Keep the skies dark, damnit.
Sign the National Dark-Sky Day Petition

Read this on NRO The Corner and thought it damn hilarious:

UN CADEAU FOR JONAH AND J.J. [Rod Dreher]
I thought of Jonah and John when a friend forwarded me this passage from the 1979 novel “Shibumi,” by the novelist Trevanian. It’s a conversation between Le Cagot, a Basque, and Hel, an Englishman:
Le Cagot patted the hostess’s bottom and sent her after their food. “I don’t think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared.” Le Cagot laughed, “After all, his father was French and very active in the resistance.”

Hel smiled. “Have you ever met one who was not?”

“True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn’t draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazis feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning ‘bonjours’ were heroes of liberty!”

What may be the first picture of planet around another star has been taken.

Ever wondered what a planet looks like from a distance of 225 light-years? No-one really knows, because no direct image has ever been taken before. But astronomers examining at data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile spotted a faint mark next to a young brown dwarf star.

On closer examination using Hubble’s infrared cameras, they were able to classify it as a candidate planet, because it is only 100th the brightness of its stellar companion.

Another link to the story here.

My browser home page is Google…but check this out. It will automatically suggest search phrases as you type! It is pretty darn slick…

Varifrank is a must read:
” See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier…”
After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.
and then they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
I’m afraid I was “unprofessional”, I let it loose - You must follow the link and read the rest.

Drive Right, Pass Left helps everyone figure out how the hell to drive:

We’ve all been behind that person. The person who thinks he/she/it is a bad ass for driving 5mph over the speed limit. Screwing up traffic flow for miles and miles behind them. Refusing to move back into their right full place at the right side of the road despite friendly flashes of headlights from those with proper knowledge of the rules of the road. And why don’t they move? Because God forbid they sit three car lengths behind the car in front of them when they can move their ass into the left lane where the next car bumper is miles away. It’s a matter of comfort for them. Or perhaps it threatens their sexuality to look at the rear end of another car. Regardless, it is rude and inconsiderate.

Thank you!

Democrats to challenge Ohio electoral votes. Nah, they lose, and go figure. Most fraud is on the Democrat side anyways, like the Washington state race where more people are voting than there are people.

DGCI gives a history lesson:

The 2 most important events in all of history were the invention of beer & the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization & together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into 2 distinct subgroups: Liberals & Conservatives.
Once beer was discovered it required grain & that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early human ancestors were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.
Some men spent their days tracking & killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as “the Conservative movement”.
Other men who were weaker & less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q’s & doing the sewing, fetching & hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as ‘girleymen’.

Damn Funny Stuff! Please read the rest!!!

Thank you Keurig! I’ve been waiting for a home version of their single shot coffee maker to be sold, and finally it is. And its even sweet looking!
Keurig machines aren’t like those pod coffee makers.
Each coffee is a single shot cup that keeps the coffee much fresher. Then the water is high pressure injected through the cup into your coffee mug. Hot fresh coffee. And many different premium brands to keep everyone happy, like Green Mountain, Diedrich, Van Houtte, and even teas like Bigelow.
I think there are about 40-50 different brews over all, if not more. Comes with a variety pack of 18 cups even, and they’re running a special with 20 bucks worth of free coffee…
I have a problem with those pod coffees. I have no idea what they taste like. Maybe good, maybe burnt charcoal like most of the coffee shop brands out there. But no store or place I have been at yet has had a way for you to sample the brews made by ‘em. I guess they are cheap enough that they figure people won’t mind blowing 60-100$ for a coffee maker that only takes a few types of coffee. So that is why even though I have been needing a single shot maker for months now, I wouldn’t even take a free pod maker.

Now the UN is trying to take full credit for what the US and Australia are doing to help the Tsunami victims.

Check out this interview (on the UN’s official website) with SecGen Annan and Under SecGen Egeland shows,
Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh. … In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. …Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh.
Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers ” 90 of them ” which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don’t want them to be an additional burden on the people there.
I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN “air-freight handling centre” in Aceh? Bull! It’s the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers’ retreat — notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what’s the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up “a camp for relief workers” one that would be “fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything.”

The UN is one of those things that if you are on the outside, is a completely disgusting organization. And it gets worse if you are on the inside.
I think they should overhaul the Peace Corps to do two things: One, its traditional role, and then create a reserve corps, for disaster relief like this.
Thanks to the Diplomiad.

Some whacko physics professor has created a new calendar so the same date always falls on the same day. So, for example, July 4th is always a Wednesday. Why would someone do something this silly? Because he is lazy!

“For many years, I’ve had to make up a new schedule to tell my class when homework is due,” says Dick Henry, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US. “Here I am putting all this totally unnecessary work in and I decided I better do something about it.”

So Henry designed a calendar that uses 364 days, which breaks down evenly into 52 weeks. In his so called “Calendar-and-Time” (C&T) plan, each month contains 30 or 31 days. He decided on each month’s length by forbidding the new calendar to differ from the old one by more than five days and by setting Christmas Day, 25 December, to always fall on a Sunday.

No way they’re stealing ten days from my life!

My resolution for the new year? To continue to never read that insipid crap that one of my old bosses gave to everyone, that damn “Who moved my cheese” book.
See, what Craig didn’t realize, is that all the people he had working for him were too smart for that type of propaganda. He couldn’t figure it out that if he just let everyone do their thing and make money, he’d have it made. No, he had to change management styles every month. He would go to a conference for big business, to learn about management styles that work for companies with hundreds to thousands of people. And then try to do the same thing to his 50 person business. At one point, all 50 people were directors of something or other. A month later, the entire company reported directly to him. And nothing ever changed…
Thanks to the American Mind for getting me started on this rant…