To all my friends in southern California

If you live in the area of southern California affected by wildfires (which, I am given to understand, is from northern Los Angeles all the way to the Mexico border), please post here so I know you're safe and haven't been burned to death. Thank you.

Joke of the day: Politics and stock-car racing

(click here to view)

Charles Daniel, Jr. Knoxville News Sentinel Oct 23, 2007 EditorialCartoonists.com

A birthday wish...and an age that purely freaks me out

"Weird Al" Yankovic is 48 years old today!! (His Wikipedia page gives his birth year as 1959.) Forty-eight. (Thanks to wormquartet for the tip, and to wolfette for correcting the total I misread off my Calculator app; damn decrepit eyesight!) Jeezam crickets, and I thought I was a geezer... Of course, when you realize he was making his first high-school and college recordings in the 1970s, this becomes less astonishing. (Ah, those great tiled-men's-bathroom acoustics...) And of course, that makes him only four years older than Your Humble Correspondent.

Anyhoo, happy birthday to one of the leading exponents of funny music in our time. What's your favorite Al tune? I can't pick just one—there's just too many gems from three decades of musical parody and strangeness: "White & Nerdy," "Another One Rides the Bus," "I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead," "I Love Rocky Road," "Hey Ricky," "Couch Potato" and on and on and on. (Don't you wish he'd re-do "Rocky Road," "My Bologna" and other parodies from his accordion-only days, now that he can afford to more precisely duplicate the originals' sound? I'm sorely tempted to do them myself with karaoke tracks if he doesn't.)

Leopard Release Watch: Apple gets filthy stinking rich on Mac sales

T minus 3 days, 8 hours and counting...
Apple Inc. shredded all the analysts' expectations for profit growth in the quarter just ended, recording a 67 percent jump mainly on the strength of sales of its flagship product, the Macintosh computer line—not the new iPods or the iPhone, as you might reasonably have expected, although those products certainly did well. BusinessWeek Online reports the amazing results here.

And MacDailyNews reports here that Apple's new stock price has rocketed its valuation above those of both IBM and Intel. Friday's impending debut of OS X Leopard should only add to the reasons for Steverino & Co. to pop the Cristal.

ADDENDUM, 11:40a: Here's an interesting article/discussion from Gizmodo to chuck in a little perspective, just so you don't think I'm only a mindless, drooling Apple fanboy.)

Gay Time essayist: Put Dumbledore back in the closet

An openly gay writer for Time magazine says that he's not all that thrilled at author J. K. Rowling's recent announcement that Harry Potter's Hogwarts headmaster and mentor, Prof. Albus Dumbledore, was homosexual, and explains why here. Basically, he argues that the Prof is a throwback to doomed gay stereotypes of the 1950s: he never came out to his faculty or students (and provided the latter with a role model some of them no doubt desperately needed), he never got to have a canon romance, and he didn't survive the series (harking back to all those gay movie characters back last century who had to die as punishment for their "perversions").

And some on the right are now crowing (see Huffington Post article here) that Rowling's revelation vindicates the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's attacks on Hollywood's alleged promulgation of "the homosexual agenda." (Never mind that he never said word one about the books themselves; we all know fundies never let facts get in the way of a good anti-gay rant.)

Does this argument have merit? Should Rowling, who was so punctilious about having diversity in her characters otherwise, have had more gay/lesbian/transgender ones in her books? And should she not have outed Dumbledore—or should he have been more out? Your thoughts, please.

Still more ammo for the left on SCHIP

Daily Kos reports here that the right wing's battle against funding for poor and lower-middle-class kids' health insurance is getting desperate. He includes a cite of the very same article from Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker that I linked to a couple days ago here, as well as columns from other states affected by the bill to bolster it.

The late physics genius Albert Einstein is reported to have said, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." (See Quotations Page citation here.) Looks like certain Republican politicians and conservative pundits have taken the old man's words just a tad too literally.

You think you can build with Legos? This guy totally pwns your ass

Check out this gigundo homebrew Lego® spaceship, complete with realistic specs. Isn't this just crying out to be put on a TV show?

All those car-bumper fish plates

The other day, I saw a car ahead of me with a parody of the "Darwin" fish-with-legs emblem, which is itself a parody of the "Jesus" fish. It showed the Darwin fish being eaten by a larger fish labeled "Truth," clearly implying that Darwin's theories were to be excluded from consideration as "truth"—as if believing in evolution and believing in the Book of Genesis' six-day account of creation were mutually exclusive. (As Henry Drummond points out in Inherit the Wind, who's to say that "first day" didn't take ten million years?)

Such Biblical literalists tend to set my teeth on edge. But this guy, seems to me, has the last word on it all. (Note the last photo especially, with what I consider a great response to the "Truth-eating-Darwin" fish.)

CA's Stark caves on speaking truth to power

Rep. Pete Stark Apologizes for Saying Troops Die for Bush's "Amusement"
He was only calling it as he saw it...and as a lot of us elsewhere see it. But Nancy Pelosi and the Dem leadership caved in to pressure from outraged GOP Reps who saw it as character assassination. So they leaned on him to get back in the well and back down. Dammit to fucking hell. I can't believe I ever thought these twits would have the spine to end the war and rein in Junior's tyranny.

Your Wit for Today

Courtesy of StumbleUpon.com: A college class was instructed to write a short story in as few words as possible. The story was to contain the following three things: 1) religion; 2) sexuality; and 3) mystery.

The only A+ story submitted in the entire class consisted, in its entirety, of the following: "Good God, I'm pregnant! I wonder who did it?"

I realize people need news on the California wildfires...

...but did ABC really, truly need to pre-empt a brand-new Boston Legal scheduled for tonight in order to provide it? Couldn't this have been done a lousy 90 minutes later on Nightline? Now I gotta wait another week to find out whether Alan helps the lady who asks him to tell her how to get away with murder (literally)...and whether he and his leggy new lady-lawyer coworker can learn to keep their mitts off one another. Grump.