The rich got richer - in the 80s. Not now.
(Also, though the gap between the very richest and poorest grew, there is not a "welfare gap" - in other words, nearly everyone has their needs taken care of.)

Also, say thank you to the government for screwing up gas prices. (Thank you, government, for spending my money on ethanol, which is more expensive, to sell back to me at a high rate, and discouraging the production of gasoline, or the opening of new refineries! You are so awesome and wise!)

China is building a road to Mt. Everest. Starting this week.

I always wanted to see a movie about killer sheep.

Just some YouTube stuff today.

Fur Elise. Fur 2 guitars.


Awesome.

The Moonlight Sonata, on classical guitar.

I thought, "not on piano = not good." I was wrong.

Lastly, beatboxing...on a flute...the Super Mario Brothers music.

Also awesome. He's talented. Explaining to people what he was practicing was probably an exercise in creativity, don't you think?

The successful Iraq - a short article on America's successful occupation of the Phillipines - and the way we put down an insurrection.

A scientist at the University of Washington was fired for exposing the inconvenient truth that the local glaciers are not actually shrinking.

While I'm at it, global warming, shockingly enough, makes the Northern Hemisphere greener. Who would guess that with more available carbon, plants would grow more?


Have you ever wanted an awesome case (for your computer)? Would putting your computer inside a dead animal be awesome enough? It would for me.

Need money? Here's a list of things you can legally donate. Except, I guess, if it's for cash, you're not really donating, are you? Anyway, if you want some other odd jobs, here's a list of some easy ones.



Finally, have you seen "DO NOT WANT" on the the Internet? Guess where it came from?

STAR WARS! Episode 3, the prequel, was released in Hong Kong - with Chinese subtitles. The bootleg version came out soon after, with English subtitles below the Chinese ones. Rather than typing in the dialogue, unfortunately, the Chinese subtitles were translated. Which leaves us with, "STAR WARS - the Backstroke of the West"!

This book caught my attention for the title alone:
Tough Jews : Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams
I mean, "Tough Jews"? Heh. Why not? And it's an interesting period of time. Maybe a shirt reading:

Italians: not the OG

would be appropriate.

Gary Kasparov, famous for his skill at chess, and for losing to Deep Blue, has decided to take on the corrupt new Russia he finds himself in. Good luck, buddy! I hope you're still with us next year.


Scientists are trying to grow meat in a lab. Good for them! I want cheap meat. It sounds more efficient than a cow, anyway.

Yet another attempt at a gender-neutral pronoun, doomed to failure because it sounds stupid. I post it because they would like to bring to your attention that we already have a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun, and it is "they". I use it myself. But they back up their support for its usage with plenty of examples.

Greenland had glaciers 30-38 million years ago, in a time when the world was even warmer than it is now, and had far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Oh, Al Gore, what will we do when the ice caps don't melt? WE WILL MELT THEM WITH AN ORBITAL LASER - AL GORE HAS NEVER ERRED.

Lastly, you remember lolcats? How about philolsophers? I have to agree with Language Log - these two are my favorites.

A few things today -

• Firstly. "Eggcorns". That's what you call a turn of phrase turned wrongly, but that makes a new sort of sense. Eggcorns, for example. It's someone's mis-hearing of "acorns", but it makes sense because it is egglike, and it is like corn in that it is a seed. Or to use another of their examples, "to name a view." It sounds like "to name a few", but acquires new meaning.

• Secondly, a nice article summarizing why our generals just aren't very good.

• Thirdly, this:

Mickey Mouse has been blatantly ripped off to teach Palestinian children why it's ok to hate and kill Jews. And, well, everyone else.

• Fourthly, something about the gardens that started gardening - Persian gardens. I'd like to see some for myself. Shame they're in...Iran. And that I look conspicuously non-Persian. Heh. Well, I hear plenty of people there are hospitable, even if their government is not.

• Fifthly, and lastly for today, it looks like a comet killed ice-age critters, not us. The reason no one found an impact crater? There wasn't one. It exploded in the sky, over the ice sheet that covered Canada. That's why it's difficult to pin down just where the explosion was. (after the initial burst, everything burst into flame and a great conflagration destroyed more or less everything on the continent.)