Making the rounds: someone apparently adapted the film Scarface into a play for young children. The thing is so ludicrously over the top I'm very suspicious of it. But it definitely seems as if a group of parents has become completely unmoored from good taste, if not reality.

"Just shoot them," while emotionally satisfying, is unfortunately illegal when it comes to the treatment of pedophiles. These official treatments have the advantage of not landing the practitioner in jail. Note that this seems to be one of, if not the only, drug-related convict treatment which doesn't have various progressive inmate rights groups up in arms. There are, it would seem, limits for everyone.

Mike J. gets a no-prize that'll throw rocks at the kids on his lawn for bringing us at least one watermelon willing to take the gloves off. It's quite nice to see the true core of progressive environmentalism laid out so plainly. These are the policies most seem to really want. They are why I have never believed a darned thing the environmentalist movement says.

Starting the 4th of the month is Tornado Week on the Weather Channel!! *see your local listings*

The special this year, you can build your own tornado!

I got the opportunity to photograph yet another dance halfa this month. Amustela of Va was a hoot. I really enjoyed her.

I'll see your be-winged, be-striped, beknighted rice truck and raise you one dragon. Or "Dagron", as the case may be. Ya know, the defining feature of a riced-out Honda is its base is quite cheap. The Corvette is expensive, even when it's a couple of years old. Ah well. His car, his money, his fun. And mine too, since I get to point and laugh at it.

Compensating for "visa-versa?" Why whatever do you mean?

Making the rounds: it would seem that no amount of self-righteous watermelon belief will warm the southern hemisphere to the point it's actually summer, in Antarctica, in July. I know, I get it, "My faith. My facts. My movement. NOW KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!" is the attitude we normally get from these folks. I've just never before seen quite such a karmically-appropriate riposte before. Self-inflicted, even.

Update: Looks like we've been snookered. Meh. Not the first time, not the last.

China has now gone public about testing an anti-ship ballistic missile. Having a big missile designed to hit big ships, well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what they're aiming that at. Still, the Navy's seen this coming for some time now. What, you think they gave Aegis ABM capabilities because they didn't have anything better to do?

Jeremy Clarkson got to test the new Ferrari 458 in conditions that can best be described as, "challenging." Would that we could all have such problems.

Another day, another third-worlder whacking off his willie because of girl trouble. Ya know, I've been driven more than a little crazy by the women in my life. But in all that time, I never even once considered taking a cleaver to any part of my anatomy, let alone a part that, being a guy, I consider really quite important. Different... rrmm... strokes?

This time I'm including the lyrics because, while the kids are cute, it's a little hard to understand what they're singing. If it gets kids interested in music, I'm all for it!

This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.

Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.

I'm not even angry.
I'm being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.

And we're out of beta.
We're releasing on time.
So I'm GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.

Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you'll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa
THAT WAS A JOKE.
HAHA. FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, this cake is great.
It's so delicious and moist.

Look at me still talking
when there's Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.
And believe me I am still alive.

I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive.
While you're dying I'll be still alive.
And when you're dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE (x2)

Ares is carrying this look at a couple of videos regarding Russia's 5th-gen fighter entry, the T-50. Both videos are in Russian but are captioned in (mostly understandable) English. If they ever actually are able to build the thing, I would expect it to be quite formidable.

Work appears to be proceeding apace on the next Martian rover, Curiosity. Like the guy says, an awful lot of things have to go exactly right in a very short time to get this thing on the ground in one functional piece. That said, the project seems very far along and it appears likely the probe will in fact get launched next year. A mini-cooper on Mars? It's more likely than you think.

It's not just that public-sector employees have seen their wages grow substantially faster than those in the private sector. It's the details of just what that growth means that rankles. When the economic environment makes a practice untenable, in the private sector that practice stops. What progressives refuse to recognize is that when it happens in the public sector, the only real change is everyone's taxes go up.

But by all means, please do keep giving politicians more power. It's worked out really well so far, after all.

Via Instapundit.

Computerworld is carrying this year's look into how Formula 1 gets IT done. The much shorter answer is, "very quickly and very very expensively." The long answer should warm the heart of any race car-obsessed computer nerd.

By using data from a massive Hubble sky survey, scientists have created a false-color 3D map of dark matter in the universe. Not sure exactly what it gets us, but it is neat to look at.

It seems the people who power the engine of the global warming frenzy in Europe are finally coming to their senses. Germany has been driving the environmental agenda of the EU since at least the 1980s. The watermelon greenies will blame this loss on irrational kulaks who turn tail at the first nasty cold snap. I, personally, think it has much more to do with "climategate." I doubt if the other side will see the difference.

It's a funeral home, and a mini-amusement park. Great. Yet another thing to add to Ellen's dream-home list.

All those times progressives claimed an elite group of people were reaping benefits on the backs of us regular folk? How income inequality was growing at an alarming pace? Well, ok, I guess I'll have to concede those:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), from 1998 to 2008 public employee compensation grew by 28.6%, compared with 19.3% for private workers. In the recession year of 2009, with almost no inflation and record budget deficits, more than half the states awarded pay raises to their employees.

Who's watching the watchmen, indeed.

Olivia got invited to a birthday part in a bake store. Here's what she looked like.

Problem: The "God Hates Fags" people have set up a protest in your city. Solution: Engage in some creative media jujitsu. This is one I really do hope to see go viral.

There's something a little twisted in LIFE magazine running a photo essay on "truly amazing mummies." Bonus: it's a new exhibit opening in Santa Ana California, which means we won't be able to see it but I bet Nina will.

Three words: Giant. Poop. Bubbles.

Oh go on then. It's a web site. Nobody'll ever know you clicked the link.

I promise.

Ellen's re-coloring her hair. Olivia, shocking I know, came out of her room looking to score a snack.

Olivia: "MOM!!! What smells like donkey poo?!?"

I kid you not.

To wit: Let's take a famously fragile example of high-style, high-maintenance engineering and park it outside on a pier in Manhattan. Listen up, sparky. I got a one-onethousandth scale model of those issues (it's even white), and it rusts if I just wave salt outside the garage door. If NASA wanted a shuttle to rot away in an inappropriate environment, they'd just park it outside the hangar for the alligators.

An island nobody lived on, only inches above sea level, in the middle of a bay frequently swept with cyclones, with no resources, which of course was being fought over by two different countries, would seem to have disappeared into the sea. Hey, if global warming can resolve international disputes, it can't be all bad, eh?

Damion gets a no-prize that's stone-dead reliable, but only to a point, for bringing us this abject lesson in why race car engineers get paid for what they do.

They haven't even actually passed the damned thing and already the unintended consequences are starting to be seen: due to a feel-good progressive exception in the health care bill, expect an explosion of young Muslim and Hindu converts in the coming years. Of course, it's illegal to convert to a religion just to avoid a government law, so now we'll need to hire even more government employees to enforce the law, and converting or declaring a religion will now result in reams of paperwork to be filed with the feds, which will again require even more federal jobs to process.

For those of you who insist that government is the answer, it's all good. For the rest of us, maybe not so much.

Scientists have proven T. Rex ancestors once lived in Australia. The find disproves the theory that tyrannosaurs never lived on the southern continents, but provides no answers for the question why they grew so much larger in the north.

You'll have this song in your head the rest of the day...

Dang it, they need to come out with v2.0. It's been, what, three years at least?

USA Today is carrying this retrospective on the... GULP!... 30th anniversary of the release of Empire Strikes Back. The story includes news that Boba Fett's character will be re-imagined as a teenager and featured in Cartoon Network's The Clone Wars series.

I usually judge how well a country is doing by how invisible it is to the MSM. It seems bond investors have a more rigorous method for doing the same. Bonus: California bonds aren't much better than Iraq's. Perhaps a surge against unions and progressives would be in order?

Scientists have announced the first successful clinical trial of nanoparticles as a cancer treatment. The trial was a complete success... the tumors were destroyed with no observable side-effects. The treatment is general-purpose, and has the potential to work effectively on a very wide variety of cancers.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new human relative, previously unknown but living in the same place as humans and neandertals about 50,000 years ago. While the fossil discovery was that of a single bone, the conclusion is based on DNA analysis. The find has implications beyond that of the fossil itself.

Remember that old joke about the tractor-trailer driver who woke up on the road because of a mysterious beeping? You know, the one where he slows down just to figure out where the sound is, only to see a VW bug swerving away out away from his grill? Yeah, that only works if your car isn't stuck against the grill sideways. Thankfully, nobody got hurt.

Turns out the authors of the Curious George series barely escaped the Holocaust. Some day someone will likely trace significant parts of the US's post-war dominance to enormous numbers of extremely talented people who fled the ultimate expression of progressive doctrines. I think it's a real, and largely unchronicled, tragedy that the progressives in charge of US foreign policy at the time made it cheaper for the USSR and the Nazis to kill their undesirables instead of send them our way.

Gaming, hell, I think this would make for a nifty hobby table too. All those little cubbies and a sunken work surface... the only way you'd know I was building scale models was the smell of the paint thinner.

Why thank you for this sign, but Ellen gave me one that said pɹǝu a long time ago.

A civil judge in Belgium has officially gone on record as saying a crime victim invited an attack, and fined the victim because of it. Just when you thought Europe couldn't be any more "progressive", they go and prove you wrong.

Chris gets a no-prize that'd make Kelly Johnson proud for bringing us this look at how U2 operations are adapting to the modern battlefield. The short answer seems to be, "pretty well, actually." However the plane remains a difficult and dangerous aircraft with which to work.

Ron gets a no-prize he can hurl down at the wayward people when he returns from the mountain for bringing us The Gospel According to John [Moses Browning]. The only bad things I've consistently read about the 1911 was its weight and its kick. I guess that's why they're still so popular after all these years.

Another day, another bunch of idiots learning the feds do not know or care that you're kidding. Ok, so we'll go over this one more time: the Secret Service takes its job very, very seriously, and has the money, resources, and time to find and throw your butt in the pokey if you tweet threats about one of their charges. So let's just keep those thoughts to ourselves, mmkay?

Remember those "reactor-in-a-box" ideas that were getting pushed around a few years ago? It seems they've attracted some pretty serious money. Solving the problem of how to make unlimited green power will, of course, not please many of said greens. First there's the whole sturm and drang we'll get because ZOMGQ!!1!! You just buried all that in mother earth!!! Then, of course, there's the fact that most of the green agenda isn't about helping the environment at all.

Sometimes Cracked's "Top 5" lists don't do much for me. This is not one of those times. All you true crime fans should have a field day with it. I've actually seen a few of the Toynbee Tiles, although I can't quite remember where.

I think an alternate title might be: Have Craigslist, will rally. Maybe after this third-place showing he'll pick up some sponsorship? It would be fun to see what he could do with some real money to throw around.

By analyzing the size of the plates and the food in them, scientists have shown an interesting trend in depictions of the Last Supper over the centuries. Turns out the habit of up-sizing proportions is not a particularly new phenomena.

Ron T. gets a no-prize that'll impress the ladies in the past again for bringing us the best hard-core nerd headline fail of the year. So far. In the past. Or was it, again?

F- the health care bill. All that will do is ensure people who have no damned business running a country are kicked to the curb in nine months. We can, and will, undo what they've done, and quickly. What nobody is noticing is the Euro is flying apart like an unbalanced washing machine. People have been saying the inclusion of inflationary Mediterranean economies into the EU was a disastrous idea for northern Europe for years, but they went and did it anyway. Will ensuring survival of the only vaguely viable alternative to the dollar be worth the cost to China, India, and Saudi Arabia?

All I can say is, the sound you're hearing is the clanking of the last links of the belt, as our Particularly Interesting roller coaster comes to the top of its next hill.

LA Times: U.S. may expand use of its prison in Afghanistan. Bonus: "[It was decided it would be better to kill a suspected terrorist than take him alive] because of uncertainty over where to hold him." See, folks on the left side of the peanut gallery seem to think the reason our government is f'd is because they haven't found the right set of politicians to run the place. The folks on my side know that all politicians are f'd, and the only hope we have is to take as much power as we can away from them all, and as quickly as possible.

Mike J. gets a no-prize he'll just have to take our word about for bringing us this abject lesson in economic theory. The best part will be the folks on the left side of the peanut gallery will who see injustice and calumny as the lesson to be learned. More's the pity.

Authorities have arrested a man who is accused of spending his free time talking people into suicide so he could watch. Just when you thought the depths of man's evil to man had been well and truly plumbed...

Surveys are now showing public support for nuclear power has reached an all-time high. The good news is the Obama administration's broken-clock powers seem to have aligned on this issue, and they're supporting it. The bad news is access to clean power has never been high on the far left's agenda, as its knee-jerk response to any attempt to build new plants can attest. It'll all boil down to what happens when they actually try to build one.

And now, a radical lefty who has been declared the messiah. One of the things which defines Britain is the country's famous encouragement of eccentricity, if not outright lunacy. If this doesn't prove the case, I'm not sure what will.

Skeptic extraordinaire The Amazing Randi has officially come out of the closet. In retrospect, can't say I'm all that surprised. Can't say it makes much difference to me either. But, well, there it is.

And now, your moment of... Ok, speaks for itself: The latest entry in the USAF tanker competition is a US-built version of the Ilyushin Il-96. Click the link for a picture of the proper reaction.

Bris?, Seder? Search for Sarah Conner? It's all good. Your mother wants you to visit her. You have fifteen seconds to comply.

Event: a rich association out-bids a different, slightly less rich association for a prime hotel because someone wasn't paying attention to who was going to be in town that weekend.

Result: ZOMG!!1!!ELVENTY!!! ALGORE IS GOING TO KILL COMICON!!!

I watched a non-profit schedule their annual meeting for 14 years. Getting outbid happens. This reaction? Comic book guy would be so proud...

Dude, turns out Geata does a voice on one of Olivia's all-time favorite Barbie movies. In the totally non-threatening but otherwise completely handsome role of the male lead, "Nalu." So trippy, especially considering how it all turned out for... no, Carrie, I wasn't about to spoil something about... please put the frying pan down... no really, I can shut up---

*CLANG*

#@$$#@$

NO CARRIER

Tivo has finally announced its new lineup of DVRs. The base model gets 45 hours of HD, the XL model gets a whopping 150 hours (on a 1 tb drive!) And they get a capacity meter too! Me, I'm hoping some firmware updates will allow us poor Tivo HD owners to use that spiff new split remote. It'd be nice if they'd let us get rid of the bloody tuning adapter, but alas, it would appear to still be required. Fios users and others with less traditional cable providers, not so much.

The latest "holy crap the CIA pulled some scary stunts in the 50s" story is an alleged mind control experiment which involved poisoning an entire French town in 1951. An allegation this explosive requires the evidence bar be set very high. From what's presented in the article, I don't think the author has cleared it. A bunch of unnamed sources and a single document which does not explicitly connect the dots does not a true conspiracy make.

Mark and his harem.

Hint: Olivia represents the last bar.

Carrie made us. It was tasty, but weird. Lemmings? Us? It's not like everyone's doing the same thing!

Oh, wait...

That'll be Mister Mazda Miata to you, bub. And they've got some toned chick with a katana to make it stick, donchaknow?

The now she has it, now she don't saga of Anna Nicole Smith's battle to get a piece of her sugar daddy husband's fortune has now moved solidly into the "now she don't." This in spite of the fact that the two primaries involved are both, well, dead. A more clear case of, "only the lawyers ever make money" I never have seen.

Scientists have published a detailed examination of the brain of a toddler who died some 800 years ago. The nearly perfectly preserved organ contained intact structures all the way down to individual neurons. It's hoped further study will provide more information about the robust nature of the brain and how it works.

After, what, five years of trying to save disk space on our host, and hoping their bandwidth cops don't notice that we're, oh, at double our bandwidth allowance, lo and behold we have been f-ing gifted an unlimited bandwidth and disk space account from our host, HostingMatters. Old-timers will know, but others may not, that we moved here because one of our for-real pensioned vampire hunters threatened to sue our original host company because... oh hell, I'm not sure why, he still considers himself a professional vampire hunter, indignant enough to accuse us of "Deceit and Calumny".

At any rate, his links have all been rolled up and we're still here, going strong. So, if any of you have a hankerin' for hosting your own website, well, we have a secret. Drop us a line (our email addresses are over there on the left), and we can hook you up with the same unlimited package for an unbelievably reasonable rate. Wtf are you waiting for?!?

Turns out canid ethics put your garden variety leader's to shame. That a pack of wild dogs are roughly as "ethically intelligent" as a pack of wild 4 year-olds is darned interesting. That both put a pack of wild politicians to shame is merely expected. That we put the latter in charge and stick the former in managed care facilities says something quite complex about human society. And not a nice thing.

The first top-down father-daughter ride of the season!

ZOMG!!1!1ONE!1 Google's gonna take over teh hole wurld!!!

Mike J. gets the coveted "tin foil hat" no-prize for bringing us proof that no matter how hard you try to please people, there's definitely going to be someone out there who'll go all Chicken Little on you for trying.

Being a professional graphic artist sometimes just means everyone gets to see your mistakes. Some of them are a little subtle but others...

Personally, I think it's more about the hot broad hosting the thing. Humanity has a long, storied history of doing heinous things for fame and fortune. It's only surprising here because the media find it surprising.

Finally Ellen has a reason to visit Paris. Well, except for hunting down the tombs of various incorruptible saints, that is. Macabre? Ellen? You don't say...

Now, I'm not at all sure if all of these broadcast news "fails" are legit, but most of them sure seem to be. Looks like a combination of "durpdurpdurp", "it's my last day f'it" to me.

Birds, like cats, have an undeserved reputation for elegance.

Less than six months after we moved here, I sat in the Spider with a screwdriver in my pocket and did what you see in the first picture. For whatever reason, the split didn't migrate all that much in the next seven years, but it was still getting wider. What to do? Turn the manic skilled at stitching things up (aka Ellen) loose on it. A half hour later, and voila! If you're not looking for it, the repair is nearly invisible.

We could just re-cover it, but the seats got redone by the previous owner and whoever did the job used high quality vinyl and the fit is just wonderful. The dratted things still smell new. I would've likely had to redo both seats if I wanted to get an acceptable result. Now I don't have to worry about the tear spreading.

A Soviet lunar probe which disappeared in the 60s and was purchased, location unknown, by a British computer game developer, has been found. I saw a two hour documentary on the Lunokhod rovers. They're quite impressive!

Update: Link fixed!

While this Spiegel interview with a "defense expert" is interesting in and of itself, notice how he tries to have it both ways. In the beginning, he insists that the remote quality of drone warfare is at least as, if not more, stressful and emotional than conventional combat, and then at the end claims that such war is a kind of entertainment.

No, really, when anarchists attack. As mentioned before, political belief is not a line, it's a circle. If you push far enough to become a loony in one direction, you'll quickly be indistinguishable from the loons on the other side. Deny it at your peril.

Progress on creating a car that can go 1,000 mph seems to be moving forward nicely. Seems like their initial designs were generating twice as much lift as the car itself weighed. Having the vehicle try to fly while going faster than the speed of sound would be... bad, donchaknow?

For those who've always wondered: taking a whack at a cop with your winkie will cost you about $1000. I think. Haven't gotten around to checking the exchange rate lately, but I bet I'm close. Have at you!

Sometimes there's no improving the Fark headline: I have no idea what you're talking about so here's a picture of an alpaca surfing off the coast of Peru. No, really.

Sorta reminds me of a really retarded-looking cat. I guess it's the pissed off look I'm recognizing.

Well, this would be more like "back in the day." She's pretty much a retired nasty kitty nowadays. And, really, it would only be when Amber was around.

Hey, knowing stuff like this beats the hell out of all those zombie survival guides. You know, because aliens might actually exist, whereas zombie hordes are nothing but the fevered imaginings of a nerd with a shotgun fetish.

Hang on, there's a bunch of moaning creeps banging on my door. BRB

&*(%@#%$

NO CARRIER

Via Violins and Starships.

That's No Angry Mob, that's My Mother. If my own mom hadn't blown out her knees years ago, I'm just about certain she'd be right up there carrying a sign. Heck, I'd lend Olivia to her to hold another, just for the cuteness effect.

While hardly a true secret, it's always important to remember the "other" genocidal unit, 731. The Germans at least have done everything anyone could think of to gain redemption for their crimes. Only the current generation of adults, the first to be able to legitimately claim they had absolutely no part in any of it, are attempting to point out that Germans suffered too. The Japanese, well, one of the best ways to shock a Japanese person is to have them look up Unit 731 on the English Wikipedia. The smart Westerner, the one who doesn't want his Tokyo apartment firebombed, will do nothing more than that.

There's a reason the rest of Asia hates Japan, and it has nothing to do with their current success.

The MSM is shocked, shocked, that intelligent, unemployed 20-somethings are taking advantage of government programs meant for the poor. News flash, sparky. They are poor. They're also smart enough to eat right and really make those subsidies count. Of all the bad habits the MSM claims not to have, this tendency to disapprove of people who are the wrong demographic playing by the rules I think makes me the angriest. Being on government assistance means filling out reams of humiliating paperwork weekly. Trust me, if these kids really didn't need it, they really wouldn't bother.

The fact the reporter seems to think otherwise speaks much more about said reporter's lack of experience of real poverty than it does of these clever kids "gaming" the system.

So now there's a lipstick out there which, according to the manufacturer, changes color if a woman gets aroused. Which is all well and good, but it's the image of me running up to Ellen with a bunch of paint chips to hold against her face that makes me laugh out loud.

Ah, the joys of waterproof electrics and periscoping intake and exhaust tubes. Still, I only see him getting into the water, not getting out.

Of course, for that to work with my bunch, it would mean they'd have to burn a calorie or two. Not happening. And no, Ellen, you can't have one.

Hey, it's definitely more interesting than the local news in our town!

Scientists have developed a device which allows blind people to "see" using their tongue. No, not like that. The device works by translating images into electrical pulses which are then transmitted to the tongue via a lollipop-like transmitter. With practice, the prototype has allowed a man blinded by an Iraqi grenade to perceive much more of the world around him.

The Air Force is prepping its prototype space plane for a test flight. I guess they simply can't hide that they're doing it, but they sure are being tight-lipped about why they're doing it. In concept it sounds like a retread of the Dyna-Soar program, which got canceled in the early 60s for at least some of the same reasons people are wondering why this project is going forward.

The "buried, not buried, buried, not buried" saga of James Brown seems to have been switched to "not buried." Again. I always thought his "get dragged off the stage only to come right back" schtick was annoying. Now that he's dead, well, not so much. With bonus picture of what the ex-Godfather of Soul looked like, and probably still does.

The world's most recognized straight man has retired, permanently. Gah. I'm old enough to remember him on TV when he wasn't a caricature (f- me, I spelled that right the first time!) 83's a pretty damned good run, so, salute!

I think we'll call that fisherman: 0, enormous scary crocodile: 1. At ~ 4 meters, this one's on the small end of adult males. Sheesh!

Exactly why he picked a spider, I'm not sure. A cheap, small, pretty car to use as a base, I guess. The rattling is a bunch of loose stuff banging around when the car goes over rough pavement. A 76 model was saddled with huge steel battering rams for bumpers, so without those and the engine, even with all the batteries it might actually not be all that heavier.

New data seems to be indicating a small star is on a collision course with the solar system. Its arrival is predicted to happen in a relatively short time, too. Climate change claims yet another victim...

I live in DC! What do you want!?

So, turns out the life of even a red-headed "bear" prostitute is interesting. Meh. Pay your taxes, stay out of trouble, keep off my lawn, and I'm good. It does make for some interesting stories, I'll give you that.

The place is not small by any means. It's about as big as a general large supermarket, but with lots and lots and LOTS AND LOTS of strange stuff.

Mike J. gets a grimly amused no-prize for bringin us this "oddly specific" graveyard sign. No, Ellen, you can't have it.

One of his students asked Buddha, "Are you the messiah?"
"No", answered Buddha.
"Then are you a healer?"
"No", Buddha replied.
"Then are you a teacher?" the student persisted.
"No, I am not a teacher."
"Then what are you?" asked the student, exasperated.
"I am awake"

Heck, I would've watched it if all they did was just knock a bunch of stuff over. The music just happens to be pretty good too. I only saw one possible cut in the whole 3:50-ish shot, and I'm not sure of that. One helluvan achievement!

A radical atheist endorsing Buddhism? It's more likely than you think. Distilling the faith to its four essentials allows the jettisoning of the quirkier bits of received Buddhist tradition (reincarnation, bodhisattvas, etc.), which in my opinion are the main impediments to widespread adoption in the West. The biggest worry I have with atheism is its horrible moral track record when applied to a large society (c.f. USSR, PRC, Khmer Rouge, etc.) Grounding atheism with a true, practical, and absolute morality could be just what the doctor ordered.

The on again, off again search for something really big orbiting the sun far, far away is now on again. No, the discussion of such an object indirectly causing mass extinctions on Earth is not particularly new, but the telescope with the equipment to detect the object is. Here's to hoping we'll be able to put this thing to bed once and for all.

Mark gets a no-prize shaped like Davy Jones' locker for bringing us news of the discovery of a bunch of centuries-old shipwrecks. The wrecks were found at the bottom of the Baltic during routine surveying for a gas pipeline being built between Germany and Russia. All are apparently in remarkable condition, and one may be as much as 800 years old.

And now, a Japanese shut-in who decided to marry his pillow. I guess "pillow" and "beer" must look the same in those "is better than a wife" posters.

Making the rounds: DNA tests have confirmed that a prime suspect in the Bail bombings has been killed. Bagged by the Indonesian police, no less.

Here we go again (~ on our own ~): Rock Band 3 has been officially scheduled for release during the 2010 holiday season. Scheduled is not the same things as actually released, but consoles seem to have a much better track record of hitting their deadlines than do PC games.

Leave it to the Top Gear crew to resoundingly call out people with too much time on their hands and far too many crayons in their box. The pictures are scary. The captions are a scream.

Damion gets a no-prize that will become the obsession of millions of aviation weenies for bringing us the for-real "owners manual" of the SR-71 Blackbird. Complete with redaction marks! Always puzzling to me, those marks. From what I saw of the first few pages, I'm thinking they cover the fact that the manual likely was also meant for the A-12 and YF-12A, and who knows what other damned variants.

Another advantage of little girls vs. little boys: little girls love to share their toys. The bike belongs to the other little girl, but they had fun swapping it back and forth without anyone making them or breaking up a fist fight or anything! Amazing!

Yes, I know, next up. Heck it's only been warm enough to actually use a bike for, like, the past two days or so.

It's our site, we'll post what we want to! :)

Iran is openly expanding its missile launch complex to accommodate larger launch vehicles. Just when you think the mullahs couldn't get any madder, they go and prove you wrong again. Help us, Bibi, you're our only hope...

A California start-up has created a new kind of fuel injection which could increase an automobile's efficiency by as much as 50%. The key to the tech is to heat and pressurize the gasoline, and then injecting it directly into the cylinder. A whole host of benefits accrue from this seemingly straightforward change, but it's still not clear just what, exactly, would be required to implement the idea in a production engine.

New evidence seems to indicate Alzheimer's may end up being yet another autoimmune disorder. The evidence is, of course, not totally accepted, and even if it proves true it's not clear if it will lead to any new treatment strategies. Still, anything that demystifies this terrible killer must have some net positive result, donchathink?

Problem: A poorly-managed city is dotted with abandoned property.

Market solution: Design zoning and tax laws to incentivize new development, allowing the problem to essentially cure itself.

Political solution: Come up with a bunch of social engineering laws to force what you want, and make the rest of the country pay for it.

Three guesses as to which route Detroit's leadership is taking. The first two don't count.

While it starts out with an utterly horrifying anecdote, this look at the unintended consequences of son preference in traditional families running up against the capabilities of modern medicine is still quite informative. One quibble: the author continually plays up how the preference for a son rises substantially after the birth of one or more daughters as somehow exclusive to the societies being studied. On reflection, I can't think of any family who would state they'd rather have more of one sort of child than another. Then again, I'm not sure just how far a western family would go to guarantee the outcome.

Is it a rickroll from 1976? A clever recreation of something that might have come from the 70s? A commercial for "Bob" that went horribly wrong somehow? You decide. Yeah, it's been making the rounds, but I hadn't seen it. Therefore nobody important had seen it either, until now.

Top Gear is featuring this look at a car restoration shop. The catch? It's run by the state of Nevada. Specifically, the department of corrections. That's right, it's a prison restoration shop, filled with men who many times will never be able to drive a car like the one they're restoring.

Scientists have announced the creation of particles so intensely complex and strange, they can only be termed "really weird." I've had a very cursory review of the math that goes on in high-energy physics land. I'll take their word for it.

Anyone in the market for a DeLorean? I think $57,000 is probably close to what they cost back in 83, adjusted for inflation. I see DeLoreans from time to time around here. It'd be nice to see even more.

Amber got Ellen these ridiculously fuzzy house shoes for Christmas. Now I know who "harvested" them. Go for the picture, stay for the goofy gamer quote at the bottom of the entry.

I have no idea what to make of this. But I like it! Oink oink oink...

No, not Olivia's. This is what's called a "representative sample."

Sit back, strap in, and enjoy just how loopy the very top of the high end of the hi-fi hobby can be. And less ye think the economy has sunk all these companies we have an updated version. The super-high end speakers I think are nifty are an absolute bargain by comparison.

Who needs a forklift or a big truck when a Sumo wrestler will do the job just as well. Seems like a lot of work for an $850 payout split (presumably) two ways.

Yeah I know, been making the rounds, but I thought this set of "truth in movie posters" was funnier than most. Maybe because, for once, I've actually seen several on the list?

And it's a nice thought, too. In a weird and twisted way, but still nice.

Looks like the 70s "folded paper flying saucer look" is coming back again. All the Italian design firms were rendered nearly useless in the early 70s by this fashion trend. Let's hope this one remains a one-off. I like curved, not folded ones.

Scientists have found the first direct fossil evidence that snakes preyed on dinosaurs. While a bit of a "duh" revelation, the find is one of the very few reasonably complete snake fossils ever found from the era, and does provide important insight into the evolution of one of Ellen's favorite belly dance accessories.

Remember, folks, guns don't kill people, giant lawnmowers kill people. Let's just say she got a real close shave...

I pulled the Spider out of mothballs today, only to find it'd blow a fuse. I'd forgotten that Alfa helpfully put a diagram on the inside of the box cover. It was only when I tried to read what it said that I realized why I'd never found it useful. FYI, it'd blown fuse 6, probably because of a frayed wire I found and fixed just before I opened the fuse box.

And yes, everything electrical on the spider, every single thing, is managed with exactly 10 fuses. Go out and look in the fuse box of your own car, and wonder.

Scientists have published a new article claiming conclusive evidence for Earth having a strong magnetic field 3.45 billion years ago. This is about 200 million years earlier than previous evidence seemed to support. It's my understanding there aren't many rocks much older than that, so (in my extremely expert opinion) it's a good bet Earth has had a strong magnetic field for as long as it could have one.

Headline sorta says it all: Anti-gay state senator arrested for DUI leaving a gay bar. Research, he was doing res-- Oh, wait, nevermind.

Let it not be said I am one to cover up when my side coughs up the ball. Especially when they do it in heels.

Problem: You're a hyper-rich oil magnate who loves boats and entertaining lots of guests.

Solution: Port-a-Island.

Ellen has entertained the notion of living on a boat for years, but was never sure where the cat boxes would go. This would solve that problem rather neatly, no? It's checkbook time!!!

And now to give Ron and Amber horrific Jersey flash-backs. Some of these I'd seen before, others were quite new. It's my understanding this sort of... behavior... is less a "whole" New Jersey thing and more a "north NJ / East Long Island" sort of thing. None of my in-laws who live in the area look like this, but I bet they know people who do.

Nothing like people who don't even have English as a second language to really get creative with the bootleg merchandise. I think Fox should license those Simpson knock-offs and sell them here as legit. That sort of loopiness just dovetails so nicely with the actual series.

Is it a hovercraft? An airplane? A boat? See for yourself. That seems to be the best part of Oz and Kiwi-land... if you want to try creative and exciting ways to kill yourself, well, good on ya mate, we'll have some beer waiting if ya manage ta make it back!

Nice to see it's not just American SUV drivers who think 4WD magically transforms the road into dry pavement. I'm thinking that's somewhere either in Turkey or Iran, but I'm not at all sure. It'd be nice to think nobody got hurt, but I'm pretty sure I'm wrong there, too.

Scientists have announced the creation of an organic superconducting material. This particular material is in no real way superior to existing ceramic materials, but it's hoped that now that it's been proved possible, other organic chemists can suss out higher-temperature combinations.

It would seem even if that 'tard had managed to light his bomb off a few months ago, the plane would've survived. Wits and psyches of the passengers, probably not so much. Includes a video of the test! Fark comments are discounting the lack of pressurization. Best comment: "This test was flawed because the bomb was not strapped to a brown person when it was detonated. Everyone knows that brown people are unstable and likely to explode all by themselves. The added 180lbs of explosive material would have made for a much bigger (and holier) boom.

Plus Allah himself would have reached down and smacked the plane out of the sky when the righteous bomb went off."

He says it's known as the Dry Gulch chupacabra, after the legendary animal that supposedly sucks the blood of goats.

Really? Goats? This one was found in a trap with a slice of apple.

Pininfarina has revealed the concept car it created for Alfa at this year's Geneva auto show, and it's definitely full of win. The shape of things to come? Oh hell, nobody's sure Alfa's even going to be around in two years. Still, if they manage to stick it out, they could do (and often have done) a lot worse than basing a production car off of such a slick piece of artwork.

Mark gets a no-prize don' do nothin' but talk some sense for bringing us this lesson in why it's best to just leave old white people alone. Personally I just want to get my rear home when I'm on the bus. I imagine that's what the old man wanted too.

Update: Some local radio station found the principals, and interviewed them.

Scholars recently discovered a long-forgotten English inscription on a wall in England's Salisbury Cathedral, and are now polling the public to see if anyone else wants a crack at deciphering it. Salisbury Cathedral is also, apparently, home to the oldest functioning clock in England, a 14th century device that was removed three hundred years later and then forgotten, until it was discovered in an attic during the 1920s.

In other words, Britain has so much history there's probably still a lot of it stuck up in people's rafters, just waiting for re-discovery.

The final clip is her breaking a (much thicker than before!) board with her bare hand.

Scientists have announced the creation of a device that literally prints replacement human body parts. At heart (as it were), it's an inkjet printer that sprays both stem cells and a sugar-based scaffolding for shaping the result. At the very least, I'd think a device like this would give severe burn victims a very real chance of having a normal life again.

Lucky shot!

This time I found a ton of old records about the Spider, along with missing CDs, photos, the works. It was less a closet clean-out than it was an archeological dig.

It looks like Google really wants all us Android-based phone users to be on the same version. Understandable, really. Good news: Looks like it'll come down to us this quarter. Bad news: seems the only phone that definitely WON'T need to be reformatted is Motorola's Droid. Meh, we put backup widgets on ours weeks ago, they should be fine either way.

By transplanting fetal neurons into the brains of older mice, scientists were able to "re-activate" a brain's ability to rapidly, and significantly, re-wire itself. It's thought that if the mechanisms can be teased out and they prove to work in adults, the findings could open up an entirely new avenue of research for brain therapies.

As predicted endlessly by watermelon greenies, a city is now officially running out of water. Of course, this is a city perched on the edge of a desert, with a corrupt, rickity government subsidizing the growth of a water-intensive crop, but that doesn't matter! I'm sure climate change is behind it all! Quick! Destroy industry before another inefficient, controlling government is threatened with chaos! The nanny-state you save could be your own!

It's like watching a slide show of a fish bowl... you just can't stop. I'm at least as impressed with the people who've managed to keep the same house, sometimes the same decorations, for such a long period of time.

It would seem this year's census will be a game of "10 questions." I still remember the carpet-bombing of TV commercials the government financed for the 1980 census.

Actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long for some loon to fasten onto global warming as an excuse to off themselves. It's damned sad when even maniacs do this sort of thing to themselves. It's inexcusable to take their kids with them because they can't seek help.

Not only did "O" get in for FREE ($10 door fee and table fee) she got a FREE SUPER BROWNIE ON STEROIDS ICE CREAM SUNDAE for Free! Thanks to Alf Laylah Restaurant in VA!

I don't care how gross it may at first seem, you'll still find this extensive scientific review of all the different ways human pubic hair, well, "stands out" fascinating reading. Well, I did anyway, and we all know how normal I am.

Ok, ok, the laughing is expected. The pointing's a little rude, though.

Hey, if this thing doesn't count as a multi-tasker, I'm not sure what does. I got two problems: a) it looks pretty large in the video and b) dang, $900? Really? That's, like, really sweet stove range right there, I think. Still, if it catches on I could personally see shelling out, say, 1/3rd of that (which is, as I recall, about as much as a really nice mixer costs). Gadgets, FTW!

Hey, don't worry guys, I found a great place to park the fire truck. Meh. Detroit. Sorta says it all.

Scientists have announced a new manufacturing technique which promises to significantly reduce the cost of solar cells. They're not as efficient as current models, but if they're 30% less efficient and cost 90% less to make, well, that's math even a progressive greenie will likely understand.