Christmas isn’t over yet!

Waiting for Epiphany

For everyone still caught up in the (secular manufactured, commercial) “holiday spirit” here’s A Wonderful Life—in 30 seconds, with bunnies. (HT: Sean Gleeson)

For the rest of us, who might be quite willing to celebrate Christmas all the way through to Epiphany (or with the Orthodox church, on January 7 :-), why not watch a video of The Passion of the Christ? After all, that’s what Christmas is really all about.

On second thought, it’d be best if both classes of folk watched both productions. The contrast would do us all some good.

Typical LLM Mass Media Podperson

The Strib’s Nick Coleman needs his meds moderated

I read this Nick Coleman article (referred by Instapundit) attacking the Powerline bloggers. Then I read Hindrocket’s response at Powerline. Strange… although I can’t say the first portion of the following (I’m not a lawyer), I had almost exactly the same thought:

“It’s been a long time since I went to law school, but I think there is a technical term for journalists who make charges that they know to be untrue.”

Of course, the technical term is “bankrupt and jobless.”

Happy Friday 13!

April 13, 2029 might be a BIG day, indeed

While this isn’t news to anyone who’s been connected over the last week or so, there’s a moderately large (1,300 meters across) asteroid that’s scheduled for NEA (Near Earth Approach) for 04/13/2029. In fact, latest calculations give it about a 1/37 chance of actually hitting Earth.

That’s upgraded from an early 1/245 chance.

Hey, not to sweat it. It’s certainly no planet-buster (though regional devastation if it should hit—wherever it hits, IF it hits—should be pretty total…

No problem. After all, Social Security will be belly up by then and all the elderly living in cardboard boxes under bridges willl welcome a Krakatoa-level catastrophe!

Happy Friday 13th!

Is this it?

Can this be a candidate for “Worst Christmas Song Ever”?

Yeh, I’m reproducing all the lyrics to the song, “SantaClaus Got Stuck in my Chimney” below. Who cares about copyright on something this horrible, anyway? Thankfully forgotten… until its mention at Powerline [curse you, Big Trunk!].

[heh]

SANTA CLAUS GOT STUCK IN MY CHIMNEY
(William D. Hardy / Billy Moore Jr.)

Ella Fitzgerald – 1960
Lisa Nicole Carson – 2000

Santa Claus got stuck in my chimney,
Stuck in my chimney, stuck in the chimney
Santa Claus got stuck in my chimney
When he came last year

There he was in middle of the chimney
Roly-poly, fat and round
There he was in middle of the chimney
Not quite up and not quite down

Santa please come back to my chimney
Back to my chimney, back
Santa please come back to my chimney
You can come back here.

Cause baby, made a brand new chimney
Just for you this year!

Santa, come on back!

Yeh, I’d like to be able to say that they just don’t write lyrics that bad any more, but then I have a radio, so I know better…

“What will we do tonight, Pinky?”

What do these have in common: eugenics, pebble bed reactors and 40 million surplus males…

China in the 2020 “taking over the world”?

See this article about China’s eugenics program and its implcations for the future. The goal? Eliminate as many genetic defects as possible from the population via draconian measures that include sterilzation, abortion and infanticide.

A side effect? By the year 2020, China may have as many as 40 million “surplus” young men available for use in military adventures…

Oh, and pebble bed reactors? By that same year, China (with the aid of U.S. companies!) intends to have as many as 200 pebble bed reactors. The result? A projected power production sufficient for its own use and power for sale in amounts perhaps nearly equal to the current total world electrical power production.

With these in place, what then of the vaunted productivity, economic and military power of the U.S.?

Sleep well. Of course your children have nothing to be concerned about…

(link to China/eugenics article via Chaos Manor.)

The Incomprehensible Weirdness of the Universe

Where do lost socks go?

It’s one of those paradoxes of the universe. One of God’s best jokes on humankind…

I’ve spent the last few months, in between bouts of plastering, painting, building, etc., throwing out boxes and bags and more boxes and bags of accumulated stuff. The heck with garage sales and taking to some collection center or whatnot, I’ve just been savagely purging stuff.

Now, here’s the paradox: we have less room for stuff tha n before I began “savagely purging” stuff. Now, where once two of the rooms downstairs were relatively free of stuff and could be used for, well, living in, there is almost no room to walk because boxes and boxes of other stuff have drifted out into the open and are now crowding out any human use of those rooms.

Upstairs is just as bad. As soon as an empty space is created, twice as much stuff creeps in under cover of darkness to crowd out human use of space.

What’s going on here?

You know, the really weird thing is that even as stuff creeps out of hiding places in some alternate universe to doubly crowd any space cleared of formerly-occupying stuff, not one lost sock has returned!

Go figure that one…

Ambivalence #2

“Torn between two lovers… ”

It’s a big deal this year, apparently. Saying “Merry Christmas” has become a sort of battle cry for some who are simply fed up with Christian-bashing associated with tearing down crêches, deleting Christmas carols from kids’ school programs, and the bland “Happy Holidays” now being taken up as an “in your face” insult of the LLMB toward all things Christian about Christmas.

OTOH, whenever I hear “Merry Christmas” (or “have a nice day” for that matter), a small part of me wants to say, “Says who? You’re not the boss of me!” [heh]

For the gripping hand, see today’s post on Whisling in the Light

10 More Reasons…

…why Rummy is, uh, rummy

Sean Gleason has the list.

My fav of Gleeson’s “…Reasons to Hate Rumsfeld”?

He has had most of his clothing outfitted with “buttons” and “zippers” to make dressing and undressing almost effortless.

Gleeson: very funny guy. But do not take my word on it. Check it out yourself.

Kiss an Engineer

Engineering a Christmas Miracle

Linked from Instapundit (I wonder why? :-), this article by Glenn Reynolds at Tech Central Station extols the renewal of Christmas civility brought to us, well, let him say it:

…with online shopping picking up some of the slack, and in the process relieving the crowds, congestion, and frustration associated with traditional retail Christmases, old-fashioned Christmas shopping might actually become pleasant again, in a way it hasn’t been in decades — all thanks to the Internet.

Now there’s a Christmas miracle. Brought to you not by elves, but by the people responsible for most of the miracles in our lives: Engineers!

(Glenn, for those who are still unaware of it, is a blogophere giant. His Instapundit blog is a daily must-read. Oh, no wonder his article is linked from Instapundit… [heh, heh] Yeh, I’m not exactly giving him a hat tip for linking his own article. 🙂

Artificial Life?

Yeh? Well, get your own dirt

Instapundit links a story about researchers who are making “progress toward artificial life”—what was once called “creating life in a test tube.” However, key info from the article reveals that they are close to building an “erector set” version of life, not even approaching creation at all:

The soft cell walls are made of fat molecules taken from egg white. The cell contents are an extract of the common gut bug E. coli, stripped of all its genetic material.

This essence of life contains ready-made much of the biological machinery needed to make proteins; the researchers also added an enzyme from a virus to allow the vesicle to translate DNA code.

When they added genes, the cell fluid started to make proteins, just like a normal cell would.

Yeh, well, if they want to create a lil life on their own, they ought to get their own dirt first. This is more akin to someone being proud of baking cookies they bought at WallyWorld. Sure, they opened the package and put ’em in the cookie jar. Big whoopie.