February 7, 2012 – 7:22 pm
A reader sends us an impressive clip of Russia’s SU-30 multi-role fighter in flight. This is what matches up against our Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning “Joint Strike Fighter”. As formidable as this thing is, the tip of the spear as far as Russian air power is concerned is the fifth-generation Sukhoi PAK-FA (T-50). The matchup […]
February 6, 2012 – 11:35 pm
Drove up to Massachusetts this evening; stopped in Orleans to pick up supplies. The place seemed to be in a somber mood, for some reason. From the snatches of conversation I overheard, it seems some local chap by the name of Welker must have died, or is going to die, or something. Couldn’t quite make […]
February 5, 2012 – 1:46 pm
We’re all familiar with the importance, in Oriental cultures, of “saving face”. Now a Japanese outfit offers consumers a new way to do so. Note: the linked page is in Japanese; you may want to have Google translate it for you.
February 5, 2012 – 1:26 pm
It’s easy to lose perspective with one’s nose pressed up against the local affairs of this evanescent speck of dust we call home. So: zooming out just a little from U.S. politics, here’s a nice example of gravitational lensing: a “magnified” galaxy that we see as it was two-thirds of the age of the Universe […]
February 4, 2012 – 4:57 pm
For the past month or so, common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) have been stranding themselves in record numbers on Wellfleet’s bay and harbor beaches. Here and here are some video clips from CNN. Wellfleet has always been a hotspot for this sort of thing; the clean cold waters of the harbor are full of good things […]
February 3, 2012 – 11:18 pm
There was a positive jobs report today, and the markets, starved for encouragement, rallied. Obviously any upbeat economic news is to be welcomed, but it’s election season too, and so for the loyal opposition these little silver linings come complete with little clouds. (Those who found the Bush years unbearable often found themselves rooting for […]
February 2, 2012 – 4:03 pm
Just saw this, from our “uniter”-in-chief: Today, we’re announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama. There’s no better time than African American History Month to consider the tremendous progress we’ve made through the sacrifice of so many””or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now. Visit […]
February 1, 2012 – 11:01 pm
I just ran across an old article by my sigung for many years, Master Yee Chi Wai (aka Frank Yee). It’s a discussion of the many varieties of ging, or internal power, that are cultivated by the advanced Hung Ga practitioner. The Hung system, in which the student must endure years of grueling stance and […]
January 31, 2012 – 9:50 pm
Here’s an all-Macbeth smackdown: Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart, and the late Nicol Williamson go head to head to head in the steel cage. Who claims victory?
January 31, 2012 – 3:08 pm
Dennis Mangan brings us news from the prestigious London School of Economics — where the Student Union has declared “Islamophobia” to be “racism”, and has appointed itself to identify, root out, and prosecute blasphemy against Islam. This craven gesture is not only an affront to freedom of speech, and to freedom of thought itself, but […]
January 30, 2012 – 9:15 pm
How wonderful it is to see democracy flowering at last in the Maghreb! It would be too much, though, to expect everything to be put right all at once, after so many years of ruthless oppression. Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s […]
January 30, 2012 – 11:51 am
At the Washington Post’s website there’s an item titled “Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.” The article looks over the gap between Presidential job-approval and job-disapproval ratings (by respondent’s party affiliation) over the years, and concludes that Mr. Obama has divided the nation more than any third-year President ever has. (In a recent poll, 80% […]
January 29, 2012 – 11:16 pm
Hey, maybe we’re going to win this thing after all!
January 29, 2012 – 12:06 am
The music biz isn’t always fair. A lot of mediocre talent makes it big, and there have always been world-class players who never get the wider recognition they deserve, and spend their working lives playing for a devoted local following far from the big-city spotlight. One such is my old friend John Bushnell, whom I’ve […]
January 28, 2012 – 1:40 pm
Here’s a curious item: a strange, roughly circular object, about the size of a 747, found last July at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It even comes with what some are calling “drag marks”, hundreds of feet long. It looks like this: What is it? A UFO? Kvenland? I’m dead boring when it comes […]
January 27, 2012 – 11:21 pm
Here, courtesy of Bill Vallicella, is an appalling story: a young woman who has eaten nothing but chicken nuggets all her life, and was finally taken to the hospital after collapsing. I suppose this is no different from somebody drinking herself to death, but one does wonder what her parents must have been thinking. (Our […]
January 27, 2012 – 12:08 am
I’ve been working all day, with no time to write. I won’t send you off empty-handed, though: here’s a singular series of illustrations made by the artist John Vassos for his 1931 collection Phobias.
January 25, 2012 – 8:12 pm
Are you tucked away in an elite intellectual and cultural cocoon, isolated from America’s ‘vibrant’ popular mainstream? One can only hope. Find out here.
January 25, 2012 – 10:24 am
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s something new about to make its debut: the Tata MiniCat. Not what you want for traversing the Interstate system, but perfect for getting around locally — and cheaply.
January 24, 2012 – 11:34 pm
We were on the road all day, so all I have tonight is this odd item from long ago, in which goldfish bowls were banned in Monza, Italy. Apparently, according to the town council’s Giampietro Mosca, a fish kept in a curved glass bowl “has a distorted view of reality … and suffers because of […]
January 24, 2012 – 1:02 am
It seems old Sol has just launched a gigantic flare our way — the biggest in seven years — and we will notice its effects on Tuesday. While you’re waiting, here’s a fantastic gallery of solar images. My favorites: numbers 15 and 16.
January 23, 2012 – 10:56 pm
Here’s how you can tell working coders from computer-science Ph.Ds: Make them mad. We all know when you’re angry you should count to 10; this should be sufficient for distinguishing the two species. The Coder: “zero…one…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight…nine.” The Ph.D: “one…two.”
January 23, 2012 – 7:16 pm
Bored? Then spend a few minutes contemplating this grammatically correct and semantically coherent sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Read all about it here, and here.
January 23, 2012 – 6:39 pm
Here’s a funny line: “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Funny? Well, not so much, maybe. According to a tart item at the Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, Mr. Romney actually said this in a […]
January 22, 2012 – 11:39 pm
More on the blessings of socialized medicine, from the Daily Mail.
January 22, 2012 – 11:26 pm
What say you, readers? Is this child abuse?
January 22, 2012 – 11:08 pm
When you mix cornstarch with water, you get a gloopy liquid with a strange property: its viscosity increases the faster you try to move through it or deform it. Back when my kids were in grade school, they informed me that the stuff now has an official name: “oobleck”. It turns out that oobleck behaves […]
January 21, 2012 – 10:17 pm
First real snow of the season here in Wellfleet. Here are two views from chez Waka, taken earlier today (and about half a foot ago). Looking northwest, down the hill: Looking east, out the back door: I liked the way these tree-trunks along the lane looked in the grey light:
January 21, 2012 – 9:52 pm
Off the coast of Brazil is a huge oilfield. Ensuring a stable source of Western-Hemisphere oil would be a good thing for us here in the U.S., especially given recent unrest in the Mideast, and uncertainty about the security of the Persian Gulf. So The Obama administration went to Rio last month to make a […]
January 21, 2012 – 12:41 pm
Here’s a cheery item: Bankrupt Solyndra is now smashing its inventory and throwing it into dumpsters. I thought our American readers would find this of particular interest, having paid for the stuff.
January 21, 2012 – 12:54 am
Here’s some really terrible news that I just heard about tonight; Tom Ardolino, NRBQ’s longtime drummer and one of my favorite drummers of all time, has died. I don’t know what the cause was, but he’d been sick for a while. Tom Ardolino just whacked the hell out of the drums, and played the biggest, […]
January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them. The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them […]
January 19, 2012 – 12:28 pm
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention (with pithy comments of his own, here) an article from the Daily Mail on the SOPA bill that has been getting so much attention. (I’ll confess I haven’t read the dense 78-page bill itself yet, but from all the summaries I’ve seen it does indeed appear to be a […]
January 18, 2012 – 6:34 pm
Sorry to harp on politics today, but President Obama has now petulantly squashed the Keystone Pipeline project, which had broad support, would have created many jobs, and would have decreased our reliance on Mideast oil. Even his own base was divided on this one, with unions supporting it and environmental groups in opposition. Detailed commentary […]
January 18, 2012 – 3:31 pm
In a gratifyingly swift response, those non-recess “recess” appointments the President made a fortnight or so ago are now being challenged in court.
January 18, 2012 – 1:22 am
Well, Wikipedia’s down for a day. This should reduce the apparent know-it-all-ness of the blogospheric commentariat by about 98%, I reckon. (Fortunately I downloaded a copy, so I should be OK.) Feeling a little better today. Should be my old self shortly.
January 16, 2012 – 11:20 pm
Still under the weather here, and in my depleted state I seem to be losing the battle with the blank page. If brain not in better shape soon I may have to turn things over to my Super PAC for a few days. Update: OK, here’s something, in case you missed it over at Kevin’s […]
January 15, 2012 – 11:49 pm
I’m not at all well tonight — I seem to have caught a nasty sinus cold, a rarity for me — and it’s all I can manage to keep the conversation going in our “What Is A Nation Anyway?” thread. Back to normal soon, I hope.
January 13, 2012 – 10:09 pm
Pat Buchanan has now lost his TV gig for crimespeak, but he’s still got his website and newsletter. In his latest offering, he examines Ron Paul’s candidacy, and what Mr. Paul’s investment strategy says about his view of the near future. Here.
January 13, 2012 – 11:55 am
Well, here it is again: Friday the 13th. I consider them auspicious, but I’ve already written about that several times (such as here and here), so for today I’ll just note the event en passant, and get on with other things.
January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item: Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional. “Human rights do not prescribe national […]
January 12, 2012 – 4:17 pm
In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or […]
January 11, 2012 – 7:04 pm
Meet Mercedes-Benz’s new spokesman.
January 11, 2012 – 6:35 pm
BE IT KNOWN BY ALL that Hizzonner Michael Bloomberg, Lord Mayor of Manhattan, Imperator of The Five Boroughs, Slayer of Term Limits, and Guardian In Loco Parentis of the Well-Being and Moral Probity of the Gothamite Flock, has of Late turned His Attention to the licentious Consumption of Alcoholic Liquors, and other stimulating Potations, by […]
January 11, 2012 – 11:07 am
Here’s a dispatch from our senior White House correspondent, Milton Polchek: WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 – Michelle Obama, the first black woman to serve as First Lady, took to the airwaves recently to express her irritation at being characterized as an “angry black woman”. Mrs. Obama could not be reached for comment, but a close friend […]
January 11, 2012 – 12:25 am
Here’s a curious item for you: the only recorded capture, in the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America, of the exotic Piercing Devil.
January 10, 2012 – 9:12 pm
With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’. And here’s a related video.
January 9, 2012 – 2:19 pm
With a hat tip to VFR, here’s the Jerusalem Post’s latest report on the Islamist renaissance that is coalescing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’. Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the […]