— the F-35 Fugue —THIS JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER: according to DEFENCETECH "Did Chinese Espionage Lead to F-35 Delays?", that's what happened.Chinese spies apparently hacked into secure conference calls and listened to meetings discussing the classified technologies aboard the jets. In particular, China may have stolen info about the F-35’s secure communications and antenna systems; leading to costly software rewrites and other redesigns to compromised parts of the plane.The worst part, this problem isn’t just limited to the F-35, though the program’s size and the fact that it’s …
[Read more...]

—  Mr. D. —HARD TIMES AGAIN: that's the title to a fine article on The American Conservative (go figure) by Theodore Dalrymple, who contends that "Amid the wreck of capitalism and socialism, Dickens is timelier than ever."We live in hard times, and all the indications are that they may get much, even very much, harder. No one, at any rate, would take a bet that they won’t.The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up; the homeless are increasing by the hour; the formerly prosperous are laid off without so much as a thank you; the young struggle to …
[Read more...]

YOU ARE HERE. Indeed. Earth From Mars.This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004) …
[Read more...]

CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, ARIZONA: three states where water is becoming top-of-mind, because it may become rather scarce. According to Austin Troy's Design Observer article, "Thirsty City", it's been a long time coming."Under no contingency does the natural face of Upper California appear susceptible of supporting a very large population"So wrote Navy lieutenant Henry Augustus Wise, after spending considerable time in the Golden State in 1847. Although Lieutenant Wise would no doubt be surprised to know that California is now home to almost 40 million people, the fundamental water constraints that …
[Read more...]

DEMOTIVATIONAL POSTERS are such a delight, especially if you have a sense of humor that is somewhat oblique. The Demotivator is part of the Tumblr world, and is a great collection from all sorts of places. Great place for a cynical re-charge. …
[Read more...]

LEONARD COHEN has a fabulous new CD out. Love that guy, and so does Liel Leibovitz at The Tablet, whose review of Lenny's new oeuvre, "St. Leonard’s Passion" is a great read. Remember the festival at the Isle of Wight in 1970? Lenny was there. The account is hair-raising:The audience wanted to see Jim Morrison, so they tried to burn down the stage.By the time Jimi Hendrix came on, they succeeded. …
[Read more...]

TALI-TUBBIE. Now, that sure is something you don't see every day.  …
[Read more...]

— Leo Fender's Stratocaster —THE ECONOMIST has a fascinating tale of Jackie Shin. Jackie who? Considered to be Korea's Jimi Hendrix , Jackie had to struggle with the demands of the Korean government and when he wouldn't play nice, the fascists made sure Jackie couldn't play at all. Being imprisoned in a mental hospital sure puts a crimp in the recording career . . .Shin Joong-hyun first learned to play guitar in the 1950s, and soon found a following among the American soldiers stationed here. Jackie Shin, as they knew him, was a master of jazz, rock ’n roll, rhythm-and-blues, and …
[Read more...]

— Fred —MIDWINTER: AKA GROUNDHOG DAY. Actually, celebrating midwinter happened a long time before some American marketing weenie thought of promoting a rodent. According to thepaganperspective, Midwinter began as a celebration of the returning sun and sometimes a propitiation to assure that same return. Neolithic chambers, such as An Lianh Greine (Cave of the Sun) at New Grange were built to capture the sun’s power, while the Zuni and the Hopi Indians performed sacred dances to guide the returning sun. The temples of Egypt in Karnac, Thebes, and Abydos focused the midwinter sun’s …
[Read more...]

DEFENSE TECH follows military happenings world wide. Of interest, India has decided to buy 129 French Rafale fighters after comparing "against everything from the Eurofighter Typhoon and Mig-29 to the American made F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-16." That's the Rafale, below. They will definitely give China and Pakistan something to ponder, because gaining air superiority over the Indians isn't going to get any easier in the next decade.Next, we have the dispatch of HMS Dauntless to the Falklands, to the relief of the inhabitants. You see, over the last 18 months, the Argentine government has …
[Read more...]

EXCELLENT! Cartoon Brew is a fine site for classic animation aficionados. As Jerry wrote:Here’s the perfect film for me to post in the middle of the night. Andres Tapeton’s graduation film from the Classical Animation program at the Vancouver Film School. It’s quite a trip. …
[Read more...]

WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE of Noah's house? Somehow, he remembered cockroaches and black flies, and a couple of Sasquatch to make up for it, I guess. Then there's bed bugs. Way to go, Noah. …
[Read more...]

…
[Read more...]

Bad Hair Day: Execution of the Czech 'heretic' Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, anonymous woodcut, 1415 ©AKG-imagesTHE NEW HUMANIST is a delightful site, at the other end of the intellectual rainbow from the GOP and its chimps, and well worth a visit anytime. Currently, there's a fascinating article about the Holy Inquisition. Why should you care, in a Stevie world, about stuff that happened 500 years ago? Well, Cullen Murphy believes its echoes are to be heard today:Interrogation. Surveillance. Ethnic profiling. Censorship. The words come from 21st-century headlines, but they have an …
[Read more...]

GOOD ADVICE from CalgaryGrit: "Advice from South of the Border". How the Liberals can learn from Obama — if only the back-room wizards would pay attention. I sure hope that the party chimps that clustered around Ken Dryden and the rest of the Liberal insiders have been sacked. In talking to them, I was impressed with their arrogant obliviousness, but that's another story.Check out CalgaryGrit's post, which outlines what the Liberal party has to do to off Stevie. More important, it outlines what YOU have to do to off Stevie. Capice? It all starts with you. Indifference and laziness are …
[Read more...]

THE BONES OF WAR, indeed. That's the article title at WEB URBANIST: "The Bones of War: Haunting Skeleton Photography"When Francois Robert unexpectedly acquired a human skeleton in the 1990s, he knew he had to do something wonderful with it. Several years later when the economy collapsed and he found himself with time on his hands, Robert finally settled on a project: powerful anti-war images spelled out in human bones.Powerful stuff. Check out the rest. …
[Read more...]

WHILE WE WAIT FOR STEVIE and the chiefs to get really going, check out WIRED's accounting of who spends how much to advertise on Google. According to John C. Abell's article, "Who Buys All Those Google Ads? An Infographic Breakdown", Google cleared $37.9 billion in 2011 revenue, which equates to more than $3 billion a month, mostly from those little text ads next to your search results that neither you or anybody you know will admit to ever clicking on.Insurance and finance buys for Google Adsense words accounted for $4.2 billion of that total — more than 10 percent — according to …
[Read more...]

PARAPROSDOKIAN SENTENCES: A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to re-frame or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect.If you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, why do some people have more than one child?Change is inevitable, except from a vending machineI asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level …
[Read more...]

AN AMERICAN TOURIST in London decides to skip his tour group and explore the city on his own. He wanders around, seeing the sights, and occasionally stopping at a quaint pub to soak up the local culture, chat with the lads, and have a pint of Guinness. After a while, he finds himself in a very high-class neighbourhood.....big, stately residences... no pubs, no stores, no restaurants, and worst of all... NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS. He really, really has to go, after all those Guinness's. He finds a narrow side street, with high walls surrounding the adjacent buildings and decides to use the wall …
[Read more...]

SLATE ASKS: Saudi Arabia. Nigeria. Venezuela. Canada? Is our neighbor to the north becoming a jingoistic petro-state?Take, for instance, the country that provides by far the largest share of our petroleum imports. Its regime, in thrall to big oil interests, has grown increasingly bellicose, labeling environmental activists “radicals” and “terrorists” and is considering a crackdown on nonprofits that oppose its policies. It blames political dissent on the influence of “foreigners,” while steamrolling domestic opposition to oil projects bankrolled entirely by overseas investors. …
[Read more...]

WHILE DAVE, BORIS & REV regale us with an outrageous string of things to get outraged over, I ran across this small delight, worth 1:27 of your time. It's a video, as you see, with the title: "Aston Martin Loves Women. Women love Aston Martin." Chris Shunk, at AUTOBLOG, points out that it's not what you think:The spot illustrates that women don't need a mini skirt to be featured in an exotic luxury car commercial, and that you don't have to be a guy to appreciate automotive beauty.Plus a charming piano, too. Astons are so delightful, so Savile Row bespoke, with a certain something that …
[Read more...]

MERCEDES MARKETING: clever, sensitive. At least, that's what Dieter thinks. The Doktor made an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show, to proclaim a revolution in new Mercedes sleds. Some in the audience were less than pleased, according to AUTOBLOG. Che with M-B Tri-Star? …
[Read more...]

EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS are some of the funniest people around. Check out the delightful lunacy. …
[Read more...]

FROM THE NEW YORKER, the triumph of the wall-wart. …
[Read more...]

1962: FIFTY YEARS AGO, and a time of great changes, the effects of which are still being adjusted to, today. MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE, a fine site run by the Economist gang, has an article by Matthew Engel, "FIFTY YEARS ON: 1962", that is worthy of your attention.For most real people who remember 1962, the 50-year mark will not necessarily be a moment of celebration. It was not that kind of year. We can expect 2012 to be punctuated by the customary anniversary articles. Politically, 1962 is remembered above all for the Cuban missile crisis (October), in which President John F. Kennedy and the …
[Read more...]

THE ORIGINAL TERMINATOR: the Japanese Giant Hornet. Really. Check out the BBC doc below, as 30 of these intelligent team-workers slaughter 30,000 European honeybees. Awesome photography of ruthless extermination, not war. Mother Nature can be so warm and fuzzy. All that delusional 18th and 19th century European poetry about the wonders of Nature . . . then again, North America generated its Walden wackos, too, and Jack London, to compensate.   …
[Read more...]

BE VERY, VERY AFRAID. WIRED has a disturbing report: "India Reports Completely Drug-Resistant TB". Not good. TB is difficult to treat at the best of times.Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.Total drug resistance. Nothing works. Untreatable. Marvelous. It's the ideal Republican/Conservative Party disease: it primarily …
[Read more...]

IN CONTRAST TO the political foulness below, here's a bright piece of humanity. According to the Star, "Video for Burlington band Walk off the Earth goes viral". Almost five million hits. Wonderful. Dedicate this song to Stevie. Enjoy. …
[Read more...]

STEPHEN HAWKING IS 70 today. Our foremost living theoretical physicist, his work is given thoughtful appraisal by Luboš Motl, who ponders things astrophysical from Pilsen, in the Czech Republic, on his site, the reference frame. What made Hawking somewhat special was that he was very good not only in quantum field theory as understood by particle physicists: he was doing lots of important research in general relativity, too. This pretty unusual combination has predestined him to become the first person who usefully merges these two mostly incompatible pillars of fundamental physics, …
[Read more...]

ACCORDING TO IO9, the "French fast food chain offers Darth Vader burger with black Dark Side bun". Looks like a Stevieburger, to me, fried in VX for an extra tasty, crispy flavor. …
[Read more...]

The Canada Party: The sanity alternative. …
[Read more...]

GM HQ, aka "The Tubes"JIMMY HOFFA. How Jimmy Hoffa Was Buried Under GM’s World Headquarters. Really. Rather inspirational. Now, are there any big building sites in Ottawa? Do Conservatives mix well with Portland? …
[Read more...]

TAKES ALL KINDS TO MAKE A POLITY. And in Iran, nuts and flakes abound. There's an election coming at the beginning of March. I Need a Dinner Jacket's kinda worried about it, too, because Iranian politics have become more fractious, as the various factions try to work out the path to power held by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.According to Thomas Erdbrink at the Washington Post, in his article, "Establishment factions to face off in Iranian elections", it's a real free-for-all:Iran has begun gearing up for elections that will represent a showdown between two factions that just …
[Read more...]

The Laetoli footprints of Tanzania date back to approximately 3.5 million years: the original Mall-crawl.EVERYWHERE AND EVERYWHEN, people have tried to cope, tried to "get ahead", tried to prevail. Different times and different scenery produce different challenges and different perspectives from common-sense survival to the sophistry of delusional abstraction.Venkatesh Rao, has a post on his RIBBONFARM site that is worthy of pondering, "The Evolution of the American Dream". Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they …
[Read more...]

ONCE UPON A TIME, THE USAAF got a bright idea for a bespoke night fighter, which resulted in the Northrop P-61 Black Widow. Not one of John Northrop's successes. Over-weight, overly complex, the USAAF European theater generals wanted the de Havilland Mosquito, instead, but they got the P-61 because that's what the procurement process had produced. Mind you, it was not a Brewster Buffalo failure, the P-61 did OK, but it was an unnecessary redundancy and economic waste. For what it's worth, the USAF isn't the only beneficiary; the Navy and Army get their opportunities, too. A classic case is the …
[Read more...]

CONSUMERISM. You look at the Boxing Day ads, ya gotta wonder, doesn't everybody have a flat-screen TV? Like the song goes, buy, buy . . . …
[Read more...]

OCCUPY WALL STREET has created an extended awareness of the corporation as enemy of the people, a viewpoint shared by most thoughtful people. However, while a lot are concerned, a lot of us have no real idea how the corporation came to be.RIBBONFARM is a site that proclaims its purpose "experiments in refactored perception". One of its principals, Venkatesh Rao, has a fascinating post, "A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100", chronicling the rise and fall of the corporation.On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London …
[Read more...]

THE ENDLESS VENAL LUNACY OF THE GOP can overwhelm, and it's easy to lose track of where a large part of this originated. SLATE has a reprise of a delightful article by the late Christopher Hitchens, "Not Even a Hedgehog / The stupidity of Ronald Reagan".Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, …
[Read more...]

…
[Read more...]