

Food banks, of course. Medical supplies, water, the basics, they'll all be needed. We'll be doing what we can, and hoping it's just a wet hot mess this weekend, and not something worse.

It can always get worse.

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I like this article, by Soraya Roberts, a writer I just found today, but with a voice I enjoy. I agree with her, of course, as do a lot of people, that Hollywood is currently in a boa constrictor's nightmare: swallowed the pig and now stuck digesting the thing. They've hit the big time with the worldwide blockbuster, and they're not sure how to do some types of movies they've done before.

That said, Netflix and Amazon and BBC America have their own opinion on this matter...

Um. And I kind of think writers have an opportunity here; there's space for those with a voice and an idea and a little work ahead of them...

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I wonder what Charles Hill thinks of the Russell Westbrook trade? My suspicion, when the Rockets originally brought Chris Paul on board, was that this was the end state; but then, I went through it with the Rockets and Moses Malone, Ralph Sampson, the Hakeem era where the more they added, the farther from getting back to the championship they got, Yao Ming and the never quite made for prime time players... yeah, I didn't think Chris and James were going to fit together.

Not for long enough to matter. That they've made it the past couple of years seemed as far as they could go.

My question is, have Russell and James learned enough to live together again? There's history there, too. It speaks well of James Harden, I think, that he'd sign off on trying again. And, I'm assuming, Russell the same thing. They're pros, granted, but us on the outside looking in never quite know where the frictions can't be overcome.

I'd have asked for a center, though.