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Speaking of which, greetings from Laura in Mount Shasta. Way way up in Northern California, we know how we feel, but let’s see what the experts are telling us. As of 8:30 A.M., AQI (AIr Quality Index) levels for Siskiyou County are as follows: unhealthy, unhealthy, unhealthy and unreported: Weed 137, Yreka 192, Fort Jones 193 with Happy Camp a blank. Happy Camp (in the midst of many fires) is often not reported. I don’t know if that means the little town has broken its pollution meter or is too busy to bother.

Next we have the statewide fire map. It’s kind of boring, though.

For color, smoke and flames with an interactive punch, I always head for the WunderMap. After moving the satellite across the U.S. to the State of Jefferson, I click on the options: Map, Satellite, Hybrid and Terrain to get a good view of the fires in relation to highways, byways, land formations and cities. All that smoke over our area today looks black and thick, which it is. Chris’s brother flew over Mount Shasta when the smoke was blowing our way and said that’s exactly how everything looked at three thousand feet—horribly horribly black.

I am so grateful that I don’t have to work outdoors. The poor Olympic athletes! Let’s check in on the air they are sucking down their lungs. Our friends at the Wall Street Journal sum everything up quite nicely: China is encouraging the arriving athletes not to believe their own stinging eyes. Here is a strange analogy from Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environment Protection Bureau: “It is quite natural,” he told reporters. “For example, when you are taking a bath in the bathroom, you are unable to see the one opposite us. It does not mean there is pollution.”

In other words, soupy skies and stinging eyes are not proof of pollution. The Chinese deputy director goes on to say that we should base our judgments on Chinese collected data, instead of the color of the sky. For some reason (cough cough), there is very little trustworthy data. Could it be that the government has manipulated the sacred data by moving polling stations to less-polluted areas and changing the way it measures pollutants? (cough cough?)

The Chinese officials promised the air would be good way back when they bid for the Olympic Games, but it doesn’t look like they are going to be able to keep their promise. According to BBC weather forecaster Dan Corbett, meteorological patterns in Beijing over the summer are not conducive to dispersing pollution, with high pressure and inversion layers common.

“It is like taking a pan of soup off the hob. It steams, but put a lid on it and everything just sits under the lid.”

Here’s the thing in a nutshell, Folks: Beijing is used to telling people that gray is blue, but this is not going to work as well as it used to. For the Chinese officials, though, it’s business as usual. I’m wondering if they’ve forgotten about the 20,000 foreign reporters in Beijing, the 11,000 Olympic athletes and their trainers, the million or so attendees, not to mention the gazillions who are watching on tube. How many of these folks can be coerced into saying or believing those blue sky day fairy tales?

It’s true that there is very little independent monitoring of Beijing’s air quality, but the BBC has been conducting air tests with a handheld device over the past three weeks, and so far only six of 21 days have met the World Health Organization’s standard for particulate matter. Where, on where are the test results conducted by the International Olympic Committee? (cough cough cough)