It’s all about the oil
Bush: US Must “Get Off Oil” — and onto what, President Smartypants?
Look, can we stop acting like there’s an excellent, cheap alternative to petroleum all ready to go, and we’re just too lazy or stupid or stuck in our ways to take advantage of it? Or that a moon-landing style government program is going to get us there faster?
There’s a shit-load of money in oil. You know what? There’s a shit-load of money in whatever is going to replace oil. And, working on the assumption that such a thing is really out there, the oil companies want to be the ones to find it. The car companies want to be on top of it, too. So do lots and lots of little guys (did you see the air car idea? I liked that, mostly because it caught me by surprise).
Capitalism is the mindblowingest driver of technological innovation that the world has ever known. There’s a gigantic money to be made. And people who already have gigantic money yearn for more.
Greed + resources + huge impatient market = we’re on it already!
March 6, 2008 — 11:43 am
Comments: 54
Your one-stop shop for half baked ideas
Hey, hey…check it out. I ran across this while looking up the refractive index of vinegar (yes, I had to look it up. Shut up). It’s the Halfbakery “a discussion forum for poorly thought-out original ideas for inventions.”
Worth a morning browse. My favorite so far: cream cheese marketed in ring shape, so you just slap it on your bagel. I don’t know why I like that, though. I don’t like my bagels cut in half longitudinally. I like to eat them toroidally, dabbing cream cheese on the gnawed ends.
Why am I telling you this?
March 5, 2008 — 8:51 am
Comments: 54
A quibble
Saying “weather is not climate” or “the plural of anecdote is not data” is like saying “the plural of tree is not forest.”
Well, it might be. How many trees we talking about?
— 6:37 am
Comments: 11
What in the name of all that is GOOD and PURE and EDIBLE is this?!?
This would be a disturbing thing to find in a jar of pickles you just brought home from the store. It’s a TERRIFYING thing to find as you are attempting to fish the very last pickle out of the jar. I’m almost certain it’s a chunk of root or something.
Only…whenever I look more closely at it, it appears to be bilaterally symmetrical, with a defined head and thorax. It’s got way too many legs for a terrestrial beastie, but they cluster into what could conceivably be considered six leg clumps and some extra antenna and mouth parts. Like a regular, albeit very large, bug that exploded in a hot vinegar and dill solution.
No, I’m not fishing it out.
I’m not.
I don’t want to know. I don’t care if it is science. I ATE THOSE PICKLES.
March 4, 2008 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 34
Dude is definitely not stupid
Obama was here on Saturday. Walking distance. I could’ve gone, but it would’ve meant…you know…putting on pants and stuff.
It was big. Five thousand inside, five thousand outside. That’s big for Rhode Island.
When he showed up, first thing, he stood outside in the rain and gave the overflow crowd a short version of the speech he gave inside later on. I heard he does this everywhere he goes, when the crowd overflows the venue. Which it’s doing pretty consistently now.
And tonight, I walked to WalMart. Because I needed a walk. And a cheap pair of slippers. Every car in the parking lot had a flyer on the windshield titled Obama and Religion. The things looked amateurish, like they didn’t come from the official campaign, but from the heart. I assume they were pro-Obama. I didn’t read one.
That first thing shows his campaigning smarts. And that second thing shows his constituency has identified itself and is good and fired up.
If I had a clown in this parade, I’d be plenty worried.
March 3, 2008 — 7:53 pm
Comments: 19
Wine makes old ladies scowl and forget to comb their hair
This is Anne. She drinks a couple of glasses of wine a day. If she continues recklessly for another twenty five years, experts say she will look like the lady on the right — and they have a super scientifical Photoshop hit-job to prove it. If she stops right now, she has a chance to look like the lady on the left.
Excuse me…WHAT THE FUCK? What’s the difference? What on earth is the matter with Boozy Betty that a smile and a hairbrush wouldn’t fix? If that Photoshoppist couldn’t take all the pseudoscience in the world and make two and a half decades of hooch look scarier than that, he’s fired.
Think I made this up? Nuh uh! Have a look at it in color — (yup, alcohol makes you wear ugly-colored sweaters, too). No offense to old ladies — one of which I desperately aspire to be some day — but how fresh is a dame expected to look at 77, anyway?
Brits drink more than we do. Or, at least, they drink more unashamedly (it’s probably us and religion and that whole Prohibition business and all). Lately, there are definite conspiracies afoot to change that. They’re taking aim at two targets: underage binge drinking (of which “cheap alcohol” is a sub-complaint) and the middle class drinker. Not flat-out lush, mind you. Prosperous, middle-aged professionals who come home at night and split a bottle of wine with the other half in front of the fire in their 16th Century farmhouse.
The Daily Mail is trying as hard as anyone — which is heartbreaking. They’re about the best low-rent down-market right-wing tabloid in Britain (think a slightly trashier New York Post). If they’re joining the League of Po-faced Killjoys, we’re doomed.
I know what you’re thinking: socialized medicine. This is what happens when the state owns your liver. Except newest clinical data suggests a few glasses of red wine a day is good for you — and the good-for-you amount seems to creep up with every study.
Nah, this is down to free-range assholes, wandering the landscape looking for innocent joys to crush. And you wonder why Brits say “cunt” so much.
— 1:07 pm
Comments: 21
Whoo-whoo-whoo. Whoo. Whoo. Whoo whoo, whoo whoo
February 29, 2008 — 11:57 pm
Comments: 30
It’s a cat’s-asstrophe!
— 6:05 pm
Comments: 38
Permissible dual-cat configurations
My two cats are like matter and anti-matter: they mixeth not, neither do they mingle. They will, however, appear on the same bed — now that I’ve turned the thermostat right down to save money and nurse my boiler through its last Winter. They will share a bed in two and only two configurations, as pictured above.
A single-cat configuration is always to my right, regardless of cat. Since all cats really are gray in the dark, I try to work out which one I’ve got by stroking its fur (his is coarser). Usually, I get the wrong end of whichever animal and find myself whispering sweet nothings to a cat’s bottom. They don’t seem to mind.
Cat blogging: because it doesn’t make my spleen throb like a native tom-tom.
Also: Garfield Minus Garfield as seen on Innocent Bystanders.
February 28, 2008 — 10:05 am
Comments: 31
Good manners type class? Or shut up, peasant type class?
Okay, I promised myself I wasn’t going to take any more shots at McCain, but this is really pissing me off.
Backstory: at a rally in Cincinnati, one of the speakers who worked the crowd before McCain appeared was some bozo local talk show host named Bill Cunningham. He delivered the rhetorical equivalent of a typical Free Republic comment, with references to the Clinton News Network and Barack Hussein Obama. Meh.
Afterward, McCain sought out the press and distanced himself from the remarks. Apologized, even. The blogosphere is taking this as a sign of McCain’s classiness and good judgement. HotAir even wondered if this consititutes a Sister Souljah moment (as if McCain needs to juke left in ’08 the way Clinton needed to juke right in ’92!).
HEL-LO! McCain didn’t hear Cunningham speak. Leading with Cunningham’s remarks or pretending McCain was reacting to the specifics is pointless. When he apologized, McCain had no freaking idea what exactly Cunningham had said. All’s he knew was, some peasant had dared to speak ill of a Senator. And I quote:
“It’s my understanding that before I came in here a person who was on the program before I spoke made some disparaging remarks about my two colleagues in the Senate, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton,” he said. “I have repeatedly stated my respect for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, that I will treat them with respect. I will call them ‘Senator.’ We will have a respectful debate, as I have said on hundreds of occasions. I regret any comments that may have been made about these two individuals who are honorable Americans.”
Bolding mine. It isn’t McCain’s lean to the left that’s pissing me off here (though it’s hard to escape the impression McCain thinks more highly of Hillary Clinton than he does of Mitt Romney). It’s the whole collegial atmosphere of the Senate thing.
This is why we so seldom elect one of these self-regarding bubble-headed jackasses to the presidency: they think a hell of a lot more highly of each other than they do the rest of us. How this became a blogospheric conversation about whether Obama’s middle name is a cheap shot…is a mystery to me.
Okay, no it’s not. We’re having that conversation because that’s the conversation the media wanted us to have. Happy now?
February 27, 2008 — 11:40 am
Comments: 27