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Not sure how many Flockers this applies to, but it’s an interesting development. I can’t help but draw parallels between this and the slow-but-gaining-momentum movement among orchestras to market to the under-30 demographic, as chronicled by Drew McManus here, here and here. Who else is doing this sort of thing? Who should be doing this sort of thing?
Global Warming Skeptics in Congress
Perhaps the most pedagogical scene in the hearing came when Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) tried to explain to Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), an old friend of the oil and gas industry who chalks global warming up to the sun, how greenhouse gasses from human activity — despite being only five percent of the total — can upset the balance of the earth’s atmosphere.
“On a seesaw, there’s a thousand pounds on one side and a thousand pounds on the other side. It’s an equilibrium.” Add 20 pounds to one side, Markey said, and the seesaw tilts.
For a moment, Congress felt like grade school.
Swedish Chef Ringtones!
Proof that SNL is funny sometimes, or at least that Andy Samberg is.
This could be a fun weekly (or monthly) thing
I’ve enjoyed this whole “See the Flockers” thing a lot. Wouldn’t it be fun to do something like this semi-regularly? Ideas I’ve come up with so far:
- Eat the Flockers (recipes)
- Hear the Flockers (podcasts or music posts)
- Big Pants Flockers (okay, I just want to see this one because I crack up every time I see those three words – which had probably never been expressed together before Shelia posted them in the now infamous Renner post – together. I have no idea what it would be about)
- You’ve gotta be Flockin’ kidding me! (in which we post something outrageous about ourselves that is not well known)
I’m sure you all have much better ideas (which I look forward to seeing in the comments) but I’m concerned about getting all solipsistic and carried away. What does everyone think?
See the Flockers: Joshua Conner
I just got new glasses and this is the only post-new-glasses picture I could find. Me, on 1/1, post midnight-run-in-Central-Park, with a couple of friends.
OMFG funny
(via Metafilter)
What does 200 calories look like?
Guess what the link is!
“We don’t want the entire show to be ‘Late Night With Horny Manatee,’ ” he said. “Though, of course, it will become that eventually.”
The Nietzsche Family Circus
God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him.
The House of Death
Just another casualty of Mexico’s drug wars? Perhaps. But Padilla had no connection with the drugs trade; he seems to have been the victim of a case of mistaken identity. Now, as a result of documents disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that his murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez ‘House of Death’, is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to top Washington officials close to President Bush.
Long, but absolutely worth it. Link
Ben Stein on Warren Buffett
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Can-Spam is a sham
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the alleged spammers. In a little-noticed opinion issued in mid-November, a three-judge panel acknowledged the e-mail messages in question may have included a false Internet address and a nonworking “From:” address, but concluded that they nevertheless were permitted under the federal antispam law known as the Can-Spam Act.
Helsinki Complaints Choir
Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala
Mr. and Mrs. Brown had one child. They called him Leroy and so did his teachers.
Everyone else in Idaville called him Wikipedia.
Link and Wikipedia for those who never read any of the Encyclopedia Brown books
CNN’s Glenn Beck to first-ever Muslim congressman:
“[W]hat I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’”
It’s gonna be the future soon!
There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years,” said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work.
“We started thinking, ‘it would be really convenient if you didn’t have to recharge these things’.
“And because we’re physicists we asked, ‘what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?’.”
Bonus link: acoustic version of Jonathan Coulton’s “The Future Soon”
WTO Announces Formalized Slavery Model for Africa
The initiative will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright. Schmidt recounted how private stewardship has been successfully applied to transport, power, water, traditional knowledge, and even the human genome. The WTO’s “full private stewardry” program will extend these successes to (re)privatize humans themselves.
The $5 Jackson Pollock
“The work that Teri Horton says was made by Jackson Pollock. She bought the painting for $5 in a thrift shop in the early 1990s and now says she will not sell it for less than $50 million.”
4 Military Newspapers to Call for Rumsfeld Resignation
“This is not about the midterm elections,” continued the editorial, which will appear in the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, and Marine Corps Times on Monday. “Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go.”
Article, full text of editorial (via Daily Kos)
Audi RS4 Review
The Prius will set you back $25k. The RS4 costs three Prii. At freeway speeds, the Toyota is a near silent and comfortable cruiser, whereas the Audi sounds and feels like a volcano making love to an avalanche. I only tell you this because the moment I saw the RS4 a Toyota angel appeared on my left shoulder and an Audi demon manifested itself on my right. And then I drove the RS4 and the demon kicked the snot out of the angel.
Not impossible, just highly improbable
What he’s saying is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for a predisposition to favor intelligence in biology. Features like multicellularity, photoreception, long sharp fangs, flight, etc., pop up in life’s history over and over again, independently; but intelligence? Feh. The universe doesn’t seem to like smart guys. We happened once, and what’s more, we seem to be teetering at the end of one long chain of improbable events in the history of one marginal set of lineages, of which most of its members are in decline.
Link (via Blowing and Drifting)
“I’m your son from the future!”
We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.
Post your favorites or your own in the comments! (I’m not ashamed to admit that I stole the title of this post from some of Dane Cook’s excellent early standup.)
Santorum compares Iraq war to LoTR
But if we’re mapping the Lord of the Rings onto Iraq, the books pitted weak hobbits relying on stealth and guerrilla warfare against a mighty superpower that had a huge army and amazing surveillance capabilities. They defeated Lord Sauron by drawing him into a military conflict as a distraction while the hobbits snuck into Sauron’s homeland and destroyed him with the medieval equivalent of a suitcase nuke.
America’s Dumbest Congressmen
But in a notably dumb year, perhaps the dumbest move came from Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, who sponsored a bill seeking $20 million in taxpayer money for a party to celebrate America’s victory in Iraq. Not long ago such flagrant obtuseness might have ensured the senator a place on our annual list of America’s Dumbest Congressmen. Alas, given this year’s stiff competition, he didn’t even make runner-up.
“Handsome doesn’t hurt”
Democratic operatives do not publicly say that they went out of their way this year to recruit candidates with a high hotness quotient. Privately, however, they acknowledge that, as they focused on finding the most dynamic politicians to challenge vulnerable Republicans, it did not escape their notice that some of the most attractive prospects were indeed often quite attractive.
Link (via Today’s Papers)
