Anybody like the renovations?

Fafnir's got it right. Things are bound to be a lot better once we start really studying Intelligent Design. Just imagine what we will discover!

I've heard of B-roll, but this is just damn ridiculous. Authorities caught some fugitives and CNN puts up a photo of crap in their hotel room. Inspiring journalism!

This food was left behind in the room where officials say Jennifer and George Hyatte stayed.

Amusing word from Hugh Brogan's The Penguin History of the USA: squirearchy.

Ha! McSweeny's strikes again, this time with Lesser-known Movie Prequels.

Come on, Google. Buck up, some.

A picture's worth a thousand...excuses?

Check out the Mt. Wilson solar cam.

Gah! I don't know if the statistics in this post are correct, but if they are...gah!

22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so...Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan.

Check out these optical illusions having to do with color (or rather, colour). They're pretty crazy. (via geekpress)

If Bigfoot is blurry, do you think his hairs are extra fuzzy, too? (via geekpress)

"Scott McClellan said documents won't be released from Roberts's time as deputy solicitor general because ``you're talking about attorney-client privilege'' that shouldn't be violated. Making such papers available ``would really stifle'' candid talks between government lawyers as they plan arguments on behalf of the U.S. government, he said." (Bloomberg news service)

Here's a thought: the U.S. government shouldn't necessarily have the privelege of secrecy when it comes to arguing legal cases. It is, after all, us.

From the annals of poor acronyms: ARSAC. It stands for "Alliance for a Regional Solution to Airport Congestion." They don't want LAX to expand. They way they pronounce it is really unfortunate.

Wow. Even NBC thinks that watching their bad tv this last year was like getting an enema.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 24 NBC's plunge last TV season -- from first to fourth place among the young viewers advertisers covet -- was "like a colonic" for the network, NBC's entertainment division chief, Kevin Reilly, said Sunday.

David Brooks, ordinary guy:

Anybody who thinks it takes a village to raise a child has never sat near a crying baby in first class. In these circumstances, if it were up to the village, somebody would be stapling the brat's mouth shut and somebody else would be locking mom in the overhead storage compartment.

(Italics mine)

speaking of ipods, i just got one for my birthday yesterday!!! i love it, but my only complaint is the earbuds are too big for my ears!

Wow: In Between Days, by The Cure, has come on the iPod three times already this morning.

O'Reilly is a punk! He should be fired!

Hehe. This bar code clock is cool. (Via Geekpress)

Bald eagle! Moon! Gah!

This is just lovely:

In a study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group. The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

The Base Realignment and Closure Committee "has some reservations about parts of the Pentagon's proposal to restructure domestic military bases, including its plan to disband or move dozens of Air National Guard units."

But of course they do! How ever will the children of the patriarchy dodge any coming drafts, if they can't get strings pulled for them to join the (Texas?) Air National Guard.?

Sophocles never wrote about this. But he should have! (there's a video you should play there)

Colorado republican congressman says we might destroy Mecca if nuclear weapons are used on us.

I'd say that's fine: if Saudi Arabia attacks us. Otherwise, WTF?

Halloween in July?
This morning, Tom & I were clicking through the TV channels, and we came upon an episode of Monk in which Monk and a kid were out trick-or-treating. A few channels later, we landed on an episode of Spongebob Squarepants that featured Sponge Bob and his starfish buddy dressed up as steaks for some kind of Halloween-related prank. Then this evening, the rerun of The Simpsons was one of the (you guessed it) Halloween specials! What the devil is going on?

Not long ago Susan and I went to Target to buy ice cube trays. As our apartment came with a dilapidated old refrigerator sans ice cube trays, and the weather was getting a tid bit warmer, we had decided that our very sweaty limbs needed the cool-me-off...

So we went to the section of the store where we guessed these thingies would be- near the other kitchen implements. We searched high (me) and low (Susan) to no avail. Finally, while we were in the frozen food section, picking up some delicious, low-fat, Skinny Cow Ice Cream Sandwiches, we spotted an employee.

We asked the fellow where we might find these ice cube trays, and he was flummoxed. He thought they might be "right up this aisle" and pointed us onward to the glorious culmination of our quest- maybe.

His directions prov'd correct, though it was more than a little strange that the ice cube trays were located near the tupperware. I guess the organizational scheme made sense if you consider ice cube trays to be a form of storage for water. Like individually-partially-wrapped-bite-sized aliquots of water...

As we made our way to the registers (and the inevitable hassle of waiting behind people who've never used credit cards or ATM cards before- evidently they always previously payed with sheckels, or virgin daughters, or something) we decided we ought to thank the helpful employee...

We swung back through the section where we'd last seen him, looking pretty carefully for the fellow or any traces with which to track him. To no avail. The man had disappeared faster than the Roadrunner from Wile E. Coyote's traps.

I felt like the guy in that old campfire story. You know the one, about the dude who picked up a hitchhiking young lady, only to have her sweater left in his car? Then he tracks down her mother and finds that the sweater did belong to her daugher, but she'd been dead for years?

It was like that. With ice cubes. Without the sweater. Or hitchhikers.

I'd like to reiterate, people: there's a bald eagle landing on the moon. And all I get is guff from Susan and silence from the rest of you?! Intolerable, I say!

Okay... this is really weird. Eisenhower has (had) a dollar coin. On the obverse is, well, Ike. On the reverse? An eagle landing on the moon. An eagle landing. On the moon. The same design is on the reverse of the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which prompts us to ask: what the hell were they thinking?

Hey Megan- what're you listening to, these days?

Jumping cats!

Bathing Mt. Rushmore. (I wonder if they'll find a secret "Team America" base while they're up there...)

Interesting article about Southern American English. Y'all might could give it a look-see!

Three posts in a row began with the letter "O." So I guess this post is brought to you by the letter "T," appropriately enough.

They're fertilizing the campus grass, again. Yesterday, or perhaps the day before that, the grounds staff scattered dried manure everywhere, creating a lovely little brown smog of our own. It hung around for part of the day, and the smell reminded me of late summer at Upper River Road. My friends complained about the smell; I laughed and enjoyed the reminder.

This morning they watered the lawns, and the smell reminded me of mid-spring, maybe early summer in the same place. This time, however, the reminder was so strong it was like a body blow. Since I've been here in Southern California, each passing year has made the place more home-like, slowly erasing the sense of being in a land foreign to me. Though they do this fertilization every year, this is the first time that I've been so affected...

And I realized that after all this time, I'm still homesick.

Our "fearless leader" turns another year older today. Interestingly enough, so do:

The Dalai Lama
Sylvester Stallone (born the same year as Dubya)
rapper 50 Cent (fiddy cen')
Kenny G
and Nancy Reagan

Tsar Nicholas I would also have celebrated his birthday today if he weren't, you know, dead.

Once again, Fafblog summarizes the state of political discourse, as typified by the President's recent speech.

Oooohh....Google Earth looks neat! Hope it becomes available for download again soon...

California: We're just like Canada...only not.

The domestic partner law, signed in 2003 by then-Gov. Gray Davis, represents the nation's most comprehensive recognition of gay domestic rights, short of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts and civil unions in Vermont and Connecticut. (emphasis added by me)

...so, not so much on the whole "nation's most comprehensive" thing. It's like saying, "We're the best! Oh, except for these other three guys, who are better than we are..." I'm glad we're moving in this direction, but let's not make it seem like we're more liberal and accepting than we actually are, okay CNN?

Lego Bible

Hehe- check it out: scenes from the bible illustrated with legos. http://www.thebricktestament.com/

This article from slate talks about the Shakespeare in the park business in New York. Apparently, many feel that the whole enterprise is "middlebrow" and feel this is a mark of derision against the makers (and those of middling-brow). What I think I'd like to point out is that many of Shakespeare's plays were written for a motley and uncouth audience, full of salt and slobs.

Fun with slang

From the Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict a Riot: Oh, watchin' the people get lairy / it's not very pretty, I tell thee / Walkin' through town is quite scary / and not very sensible either...

As is fairly clear from the context of the song, the Brits use "lairy" to mean someone who is being somewhat noisy and a bit abusive...this almost always means someone who has been drinking.

However, the word appears to have older roots in Australia: "Lairy is widely used in Australia to mean either 'flashily dressed, showy' or 'socially unacceptable'. Lairy is thought to have come into Australian English around the end of the nineteenth century from the British slang term leery, meaning 'wide awake, knowing, sharp, streetwise'."

Anyway, just a random fact of the day.

(some of) The science behind post-hypnotic suggestion. You are feeling very sleepy...

KAISER CHIEFS LYRICS
"Saturday Night"
Pneumothorax is a word that is long/
They're just trying to put the punk back into punctured lung

(from Pollkatz via Washington Monthly)

What's striking to me, here, is that post-9/11, and after every big "positive" event thereafter, there's approximately the same trend: the downward slope is roughly reproduced after 9/11, the beginning of Gulf War II, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the 2004 presidential election.

That weirds me out- as does the fact that the trend is approximately linear. What the heck? That's not natural in any way. What mechanism is responsible for a linear trend in public opinion? These things should be roughly exponential (like a lot of epidemiological phenomena)...

I won't complain about the results, though.

All right...take a few minutes and read about Toothpaste for Dinner. And then go check out Toothpaste for Dinner.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

Whoa- the voice of Piglet died this weekend. So did the voice of Tigger. Within a day of each other. That's creepy.

David Brooks, jackass extraordinaire, in his new column:

Sachs is also a materialist. He dismisses or downplays those who believe that human factors like corruption, greed, institutions, governance, conflict and traditions have contributed importantly to Africa's suffering. Instead, he emphasizes material causes: lack of natural resources, lack of technology, bad geography and poverty itself as a self-perpetuating trap.

David, "corruption, greed, institutions, governance, conflict and traditions" and "poverty" are barely distinguishable. In fact, the idea of poverty as a self-perpetuating trap requires a mechanism- and poor governance, corruption, greed, and [these are] traditions form that mechanism.

On NPR today there was a segment on the effects of advertising new drugs. The essential arguments for and against were as follows:

For

• It makes people aware of both conditions and treatments
• It helps engage people with their healthcare

Against

• People tend to both hypochondria and unfounded optimism about the next big thing
• Doctors are frequently undereducated about new drugs
• Overmedication leads to higher healthcare costs

Now, I'm not sure about the veracity of any of these claims, but they mostly seem reasonable. What I'm wondering, is: doctors have an ethical duty to give their patients good care. Do they have a similar duty to society and its needs? For example, if overmedication (or "lifestyle" medications, like Cialis or Propecia) really does raise the cost of healthcare to everyone, are doctors obliged to resist?

Girls State was so much freaking fun!! Although they did looove to embarrass us, I still had fun. They made us chant these stupd songs about girls state while we were at meetings or walking around the campus! One of them was: "Girls State is long and fine just like these legs of mine and when we cross the street boys state goes 'beep, beep, beep-woop woop," HA! Other than that, it was awesome. I was in the house of representatives and debated for like 7 hours each day. It was cool. Also, all the girls were split up into countys, and that was who you lived with and voted for and what not. My county was great, and I think I will go back next year to be a councelor!

Megan- how was Girls State? Write about it!

Funny thing heard on American Chopper:

"Looks like the tranny's cocked." - Vinnie

Heh heh...

I'm Batman. No, really, I swear! See, here's my utility belt (got it at Hammacher Schlemmer, and here's my Bat-z-boy (from the Sharper Image) ...

I knew it. I just knew it. Apparently, the tendency to be an early or late riser has genetic components. So there! I wasn't lazy after all.

Whoa. This is a pretty crazy story. (And a good reason not to move to Ethiopia...not that I needed a reason.)

Yikes.

Citing Flaws, Maker Recalls Heart Devices

Ouch.

Now here's an effective use of state gov't resources. Way to waste some money there, Jebby.

Earthquake

Wow- we just had an earthquake! Sweet! It really shook for a couple of seconds. Hopefully nothing bad happened.

There's an interesting article about Spielberg and Lucas in Slate.

This is why "because that's the way it's always been" or "why mess with tradition" are poor reasons not to seek and correct injustice. (found via GeekPress)

Concert time
Susan and I went to a concert in Hollywood last night. We went to the show to see OK Go and the Kaiser Chiefs. OK Go was the first opener, though we wanted most to see them, I think. We were happy to also see Kaiser Chiefs... sadly, they had a second opener- a band called Jason Faulkner or Jason Wagner or something- and they sucked... it was like 1989 come home to roost. They wouldn't have been out of place with makeup and long hair.

OK Go played a really short set. It was very good, but much too brief. At the end of their set, they did a funny little music video-boy band-dance routine to one of their new songs! It was freaking hilarious- I was all light headed by the end of it.

Kaiser Chiefs were great fun- super energetic. The lead singer dove into the crowd (I think twice), pulled up a girl onto the stage and danced with her, and generally bounced around like a Tigger. Their songs were fun and the crowd (which was pretty well packed in) was really into it...

Aside from the second opener, it was a great, fun show.

Physicists are really dorky

Physicists Do It....
with the least action (Devlin Gualtieri)
discretely (Steven Watanabe, Bryan Dorland, Caroline Ritz-Gold)
with a Big Bang (Damian Handzy)
in Super-Positions (Todd Pittman)
with gravity (Roald Wangsness)
with increasing entropy (John Hornstein)
with chaotic motion (John Hornstein)
quantum coherently (John Hornstein)
with minimal coupling (Lewis Orphanos)
with momentum (James McGee)
relatively well
with uncertainty

Sex is the physics urge sublimated (Daniel Grupp)
Old physicists never die; they just accelerate to light speed! (Bill Martin)
This car brakes for Schroedinger's Cat (Devlin Gualtieri)
Maintain chirality: Pass on the left only (Devlin Gualtieri)
Conserve energy: Don't be a joule thief (Joel Liebman)
Conserve energy: Commute with a Hamiltonian (Enid Sichel)
Ys Matters! (Chris Paul)
Gravity Gets Me Down (Seyffie Maleki)
Excuse me while I collapse my wave function (Leonard Anderson)
Know a Good Quantum Mechanic? (Loren Booda)
Honk if you love phonons (Loren Booda)

Oh- this is really neat...

Every year, in addition to granting honorary degrees, Williams also honors four high school teachers. But not just any high school teachers. Williams asks the 500 or so members of its senior class to nominate the high school teachers who had a profound impact on their lives. Then each year a committee goes through the roughly 50 student nominations, does its own research with the high schools involved and chooses the four most inspiring teachers.

Each of the four teachers is given $2,000, plus a $1,000 donation to his or her high school. The winners and their families are then flown to Williams, located in the lush Berkshires, and honored as part of the graduation weekend.

On the day before last Sunday's graduation, all four of the high school teachers, and the students who nominated them, sat on stage at a campuswide event, and the dean of the college talked about how and why each high school teacher had influenced the Williams student, reading from the students' nominating letters. Later, the four teachers were introduced at a dinner along with the honorary degree recipients.

"Every time we do this, one of the [high school] teachers says to me, 'This is one of the great weekends of my life,' " said Williams's president, Morton Owen Schapiro. "But it is great for us, too. ...

A very fine idea.

Goodness

My conference submission has been accepted and I will be giving a 15 minute presentation at the Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science Optical Society of America annual meeting!

Yay!

Homeland security? What's that? (Warning, the guy in this article is really creepy-looking.)

Apparently, according to a U.S. customs official, "Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. ... We are governed by laws and regulations, and [the creepy guy in the article] did not violate any regulations." And yet, how much does anyone want to bet that if this guy had been wearing a turban when he tried to get across the border, he'd have been immediately detained?

Hehe. Ph.D. satirizes Revenge of the Sith.

Can you imagine what the people sitting next to this woman on the plane from Singapore to Australia must have thought?

Apparently, some female dolphins are figuring out that certain areas of the sea floor are sponge-worthy.

Here's an insane thing from Hitachi- they've developed a HD technology using magnetic domains oriented vertically (out of the plane of the hard disk platter). They're trying to promote it with creepy anthropomorphization. Bad idea.

Salsa Cruda:
(for 4 servings)
This is a very quick and easy sauce to make, and it's great for those times when you want a change from jarred sauce but don't have the time or inclination to make marinara from scratch. You can go from ingredients to finished product in the time it takes to boil the pasta.

Ingredients
4-5 small or medium tomatoes (the riper and tastier, the better), chopped
1/4 onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
~2 tablespoons olive oil
salt, pepper, parmasean cheese, to taste

Chop/dice/mince the various vegetables and place them in a large bowl. Use a potato masher to smash the tomatoes, thus liberating all their tomatoey goodness. Add olive oil, salt, pepper and parmasean, and stir. Spoon over al dente pasta and enjoy!

Susan, post the recipe for the salsa cruda. It's too good.

Over the course of our country's history, at least 6 times amendments to the constitution changing the preamble to say that our rights derive from God and that Jesus is the divine governor of all nations. In 1863, 1874, 1894, 1910, and 1954 (and one other time that I can't remember)- and that's not to mention the hullabaloo over ratification! Each time it was defeated. Every time. The constitution, sans God, was ratified, my lambs.

Is this a Christian nation? Founded and framed by religious men to be a religious country?

I'm going to check out this book, The Godless Constitution, by Isaac Kramnik. On This American Life this week, the author talked about the current upwelling of religious sentiment and the crazy religious correctness prevalent, nowadays. Sounds pretty good.

In the 1830s, Abolitionists and Women's rights activists often occupied the same stage. When the activists were women, this drew quite a bit of criticism from both religious nutjobs (i.e., a goodly portion of the country), and men (who felt their proper place threatened, not a little bit because a great many men were the aforementioned religious nutjobs). In 1837, the Massachusetts Association of Congregational Ministers, prompted by the popular lectures by two such women (the Grimke sisters), produced a Pastoral Letter comdemning the public speaking-out done by women, to be read from each pulpit. William Lloyd Garrison was a supporter of both abolition and women's rights, and called it "Pastoral Bull," analogizing it to both the Catholic Papal Bull, and, of course, crap. The women also responded:

"They've taken a notion to speak for themselves,
And are wielding the tongue and the pen;
They've mounted the rostrum; the termagant elves,
And—oh horrid!—are talking to men!"
--Maria Weston Chapman

Wow. She's sooo scary! (As seen on a banner at The American Spectator).

Wow. Just when you thought TV programming couldn't get any worse...and these are supposed to tide us over until shows like The West Wing and CSI return in the Fall?

At TAPPED, Matt Yglesias posted a good reading list. After all, if Phyllis Schlafly thinks something is bad, there's a good chance you should admire it.

My grandparents were shopping here when this all went down, yesterday. Fortunately, they're okay.

Things that make you go..."Buh???":

"I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here."
-At the President's Economic Forum

"We discussed the way forward in Iraq, discussed the importance of a democracy in the greater Middle East in order to leave behind a peaceful tomorrow."
-At Tbilisi, Georgia, earlier this month

Brought to you courtesy of our very own Fearless Leader.

Listening to Jeremy Hotz... funny guy.

I see a psychiatrist now, too. She hates my guts. She says that I suffer from delusions of sexual superiority. She just wants to [date] me. Get in line, lady!

Lets get out of here: lets just go. Three hundred of us, that'd be great. Let's go bowling right now. Oh, Christ that'd be hysterical. We show up at the same bowling alley at the same time, just freak the guy behind the counter out.

We're here!

Holy [crap]! I don't have shoes for these people!

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

So we went to see Revenge of the Sith last night. It was okay. Like most every review says, the dialogue is crap. The movie is visually good, except some few dumb things. The most memorable dumb thing was the insistence that cutting up close to a light-saber fight will somehow work out well- completely useless shot.

Mace Windu just doesn't sound like he believes the stuff he's saying. Samuel Jackson really seems like he's acting, which is too bad. Yoda's syntax is so stilted that it is a speech impediment, though he has the best line of the whole movie (all the other speaking is down hill from there):

Good relations with the Wookiees, I have.

Sadly, though, Yoda also breaks character when saying goodbye to Chewbacca. I mean- Jedi masters aren't supposed to be sentimental, and there Yoda goes, telling that big ol' overgrown Lhasa Apso that Yoda will miss him? Huh?

The incident which confines Vader to his armor is quite gruesome, though I suppose I expected something a little worse when I saw where it was going to go down... and there are some really dark moments during Anakin's turning. Though I suspect it was more for reasons of ratings that it wasn't more explicit, the implicit menace of Vader's actions in the Council room during the sacking of the Jedi temple was more than sufficient.

Over all, I am with most people in thinking that this one was better than episodes I and II, but inferior to episodes IV and V... I won't comment on episode VI, as I'm having trouble remembering much from it. However, Lucas should be dragged out and shot. And then never allowed back into the director's chair, or be permitted to type, write, or dictate any dialogue. For the good of all mankind.

You'll go blind!

If this isn't a ringing endorsement for an ability-based education system, I don't know what is.

In the six charter middle schools in [New York City], 49.8 percent of eighth graders met the state standard on the English Language Arts exam [...] In contrast, only 32.8 percent of eighth graders in the public schools were reading and writing at grade level.

So, just over half of the charter school 8th graders in NYC are NOT reading at the 8th grade level, and this is an improvement over performance in public schools?! I would ask what in the hell is wrong with this country, but I think I've already got my answer.

As always, Giblets says it best:

It's hot today - TOO hot - and Giblets bans the sun. It is outlawed in all decent Gibfearing lands! Never again shall the brow of Giblets be sullied with its base photonic energy. Three huzzahs and a tally-ho!

Tom DeLay can't distinguish reality and fiction.

Ahh, the sweet forbidden fruit of the Fruit Pie. What's it like, Fafnir?

And you're off! Runnin over the tops a cars to make the winnin touchdown an punchin out Hitler's brain before it lays a tentacle on your lady friend an the ninja coach gives you the all-star trophy an it's all on accounta pie! An you hold it up in the air an the camera spins all around you an you toss it back to Spiderman or Mr. Rogers or trusted newsman Walter Cronkite who's givin you a thumb's up an the hot pie fillin hits him in the face killing him instantly. The jury is merciless; you receive twenty years to life.

Diet Coke with Splenda vs. Diet Coke with Aspartame:

Note first the ingredient lists:

Diet Coke: Carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, natural flavors, citric acid, caffeine

Splenda-y: Carbonated water, caramel color, natural flavors, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, sucralose (splenda), acesulfame potassium, caffeine, citric acid

The Diet Coke with Splenda has a more definite vanilla scent, and is generally sweeter- I couldn't really taste the sour note that I like. I didn't get a filmy feel that Coke with high fructose corn syrup leaves. There is much less of a chemical taste to the sweetness than in regular Diet Coke. Strangely, I've come to enjoy that strange little frisson of "What is that? Why, you strange, Ridley Scott-style sweetener!?"

Heh. Rock & Roll - Thesaurusized, a la McSweeny's.

"Talkin' bout my generation" --> "Discussing on the subject of my age group"

Here's a neat thing from Slate, about missing women throughout the world. There's a buried story in there, referring to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, a servicable, if a bit half-baked, book.

The thing about Gladwell is, he's good at writing. His books are entertaining, ultimately unsatisfying to me. His books, which, I will grant, are for popular consumption, seem to only graze the surface of the ideas he presents. The lack of depth frustrates me.

I'm beginning to get a little freaked out by NPR. The little musical interludes between segments this afternoon have all come from my iPod.

Winning vs. losing?

During a joint appearance with Hamid Karzai, President Bush fielded some questions...

[Q:] ...and if I may ask you, Mr. President, as you know, the casualties of Iraq is again high today -- 50 more people dying. Do you think that insurgence is getting harder now to defeat militarily? Thank you.
PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don't think so. I think they're being defeated. And that's why they continue to fight...

So... we're continuing to fight, too, right? Does that mean we're losing, also?

Tom introduced me to more songs by The Proclaimers this weekend (where by "more songs" I mean anything other than the one - "I'm Gonna Be" - that I already knew). I can agree with him that they're a highly underrated band. And they're just so...Scottish! Here's an excerpt from "Sunshine on the Leith":

Your beauty and kindness
Made tears clear my blindness.
While I'm worth my room on this earth
I will be with you.
While the Chief, puts Sunshine On Leith
I'll thank him for his work
And your birth and my birth.

Good stuff.

I really shouldna read this so long before lunch...

The brisket we ordered was moist and incredibly smoky. His ribs were even better, crusty on the outside, with meat that pulled right away from the bone, as a perfect rib should.

To anyone in the vicinity of a Trader Joe's (even if said vicinity is large): Get your hands on some lemon Citrons Givres "Lemon sorbet in naturel shells" (i.e. lemon husks)...80 calories each and de-freaking-licious!

I should say about the below recipe: really good avocado helps a lot. Use really good tomato with good avocado and the stuff is transcendent. Some people add a little hot pepper- and that's good, too, if you go in for that.

Recipe: Guacamole (this one's for Mom)
Materials

• Salt
• Black pepper
• Two sections of garlic
• 1/4 large tomato
• 1/4" thick section of medium red onion
• Two large avocados, slightly softer than you'd really think

Preparation

• Remove avocado pits, reserving them for later, scoop flesh into bowl
• Dice onion and tomato
• Mince garlic
• Put garlic, onion, and tomato, into the avocado bowl, mash well
• Season with salt and pepper to taste

Note that the onion and tomato quantities are approzimate, and you'll learn to adjust to your tastes. If you want the guacamole to keep, make sure to refrigerate. The avocado flesh will turn a Yoda-like color, but this can be slowed by putting the pits back into the finished dip, or putting in a tablespoon of lime juice.
Try it- you'll like it (and it's really no fattier than the avocado!)!

Whoo-hoo! Arrested Development ain't dead after all.

Ooh...the USGS has put a real-time earthquake probability map online for California. Be interesting to see how accurate the thing turns out to be. Shake, rattle & roll, baby.

Today on Fresh Air, one guest is D.James Kennedy, founder of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ.

Here's a bit about the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ

the CENTER focuses on five key fronts of the modern-day culture war: (1) Religious Liberties, (2) the Sanctity of Life, (3) the Homosexual Agenda, (4) Pornography, and (5) Promoting Creationism.

...and amazingly, the interviewer is able to listen without vomiting.

Ick, I got some Homosexual Agenda on me.

26 Songs About Scientists: Vol. I - Anning to Malthus...definitely looks entertaining.

Hey, bebe. How you doin'?

Whooo, me?

Yeah...

Great...just what NPR needs - less news and more crappy jazz (oh, and more censorship).

This one's for Dad: Freakonomics author Steve Levitt addresses some criticisms of his hypothesis that the legalization of abortion in 1973 was responsible in large degree for the large drop in crime the U.S. experienced in the '90s. In so doing, he summarizes the evidence supporting his theory. The book presents the case a little more fully, and his technical work more so.