Somehow, while watching this event on “real” TV the other day, I missed this. OMG!
William Shatner sings (for certain values of “sing”) to George Lucas
…Worth watching just to see Harrison Ford veering dangerously close to anoxia. George’s poleaxed looks, every now and then, are also priceless.
(As it happens, P. and I are co-guests with Shatner at the Fargo Fantasy Festival later this year. I can’t wait to sit down somewhere quiet with the man — whom I haven’t seen in the flesh since he was hit with a pie at a very early New York Trek convention — and talk a little Denny Crane with him.)
This collection of questions purportedly sent to the organizers of the Sydney Olympics makes me seriously doubt that old canard of my teachers’ that “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Yes there is! (or at least that’s what I think before having my tea…)
Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name. It’s a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA)
A: It’s called a Drop Bear. They are so called because they drop out of gum trees and eat the brains of anyone walking underneath them. You can scare them off by spraying yourself with human urine before you go out walking.
Q: Which direction is North in Australia? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 90 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we’ll send the rest of the directions.
Q: It is imperative that I find the names and addresses of places to contact for a stuffed porpoise. (Italy)
A: I’m not even going to ask…
Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys’ Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is…oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in King’s Cross, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.
(Thanks and a tip of the bush-hat-with-corks-hanging-off-it to Khorbin at Geeks Incognito.)
…my favorite tea mug that said “Caffeine First, Wizardry Later”. I got it ages ago to test the CafePress printing system (which is pretty good). Got a little careless this morning, put it down too close to the edge of the counter, turned to pick up the teapot…and crash!
Oh well. The design was a little tired anyway, and imperfect — the regular Tema Cantante font (that’s the one they use for the titles on the YW books) doesn’t work too well in smaller sizes or when there’s too much text: the thin upstrokes get lost. The sans-serif Cantante, though, works better. So I’ve pulled the old mug designs and done new ones that wrap right around the cup instead of just being on one side. For anyone who’s even slightly interested, they’re here, in tea, coffee, cocoa, and generic caffeine versions (just the molecule instead of an image of a cup). You can click on the image below for a larger image showing the tea variant.
…And now I’m gonna go off and order myself one, because all the other mugs in this house are too small for the way I drink tea in the morning.
In a purr-fect ending, a miner with a heart of gold…rescued Molly the cat last night.
After spending 14 days stuck in the guts of a 19th-century West Village building, New York’s famous fur ball was safe and sound and eating sardines.
The kitty cornered in the wall had drawn such widespread attention that she had become the city’s newest attraction, touching the hearts of locals and tourists alike.
…Between yesterday and the day she got stuck (April 1st), here are some of the ways they tried to get her out:
- Humane traps baited with mackerel
- Entreaties from cat therapist Carole Wilbourn
- Mewing kittens
- Tiny video cameras
- Recordings of whale and gull sounds (That was supposed to help how? Someone please explain that to me. Especially the gull sounds….)
- Pet psychic Maxine Albert
- Removing bricks from landmarked building
- Drilling holes in same (Before removing them, I assume.)
- Animal Care & Control officers
- NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers
- Catnip (Yes indeed, when all else fails, try drugs… [eyeroll]))
(See also [if you can get at it without a subscription] the New York Times‘s take on the story)
Oh, yeah, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and I was dealing with requests for help with people’s soda bread, or some such.
WASHINGTON — President Bush nominated infinitely rapacious cosmic entity Galactus on Thursday to be his new interior secretary.
If confirmed by the Senate, Galactus, 11 Billion, will replace Gale Norton, who resigned last week.
Bush said Galactus, Third Force of the Universe and Devourer of Worlds, wields the Power Cosmic and has broad experience needed for eating the 388 parks of the National Park system, 544 wildlife refuges and more than 260 million acres of multiple-use lands located mainly in 12 Western states, in addition to the rest of the planet.
“Galan understands that those who live closest to the land know how to manage it best, and he will begin preparations to digest our planet immediately,” Bush said.
Galactus promised to construct giant machines in the heart of Manhattan in order to “suck the very essence from the land and consume the natural resources with which your planet has been blessed.”
His chances of Senate confirmation are greatly increased by his godlike endurance, immesurable intelligence, omnipotence and possession of the Ultimate Nullifier. The Senate rarely turns down cosmic beings of utter destruction, and Republicans hold the majority with 55 of 100 seats.
“Galactus is a strong nominee,” said Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. “I look forward to his swift confirmation by the Senate.”
But for some reason, not everyone seems to have liked this idea.
Barbara Miller, a citizen activist in northern Idaho who has fought for decades to get more health screening for local people affected by historic lead and zinc pollution from the Bunker Hill Mine, said Galactus has an interest in eating the planet Earth, at the expense of the environment.
See, now, those pesky fault-finding tree-huggers, they’ll complain about just anything.
The Venus Express has successfully gone into orbit. Yay ESA!
After the end of the main engine burn, Venus Express still had to perform a few automatic operations. These included re-orienting the solar panels towards the Sun and one of its high gain antennas (the smaller High Gain Antenna 2) towards Earth.
It is through this antenna that the spacecraft established the first communication link with Earth and started to send back information about its health status. The spacecraft data are sent to ESA’s European Spacecraft Operations Centre (ESOC) via ESA’s Cebreros ground station near Madrid. The data downlink lasts for a few hours.
(Long enough for him to start blogging, it looks like. Wonder if that downlink counts as broadband?)
Christians Sue For Right Not To Tolerate Policies
Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she’s a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.
Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she’s demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
And a little further on in the article we find out why:
In their lawsuit against Georgia Tech, Malhotra and her co-plaintiff, a devout Jewish student named Orit Sklar, request unspecified damages. But they say their main goal is to force the university to be more tolerant of religious viewpoints.
So let me get this straight. They’re suing to stop tolerance…to increase tolerance? (headclutch)
I have got to stop reading the news before I’ve had my tea. (staggers off, muttering)
Wowie!
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has uncovered new evidence that planets might rise from a dead star’s ashes.The infrared telescope surveyed the scene around a pulsar, the remnant of an exploded star, and found a surrounding disk made up of debris shot out during the star’s death throes. The dusty rubble in this disk might ultimately stick together to form planets.
This is the first time scientists have detected planet-building materials around a star that died in a fiery blast.
Yet another cool “missing link”:
Fossils of a species of fish in the act of adapting to life on land have been found by scientists, shedding new light on one of the most momentous events in evolution.
The well-preserved remains of creatures with a crocodile-like head and flattened body neatly fill a gap between fish and the first creatures to walk on land.
Previous fossils representing this milestone have essentially been fish with a few land characteristics, or slightly fishy land vertebrates. The newly-found fossils show an animal that sits between the two.
Dr Ted Daeschler, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, said: “The find is a dream come true.”
Put Chapter Two up for the subscribers very, very early this morning, and then forgot to edit the gateway page so that other human beings could actually get at it.
Many apologies, everybody. It’s accessible now. (And I had a chance to get at it again this morning and remove some typos that squeaked through.)
If you’re not a subscriber and you’d like to see the chapter before it goes public, now’s the time to go to the Big Meow subscriptions page and choose the option that best appeals to you — single-chapter or full-novel.