« March 06, 2005 - March 12, 2005 | Main | March 20, 2005 - March 26, 2005 »
March 19, 2005
Poll shows French cooling on EU treaty
Marvellous news, in my opinion. It was a disasterous idea from the start. You go, Euros!
Posted by BIL at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2005
Left in Nepal at 3, Daja Takes Decades To Find Out Why
Feather? Greeneye? Wongmo? In my opinion, the Sixies were like the Holocaust. We must never forget, and we must never allow it to happen again.
Posted by BIL at 06:08 PM | Comments (3)
March 17, 2005
Happy St Patrick's Day!
Posted by Eddie at 06:54 PM | Comments (2)
Play Freebird!
Apparently a lot of bands are sick of being asked to play Freebird.
On a recent live album, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock declares that "if this were the Make-a-Wish Foundation, and you were going to die in 20 minutes -- just long enough to play 'Freebird' -- we still wouldn't play it."
The last concert I went to was Marc Almond. Nobody yelled "Freebird." However, when I went to go see David Lee Roth at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival a few years ago, a lot of people yelled "Freebird." In fact, a lot of people yelled a lot of things. David Lee Roth gets no respect.
Posted by Jan at 02:59 PM | Comments (6)
Internet program oversight said flawed
A multibillion program to provide internet access for people in poor and remote areas has been undermined by repeated cases of fraud and abuse. Better off using the money to provide health care in poor and remote areas, eh?
Posted by Kay at 07:51 AM | Comments (7)
March 16, 2005
Protecting the Golden Gate from terror
Maybe the best thing to do is to do nothing. But the author(s) suggest that to be unlikely in reality, because it's hard to make political hay out of doing nothing.
Coolest piece of info gleaned from this article:
"Without computers, Charles Ellis, the bridge's designer, used about 10 books full of handwritten equations to work through the structure's requirements."
Posted by Jan at 09:52 PM | Comments (1)
Stretching is a big waste of time
I always suspected as much.
Posted by Jan at 12:05 PM | Comments (2)
Fake moon dirt shortage
...the agency will need lots of sooty gray fake moon dirt for experiments -- more than 100 tons of it. Unfortunately, NASA gave most of its old supply away years ago. The dirt it now has on hand fits neatly in a five-gallon paint bucket from Home Depot.
My biggest question is: does a five-gallon paint bucket from Home Depot hold more or less fake moon dirt than a five-gallon paint bucket from Lowe's?
Posted by Jan at 12:00 PM | Comments (1)
Gambia to ban imported vehicles without catalytic converters
I told the following story this morning and ignited quite a controversy: My Darling Wife and I bought a green-gold Ford Fairlane back in 1982 from the Reverend Lonnie. The Reverend spent a lot of time on the road and "took off the catalytic converter because the car runs better without it. It's in the trunk, if you want it."
It stayed in the trunk for 2 years. One day, while sipping my morning brew, I stumbled upon an article stating that a new emission law was going to go into effect in three months time and that all cars would be tested to see if their catalytic converters were up to snuff. The local garage said that reinstalling the converter would be a royal pain, one that would cost me $700. So, I ran an ad in the paper and sold the car to some old guy, telling him, of course, that the converter was in the trunk.
I did NOT tell him of the impending law. Well, about 5 months later, down at the local drug store I was with our son Enko when I heard someone saying "Liar! Cheater!" It was, of course, the old guy, who was really pissed that I had "lied and cheated and I want my money back." Which I refused, under the theory that it was not my duty to inform him of the impending law change.
Two weeks after that he was in front of our house, circling it on a bike, calling out "Liar! Lawyer equals liar! A liar lives in this house."
That was the last I saw of the old guy, but the opinion at the gym this morning was split pretty much 50/50 over whether I had "done him wrong."
Posted by Eddie at 10:20 AM | Comments (16)
Parents of activist sue bulldozer manufacturer
The death of West Bank activist Rachel Corrie happened because she was standing in front of a house scheduled for demolition. Common sense dictates that a several-ton bulldozer isn't going to stop on a dime. So whose fault is it that Corrie was run over?
Posted by Kay at 08:15 AM | Comments (4)
March 15, 2005
Big Dig tunnel now deemed unsafe
Since it's partly funded by federal monies, is it any surprise that the project is now showing its flaws? One website has lampooned it as "The Road to Hell" for different reasons.
Posted by Kay at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
This is cool
You enter any text you like, and it turns it into a ransom-note effect by pulling down images of letters from Yahoo's image search engine.
Posted by Jan at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)