Jeff gets a no-prize that should not be greeting him at the door when he gets home for bringing us an example of just how determined a bored beagle can be. That's probably more dangerous than it looks... I can definitely see about six different ways for doggie to get hurt pulling a stunt like this.

I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for Alfisti sellers to start seriously questioning their buyers. They are fine little machines, but they definitely take a specific sort of owner to get the best out of them.

Something tells me this holds true, with some variation, for just about any car worth having.

It would seem it's actually government policy, not "market failure", which is the root cause of the current financial chaos. Color me completely unsurprised. Just about every large-scale "social engineering" attempt by Democrats starts out well-meaning, and usually works for a brief time. Unfortunately, and inevitably, the wheels fall off in spectacular fashion when all the other incentives their policies create come home to roost. Come to think of it, I can't think of a single instance where this didn't happen, all the way back to the New Deal. Those who can are welcome to comment.

"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. "
-- Milton Friedman

Everyone sees these things happen, yet most of you still persist in believing, "if only we could create the right program, and actually allow it to be fully funded by taxing all those billionaires and corporations out there a little more, by golly we'd get our government to do something right for a change."

I'd like to think it's not possible to hold a belief founded on so many false assumptions at once.

I would, of course, be wrong.

Go for Sal and Richard completely f'ing up a reporter's live feed, stay for the straight-laced description the anchor tries to put together at the end. I don't know how, but those two weirdos definitely managed to land some of the best jobs in the world.

Those wacky Finns are at it again, this time cooking up an Alfa-based 4x4 extreme off road vehicle. With a US V6 no less!

Jeff gets a no-prize that can move with eerie silence for bringing us this clear and simple example of just what happens when you put that dratted cat in that German's box and close the door. Don't worry, "kitteh" is just being a cat, and was not harmed in the least.

Ours are too fat and lazy to do this sort of thing anymore, but Ellen's Mom's cat Lovey was justly famous for doing this sort of thing all the time. Except it was even spookier because she never seemed to move from a sitting position.

Biking across the W&OD trail: fun. Biking across the Himalayas, on a unicycle, well, not so much. There's a guy in our neighborhood who has one of these "off-road" unicycles. We saw him a few times as we were taking Olivia home from day care. They look interesting, but I have a hard enough time staying upright on two wheels to even think about trying it with just one.

It would seem that, perhaps some day, everyone's network could be parked out on the ocean. Boy, that sure would make those remote "shutdown -h now" mistakes a pain to correct, eh?

Go for the wacky preacher saying "Mickey Mouse should die", stay for the surreal sign-language translator in the bottom-right corner. I'm not a huge fan of ol' Mickey myself, but I think whacking him is a little extreme.

Pet Food Recalled After Salmonella Link Suspected.

Two isolated cases of a type of the salmonella bacterium known as Salmonella Schwarzengrund in humans has caused a Pennsylvania pet food manufacturer to recall a number of dry dog and cat food brands nationwide.

Mars Inc.'s Mars Petcare is recalling cat and dog food made at its Everson, Pa. facility, according to wire service reports.

While Mars Inc. maintained no direct connection has been made between illness in either animals or humans and its pet food product, the possibility that two humans may have contracted salmonella caused the recall, which began at the beginning of August.

The latest announcement expanded the pet food brands being recalled to include some Pedigree brands, Country Acres, Retriever, Doggy Bag, Members Mark, Natural, Ol' Roy, Special Kitty, Paws & Claws, Wegman's, Pet Pride, PMI Nutrition and Red Flannel.

Consumers should look for "17" as the first two digits of the second line on the Universal Price Code. Pedigree products will have "PAE" on the bottom line. Consumers can also call 1-877-568-4463 for more information.

Salmonella Schwarzengrund is one member (serovar) of the salmonella family. According to the U.S. Food and Drug administration, symptoms in humans include fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Animal symptoms include lethargy, diarrhea (sometimes bloody), fever, and vomiting. Some pets will only have decreased appetite, fever or abdominal pain.

Actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to gin up their very own landspeeder. Even though the article says it's a 1:1 copy, it looks a little small to me. Maybe I just never looked that closely at the original.

NASA's managed to capture more images of Martian whirlwinds, this time from the Phoenix lander. It's not yet clear if this is a common site near the poles.

U go wai, steel fark banwith... k thx bai!!!

Mark gets a no-prize that'll rant impressively for bringing us yet another re-imaging of just what happened in a specific bunker at a specific time and a specific place.

I honestly don't know just what it is about that scene that allows it to be re-tread time and time again and yet never once lose its funny. This one definitely worked for me. Obamamaniacs... well, probably not as much.

Olivia and Master Bruce.

Olivia is up for white belt! This is her test session. Complete with a board break!

Don' like papr... u go wai!

They probably didn't need the "bang" sound... the cat was probably hitting that printer hard enough to make plenty of noise.

It's official, the Post ran an over-the-top attack on the Republican ticket every single day this week. I wonder just how long they'll keep it up?

Nevermind, I know. November 4, right?

Airplanes do lots of things really well. Unfortunately parking in a car lot ain't one of 'em. So much for that paint job!

(09-11) 17:15 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A car-burglary suspect fell to his death early today after he climbed over a wall on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill while trying to flee from police, apparently unaware that on the other side of the wall was a 200-foot cliff, authorities said.

Article

And the Parrots!

AvWeek (natch) has some interesting commentary on the recent visit of Mr. Chavez's new friends. The Tu-160 looks like a scaled-up B-1 bomber. Whether or not it has scaled up capability commiserate with its spy-cribbed little brother is unknown.

Is it just me, or are the right's hysterical reactions to criticism of Palin starting to sound a lot like the left's hysterical reactions to criticism of Obama? Is this some sort of bizarre tit-for-tat "you started it!" sort of thing, or is it that everyone on the fringes is just plain nuts no matter which direction you look?

It would seem there's a reason people tend to believe in things like astrology and "the power of threes." To me, it looks like the old, "probability of something happening vs. the consequences of it happening" axiom in play. If being superstitious makes you less likely to get killed, then superstition will be selected for.

In other words, a smug assertion that rustling grass is caused by the wind will not impress the natives when a lion jumps out and eats you.

Fans of old buildings may find this pictorial exploration of an old abandoned brewery of interest. Remember folks, it costs money to tear something down, and nothing to leave it standing.

Then again, that building would seem to be chock-full of all sorts of useful bits, not to mention what I would suppose to be tons of Not Cheap copper. You'd think someone would've salvaged it by now.

Athlete + "Vodak" + cell phone camera = teh funnay. It takes a little while to get to the good part, but it's worth it. I wonder if the event was televised? If so, there's most likely even better footage out there somewhere.

Yes! This is one of the kitty cats I work on! Names? Nope. Sorry. Names are withheld per request of the cat!

"Dammit Snarfle, I told you if we wanted to vaporize those hairless apes we needed to get started on our gamma-ray zapper before the bloody planet was half-way across the universe!"

Astronomers think they know what caused the brightest ever gamma-ray burst, which was observed in March: a tightly beamed jet of matter that happened to be aimed almost directly at Earth.

And yes, I do know there's an inconsistency in there. Never let the facts get in the way of a really cheesy joke!

Just keep checking, just keep checking, just keep checking...

Another year, another big-money bribery scandal involving third-world leaders. Unfortunately, other countries (*cough* France *cough*) consider themselves much more "enlightened" when it comes to dealing under the table to get what they want, so this may just end up helping them instead of stopping corruption entirely.

As with all previous apocalyptic predictions, the world keeps stubbornly refusing to end. Black hole: NOT YOURS.

I can barely imagine seeing one of those monstrous strip-mine dump trucks trundling around with a driver. It would seem that, pretty soon, they'll do it all by themselves. Those things are emphatically not cheap, so it remains to be seen how Caterpillar would warranty one to not drive itself off the edge of a pit. It would, however, make a for a really amusing video!

Scientists are reporting that tiny creatures known as "water bears" are the first animals known to be able to survive the harsh environment of space. They didn't all survive... the UV radiation got most of them. However, enough did to prove it's possible, and if it's possible here it just might be possible for some small ET somewhere else to survive as well.

Mark gets an ancient upside-down no-prize for bringing us an update on those gigantic fossilized forests found in the coal mines in the border area between the states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. As noted in the article, fossilized forests aren't particularly remarkable. Fossilized forests the size of a large city are.

The Post's attempts to smear Sarah Palin are getting a little more desperate:

... what the story ultimately reveals is that Palin (a) billed the state for most expenses allowed by law, including per diem when she stayed in her own home ...; (b) didn't bill the state for other expenses, when she could have done so lawfully, such as per diems for her children; and (c) spent a lot less money on expenses than did her predecessor, especially on travel and by ridding herself of the state's personal chef.

The story's headline? "Palin Billed State for Nights Spent at Home"

And that, dear friends, is just about the clearest case of MSM bias I've seen in this campaign season to-date. Unfortunately it's just about a certainty it won't be the last.

Via Instapundit.

At first I thought this scheme to pay Jews $50,000 to move to a smallish Southern city was some "Jews for Jesus" - style recruitment effort. Then, after having actually read the article, I realized it was a synagogue-funded effort to revitalize a pre-existing Jewish community. I still don't know if it's a good idea... the reason most people move to a different city is they can't find good work at the one in which they currently live. $50,000 is very nice, but it won't last long if you can't find a job.

Aviation fans (and really, who isn't?) should find this report-and-pictures detailing the recently completed Red Flag 08 exercises of interest. I can verify that brand new airplanes smell just like brand new cars... in 1997, I walked around in a then brand new C-17, and I got a weird showroom floor deja-vu vibe from the way it smelled.

Researchers seem to have discovered evidence that at least some changes in the human species have been caused by so-called "junk" DNA. I've read rumblings that junk DNA, well, might not be, a few times before, but this is the first article that seems (to me anyway) to provide direct evidence for it..

While the MSM has fallen back to the more standard "let's cast the Republicans as religous nut-jobs" strategy, enough people are still trying to attack Sarah Palin in whatever way they can this article separating fact from fiction was still quite useful to me. The fact that many commentators still bring up her disabled child as some sort of impediment to her ability to perform the job of Vice President is to me the epitome of unacknowledged sexism. Any time I hear it, I say the same thing, "what, suddenly she doesn't have a husband?"

I guess stay-at-home dads are only relevant when you're trying to pry more tax dollars out of the system, not when, you know, they empower women or something.

Via Instapundit.

Mark gets a trunk-shaped no-prize for bringing us news of the discovery of a rare mammoth fossil in France. The species, Mammuthus trogontherii, also known as the steppe mammoth, is thought to represent a transitional type between an even earlier creature called a southern mammoth and the more familiar wooly sort.

There's detailing a car, and then there's Detailing a Car. The closest I ever got to something like this was removing my car's bumpers to polish them. Heck I only ever did that once.

Nothing else says "speed" in quite the same way as 40 mph+ runs downhill on a skateboard. Of course, nothing else would likely say "road rash" as crashing on a run like this, even though they didn't.

I wouldn't do it, but it sure was interesting to watch.

Aviation Week is today featuring the neatest air-to-air refueling picture you've seen in... I dunno, forever or something.

“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Via Instapundit.

I don't often link FARK threads, unless they have as much "WIN" as this one does. Go for the guido pictures, and do not miss guidos in motion.

The weirdest thing of all is, after living with and around yankees for the past twelve years or so, I'm starting to be able to tell the difference between someone from Jersey, Brooklyn, Long Island, upstate, and Manhattan. I guess it's a kind of radiation, seeps into your bones, that sort of thing.

I dunno... for some reason this, this reminds me of... "someone":

Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association. His mental approach to it could be visualised as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled "Me, who does the telling" and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled "Everyone else".

-- (Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)

Now, I would never think of scratching out Ridcully and putting in "Ellen". Nor would I ever change all the "he" and "his"'s into "she" and "hers"'s. My story, sticking to it.

This time it looks like they're exploring retractable rotor blades on a helicopter-like... thing. Bah. Airwolf managed all this fancy stuff and it kept its rotor blades going!

Annie gets a smoldering no-prize for bringing us this latest tale of firemen rescuing cats. The stinger? It was the little monsters who probably caused the fire in the first place!

Reviews of the new MiTo continue to roll in. It's especially heartening to hear the automaker is deciding not to build Alfas in southern Italy any more. The marque's serious decline began with the government decision to use the automaker as a tool for social change instead of making cars. The result definitely confirmed the old saying, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union."

Well, it would appear there are now just two animal species in Australia which won't kill you:

An attack on a child by a large wallaby in Cairns has sparked calls for a cull of the area's growing mob before someone is killed.

This is from a Spam-Bot.... I think.

[22:11] NigglingTrout: Listen, this is going to sound very weird, but how in the world does one remove an angry spider monkey from one's...sensitive areas?

1. Why would you put spider monkeys there?

2. Why do I care?

3. I am sure there is a cream for this.

4. Please see a therapist.

"The deadly disease sylvatic plague was discovered in May in a huge prairie dog town in the Conata Basin. The black-tailed prairie dog is the main prey of ferrets, and the disease quickly killed up to a third of the area's 290 ferrets along with prairie dogs."

Check It Out!

AWWWWWW!!!!!

Go find it on your own! Yoda the 4 eared cat! :)

"According to genetic research published on Wednesday, when Julius Caesar made his first exploratory visit to our shores in 55BC he triggered a chain of events which may have lowered our resistance to the virus which leads to Aids."

"The theory is that as the Roman Empire spread so did an unknown illness that killed those carrying a gene that would one day give their descendants resistance to the virus."

"As a result, today's inhabitants of nations once conquered by the Romans tend to lack the gene and so are more susceptible to HIV."

Interesting...

"John stopped to take a photo of the canopy, and saw something that didn't seem quite right through his viewfinder. He watched it for a little bit longer and the wind blew, and caught it, sending it spinning, and it seemed to be a body."

Read entire article here.

Really neat article! Don't miss out!

Personal dolphin-shaped watercraft, anyone? Seems to me the jumping would be fun, but not the landing.

Inkjet printer, meet the concrete jet printer. Does this mean that even illegal labor is now too expensive to build houses economically? Or, perhaps, construction demand is now so high worldwide there simply aren't enough skilled mason to go around?

Olivia would want to feed these to her plush dinosaur.

Olivia: "Daddy, what do t-rexes eat?"

Me: "I dunno, other dinosaurs I suppose."

Olivia: "No they don't! They eat guts!!!"

Me: "If you already knew the answer, what'd you ask me for?"

Olivia: "Silly daddy!"

Chicks...

Via I Speak of Dreams.

If only SNL were this funny.

The Post, at least, is most definitely hammering away at Palin, and the MSM in general is trying hard enough that British bookies are now taking bets that she'll bail, perhaps before the end of the convention. Note the snarky back-biting in this LA Times piece.

One of the other things I'm known for, in a very small and particular pond, is writing a FAQ about Alfa Spiders. I'd let the thing disappear, but due to some truly weird coincidences which will eventually be detailed here, I've decided to bring it back. So, if you're interested in Alfa Romeo Spiders (and really, who isn't?) here's where to start learnin'.

I wrote the thing 12 years ago. Geeze!

I've always been a bit chary about even accepting the existence of borderline personality disorder. It always seemed to me to be a band-aid to cover up people who were just monstrous pains in the ass. I'm sure you'll all be as shocked as I was to find out I was wrong. Scientific and repeatable study FTW!

It looks like official France is finally admitting French is no longer the, well, lingua franca of the developed world. Only took them, what, a few hundred years to get around to it?

Me, lurking on e-bay: "Hey! Did you know they make Alfa Romeo jackets!?"

*crickets*

Scott: "..."

Me:"???"

(No, really! After what is effectively 12 years of marriage, we really do "talk" like this.)

Scott, in sheepish voice: "Yeah, and they're pretty cheap too..."

Me: *blink* *blink*

Scott, desperately: "I wanted to see what mine looked like before I ordered you one!!!"

That's OK. The Alfa jacket I've picked out is way cooler than his.

Fans of Smokey and the Bandit will be sad to learn that Jerry Reed died yesterday of complications from emphysema, at the age of 71. I'd read somewhere a few months ago he was very ill, so this isn't a huge surprise to me. Doesn't mean it sucks any less.

Ron gets a sad truck-shaped no-prize for letting us know of the passing of this great entertainer.

Scientists have used observations of galactic superclusters to put a much more precise upper limit on the amount of antimatter which could exist in our visible universe. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), that amount was not actually zero.

Ah, college. The long hours. The tough assignments. The passive-aggressive room mates.

In my first "group house" we had a member who expressed his displeasure with us by turning the thermostat down to 50 at 1 am. I out-p-a'd him by waking up 5 minutes later and switching it to FAN so it'd still make noise but not freeze us/power bill us to death. Needless to say, that group didn't stay together very long.

Disapproving reporter: 1, castle: 0, teacher: 0. I'm filing this one as another case of, "I'm actually quite surprised they didn't arrest the property owner for assault."

Were it Texas, the property would've survived unscathed, but I wouldn't place the teacher's chances anywhere near as high, both on the "surviving" and "unscathed" odds.

I'm not completely sure that's a good thing. It really would be a shame if some damned fool got drunk and ended up dead because of a set of really idiotic actions. After all, that damned fool could be me! Then again, being an American and quite aware of the potential consequences of playing this particular game in the US, perhaps I'd be less likely to do something quite so spectacularly dumb. Deterrence at its finest!

Coming soon to a hookup near you: hyper-speed internet access. Hollywood has been largely ignoring the Internet's piracy potential because, right now at least, it's problematic for users to download entire movies in a hi-def format. If this sort of speed ever becomes commercially available, that restriction will perforce be removed.

In other words, you only thought that whole RIAA vs. college kids thing was a giant fiasco. Hollywood's got a lot more money to throw around, and they're much less subtle about it.

Amber gets an extremely silly no-prize for bringing us "I am Cow", a benediction to everyone's favorite burger ingredient. Moo!

'County fire spokesman Lt. Frank Fennell says the boy was eating "Steak on a Stake" when he pulled the wooden skewer out of his mouth and then somehow stuck the skewer in his eye.'

Read entire mini asinine article here.

This is WHY you pay nearly $20 a head to get in. Next thing that is going to happen... No TURKEY LEGS!