B Kliban’s cartoons are funny.
Those wacky Thais! The newest fad in Thailand is raising giant African cockroaches as pets. To me it just sounds like a bad punchline to a joke: “We were so poor, all we could afford for pets were cockroaches.”
The Washington Post now has an Electronic Edition that is an exact digital copy of the entire paper available online. You can use your web browser or Adobe Acrobat to read it, and it is fully searchable and zoomable. I started a two-week free trial, which I assume to mean that it will not be free forever, but it might be worth it…
Along the same lines, the awesome Newseum has a feature that let’s you see 119 current front pages from newspapers in 23 countries as well as an
I hate it when posts get corrupted like above. To continue… as well as an archive of front pages in the aftermath of 9/11/01.
Some opponents of using Yucca Mountain, Nevada as a nuclear waste repository site have come up with a particularly hare-brained idea: use ICBMs to transport the nuclear waste to the Moon. Even before reading the article I could think of so many things wrong with this stupid idea; I’ll confine myself to just a couple. First of all, there’s the obvious issue of a launch disaster that could conceivably contaminate a much larger area than anything that might possibly happen at the Yucca Mountain site. Secondly, I think that humans might like to visit the Moon again without getting irradiated. Although their plan calls for precisely targeting a crater and burrowing the waste into soft regolith, that’s a lot to ask out of a system that’s supposed to be cheaper and more reliable than earth-based solutions. Granted, the moon has no atmosphere with which to distribute radioactive material from the crash site area, but it’s not like a missile slamming into the moon is going to bury itself nicely under 30 feet of soil without any sort of explosion! Designing any sort of terminal guidance system to automatically land and bury the waste will almost certainly be prohibitively expensive. Although this plan adroitly sidesteps the NIMBY syndrome encountered any place even studied as a possible disposal site, the potential for permanently contaminating our nearest satellite neighbor makes this a pretty dumb idea in my opinion.
Update: OK, I’ve switched back to YACCS for my commenting host, as enetation is just too damn slow. I don’t get too many comments, but I imagine that waiting a couple of minutes for things to load isn’t exactly encouraging people. Hopefully things will be a little faster, so go ahead and let me know what you think! And for those of you that have posted recently, I’m sorry to say that I have no idea how to import those comments into the current system yet. Sorry about that…
In an effort to stem the recent tide of forest fires, W is initiating a “Healthy Forests Initiative” that will allow for selective thinning of forests. Environmentalists and logging conglomerates alike have said that the judicious thinning of forests could have prevented some of the wildfires that struck over the summer. The first image that came to mind for me, however, was that of the Simpsons episode “Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington.” In this episode, Lisa espies lobbyists trying to get a logging permit for Springfield Forest using the argument that animals are more happy with a clean forest, showing a before picture of a scary, dark forest versus an after picture with happy animals playing leapfrog and drinking tea on the remaining stumps. OK, so I watch too much Simpsons; I still think it’s funny.
CNN has a great review of “Like, Omigod!: The ‘80s Pop Culture Box (Totally)” released recently by Rhino Records. The boxed set comes with 7 CDs (143 songs) and a 90-page booklet of ’80s trivia. If I didn’t already own pretty much every ’80s compilation, album, and single out there, then I must say that this would be something I would buy in a heartbeat. But don’t think that I’m not itching to anyway… 
<shameless self-promotion>
If you’re interested in buying this yourself, please consider using this link to CDNow, as I am an affiliate with them.
</shameless self-promotion>
I think this (ex-?)baseball fan says it all.
Here’s a timeline of Crayola Crayon colors which includes a summary of colors that have been added as well as retired from 1909 to the present.
