Good morning, 99percenters! How's it going in your neighborhood today so far? Hope all is well with everyone.

It's a rainy Memorial Day weekend here. I'm preoccupied with the weather because there are flowers to plant! We've had rain every day for at least 2-1/2 weeks. Maybe more; I've lost track. And, the forecast doesn't look hopeful. I try to appreciate it because other areas such as California would love to have it. But, enough already.

This is a closeup of the flower on the first plant shown below.
Come inside and take a look.

TPP

Three Pink Plants

If the ground is ever not mud, here are a few flowers I will be adding to my small garden.

Top to bottom, Lychnis Atrosanguinea, aka Campion Rose, Echinacea Pink Double Delight Coneflower, Echinacea Rocky Top hybirid.

I already have 3 Pink Double Delights (middle picture) ready for planting,
and the other two are on hold, but only for a week at the local nursery.
Please wish me luck in keeping them alive on the front porch until the sun comes out.

Airbag recall

This is on my mind this morning because my car is one of the models affected, but my car does not have a recall on it currently. The web site where you enter your VIN says if your car does not show up on the recall, keep checking back because it will take awhile to determine all of the cars involved and have all of the numbers listed.

Then, the news says it could take years to get all the millions of cars fixed.

I guess you are expected to drive around a few years while waiting, and hope you're not in an accident.

Confusion reigns in airbag recall - New York Times

Takata, the Japanese maker of airbags, agreed to double to 34 million the number of vehicles in the United States that needed to be recalled. The vehicles may contain airbags that can explode violently when they deploy, sending pieces of metal flying into the cabin. Six deaths have been linked to the problem.
…
Honda, [and my car] the automaker that has been most affected by the recalls, said on Wednesday that it was working on the list [of affected cars] but did not have a specific timetable.
…
While the recall list will take days to complete, a more difficult problem lies ahead: actually replacing the tens of millions of Takata airbags. Federal officials estimate it could take months for some consumers and years for others to receive their repairs.

A different perspective:

Why the massive Takata air bag recall won't make driving much safer - The Atlantic

…air bags are embedded in a complicated system of sensors that is difficult and costly to work around in the repair shop. George Hoffer, an economist at the University of Richmond, suggested in some cases that it could be cheaper for companies to buy back a car instead of repairing its air bags.
…
So far, Takata’s air bags have been linked to six deaths. These preliminary estimates tend to grow over time; General Motors’s faulty ignition switches have been said to have caused more than 100 deaths, but at first that number was 13.

Those deaths are tragic, they’re awful, they’re avoidable, and they deserve to be less than statistics, but some context might change the way conventional coverage of recalls looks. The two biggest recalls of the past year (GM’s and Takata’s) have probably been responsible for a couple hundred deaths over the course of about a decade. But in the past year, more than 30,000 people have died in traffic accidents. That means that it’s likely that during the average two-week period, more people are dying in car crashes than have died from the past decade’s recall-related product failures.

Train crash

I had planned to include a section on the recent horrible train wreck, …

but enough about the Jeb Bush campaign. -- h/t Bill Maher

Music for Saturday

"Everybody Knows" must be the most pessimistic song in Cohen's vast catalog. Here are things that everybody supposedly knows: The dice are loaded, the boat is leaking, the captain lied, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich, the plague is coming and moving fast. It's quite the bummer, but somehow packaged all together you get the feeling we're going to survive this parade of horrors together. -- Rolling Stone Magazine.

Thought I'd bring you something different this morning. So, ladies and gentlemen, a tender, sentimental Paul McCartney. (These songs are from an album released in February 2012, Kisses on the Bottom. The title refers to x's at the bottom of letters for kisses. xxxoo)

Let's end with something inspirational: