SMACK
 

iPhone photo: Phil Compton

And we imagine a lot of work was avoided in the process

In a study published in the journal Physics Today, University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Dale Durran decided to take a close look at the condensation gathering on your beer can.

The Week

Not totally depressed yet? We can help!

Many authors have written about how global warming will damage some of the world’s most treasured landscapes and beloved species. This book aims to lay out exactly how bad it will be for human beings.…

Washington Post

The snail that ate Florida?

An epic battle is raging in South Florida: man against snail.

The state is struggling to contain an invasion of the giant African land snail, a species that thrives in hot and wet tropical climates. These gooey and destructive mollusks grow up to 8.5 inches long, feast on 500 different types of plants and nibble on calcium-rich stucco, which they use to construct their cone-shaped shells. 

LATimes

Another lost generation

For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity — the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.

New York Times

This will be on the exam

CHICAGO A teenage boy who used an iPad to arrange a meeting with a prostitute ended up with a different experience than he'd intended.…

CBS Chicago reports when the woman arrived at the teenager's home Wednesday, she allegedly sprayed him with pepper spray, stole the iPad, a piggy-bank and a jar full of money.…

Stairway

Stairway, a photo by Ted Compton on Flickr.

I don't know, Bunky, they sound pretty paralleled to me

SKDK brings unparalleled strategic communications experience to Fortune 500 companies, political groups and candidates, non-profits, and labor organizations.

Our nomination for Best School Ever

What better preparation for a career in work avoidance than a school that closes because the sun is out?

"SCHOOL CANCELLED DUE TO GREAT WEATHER! WAHOOO!" exclaims an all-caps notice on the Bellingham Christian Northstars website. "Yeah! It’s a Sun Day today and everyone gets the day off from school."

Gawker

We imagine such occurrences are unfortunately rare in Bellingham, WA, but still, it's the principle that counts.

Presumably there's a difference

Dead Pennsylvania Woman Found Alive in Florida

We stopped reading right about here…

…As the month that purports to be the start of spring yet never quite fulfills its promise, April is cruel because, like life itself, it requires that we measure the rough truth of the way it is against gentler, dearly held notions of the way it ought to be.

…but your mileage may vary. It's at Byliner.

Payoff time

Chicago Tribune - Making official what many have expected for weeks, President Barack Obama has nominated Chicago business executive Penny Pritzker, a longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser, as his new Commerce secretary.

Pritzker's nomination could prove controversial. She is on the board of Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp., which was founded by her wealthy family and has had rocky relations with labor unions, and she could face questions about the failure of a bank partly owned by her family.

UNDERNEWS

The wonder of it all

Fox News hosts wonder why Americans know so little.

Oh unkindest cut

I am looking at a medical information sheet here that defines the word "geriatric" as ">65." Sixty freaking five. No kidding.

I thought "elderly" was bad but "geriatric"? Give me a break.

Chair
 

iPhone abstract: Phil Compton

No end to the pesky questions

So when can America expect the “Save Meals-on-Wheels” sequestration patch? And what about medical research, food safety, flood prediction, or Head Start — just the start of a long list of vital government programs facing budget cuts that don’t have constituents as powerful as the world’s airline passengers? 

Boston Globe

Also we expect to dominate the buzzword vote

“Our venture will change the game with a Republican, free enterprise approach to data and technology. We are building an open platform to increase access to data for the entire Republican team as well as to bring creativity and technological innovation to our party through new great applications that can be built off the platform,” said Dick Boyce, the investment and technology executive, and longtime Republican donor, who founded Liberty Works. 

Roll Call

Republican congressman's bill to erase unemployment…

In what’s becoming a biennial tradition, another House Republican wants to cut the Census down to size. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) is rolling out the Census Reform Act this week, having formally introduced it April 18. 

The bill, as Michael McAuliff of the Huffington Post notes, would abolish the Current Population Survey, which is used to compute the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate. We wouldn’t have an unemployment rate if Duncan and his cosponsors -- who include GOP House libertarian-leaners like Jason Chaffetz, Raul Labrador, Thomas Massie, Steve Stockman and Walter Jones -- get their way. 

Washington Post

…literally. 

Obama to surrender at 11

	Salon.com (@Salon)
5/1/13, 11:46 AM Republicans giving up on democracy: Nearly half say "armed revolution might be necessary..." slnm.us/uwoIcTp via @davidsirota

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No way could this go wrong

LONDON - Laser beams and microwave dishes are the latest weapons in an arms race to shave milliseconds off dealing times in the shadowy world of high-speed, computerized financial trading.

Reuters

Sounds a little kinky to me

Now, roboticists from Georgia Tech and San Francisco-based Meka Robotics have built an arm covered with a sensitive "skin" that lets it reach through clutter without knocking things over and gently dab a person's mouth clean.

Popular Science

There'll always be an England: No monkey business with the monkey nuts

The Food Standards Agency issued an allergy alert saying the presence of peanuts was not declared on Booths' own brand packets of monkey nuts. 

The supermarket has removed 300 packets of 350g Whole Hearted Roasted Monkey Nuts from its shelves. 

BBC

(In England, "monkey nuts" is what they call peanuts roasted in the shell.)

Hands out of the cookie jar, boys

ALBANY, N.Y. — Four top Con Edison executives have returned $614,400 in bonuses after Governor Andrew Cuomo called for an investigation into why they were rewarded while the state’s utilities are being probed for what he has called a woeful performance during Superstorm Sandy. 

Boston Globe

Once upon a long, long time ago

Once upon a time, “homeland” was a word of little significance in the American context.  What American before 9/11 would have called the United States his or her “homeland” rather than “country”?  Who sang “My homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”?  Between my birth in 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, and September 11, 2001, I doubt I ever heard the word in reference to the U.S. 

There was a reason: “homeland” had a certain ring to it and anyone would have known at once just what that ring, that resonance, was.  Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re talking about the ring of evil.… 

Tom Dispatch

An encouraging trend

More than 20,000 people apply for one-way ticket to Mars

Sorry, I don't get this at all

Following criticism that the application to get health insurance through Obamacare was too long, the Health and Human Services Department announced Tuesday they've cut the application from 21 pages down to three pages… 

CBS News

If Obamacare is something you have to have, why do you have to apply for it at all? Can they turn you down? And if they turn you down does that mean you can't have it even if you have to have it? Isn't that a little bit screwed up?

World's first web site 20 years old today

CERN celebrates 20 years of a free, open web | CERN press office: "Geneva, 30 April 2013 - Twenty years ago CERN1 published a statement that made the World Wide Web ("W3", or simply "the web") technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish. The technology, invented in 1989 at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world."…

'via Blog this'

See the first CERN WWW page here.

And just for the record, here's a page of my own from 15 years ago, looking a little bit the worse for wear, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Dude! You say that like it's a bad thing!

"Could caffeinated macaroni and cheese or breakfast cereal be next?" said Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which wrote the FDA a letter concerned about the number of foods with added caffeine last year.

ABC News

One more time

Everyone agrees that sequestration is horrible policy. That was the point. Democrats now agree that poor and working people should bear the full brunt of that policy, while Delta Gold members should bear less of it. This is cruelty, or at least the willingness to abide cruelty.

The Atlantic

913

913, a photo by Ted Compton on Flickr.

This is a test (etc.)

The whole "bags of cash" thing isn't unique to the CIA people. You've heard of congress right?
— Blogs of War (@BlogsofWar) April 30, 2013

White River Junction

White River Junction, a photo by Ted Compton on Flickr.

Advisory: We will not use the term "red line" on this blog

We have definitely drawn a red line that issue.

Unlike this guy. (What kind of a red line is that, anyway?)

Irony, indeed

Undernews: The end of the First American Republic: Top rot: "In a collapsing society, one of the best clues is to look at the supposed good guys. What we find in politics is a Democratic Party that has not only betrayed its present supporters, but is actively undoing the progress it made over 80 years in economic equity and civil liberties, just to name two examples.

We are presented as heroes people like Bill Clinton, a politician with an exceptionally seedy past who cut social welfare and helped create the fiscal disaster from which we have yet to recover. And Barack Obama, who has shown unprecedented contempt towards civil liberties for a White House Democrat, is also the first to favor cutting Social Security, and generally supports reactionary solutions to our economic crisis.

…Thus, we have the irony of Richard Nixon being the last president whose domestic politics could be fairly described as liberal, while people like Clinton and Obama have moved the country to the right."

'via Blog this'

And speaking of austerity…ahem…

C.I.A. Delivers Cash to Afghan Leader’s Office - NYTimes.com: "KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency." 

'via Blog this'

No more sitting home alone, Bunky

Just ask Mary from North Carolina: “Fun-loving, 47 yr. old gal who cherishes life, love & liberty. I experienced my first political awakening in 2006 after a flu shot fiasco when I learned very quickly that vaccines were a well-disguised, master-minded tool of population control. … Seeking my special Valentine!”

Amarillo Globe

Epicurean delights on the street

Spam is a big deal in Hawaii. So big, they shut down a stretch of a busy retail-fronted street and have a festival devoted to the canned meat.…

Chocolate Chip Mint

You're wondering Yoo who, right?

Here's a hint:

Yoo has never met a right he didn't want to ball up like a piece of paper and toss into a trash can in the name of national security. But despite being an attorney and professor at the prestigious University of California Berkeley School of Law, Yoo is either misleading his readers about why Tsarnaev was read his rights or unaware of a basic legal rule.

Mother Jones

Yeah, that one. 

She's baaaack! (And just in time.)

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday blasted the White House Correspondents Association dinner, calling it a “pathetic” party for “assclowns.”

The Hill

Assclowns! Dude! 

Wait, you're saying cancer is more important than a late plane?

“I would invite anyone in Washington to come look my patients in the eye and tell them that waiting for a flight is a bigger problem than traveling farther and waiting longer for chemotherapy,” said William Nibley, a doctor at Utah Cancer Specialists in Salt Lake City. [...]

Think Progress

Yeah, I guess you are.

Hot news from the snugglefest

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama joked Saturday about his plans for a radical second-term evolution from a "strapping young Muslim Socialist" to retiree golfer, all with a new hairstyle like first lady Michelle's.…

Yahoo! News

Or not.

On being Bostonian

[Boston is] a city where no one thinks twice about putting a bumper sticker that says “Coexist” next to one that says “Yankees Suck.”

Boston Globe

Underpass

Underpass, a photo by Ted Compton on Flickr.

Just when you thought it was safe…

Megabanks made a bundle this earnings season, with the top five firms alone pulling in $19.5 billion in profits. But a closer look at the books shows they have been moving money out of rainy-day funds to boost earnings.

Washington Post