December 7 is . . . . . National Cotton Candy Day
12.07.2013
What, us worry?
It's 8ºF at O'Hare. But it's 35º here.
Just one little hitch…
Winter Storm Dion to Bring Snow, Ice From West to the Northeast | Weather Underground
By early Monday, the majority of the energy associated with Dion will be over Canada.
However, it appears there will be a mixture of snow, sleet and freezing rain in parts of New England…
Wintry mix, it's called. Oh yeah.
12.06.2013
Agreed
Chocolate Chip Mint: Brought To You By The Color Red
Meanwhile, I recommend you watch the movie Red2. It has kissing but it also has Spam so I figure it's a wash. Plus, it has Helen Mirrin which puts it in Must See category - a really fun movie.
I stayed home and read King Lear
TV REVIEW: BROADWAY WINS IN LIVE 'SOUND OF MUSIC'
NEW YORK (AP) -- Whew, that was nerve-wracking, right? All those kids and staircases, pillow fights, candles and dancing.…
–Grump
Oh, that guy
From this morning's Times:
Two years ago, White House officials told The Boston Globe that the president had never met Onyango Obama, known as Omar, Mr. Obama’s uncle. But Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that the 2011 statement was incorrect. In fact, the two men lived together briefly while the president was a student at Harvard Law, Mr. Carney said.
12.05.2013
Isn't there some Seseme Street character called Big Chicken?
The Obama Administration's Meaty Gift to Big Chicken | Mother Jones
Remember the proposal that Obama's US Department of Agriculture has been pushing since spring 2012, the one that would speed up kill lines in poultry slaughterhouses while simultaneously slashing the number of federal inspectors who oversee them? As I've reported before, the plan involves a unleashing a barrage of antimicrobial sprays onto chicken carcasses as they zip down the line.
Meanwhile, yum!
Oh, and also:
…"government agencies have not conducted independent research into the possible side effects on consumers of using the chemicals," Kindy reports.
In case you were wondering.
Why does this remind me of an old TV show called "Laugh-In"?
Cultural War Games - NYTimes.com
Some social conservatives embrace a seasonal victimhood this time of year, complaining that Christians are continually being mugged by anti-Christmas atheists bearing court orders. But the map pinpoints only a handful of alleged secular assaults, one of which is titled: “Salvation Army Volunteer Using Smaller Bell After Business Owner Complains.”
12.04.2013
Probably just not enough antibiotics, is all
Timeline: A Short and Sweet History of Fake Meat | Mother Jones
August 2013:Dutch scientists make the world's first lab-grown burger from cow muscle cells, fetal calf blood, and antibiotics. In a live-streamed tasting, the patties are pronounced "close to meat" but "not that juicy."
And what are they going to do with all those spare sailors?
Angola is in the process of acquiring the recently-decommissioned Spanish aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias, according to one news report. The entire Angolan navy has just 1,000 sailors. The 643-foot-long Principe de Asturias needs 830 sailors to fully function.
Goosebumps
Wisconsin DNR struggling to curb sex at nude beach
"There's no doubt there's more stuff going on," said Nathan Kroeplin, who supervises DNR law enforcement in Dane County.
Yes, no doubt. A lot of shivering, would be my guess. Nude beaches in Wisconsin? Brrrrrr.
Running out of things to buy: The end is near
News from The Associated Press
"There's so little that's new to buy for the holiday season," said Candace Corlett, president of WSL Strategic Retail, a retail consultancy. "The idea of a subscription service is fun and exciting."
Picky, picky
Obamacare Website Is in Great Shape — If This Were 1996 | Wired Business | Wired.com
According to The Washington Post, the Obama administration said Healthcare.gov processed 18,000 insurance enrollments during the most recent 24-hour period, “nearly double the previous record.” Great. But consider that on Cyber Monday last year, Amazon filled 306 orders per second. That’s 26.5 million orders in the most recent 24-hour period. This year, it’s hard to imagine that number won’t be higher.
…It so happens that Amazon is now offering the world a set of online infrastructure services, the AWS cloud, specifically designed to handle the massive amounts of traffic the White House hoped to juggle from the get-go (Netflix and Dropbox are both clients). But it took a different route, and in the simple terms of e-commerce, it’s still stuck in 1996.
Another family we know way, way too much about
Dick Cheney 'Surprised' By 'Attack' On Liz Cheney Over Gay Marriage
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was floored when his daughter Liz became the target of a Facebook "attack" from within the family for her opposition to gay marriage.
And also money
Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android - NYTimes.com
…consistent with a vision put forward by the Google co-founder Larry Page, who has argued that technology should be deployed wherever possible to free humans from drudgery and repetitive tasks.
Looks to me like a big market for hard hats
Mommy, the Drone’s Here! - NYTimes.com
Experts say there may be as many as 30,000 unmanned private and government drones flying in this country by 2020, ratcheting drones into a $90 billion industry, generating 100,000 jobs. A degree in drone management can’t be far off.
Those were the days
Positively Fourth Street, All Over Again - NYTimes.com
One primary pleasure of the Coen brothers’ new movie, “Inside Llewyn Davis” — a film that is abundant in its pleasures — is revisiting a New York that most New Yorkers thought was gone for good: Greenwich Village of the early 1960s, when downtown was teeming with bohemians and dreamers and not with lost tourists holding upside-down maps.
12.03.2013
And will Americans' awe of bureaucratic gibberish ever be greater?
Wonkbook: After Obamacare, will Americans ever trust the government again?
"There's a reputational loss that has already taken place about the capacity of government to cope with complexity and deliver services," says Ted Marmor, a leading expert on Medicare.
Lotta deadlines floating around DC these days
US to destroy Syrian weapons at sea | TheHill
The Obama administration has agreed to destroy Syria's most lethal chemical weapons at sea after failing to find a country willing to do it on their soil, the White House confirmed over the weekend.
The weapons make up a little less than half of Syria's arsenal and are supposed to be out of the country by Dec. 31…
Searching for the anti-Fox
How to Burst the "Filter Bubble" that Protects Us from Opposing Views | MIT Technology Review
Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like.
Relax—just give Amazon your co-ordinates (they already know everything else)
Amazon's Drone Has Many Asking 'What Could Go Wrong?' : The Two-Way : NPR
For the record, Amazon promises that "safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.
And other sage advice
Regular countries, like regular people, are obliged to say they're sorry. You invade your neighbor, for instance, and an apology is indeed in order. With an exceptional superpower, however, it's another matter. For Washington to apologize, whatever the issue, would be like the guest of honor at a formal dinner arriving in jeans. Nobody would ever forget it or think well of you again.
MA ambiguous
I Knew the Nation Went Downhill Once Ohio Joined the Union - Lawyers, Guns & Money
Personally, I blame William McKinley.
C- for U.S.
American 15-Year-Olds Lag, Mainly in Math, on International Standardized Tests - NYTimes.com
Fifteen-year-olds in the United States score in the middle of the developed world in reading and science while lagging in math, according to international standardized test results being released on Tuesday.
12.02.2013
Once again, technology saves the day (also your shoes)
Property Managers Use DNA To Sniff Out Dog Poop Offenders - Slashdot
Rather than put up with a neverending supply of potential EcoBot fuel on marring the landscaping, facilities managers took cheek swabs of all the dogs on the property and sent them to A Knoxville, Tenn. that provided DNA profiles under a program with the dignified name 'PooPrints.' Now, for a fee of only $60 per pooch, residential managers can confirm the provider of a pile of PooPrintable material by comparing the DNA in the dog with the DNA in the pile.
The nerve
Minn. Man Ticketed For Making It Snow Money At Mall Of America : The Two-Way : NPR
A Minn. man who was down on his luck, decided to spread some holiday cheer at the Mall of America on Friday by dropping 1,000 dollar bills from the fourth floor of the rotunda as a three-person choir sang Let It Snow.
Guy gets ticketed for disorderly conduct. Minnesota is a very orderly place.
Or why don't we just stay on Daylight Saving Time year round?
Parents Of Sleep-Deprived Teens Push For Later School Start Times : Shots - Health News : NPR
Cristina Sevin is convinced there's a better way to raise teenagers: Push back the start of school one hour. Instead of a 7:17 morning bell, how about 8:18?
What's wrong with this sentence?
Urinating robot leads up Turner prize nominees | The Raw Story
The creators of a naked male mannequin who pees into a bucket and a room filled only with conversation are in the running for Britain’s prestigious Turner prize for contemporary art announced on Monday.
Heresy! Heresy!
Why Pushing People to Code Will Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
Instead of making people adapt to technologies — in the process leaving behind large swaths of society — technologies should adapt to our needs and values.
Teaching people to code in school may be a fine idea, but no more fine than teaching people to write, say, or read. Or type, for that matter. Or play a clarinet. And some kids will learn it and some probably won't, and some teachers will be good at teaching it and some won't, and the Earth will spin.
Insurance guy, all heart, commiserates
Insurers Claim Health Website Is Still Flawed - NYTimes.com
“Somehow people are getting lost in the process,” the insurance executive said. “If they go to a doctor or a hospital and we have no record of them, that will be very upsetting to consumers.”
12.01.2013
100 down
Happy 100th birthday to the crossword puzzle! Enter our contest below. - The Washington Post
Remembering the small word squares he’d solved as a young Brit in Liverpool, he drew a diamond-shaped grid with numbered squares and numbered clues. It contained 32 words, and his simple instruction read: “Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”
Who, us?
Intel chair warns of 'huge malevolence' | TheHill
“There is a real displaced aggression within this fundamentalist, jihadist Islamic community. And that is, the West is responsible for all the things that are going wrong," [Feinstein] said.
But it doesn't matter because if it doesn't work we can blame it on somebody else, whew
The White House says it met its Obamacare goal. There’s still more work ahead.
If the system's front end works as smoothly as the Obama administration says it does, that means more applicants will get to the back-end functions of HealthCare.gov, where the insurance company needs to know who signed up for their product. We know a lot less about how prepared those systems are for a possible flood of enrollments and how they will perform in the coming weeks.
You say that like it's a bad thing
This is how your brain tells time - Salon.com
Without the ability to track elapsed time, our morning shower could continue indefinitely.
Does this mean Interpol can take a break?
What Piracy? Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10 Percent | TorrentFreak
DRM was once praised as the ultimate tool to prevent music piracy, but new research shows that the opposite is true. Comparing album sales of four major labels before and after the removal of DRM reveals that digital music revenue increases by 10% when restrictions are removed.
Forget the password sermonette—just duck
Oh, and in case you actually did forget the code, it was handily written down on a checklist handed out to the soldiers.
Almost as good as owning Jesse James's socks
News from The Associated Press
BOSTON (AP) -- Former Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger could soon see some of his jewelry, clothes and other belongings on the auction block.
And it doesn't end with jewelry and clothes:
Other items include binoculars, a telescope, camouflage clothing, nine fedoras, 27 pairs of sunglasses, ceramic poodle salt and pepper shakers, assorted porcelain cats and hundreds of books, many with Bulger's handwritten notes scrawled in the margins. There's also a McCain/Palin campaign button and a God Bless America poster.
Indeed.
Imagine our dismay
News from The Associated Press
Thanksgiving Day is no longer all about turkey: It's eating away at Black Friday shopping.
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