Drinking whiskey clear!
“We will not go gently. We will unleash hell in December because we have to. We won’t go in a shell. We’ll go into attack mode, because that’s what’s required.”
– Mike Tomlin
Pittsburgh Steelers coach
I wish I could believe him, but I don’t think this is Pittsburgh’s year.
For some reason, lately I’ve been thinking of some of the weird neuroses I have:
1) For some reason, I have this bizarre problem with wasting food. None of my family (that I’m aware of) dealt with starvation in the past, and none of my parents or grandparents ever gave me the whole “starving kids in China” routine as a kid. If I didn’t like something, they never made me eat it, and they didn’t make me feel guilty for it. Yet, whenever I see food being wasted, it drives me nuts. Specifically, it really bothers me when food is wasted purely for entertainment. Remember the scene in the movie PCU when the pranksters stole a huge vat of ground beef and dropped it onto the animal rights activists? Or when Late Night with Jimmy Fallon does the “hot dog toss” game, where audience members try tossing the most hot dogs through the mouth of a celebrity cut out? It drives me crazy. I don’t know why. And lest you think it’s some claptrap about precious animals dying to make food, I used to have no problem tossing the tomato slice that comes with most hamburgers to the side… until one day around 5 years ago, when I thought about that poor tomato growing in a field, hoping to one day be the most delicious tomato in the world… only to wind up, uneaten, in a Dumpster behind a Wendy’s in Belmont. It made me sad and guilty, so now I eat the tomato. Intellectually, I know that there’s plenty of food to eat in this country, but wasting it just bothers me. Badly. Amusingly, however, this specific neurosis doesn’t apply to leftovers. I guess if I’ve already eaten some of it, then I have less guilt about throwing it away… or something.
Here’s a yummy pic of Scarlett Johansson to kick off your weekend:
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is a band from – you guessed it: New York, New York…where all the bands I listen to these days come from.
Aside from having a pretentious name, the band has a great sound.
Their first album has as much indie cred as necessary… but the single “Higher Than The Stars” coats it all in a nice, creamy layer of delicious synthpop that sounds a bit like New Order meets The Smiths.
“The Pains” also have some connection to Saint Etienne (one of my all-time faves) as well, as there is a “Saint Etienne visits Lord Spank Mix” of this song as well.
Have a listen and tell me what you think!
[audio:pureatheart.mp3]Check out their MySpace page here.
For years, scientists have wondered why massive stones – some as heavy as 250 pounds (113 kg) – seem to move themselves across the floor of California’s Death Valley:
They think that they now have an answer: that the stones move because of the sheer flatness of the area combined with thin layers of ice which form at night, the unique soft clay in the area, and 90mph winds.
The stones – which can move up to 350 yards (320m) a year – have been a mystery for decades.
Read more here.
From Texts From Last Night, one of my favorite sites:
(416): you came home covered in oatmeal wearing a tutu holding a stolen wrotting pumpkin and “its a girl” balloons tied around your neck.you were whispering the lyrics to aaron carters ‘aarons party’. i think the real question was what DIDNT you drink last night
Quick – name the most “progressive” cities in America. Portland? Seattle? Austin? Denver? Minneapolis?
These cities are known for their fine public school and public transportation systems and healthy art scenes as well as their liberal values, like actively encouraging cycling to work and anti-sprawl policies.
Aside from that, what else to these cities have in common? They are the whitest cities of their size in America, that’s what. Black folks make up 12.8% of the US population, but only constitute 10.6% of the population of Minneapolis, 10.0% in Denver, 8.8% in Austin, 6.2% in Seattle, and a mere 6.0% in Portland. And although foreign-born people make up a lot of the difference in these cities, they still lag behind other cities in their “diversity”.
It’s amusing, then, that so-called “progressives” flock to these cities. After all, why move away from downtown Atlanta to be called a racist when you can move to Portland and be a liberal hero?
Read more about it here.
On November 20, 2009, hackers accessed several computers at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They managed to make off with around 60MB of internal emails and documents, and the picture they paint is damning. Researchers at CRU allegedly: a) heavily massaged data to reach their conclusions; b) ignored data that led to a contrary conclusion; c) willfully deleted emails (evidence) of their wrongdoing; and d) sought to replace or bypass editors of scientific journals that questioned their methodology and\or results.
The fallout at supposedly neutral sites like Ars Technica has been a giant shrug, with most posters saying that yes, perhaps the scientists did behave badly, but that the underlying science is sound. I simply have to ask: is it? When you see emails like these, one has to wonder:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Or this:
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
A month and a half before the hack, the BBC published this article, which calls into question the very idea of Global Warming. In it, the author asserts that the warmest year on record was 1998, and that global temperatures have either held study or actually decreased in the past 11 years, and that the rise of global temperatures in the decades before are based on a completely normal process known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
From The Smoking Gun:
An Arkansas cop tasered an unruly 10-year-old girl after her mother called police to report that the child was crying, screaming, and refusing to go to bed. The tased girl, Kiara Medlock, is about 65 pounds and 4′ 6″, according to her father.
Here’s the girl:
Yes, this girl was obviously a threat to a fully-grown male police officer. This makes me sick to my stomach.
And some people wonder why other people hate cops so much.
