Google TV

I got a Google-TV box, partly because it includes a blu-ray player (found a $9.99 blu-ray disk of Le Femme Nikita at the grocery store last night!). And it does one really cool thing: you can browse the web and watch a little TV picture-in-picture...that's CNN-HD in the lower right corner.

Jobs Available

They're hirin'. And they don't care who knows it!

Six Hundred Billion Crisp, New One-Dollar Bills

Treasury Secretary Geithner met with China's vice-minister for Finance. As the BBC reports it:

Mr Wang gave his backing to the US Federal Reserve's controversial decision to restart quantitative easing - effectively printing dollars to buy up US government debt.

That's a lot of paper and a lot of ink. Wish I could print money whenever I needed it...sigh.

P.S. According to this, one million one-dollar bills weighs 2200 lbs, so that's 600,000 of those, or a total of 1,320,000,000 lbs. An average tractor-trailer carries, what, 20 tons? So that's 33,000 semis full of one-dollar bills.

Hey, I know! Why not give unemployed people jobs printing all that money? Think of all that work: producing the paper and ink, shipping them to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, driving the 33,000 trucks back and forth, forklift operators...now there is some stimulus!

Or, think of it like this: what if an asteroid or comet weighing 1.32 billion pounds hit the earth? Actually, this funny-money will probably do just as much damage, with a lot less kinetic energy.

Robots To Guard Your Home

Cool!

It's Official

It must have nearly killed them to have to set that headline!

Rally For Sanity

This is my favorite sign from the big rally. There are 99 more here.

h/t Say Uncle.

I didn't go; had to work. I edited a piece about the rally for the big show yesterday and I had fun putting together a little montage of Peace Train/Crazy Train/Love Train. And I have to say that seeing Cat Stevens (Yousef Islam) perform "Peace Train" in front of the U.S. Capitol was very inspiring. He even participated in a good-natured "Battle Of The Bands" with Ozzie Osbourne.

Just Like In The Movies

Cop shoots gun out of perp's hand.

At least ONE cop in the NYPD can shoot. And well!

h/t Say Uncle.

Flying Fortress?

I saw one of these over Front Royal, VA this afternoon about 1 PM. At first I thought it was a balloon or blimp because it just seemed to hang there; I didn't think anything that big could move that slowly. It was within the air control area of Dulles Int'l airport. Is there some kind of airshow this weekend? Or maybe it was returning from an airshow elsewhere. Its course was south; maybe it was returning from Dayton, OH? It had four engines and the wingtips were rounded off from leading edge to trailing edge. Can't think of anything else it might be except a B-17.

Link to PDF of WWII aircraft silhouette book.

Determination

A Dutch woman has gone to a shooting gallery nearly every summer for over seventy years. If you hit the target, you get a snapshot:

1936

2009

Uhhh... kudos to Breda for spotting this, er... five effing months ago!

Daguerre

Daguerre is credited with inventing photography in the early 19th century. Then someone makes this nice monument to him. Wouldn't a photograph be better? Anyway, then I come along and take a photograph of a sculpture of the inventor of photography...using a digital camera. Very confusing.

Outside the National Portrait Gallery.

Two Gun Stories In The New York Times

More States Allowing Guns In Bars

Judges Want To Bear Arms After Philippine Shooting

Guns Stolen From Mexican Police Arsenal

Six thieves wearing police uniforms entered the compound, drove directly to the radio room, tied up the staff, then proceeded to the armory. They took 43 H&K G36 rifles, 26 9mm pistols plus bulletproof vests and grenades. The guards offered no resistance. The State Attorney General's office has arrested the guards.

Owner Of Segway Company Dies In Segway Accident

He plunged off a cliff.

Hitting A Bullet With A Bullet

About 2 minutes in, he does it:



h/t Maddened Fowl.

Chix Kix Lix Hix

High-schooler Ashley Flinn kicks a field goal and two point-afters to help her school's football team to a 17-10 win over their rivals from Dakota, Michigan.

The Uranian Phalanstery Is Being Evicted!

Founded by Richard Tyler:

Richard Tyler was born in Lansing, Michigan April 1st, 1926. He was the only child to an Artist Father and Mystic Mother. "Richard thought that life was a joke" Dorothea chuckles as she tells me of Richard's days of service during WWII in Japan as a Paratrooper. He was the kind of personality that would end up in the brig for robbing a Japanese bank, "disappearing with piles of void paper money. Guns, blazing to the sky".

And now it's all over.

NYT article.

A blog post about the Uranian Phalanstery.

Snapshots

Some photos from my bicycle ride:

The Browntown General Store

RC Cola sign (actually a thermometer - 92 degrees)

The bridge across the Shenandoah River - it's about a hundred yards wide here, and about three feet deep.

Mailbox made from a tractor

The ubiquitous "Posted" signs...

...and black lace panties hanging from the tree.

Beautiful old weatherbeaten farm buildings.

And another.

Weathered wood.

After work on Sunday my attention was arrested by this flower in a big planter at 6th Street and Pennsylvania Ave.

Rural Bicycling II

Today I saddled up and took a long ride on the bike, about 20 miles round-trip I believe. Crossed the Shenandoah River at a little one-lane bridge.

The GPS didn't start working for the first three miles. Blackberry GPS's are like that: they expect to have a working data connection, and if they don't have it, they'll keep looking, sometimes for hours, even though the GPS satellites are coming in loud and clear. Oh, well.

Here's the aerial view:


This was the most exhausting ride I have ever done. Nothin' but hills. I pedalled up one hill on the opposite side of the river from an elevation of 550 feet to an elevation of 850 feet. The road was "paved" with dusty, powdery dirt and gravel, and it was so steep that it was difficult to balance the bike: I had to lean forward to avoid toppling over backwards, but if I leaned forward too much, the rear wheel would lose traction. At the top of that hill, I decided, "OK, that's all I can take!" and I turned around and descended the hill; that's the steep drop in the graph.

Wheeeeee!

Over thirty minutes to climb, and then back down in about two minutes.

On the way back I stopped at the little campground store and bought an orange Popsicle: 35 cents. Best-tasting Popsicle I ever had!

I was gone four and a half hours and I was near collapse when I got home. I had plenty of water; I took a Camelback with three trays of ice cubes... I'm just outta shape!

Our Perpetual Copyright Laws

Back in the 1930's and 40's, a young audio engineer (and jazz fan) named William Savory recorded hundreds of live, over-the-air performances by some of the jazz world's leading performers. To overcome the 3-minute limitation of the 78-RPM record, he recorded at 33-1/3 RPM on acetate and sometimes aluminum disks.

His legendary collection consists of nearly one thousand disks, many of them absolutely unique recordings of live performances.

He was secretive about his collection, allowing only a few close friends to listen. When he died, in 2004, his collection found its way into a museum.

Conserving the Savory Collection

But you'll never be able to hear any of it. Due to our nearly perpetual copyright laws (which Congress has been extending for twenty years, every twenty years or so, in a desperate bid to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain) the recordings represent such a minefield of copyright claims by performers, composers, arrangers, radio networks, radio stations, music publishers and their heirs, partners, assignees, licensees and holders-in-due-course that nobody will ever be able to untangle them. And if Congress keeps extending the copyright protection of existing works, that will never change.

And the way that U.S. copyright law works, allowing lawsuits for amounts far in excess of the actual damages, the potential claims could be ruinous for anyone foolish enough to attempt to release these recordings.

The Volokh Conspiracy has the legal brief.

[It's interesting that Savory's photo resembles James Stewart. I can imagine him appearing in a mash-up of "It's A Wonderful Life" and "The Conversation" (sure!). Here's how I'd pitch it:

George Bailey and Clarence the Angel have bugged Mr. Potter's office. George takes off the headphones and says, "That miserly old bastard! He had Uncle Billy's money all along! C'mon, Clarence, let's go over to the bank and kill that sumbitch!"

Clarence: "Now, George, we can't do that!"

George: "Why not? He'd kill us if he got the chance!"

---Fade to black, Roll credits]

Long Range High-Power Champion

Sports Illustrated reports that this year's Long Range High-Power rifle champion at Camp Perry is 26-year-old Sherri Gallagher of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit.

Then the best long-range shooter in the country changed out of her fatigues and headed to Nick's Road House to celebrate, which in this case meant sipping a Guinness with friends as classic rock blared overhead. In civilian clothes, sitting quietly and smiling, she went unnoticed by the bar patrons, an anonymous champion in an at-times misunderstood sport. To her peers, however, she was something else. "Now right there," her coach, Praslick, said from across the room, pointing at Gallagher as she giggled with her sister, "is one bad-ass girl."

Rural Bicycling

Started at the eastern end and worked my way west, then returned. A 14-mile round trip. Very hilly; about 1200 feet of elevation at the eastern end and 743 feet at the western end.

In the upper left corner you can just see one of the many bends of the Shenandoah River.

At about the mid-point of the trip there is a very sharp hairpin turn. It's a lot of fun on a bike because it's sharply downhill on the way out; not so much fun to climb it on the way back.

I'm thinkin' about puttin' a still in my back yard. But how to keep the revenooers away? Any suggestions?

Foreigners And Their Crazy Laws

This time it's Israel.

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left....

It seemed like a case of religious prejudice to me at first, but apparently this "rape by fraud" crime is applied even-handedly:

One such case was that of Eran Ben-Avraham, who told a woman he was a neurosurgeon after which she had sex with him, and was convicted of three counts of fraud.

Lying to a woman about being a doctor?

I suppose as he was taking off his pants he said to her, "This isn't exactly brain surgery..."

I'll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

P.S. Suggested line of defense: "Your honor, I admit that I told her that I was a doctor, but she told me those were her real boobs!"

My Son The Comedian

He got hired this summer (actual paycheck!) to write and appear in a made-for-web comedy sketch show aimed at middle-schoolers. He'll be a college senior this year himself, so it's a great gig.

In this trailer, he appears as a wizard, a mime, a student and a guy trying to make a deal with a tomato.

The actual trailer is 15 MB, so here's a link:

http://fridaynitebytes.com/files/2010/07/Final-Trailer2.mp4

P.S. I think that's him in the crocodile costume, too.

The Evolution Of The American Popular Song...

...can take you by surprise if you, like me, haven't been paying attention for awhile.

Take last night. I hosted a group of six college girls, rained out of a camping trip, and gave them a place to stay for the night. Wipe that disgusting leer off your face; one of them is the daughter of friends of long standing and I've known her since she was a baby. The others were perfectly nice young ladies.

They arrived about ten o'clock carrying several cases of beer. They settled in the living room upstairs, set up a laptop to play music, and seemed to be behaving themselves. So I went downstairs to watch a DVD of "No Country For Old Men". Every now and then I could hear them singing along with their music.

At 2:00 AM, just as the movie was ending, they began to sing, at the top of their lungs:

Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
He put it in!

You know, when I think of popular songs, I think of Lennon & McCartney, or even Burt Bacharach...

Anyway, my choice of a movie was an ironic comment to the evening.

Well, this morning they cleaned up all the trash and beer bottles and took it away with them and the house is spotless.

But if their mothers had heard them last night, those girls would be grounded 'til they were 25!

Good News!

“The last two years have been a disaster for us,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat and a longtime advocate of increased gun control.

New York Times

Five Months Ago

So I'm not complaining about the heat.

The Gun Show Loophole Has Vanished

The New England Journal Of Medicine has just published another article on gun shows ("criminogenic pumps", according to the abstract) by the ever-industrious Garen Wintemute, in which he manages to make this startling revelation:

Concerns about private-party gun sales and the importance of gun shows as a source of guns used in crimes have led to repeated calls for closing the "gun show loophole" — by which advocates usually mean requiring that private-party sales at gun shows be routed through a licensed retailer who will do a background check and keep a record of the purchase. President Barack Obama endorsed such a measure during his 2008 presidential campaign, as did President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Legislation to close the loophole has been introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but no hearings have been scheduled.

In fact, there is no gun-show loophole as such. Federal law is silent on the issue of gun shows and permits private-party gun sales to occur anywhere. As a result, such a limited measure might well have no detectable effect on the rates of firearm-related violent crime. Gun shows account for a small percentage of all gun sales in the United States — between 4 and 9%, according to the best estimates available. Similarly, they account for just 3 to 8% of all private-party gun sales. Legislation to close the gun-show loophole would not affect the great majority of private-party sales, and motivated illicit buyers could simply find private sellers elsewhere.

The abstract is only a half-dozen paragraphs and is worth a read, if only as a masterpiece of using statistics to dress up an editorial. And vague statistics at that!

[I thought criminogenic pumps were a kind of women's shoe.]

I Wish I Had Said That!

From a wide-ranging discussion of the Second Amendment, McDonald, Sotomayor, Kagan, etc. on the Volokh Conspiracy:

Owen H: Can any of the originalists out there point to where the Constitution specifically enumerates a right of armed self defense? I mean, the 2nd doesn’t say individual self-defense, it talks about defending the nation.

Allan Walstad: This has been gone over so many times on earlier VC threads over the years. 2A says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The language “shall not be infringed” explicitly indicates a pre-existing right, not one in any way created by the Constitution. The security of a free state, mentioned in the preamble, surely includes the security of the people, not just the borders or the organs of government. Even such a twisted anti-gun propagandist as historian Saul Cornell doesn’t aver that 2A is about defending the nation, rather his joke of an interpretation is that it was a bone thrown out to the states, that their militia units could not be disarmed by the feds. Shall we believe that 2A simply means you have a right to a gun while serving in the military?? Is there some sinister likelihood of the government sending troops into battle without arms? So are we to believe then that 2A means you can have a gun locked up somewhere for when called up by the government to defend the borders and the organs of government, but if brigands invade your community or home, attack you and your neighbors, rob your property and rape your kids you can’t use the gun for defense because the “security of a free state” has nothing directly to do with the security of the people in it?

Wow!

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The second book of the trilogy is as good as the first.

What an unforgettable character! I want a T-Shirt that says "WWLSD?" (What would Lisbeth Salander do?)

I'm Lovin' It!

I'm sure I'm not the first with this pun, but it's the best I could come up with.

Otis McDonald and Dick Heller.
Two winners.

P.S. As I recall, Mr. Heller is pointing because he was saying, "Can you email me a copy of this picture?" Which I did.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

There's a story in publishing that the author William Makepeace Thackeray picked up Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo one morning at 6 AM and couldn't put it down again until 11 PM that night. Maybe Thackeray was just a slow reader; we're talking about a 1300-page novel. But it does have quite a reputation as a compulsive page-turner.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is another. I just finished it in two sittings. It has elements of:

The Silence Of The Lambs - horrific, sadistic serial killer (or killers?)
Psycho - who's that in the basement?
Laura - is the victim really dead?
Klute - two badly mismatched investigators are played for fools by Mr. Big
The Big Sleep - fabulously wealthy old-money family has secrets to keep
Pulp Fiction - say hello to Zeke

Quite a read and highest recommendation. Fantastic.

Must Carry

A court case in Massachusetts deals with the question of what constitutes safe storage of a handgun. The cops charge a guy because his Glock was found in an Igloo cooler. Now, within that cooler, the Glock was locked up in its original box with a cable lock, nice and safe. But in gun-phobic Mass., that's not enough: they wanted the locked box to be locked within another locked container, not an Igloo cooler.

Fortunately the Appeals court seems to have decided that the locked box did satisfy the Mass. statute for safe storage of a handgun.

Two commenters on the Volokh Conspiracy ask, in a state that is as hysterically frightened of guns as Massachusetts, what constitutes safe storage?

Avatar: The question is, what responsibility is incurred by a gun owner to make sure unauthorized people don’t gain access to their gun?

G.R.Mead: This is perhaps the best argument to make carry — MANDATORY ?!?!?

I cannot think of more secure way to keep the weapon from unauthorized persons ...

Yes! If you buy a handgun, you MUST carry it at all times. It's the only way to be sure.

When Hippies Collide

Electric cars are so quiet that blind pedestrians could unwittingly step into the path of these ultra-quiet cars, such as the Nissan Leaf. So advocates for the blind have demanded that electric cars be equipped with noise-makers to warn of their approach. Problem solved? Not quite:

Anti-Noise Activists Oppose Sounds for Electric Cars

New Harris Poll: Large Majorities Support Second Amendment

A new nationwide poll finds that:

Large majorities of Americans feel that they should be allowed to have guns. At the same time, pluralities of Americans favor stricter control of guns, particularly hand guns, although this number has decreased significantly in the past few years.

These are some of the findings of a Harris Poll® survey of 2,503 U.S. adults surveyed online between May 10 and 17, 2010 by Harris Interactive.

h/t Say Uncle.

Love Quadrangle

Robert Wone

Ripped from the sordid pages of the Washington Post:

From the beginning, this has been the most unusual of cases because no one is charged with killing Wone. But prosecutors tried to prove in D.C. Superior Court that Joseph R. Price, 39, Dylan M. Ward, 40, and Victor J. Zaborsky, 44, who allowed Wone to stay with them on the night of his death, know who killed their friend and conspired to stage the crime scene and cover for the killer.

It boils down to this: Did an intruder kill Wone, as the defendants say, or was it someone the housemates know? Prosecutors say the killer was someone the three men know, probably Price's younger brother.

The housemates, who say they are in a committed three-way romantic relationship, waited 17 minutes before calling police so they could plant the murder weapon, alter the crime scene and scrub Wone's body of blood, prosecutors say.

Words fail me.

Do It To Larry!

Or Aaron, or Philip, or Alan.

Tough call. What would Heston do?

And what next? It's a slippery slope. License journalists?

Not many have the stones to stop sliding.

Toilet Paper

There's a meme rattling around, "What reading matter is in your bathroom?"

Here's an actual photograph:

Now Playing: One-Hit Wonders

Bow Wow Wow, Flock Of Seagulls, Barry McGuire, Chantays, Chumba Wumba, OXO, Haddaway, Frankie Goes To Hollywood (saw them in concert!), AHA (ditto - no shit!), Mike And The Mechanics, Human League, Kajagoogoo, Billy J. Kramer, The Vapors, Unit 4+2, The Buggles, Pet Shop Boys, The Troggs, The Hues Corporation, Bent Fabric, Barbara Lewis, Walter Egan, Devo, Soft Cell, etc.

Oh, the picture: remember Martha Quinn from MTV? Early Eighties. A friend of mine dated her in college (NYU). I forgave him, but it wasn't easy.

Thunder In The Mountains

During a bicycle ride this afternoon, a brief thunderstorm appeared. It's two miles to the nearest mailbox.

Fog-shrouded Skyline Drive.

This looks like the famous shot from
Gone With The Wind.

Thunderstorm well and truly coming in now.

Beyond Eleven

My new home is on four acres in Warren County, Virginia. There are a few neighbors, but their houses are hundreds of yards away, hidden by large stands of poplar trees.

Today I hooked up my sound system to my computer for the first time since the move. It's an Altec-Lansing gadget given to me by my brother. There's a big floor unit with the power supply and subwoofer, plus two little computer-like loudspeakers. The volume control is a free-spinning digital shaft encoder, and today, for the first time, I spun it fully clockwise.

I kept spinning it until it stopped getting louder, and then I ran.

Wow.

The furniture is creeping across the room under the influence of the vibrations.

I gave the Rock 'n' Roll collection a couple of hours, now it's time for the 1812 Overture.

Wish me luck. I'm goin' in.

[Fifteen minutes later] Good lord, I'm soaking wet!

Track Rabbits

Send Us Your Subway Rat Snapshots!

And...

“They jump two feet from a running start; they can fall 40 feet onto a concrete slab and keep running,” said Solomon Peeples, 86, a former director of the city’s Bureau of Pest Control Services. “We’re no match for them, as far as I’m concerned. Man does not stand no chance.”

from the New York Times.

One Man, One Vote?

From AP, via Yahoo:

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

The "remedy" imposed by the judge in this case was to give each voter six votes, instead of just one. Presumably, the small number of Hispanic voters would concentrate their votes on the few Hispanic candidates, boosting their chances at the polls. But, to me, this sounds like "proxy" voting: giving Hispanic voters the right to cast "proxy" votes on behalf of non-citizens.

Now, I should point out that ALL of the voters in this election were given six votes, not just Hispanic voters. But the court's underlying assumption seems to be that non-Hispanic voters would spread their votes out pretty much evenly over the candidates running for office, while the Hispanic voters would tend to concentrate their votes on Hispanic candidates. Unlike most "at-large" elections, where voters can, for example, vote for any six candidates from a slate of twenty, here voters may vote for the same candidate six times.

But how can one audit such a process when the total ballots cast exceeds the number of voters six-fold? And the winning candidates could receive more votes than the number of voters in the election?

Sounds like the voting process in some dictatorial hell-hole, like North Korea or Iran or Paraguay.

Maybe we should add Port Chester, New York to the Axis Of Evil. You got my vote! All six of 'em!

I wonder if it ever occurred to the judge in this case that the reason that no Hispanic had ever won is that so many of them are non-citizens and can't vote.

Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that the judge didn't decide to make them all citizens under some sort of judicial fiat.

But we are all going to face this challenge, nationally, when the results of the 2010 Census are in. No doubt it will show that the number of Hispanic officeholders is far, far below their proportion of the population. And there is also no doubt that "multi-vote" and other wacky and un-democratic "remedies" are going to be proposed on a national scale.

h/t Rustmeister's Alehouse.

Top Ten Post-Apocalyptic Novels

The Road
The Stand
Y: The Last Man
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Drowned World
The Passage
World War Z
The World Without Us
The Day of the Triffids
The Last Man

From Time Magazine.

The Road was about the darkest ride I've ever had in a book. Every ten pages or so I had to put it down and go to the front door, just to make sure that everything was OK. Whew!

But they missed Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and Pulling Through by Dean Ing, plus Lucifer's Hammer, On The Beach and Level 7.

Quote Of The Day

There's a serious proposal being floated to repeal the 17th Amendment. That's the one that requires direct election of U.S. Senators; prior to 1913, senators were appointed by their respective state legislatures.

Columnist Gene Healy picks up the narrative:

Predictably, the liberal intelligentsia has responded with scorn. Of all the "goofy ideas from those lovable wacky Tea Partyers [sic]," John Aloysius Farrell writes at USNews.com, this is the "stupidest." Repeal talk is "truly regressive," even "Paleolithic," Timothy Egan seethes in Sunday's New York Times.

Apparently, the only thing worse than peasants with pitchforks is peasants with pocket Constitutions.

h/t Volokh Conspiracy.

American Journalism's Crazy Old Aunt In The Attic

May 18, 2010: Helen Thomas accepts
the Sarah Brady Visionary Award from
the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.




May 27, 2010: Helen Thomas mouths off
about Israel.

The blogpost title? I wish I'd said it, but it's from the WSJ.

Boomer Touchstones

James Taylor and Carol King are touring together. Maybe you remember them like this:

Bletchley Park Goes Digital

Millions of formerly Ultra-Secret documents from the WWII code-breaking program at Bletchley Park are being scanned into a digital archive to be made available to the public on the internet.

Das Vedanya!

Real Photos That Look Photoshopped.