Warehouse 13

This site has some interesting old instruments. It's also got possibly the longest URL I've ever cut and pasted. The darned computer monitor shook when I pasted it.



It's the MUSEUM ARTIFACTS of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and they made the mistake of soliciting comments should anyone recognize a piece of equipment. Isn't that just asking for someone like me to write,"Dear Lord, the picture shows that you've got the Sastry Box set to seventeen! Quick, get everyone out of the building and into decontamination as soon as possible!"

Obama Lately

It's true, governing is on hold until the campaign is over. With governing like this, that can only be a good thing.

Utopia (thankfully) Averted

Did you read Walter Russell Mead's excellent article on the failure of Al Gore? Mead hits the nail squarely on the head:

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes. You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother. You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books.

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

In Part II there's this, the crux of the biscuit:

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses....

...To make the case for a proposition like this, one needs to make the following argument: that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high, that the proposed measures are both feasible and effective, and that there are no easier or cheaper methods of accomplishing the goal. This is no special set of high hurdles invented for the purpose of frustrating the greens; it is the basic test that any proposal in any arena must pass.

Carbon regulation only sounded good as a vague concept. When you get down to it, corporations and people are the same - they aren't going to change their way of life unless compelled to do so by a significant force.

Carbon trading and regulation wasn't a nudge in the right direction. In order to work it would have to be a club, coming down to smite anyone who resisted. A nudge would have been a business expense. In order to work, carbon regulation would have to crush whole industries.

It was funny that Obama called for America to "up your game" while touring Alcoa Aluminum. Aluminum production is one of the most energy intensive industries you'll find. Given a free hand in the matter, Obama would would make aluminum a metal for the rich. They'd have aluminum walking sticks and monocles, we'd have stories for the grandkids about how we used to drink soda from aluminum cans.

I shudder to think what Obama and the EPA would do if given a free hand. Thankfully we took the House, and are in a position to cut funding to the stupidest of ideas. Now if we can take back the Senate and the presidency we can begin the task of undoing this blasted utopia.

Another Planned Parenthood Sting

When will Planned Parenthood learn to just stop answering the phone?



How is it that they get stung so easily? Because they're there for the abortions, plain and simple. They can pretend that abortions are just a small part of what they do, but the front office operates in public so it's not hard to show what they do.

Self Help

Why shotguns are not considered surgical instruments:

For five years Sean Murphy was driven to distraction by a painful blemish that no amount of creams, ointments or doctors' appointments could cure.

So he came up with his own radical and permament procedure to remove the stubborn wart forever - he blasted it with a 12-bore shotgun.

But not only did the blast take off almost his entire finger, it also left him facing 15 years in jail for the illegal possesion of a firearm.

Yesterday, with only a stump to show for the middle of his left hand, and a suspended 16-week prison sentence, he insisted he had no regrets.

Also, why beer isn't an approved anesthetic:

"The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble.”

Richard Haigh, defending, said Murphy, 38, had been “a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him”.

Mr Murphy decided to open fire with the Beretta after fortifying himself with several pints of beer. He settled down outside his caravan, took aim and opened fire.

Makes you feel smart, just for never having never done anything similar. Yet.

Donald Trump's Cat

and others...

Man, they're getting good at that stuff.

..seen in the area

various places and bits

Dangerous Stunt

h/t pre

Photoshop 1932

Old school photoshop - done in a darkroom circa 1932.

Reassuring Sounds

Here's an interesting article about designing sound into (5) products we use everyday:

A car door is essentially a hollow shell with parts placed inside it. Without careful design the door frame amplifies the rattling of mechanisms inside. Car companies know that if buyers don’t get a satisfying thud when they close the door, it dents their confidence in the entire vehicle.

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity.

Reminds me of the phones back in the days when there was only one phone company. That was Bell Telephone, and when I was a kid they offered one phone, the model 500. In the 60's they introduced the Trimline and Princess phones (the "gay phone" lines), but mainly everyone had the 500.

They were almost Soviet in design, no pretty in them, but they were solid and had the kind of heft that could put an unwary intruder into a coma should you choose to defend your home with Ma Bell's property.

Anyway, in 1970-something I had occasion to work in the recycling center for these phones. (the phone company actually rented you the phone back then; you couldn't own your own) In the warehouse, returned and damaged phones would come in on a belt and various parts would be replaced as needed.

So on one job I found a handset in the aisle where I was working. Not wanting anyone to break a toe on this rogue phone, I picked it up. But something was wrong. The darned thing only weighed a few ounces. It wasn't the hefty flail I had imagined I could fight off burglars with. So I asked one of the phone sanitizers I had gotten to know on the job. "Was this some kind of joke handset? A pretend phone of some kind?"

So she showed me Ma Bell's trick: All the phones were like that; so to give the customer the feeling that his rented phone actually had substance, they would put a bag of sand in the handle. It worked too. With the sand you had a phone; without it, the thing felt like a toy.

For some reason I felt betrayed by this simple deception. You mean all those years I was paying a dollar a month to rent this cheap, plastic, ugly device?

But it was the same thing as the car doors. Sure, it's misleading, but it gives you the impression that everything is solid. Stuff is dense and firm and nothing is going to break.

Sort of like a president that sounds good, intelligent, and caring; even though you know that there's nothing on the inside but a bag of sand, and sometimes chili dogs.

Superhero

I originally put the prez into this shirt because I liked the design. In fact, it looks much like something I might wear, with possibly the addition of a top hat and a monocle. But after completion, the image reminded me of a superhero, or perhaps super-villain.

Whatcha think? Dr. O, able to crash markets and make assets evaporate? Or maybe, Absolute Zero, destroyer of worlds?

Runaway?

Drudge linked to a story about how Hugh Hefner is getting revenge on his intended bride for calling it off just days short of the wedding. He's put a runaway bride sticker over her picture:

But Hugh, she's not running. She's walking away.
It just seems like running to you.

But you can still catch her. Use the scooter, Hugh! Use the scooter!

Ganzenpas, Maru, and Ché

Sounds like a law firm, huh? Well it's not. Maru is just a paralegal.







Only thing to add is that Ché liked to do the executions himself.

all h/t

Old Joke

h/t: pre

Easy to Remember

Medvedev Drives

I don't speak Rooskey but I think the translation is: "Say Goodbye to Your Dog."

Swingset Abuse

Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger.

Stupid Thieves

At what point do you suppose police will start trying to catch copper/aluminum/lead thieves? Oh sure they're ready to arrest anyone they see chopping down telephone poles, but when do you think they'll send someone around to the recyclers and ask about junkies selling carloads of utility wiring? This stuff is getting out of hand:

ANTIOCH (KCBS) – Just days after Pacific Gas and Electric lamented the ongoing and widespread theft of copper wire from its Antioch power poles, the utility is now revealing that a particularly brazen thief – or thieves – stole an entire transformer from a power pole.

This is in addition to the knocking down of an estimated 300 power poles, stripping them of their lucrative copper wiring.

So some thief gets $500 and some community gets a bill for $50,000.

Doesn't it raise an alarm when a citizen shows up to sell a utility transformer? Seems like a little poking around the scrap yards could put the fear of God into the recyclers. Stolen property is stolen property right? You can go to jail for it. I can't believe the police are ignoring the one place all this stolen material must end up.

The recycling industry is already regulated up to their eyeballs. Requiring them to report suspicious activity seems like a no-brainer.

Old Stuff

It's odd. One of the coolest things about Al Gores' high speed digital intertubium is that you can find images that were made long before the first transistor. Think about it - it's 1948 and you're a government agency concerned about the epidemic of flaming babies in the nation's kitchens. Well, why not advertise in Life magazine? Just that much better if your ad can go on to live in the cloud, warning mothers not yet born about the dangers of setting the baby on the stove.

And thanks to the vast infocloud, nobody will ever again have to wonder about the best way to milk a snake. Not if they own an old doorbell and a computer.

Icing on the cake: getting to point out that the reason the Russians want Obama reelected is because they like one-sided treaties that require nothing from them. They, too, don't put the interests of the United States first.

images via

Your Money

This is fun, but they don't keep track of your score: Dirty Spending Secrets. It's pretty simple to ace the quiz though - just assume the worst, and your government will live up to your expectations.

Posted Already?

I found this in a folder "to be tweaked later," so I'm not sure if I posted it already. Anyway, if I did, here it is again, somewhat tweaked.

Bamhilda

I have a policy of disclosing whenever one of my photoshops draws heavily on someone else's depiction of an old woman in undergarments and a Viking style Spangenhelm helmet, so, I should probably note that this indeed is one that used much from an existing image of an old lady in undergarments and a Spangenhelm helmet. So there, that's done.

Happy Friday

"Son, do you ever like to watch gladiator movies?"

photo via

Me as Well

von

Wine Whack

Found this on the presurfer, but I'm unsure if it's for true. It's in French, or, as we say at the lumber camp, strike one.

How Did They Get Together?

This is an interesting site. It has pictures of historical figures with people you wouldn't expect, or in surprising places. Missing: Barney Frank in church and Al Franken in front of a laughing audience. (though I'm told that 20 or 30 years ago Al was able to elicit at least nervous laughter)

The Candidate Didn't Lie

He said he wanted to bring people together, and he did:

Ahmadinejad joins China, Russia leaders at summit

ASTANA — Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday joined the Chinese and Russian leaders in a rare encounter at a summit in Kazakhstan, where he launched a new attack on the "slavers and colonisers" of the West.

Everybody now:

"I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony...."

Ms Frizzle

(clickenhugen)

Anyone remember these? Lumberkid and I watched a ton of them when she was little. Literally a ton.

xkcd

Stupidest Woman on the Planet, Literally

"Literally, back in the day, with this thumb, I hitch-hiked to the moon and back."

Dissidents

Well and good, but now I want to hear the scientific blasphemy. Performing the evolution thought experiment in my mind, with a lay person's exposure to the science, I notice many things that don't seem to make sense. That doesn't mean they can't be explained, I just haven't looked into them enough yet.

But at least I can look into them, because I have an open mind on the matter. What a waste that most students learning the science are hobbled by the theory being locked-down. "We have a consensus now kid; quit asking questions."

Seems like the same thing impedes climate science. Thankfully some scientists still remember what science was supposed to be.

No Brainer

h/t: buzz

False Truisms

Sorta. But sometimes that's how you achieve a resentful neighbor, library fine, or criminal record.

via

I'm Not Saying it Wasn't Safe

Sounds like Obama explaining the economy.

Going Out of Business

"Americans who like a bargain appreciate my presidency."

By the way, I've gone Tokyo Rose on the NYT get-Sarah Site:

So G.I. You got a girl back home? What do you suppose she's doing while you spend hours bent over Sarah Palin e-mails? You think she wait for you? Haha, she no wait for you.

Faking E-Mails

Always Happy to Help the NYT

This is fun. I've been at the New York Times Get Sarah Palin Site, where you're supposed to read some of Sarah Palin's 24,000 emails and flag the ones in which she finally admits to worshiping Satan. I've been randomly flagging the longer ones and commenting stuff like:

So she did have meetings with Bill Bjork. This could be the smoking gun.

I also looked for embarrassing ones to flag as "nothing here" but I couldn't find anything in the least bit scandalous.

OK I know it's juvenile, but I got a kick out of adding to the fatigue of those odious trolls, pouring over the mundane, looking for nasty.

Another Whodoneit

Shelton links to this well written Wired story: sort of a Who-done-it for Nerds.

Our hero:

When James Scott attended the first day of a mycology course as a freshman in college, his plan was to cut class for the rest of the semester and fake his way through on borrowed notes. But in his lecture that day, the professor told a story about a fungus that lives on peach pits. No one, he said, knows how the fungus gets from one pit to the next. “If you go to an abandoned orchard and lie on your stomach under a tree for a week, watching which insects land on a peach and move to another one,” Scott remembers him saying, “you will know more about this fungus than anyone in the world.”

“It was something even I, an undergraduate who didn’t know anything, could do,” Scott says. “I could go out there and look for stuff.” In the space of one anecdote, Scott had become the sort of person who kept a microscope in his dorm room and decorated the walls with fungal family trees he drew himself. (He also plays the banjo.)

Plays banjo too? Hey, you had me at "cut class for the rest of the semester."

Misleading Headlines

NRO had:

‘Prison Math’ and the War on Drugs

I thought prison math was where the guy in the next cell claims that the square root of 25 is 6 and you don't dare correct him because you don't want to get shanked.

New Chet's Down

Fox, Via Drudge:

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - An Ohio restaurant mentioned last week by President Barack Obama as an indirect beneficiary of the government's Chrysler bailout will go out of business Sunday after a more than 70-year history.

Co-owner Richard Lawrence of New Chet's Restaurant in Toledo says business has fallen victim to the economy and the workplace smoking ban approved by Ohio voters in 2006.

What rotten luck. They went under before higher taxes, mandated health insurance, inflated energy costs, and an easier to unionize workforce could save them. And they were that close.

And It Works Even Better in the Southern Hemisphere

Because there you can kick penguins all day and never risk unshoing yourself. What? It's a word. Unnerving is a word isn't it?



h/t: Shelton

One in Four

One in four Americans say they share the same ideological views as the president.

Anthony Weiner’s Apology Speech

(Presented By Guilty-Looking Dachshunds)

Mark Guzheng Davis

Boy, I'm still getting 5 or 6 hits a day on my Mark Guzheng Davis at Deutsche Bank post. I feel kind of good about being able to warn people away from this scam. (and I'm posting about it again so as to move myself up a branch on the Mark Guzheng Davis at Deutsche Bank Google tree -- even though I know that somewhere a Nigerian prince is cursing all lumberjacks because of me)

Annie Got Her Gun

If it weren't for that silly restraining order I'd spend every spare moment trying to get next to Ann Coulter.

"Science"

They say:

The sun unleashed a massive solar storm today (June 7) in a dazzling eruption that kicked up a vast cloud of magnetic plasma that appeared to rain back down over half of the sun's entire surface, NASA scientists say.

The solar storm hit its peak at about 2:41 a.m. EDT (0641 GMT), but the actual flare extended over a three-hour period, said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, in a video describing the event.

Yeah, sure. Well mister smarty-pantses, Al Gore just happened to be up at 2:41 this morning and guess what? He looked outside and it was still night time! The sun was still asleep when this so-called event happened. So don't try to tell us that there was a storm on the sun; and certainly don't tell us that the sun has anything to do with the climate.

Baby Baby

via

It's Trizzle

Or should that be "It's trazoozle?"

Stick a Fork in Him

He's done.

Two Things

from (i think)

What Do You Get the Dog Who has Everything?

Seen in DC

Endless Recovery Summer

Anyone else notice how bare the shelves are in the Toledo hardware store where Obama popped in? Empty shelf space indicates business isn't booming. (that's a total of 5 boxes of Miracle Grow behind the prez; one or two of each size)

And this stop on the (re)election campaign trail was intended to highlight economic recovery. Ha!

photo via

I Can Do Anything Good

Upon riding his bike solo for the first time:

Ra Ray Roo-roo

Arr ra roo!

Rykiis!

Ra-eh?

Rooo

Raaaaaay!

Dumbass