Catz

Roseholme Cottage has a new cat and this started me thinking about our long-departed Maine Coon named Zoom. Look at those ear-tufts! His tail was nearly the same diameter as the rest of him.

Bacon Tuxedo

Just in time for Christmas!

The 'Right' To Govern

There I was, minding my own business, reading a Washington Post column about people's obsession with Sarah Palin, when it leaped out at me:

The left, you see, has long thought that there ought to be some connection between intelligence or learning and the right to govern.

"...the right to govern."

Wow. Just....wow.

Obama Restores Felon's Gun Rights

Stranger Than Truth!

Then, in 2005, he applied for a gun permit and found out for the first time he had a felony conviction. He applied for a presidential pardon, which was officially granted Friday, in the first round of pardons during Obama's administration.

CNN.

Harley-Davidson Got Fed Bailout Money

So did Verizon, Toyota, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Barclays Bank (UK), Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and General Electric.

WaPo

Three-Strikes Challenger Is Charged With Four Murders

John Wesley Ewell, whose criminal record stretches back decades, was arraigned Tuesday in Los Angeles on four counts of murder with special circumstances, robbery and receiving stolen property.

LOS ANGELES — A multiple felon who campaigned against California’s three-strikes law and was free after managing four times to escape its harsh sentencing guidelines has been charged with murdering four people in home-invasion robberies here this year.

NYT.

The Iranian Worm

Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.

Nice work, whoever you are.

NYT

Oprah Invites Hundreds Of Lucky Fans To Be Buried With Her In Massive Tomb

Oprah Invites Hundreds Of Lucky Fans To Be Buried With Her In Massive Tomb

Early This Morning

Standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue at 3:27 this morning.

Hot Wheels

Spotted downtown:

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.