Dreams Into Lightning

Prediction ...

... by the year 2039, 2 out of 3 voice actors will know what an "exabyte" is.

Of Tuscan whole milk and other things.

Zoe at A.E. Brain: Tuscan Whole Milk reviewed.

Because I'm between jobs ...

... here's a few links I couldn't resist sharing.

The invaluable MJ at Friday Fishwrap has a roundup of enlightening and edifying links to improve your life. Go to the post to find out how to do DC on $85 a day, why C sometimes means F, some of the most disturbing toys (from Japan and elsewhere) ... and much more.

And do not miss her music roundup!

Speaking of Japan, Zoe at A. E. Brain gives us an awesome photo of the Earth from the Japanese moon probe Kaguya.

From the LiveJournal cohorts:

Israel-based cabal plans world domination!

Rabbits. And more rabbits.

Rebel Without a Crew

For some reason, this guy makes me think of Frank Chu.

Connecticut says goodbye to lever-and-curtain voting machines.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Robert Miller at the News-Times (Danbury, CT):

I voted today. I played my part in the democratic (small d) process of our republican (small r) government.

But the thrill is gone. Instead of the old voting machines, I voted with an optical scanner, which is as exciting as filling in the true-false blanks on the SAT.

"Just like school," my wife said upon getting her form.

Let me issue a caveat: I am, more or less, a neo-Luddite who chooses, whenever possible, to sidle away from technological innovation the way my dog Stella sidles away from the sound of anything frying on the stove. Thomas, the doubter, is my favorite apostle, and "Trust But Verify" my favorite Cold War catchphrase.

And, since 1972 -- the first year I could vote -- I have voted on the now lost, outdated voting machines -- 35 years of voting. It is not just that I know no other way. I liked that way. My only wish is that Connecticut institutes open primaries for both parties so I could vote more often.

I liked the big solid metal machines. There was some weight, some solidity there. It gave you a sense of tradition. If they were good enough for Richard Daley and John Bailey, they were good enough for me.

I liked the "ca-Ching!" noise of the lever when you first entered the voting booth and closed the curtain behind you -- sort of the same noise you heard from old-fashioned, one-armed bandit slot machines. It added some spice to the proceedings: voting as a gamble. ...

Go to the link for the rest. He's talking about the descendants of the Gillespie Standard Voting Machine. Monica Potts and Lisa Chamoff at The Advocate (Stamford) have more:

Some voters said filling out paper ballots felt like a return to the past. Others said having to feed the ballots into optical scanners compromised privacy. Still others missed the old lever-and-curtain voting machines.

But vote they did yesterday, Connecticut's first Election Day using optical scanners instead of levers, a move designed to improve the accuracy of ballot tabulation. Few problems were reported statewide.

Filling in the ovals on paper ballots felt like a throwback to another era, some voters said, though they differed on whether that was a good thing. ...

Hat tip to Instapundit, who calls it "a triumph for appropriate technology," and I agree.

Paradoxically, this is a move toward both higher and lower tech: electronic optical scanners are replacing the obsolete (and no longer manufactured) mechanical voting machines, enabling the votes to be counted more quickly and effeciently. On the other hand, voters are now physically handling and marking their own paper ballots, which are retained in case of a disputed outcome. So while I am sad to see my native Connecticut finally scrapping its luxurious "Wizard of Oz" voting machines, I think this is a step in the right direction and the best of both worlds tehcnologically speaking.

And if it makes voting a little less dicey ... well, that's a good thing.

Headline of the Day

Corrupt Chinese official plagiarizes trial apology.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

He's a rock and roller. Oh, and his older brother is ... well, different.

Trembling Before Scotland

Norm Geras can appreciate nature without the help of religion, thank you very much.

Mad In America - Independence Day Post

"They keep sending our jobs away."

Here's a great song from the brother of an old friend of mine.

Troubled by the rising tied of offshoring around the country musician and CSEA Local 2001 member Steve Dube put pen to paper and wrote an anthem called “Mad in America” for his band ETX.

[Dube]: The song was written as a protest basically, just because of all of the engineering and IT jobs going away.

Dube is now trying to bring that protest via song to music lovers everywhere by landing on ITunes top 100 on July 4. How? Dube is calling on everyone to log into their ITunes player on the Independence Day holiday and download the song. If enough people do it, the song should hypothetically find a place among the Avril Lavignes and Fall Out Boys of the world.

[Dube2]: We’d like to just get a grassroots effort going where the song could become like an anthem for American workers just to show Washington in an election year that we don’t want the middle class to go away and we want jobs in the United States.

I've just downloaded the song to iTunes and I can personally and enthusiastically recommend it. "Mad in America" raises important questions about globalization and the outsourcing of American jobs. And it's a great song, too.

My friend Chuck comes from a family of patriots and is also a musician, having performed with Leigh Gregory. Go have a listen to Mad in America by ETx - and you can download the whole thing for just 99 cents.

She must have missed the sign saying "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the TSA booth.

Israel has contributed more than its fair share of great minds to the world.

This lady isn't one of them.

An Israeli doctor complained about a security screening she was forced to undergo at a U.S. airport.

Dorit Silverman, a senior urologist at the Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv, told Israeli media Sunday that during a visit to a conference in California last month, security personnel at the San Francisco Airport made her step into a bomb-detector booth that sprayed air over her.

"My family died in the gas chambers in Europe. I never believed that 65 years later I would be marked, isolated and placed inside a gas chamber," Silverman told Yediot Achronot. "I certainly did not think that that would happen in the country and city that are the most democratic, enlightened and tolerant in the world."

Silverman said she tried to find out if she had been singled out as an Israeli but received no answer from the security staff. According to Yediot, the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem is pursuing Silverman's complaint with U.S. officials.

Fifty-one kinds of North American quarters.

Note to self:

If it has a picture of Queen Elizabeth on one side and a caribou on the other, it's Canadian.

Otherwise, you can do your laundry with it. This includes bisons (Kansas), palmettos (South Carolina), Minutemen (Massachusetts), ships at Jamestown (Virginia), peaches (Georgia), and the Statue of Liberty (New York).

Note to the United States Mint:

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE PEOPLE. 

Is there some sinister plot by Al-Qaeda to flood the American economy with worthless counterfeit twenty-five-cent pieces?  Perhaps Osama bin Laden wants to plunge the innocent people of the United States into an abyss of abject misery with a lifetime of expired parking meters, jammed vending machines, and wet underwear.

Or maybe the good people at the Treasury Department just have way too much time (and money - duh) on their hands.  I'm betting on the latter.

Is it oxymoronic to say that "the Mint is making too much money"?

Grrrrr.

Elizabeth in the control room, we love you.

Nancy Grace owned.

Life imitates

something or other.

We're doomed.

Least comforting headline of all time.

Quote of the Day

"Rookies aren't what they used to be," said Nowak, 43, in a preflight interview.

Bizarre Love Triangles

Just in time for Valentine's Day. First there was this:

A married woman who was having an affair with a fellow skydiver plunged 13,000ft (4,000m) to her death after her love rival and best friend tampered with her parachute, police say.
Els Van Doren, 37, fell to earth in a garden in front of a group of onlookers. Els Clottemans, 22, has been charged with her murder.

Minutes earlier the pair had joined hands in a star formation with two other skydivers including Ms Clottemans’s boyfriend, a Dutchman named only as Marcel, who police say was having an affair with Mrs Van Doren.

While he and Ms Clottemans broke away at 4,000ft when their parachutes inflated, Mrs Van Doren, a mother of two, was unable to open either her main parachute or the reserve and crashed to her death in the town of Opglabbeek, Belgium.

Now there's this:

A female astronaut with Maryland ties was charged today with the attempted murder of a woman she believed to be the rival love interest of a space shuttle pilot, according to charging documents.

Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, a Rockville native and Naval Academy graduate, allegedly drove 900 miles straight from Texas to Florida to confront Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman after Shipman disembarked from a 1 a.m. commercial flight at Orlando International Airport. Nowak followed Shipman to her car from a parking bus and doused her with pepper spray, the documents say.

And how did this rocket scientist set about to carry off her fiendish plan?

Nowak had brought a disguise, high-powered BB gun, steel mallet, buck knife, three to four inches of rubber tubing, several large plastic garbage bags, $600 and six latex gloves. She also had brought diapers that allowed her to drive without stopping to urinate, the documents said.

Donning sunglasses, a wig and trench coat, Nowak waited for Shipman to arrive on the 1 a.m. flight Monday morning and followed her onto a parking shuttle bus, records show. Shipman became alarmed when Nowak appeared to be following her, so she rushed to her car and locked the door, hearing "running footsteps" behind her.

The suspicious woman, who Shipman did not know was Nowak, slapped the window, tried to open the door, began crying and then asked for a ride to the parking office, saying her boyfriend had failed to pick her up. Shipman declined, and Nowak asked to use her cell phone, which she also declined. Nowak said she couldn't hear, so Shipman rolled down the window slightly before Nowak doused her with pepper spray. Shipman sped off, the documents say, eventually finding police, who arrested Nowak after she attempted to trash the disguise.

Transterrestrial weighs in: 'Unjustified astronaut worship is one of the unfortunate consequences that lingers on, almost half a century after the Cold-War space program began. Just one more reason to try to privatize things ASAP. And of course, this is going to unfairly reflect badly on all the astronauts who really do have the "right" stuff.'

Dr. Sanity:

Nevertheless, if you treat astronauts like Hollywood superstars; promote them to the public as if they were God's gift to humanity; cater to their narcissistic fantasies; and indulge them in all sorts of special ways, it is not too hard to predict that they will behave just like any other entitled superstar (or politician) whose ridiculous exploits the public follows with obsessive interest.

Why bother to go to the trouble of choosing "the right stuff" in the first place when the superstar culture of the astronauts only encourages the worst sort of narcissism and sociopathy?

Wizbang has more.

Tammy Bruce:

That concern is with the the diaper-clad love-lorn astronaut, not the Air Force captain (Colleen Shipman) who was the intended target, mind you. And I would think her 'status' has changed. She's in jail now. And last time I checked that was on Planet Earth.

No wonder our space program is in such trouble.

And can someone tell me, why do bad things happen to people's hair when they get arrested? Is Bad Hair a pre- or post-arrest event? And if it's pre, I think we have a pretty good argument here to arrest everyone walking around with bed-head past 1pm.

NASA:

The following is a statement from Michael Coats, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, regarding the status of astronaut Lisa Nowak.

"We are deeply saddened by this tragic event. The charges against Lisa Nowak are serious ones that must be decided by the judicial system. She is officially on 30-day leave and has been removed from flight status and all mission-related activities. We will continue to monitor developments in the case."

OPFOR: 'If only our body politic and our some of our elected officials were as ruthlessly single-minded.'

Still more fun with search terms.

From reviewing my site stats, I now know that Syd Barrett was Jewish, Muslim, and gay.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Fun with search terms.

Favorite search engine hit of the day:

how many coils on the noose on saddam?

You could set that to music.

Butch of the Day ...

... or maybe of the week year. Oh, and Woman Catholic has a post there, too.

Holiday Dazzle Light Parade - Putnam, Connecticut

As promised in a previous post, here are some photos from the parade in Putnam, Connecticut. Enjoy.

Best Halloween Costume of the Year

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. This one, I think, is worth a lot more:
Jeremayakovka - Homeless Suicide Bomber.

Department of Outrages and Atrocities

Some

Marg bar Israel, Marg bar Amrica …

Comment by Kiumars — June 11, 2006 @ 11:24 pm

things

How exciting! Notice that poster Kiumars’ idea of an “opposite” view is to flame us with “death to Israel, death to America” in Arabic. ...

Comment by Shy Guy — June 12, 2006 @ 1:31 am

just piss me off.

9 - That’s Persian, not Arabic.

Comment by asher813 — June 12, 2006 @ 6:02 pm

New Pic

I couldn't resist.

My apartment manager - who is indeed a saint among apartment managers - recently refurbished the lobby and installed the piece you now see on the right-hand sidebar. It's a reproduction of one of the series of six medieval tapestries known simply as the "lady with unicorn tapestries" now in the possession of the museum at Cluny, France (not to be confused with the seven-piece "Hunt of the Unicorn" series now held by the Met). The work dates from around 1500 and was discovered in 1841. Art historians offer varying interpretations of the symbolism, but most agree that the six pieces represent the five senses plus love. (This one is "touch" with the lady touching the unicorn's horn.)

Yeah, I think Dan Rather would appreciate it.

Defense Experts Explain It All

Oh, well that certainly clears that up.