Arlene caught a lobster!

Now I have to figure out how to cook it.

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SB1070 be some bullshit.

This is the kind of case civil rights lawyers dream about. This article is a bit simplistic, but very lucid.

Here's hoping this one gets shot down hard and fast.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emma-rubysachs/legal-challenge-to-arizon_b_557678.html

Thank God! Two bits of extremely good DCU news.

Emilio is back!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/28/AR2010042805680.html

And we got a win! And Najar and Cristman are finally producing! Granted it is the US Open Cup, but any win at all can only help their confidence. We might even be able to make a run at the US Open Cup if we cant salvage our MLS season.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/28/AR2010042806223.html

Jomarie is right!

Guys,

Balut is DELICIOUS. I did not expect to like it at all, but I honestly thought it was fantastic. It is still a little gross to think about but it tastes wonderful. It tastes like duck suspended in a hard-boiled egg! Go figure!

Speak of the deviled

Anyone want to guess what this is? Hint: Arlene's mom is in town and she just got back from the Filipino food store.

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Allyanna and Dad's toys, respectively.

Mom just sent me this from the farm.

:)

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Holy shit

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Los que no salta

This is a fantastic article from SI about the TV coverage of the World Cup in the US this year. I found it to be well-researched, relevant and interesting.

http://m.si.com/news/sp/to_soccer_sports/detail/2544533/full;jsessionid=3D8194523C95E96ADDDAFBF88515371D.cnnsi1b

I have no doubt that this is great news for American soccer fans. I believe that American TV networks are more than capable of manufacturing a market for televised soccer in America if they put their minds to it - and it sounds like that is exactly what they have done. Wonderful news for those of us who crave more TV coverage of international soccer!

However, I am not as convinced that this bodes well for MLS. Does expanded coverage of the major European leagues (ESPN is expanding to 85 Premiership games next year, and is making a play for Champions league games too) help the MLS by generating a greater buzz for the sport of soccer in a market that hasn't really warmed up to it yet, or does it hurt MLS by providing US soccer fans a more exciting option than watching DC United lose every game?

I recently read somewhere that some of the domestic leagues in Africa saw their game attendance plummet when they started getting live TV coverage of the Champions League.

What do you guys think?
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ohhhohohoho delightful.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1933075

Vanity

So my mom totaled the Toyota Sienna van that we all knew so well (drive to tremblant, also reminds me of my dad's ridiculous but awesomely useful fabric). She's fine, the wreck was like two months ago. Point of this post is that they bought a '07 rav4 and she wants to trade cars with me, which is freaking fantastic. I hope this car generates fuel on it's own too. They actually transferred the title to me this time since my parents are so bad at driving that a 24 year-old male being the primary on the car leads to cheaper insurance. So! I was thinking about getting vanity plates. I can have six characters on the plate. I threw around the idea of doing something like "HALFMD" or "JASPY" but then I discovered that some asshole is tooling around out there with "JASPY" on his license plates already. Eunice suggested "DJ JASPY", which I thought was amazing minus the obvious fact that there's an extra letter. I guess I could do "DJJASP" but the double J looks funky.

Ideas? Suggestions?!

Save Money, Live Better.

"You can go to Walmart and get some good-ass tracksuits. I wear them whenever I need to be comfortable — like on my plane."—Ludacris

To all my Excel fiends out there.

I feel like I have seen a ghost.

I am building a spreadsheet to track and project fuel consumption. The user inputs the fuel capacity of the ship, the last reported fuel percentage, and the number of days spent underway since the last report. The spreadsheet multiplies the days underway times a standard daily burn rate, subtracts that product from the last reported fuel levels and produces an estimate of the current fuel level. Pretty simple stuff, but very handy.

So while I was working on this I noticed that if I left the "days underway since last report" cell empty (to indicate that the ship hadn't gone anywhere), the spreadsheet was still telling me that I had burned a day's worth of fuel. And I was all like "wtf?"

The explanation I eventually came to was that in mathematical formulae, Excel treats an empty cell as a 1, not as a zero! Wtf?!

I am spooked.

(A) Why would it do that?
(B) Is there a setting somewhere where I can tell it to cut that shit out?
(C) If not, why not?!
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Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?! Yet another reason to (maybe) be a complete Apple fanboy

I literally got shivers when I read this. If this is accurate, that pretty much kills any question in my mind as to how Apple caught up to Microsoft in terms of market cap and market share. Bad...ass.

http://stevecheney.posterous.com/the-genius-in-apples-vertical-platform

It's awesome watching everyone fight to make a better product

This is pretty cool, but I think it also is yet another clear step that I am getting older, just like when I got excited about my Dyson (which is awesome)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10436851-54.html

Intel, Apple, GE, Whirlpool... pretty much everyone else jumped on this concept and I can't wait for something awesome to pop up. I guess I should probably be living in a home first, but still.

Say "be cool, bench!"

An update on Justice Stevens.

He has announced he will in fact be retiring this year.

www.thestreet.com/offers/omnisky/html/markets/marketfeatures/10722162.html

From the article:
"The leading candidates to replace Stevens are Solicitor General Elena Kagan, 49, and federal appellate judges Merrick Garland, 57, and Diane Wood, 59."

Out of curiosity I looked it up. Kagan and Garland are Jewish. Wood is Protestant.
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The most interesting commercial, I think, I have ever seen

The voice-over is a recording of his dead father.

The Gospel According to Jon

I think this segment on the Catholic Church abuse scandal is brilliant.

Pope Opera.

Tell that bench to be cool.

I just became aware of something very interesting. As I am sure you all know, Justice Stevens of the Supreme Court has been making some noise recently about retiring sometime soon. If he were to do that during the Obama administration, he would be giving President Obama a second opportunity to put a liberal judge on the bench.

But that's not what is interesting! The interesting thing is that Stevens happens to be the only Protestant currently on the bench. The court, it turns out, is overwhelmingly Catholic, and disproportionately Jewish. Since the court was founded by Hammurabi (or someone like that) in 1492 (give or take) , there have been a total of 12 Catholic supremes - 6 of them are currently serving on the court. There have been 7 total Jews, two of whom are currently on the bench. If Steven's replacement is not a Protestant, the court could be entirely without a Protestant for the first time since the Spanish Inquisition (or thereabouts.)

I did some quick wikipedia research and found that 51% of the country is Protestant, 23% Catholic and 1.7% Jewish. I also happen to know that nearly all of our Presidents have been Protestant, the single exception being President Kennedy. So why so few Protestants?

I don't point this out as a problem. The Supreme Court has no obligation to maintain any sort of representative sample of the American religious landscape. I point it out simply because it is a remarkable statistical anomaly.

I have a few possible explanations, but I am interested to hear yours. Anyone got a theory that might explain this?
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I snowboarded a glacier today.

That is all.

Uncool white guy doing a pretty good impersonation of a very cool white guy.

The coolest white guy ever.

Indiana, and other stories.

I have spent the last few minutes trying to come up with a word which I am pretty sure doesn’t exist, at least not in English. I am looking for a word which is like the word “Americana” except for India instead of America. The best I have been able to come up with so far is “Indiana,” but I think that might already mean something else. No matter. I am undaunted. I have come across a fun bit of trivia about India: a little morsel of Indiana which I found absolutely incredible.

It concerns the Indian railroad system. These numbers are vague, but I am quite sure they are accurate. I am sure a few minutes of research could produce more exact figures, but I liked the way this information was conveyed to me so I will pass it on to you unaltered.

A) If you were to pull up all the railroad tracks in India and lay them along the equator in one long single track, there would be enough of it to go around the world one-and-a-half times!
B) The railway system is all government-owned. The number of people employed by the government to run the railroad system is larger than the number of people in the US Military.

A couple of things immediately sprang to mind when I heard these numbers.
The first was a reaffirmation of my belief that there has never been, in the history of the world, a logistical enterprise to equal the British Empire. God only knows what horrible methods they used on the Indian population to construct this colossal web of railways, but there is a sort of morbid magnificence to the brutal efficiency of the world’s first capitalist empire.
The second was a sudden realization of the incredible weight of the Indian government bureaucracy. If they have that many people working for the railroad alone, how large must the government payroll be if you include the military and all the ministries? It must be gigantic.

In a related story*, it seems that Google has decided to change its name from Google to Topeka.


* I use the term "related" somewhat loosely. These two stories are related geographically because Indiana and Kansas are both corn-spangled Midwestern states, and temporally because I happened to become aware of them both within roughly the same time period.

In a totally unrelated story, I am very excited about this weekend. Twitter confirms.