Up was good-- another quality Pixar production.  It wasn't WALL-E good or Monsters Inc. good (cuz those movies were great), and it wasn't as mainstreamly good like Finding Nemo.  It was more of a tearjerker than these other films, although I'm not sure how to describe it well. 

And yet only now am I finally reading his wiki page.  Funny excerpt:

As a humorous tribute to him, a Sagan has been defined as a humorous unit of measurement equal to at least four billion, since the lower bound of a number conforming to the constraint of billions and billions must be two billion plus two billion.^[22][23] Assuming one uses the short scale definition for billion, there are nearly 100 Sagan (400,000,000,000) stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Fox is to political news what Weekly World News was to supermarket tabloids...but without a sense of humor.

For capthek , the technological optimist:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090708/sc_mcclatchy/3268145

I'm taking a long time to get through this great web article on commonly mispronounced words by The Mad Logophile.  Here's one tiny example: 

Jaguar is jag-wahr. The "u" is pronounced as a "w." Don’t say jag-you-are unless you are singing Pink Floyd's Welcome To The Machine. There are only two syllables, not three.

Sometimes, you see a movie and you decide you want the full version, so you go read the book. In nearly every case, the book is better than the movie. And why wouldn't it be? Books take several times longer and involve the reader's brain much more extensively than a film does.

Unfortunately, the Coen Brothers shocked me by making a movie that is nearly exactly the book, minus some of the whining of the old man. I believe the film was better than the book.

This is the 3rd such instance I have experienced in my lifetime, joining Blade Runner (go see the Final Cut) and Mother Night (same name as Vonnegut book).

And they are my favorite multi-issue political organization, the lobbying arm of the Quakers.  They have great principles and vision, and yet they remain pragmatic, trying to improve things as much as possible at any given time.

Their bottom line:
The legislation transfers hundreds of billions of dollars from consumers to fossil fuel companies and electric utilities without requiring them to take the necessary steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to science-based levels.

Their (shorter) article about the climate change bill is here:
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=3667&issue_id=102

Kucinich lists well-researched reasons for voting against H.R. 2454, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009:

http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=134813

Go read it and tell me if you disagree with any of it.  Then call your Senators and demand they improve it substantially.

My 3rd album will be called Listening For Returning Echoes.

My 2nd album will be called A Cycle of Waves.

"House Republicans presented a four-page outline of their health care reform plan Wednesday but said they didn’t know yet how much it would cost, how they would pay for it and how many of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance would be covered by it."

They're not even trying to compete on policy.

The SUV of the week is the GMC Yukon, an obnoxious behemoth that brushed by me on the road today.  But wait, was that a green HYBRID logo I spied on the back of that monstrosity?  Indeed it was.

That led me to wonder what mileage the hybrid version would have to get for me not to hate it for its general offensive hugeness (cars getting struck by SUVs are way more likely to be killed).  My 21-year old car gets 34 MPG overall (probably 30 city and 36 highway), so I figured if the Prius can get 50 MPG overall the Yukon should get at least 30.

I went to the GMC website to learn that the Hybrid Yukon gets 21/22MPG, whereas the normal, non-hybrid Yukon gets 15/21.

One advantage of our environmental crisis is that we have so much to improve on.

(I hope those windmills were well paid to appear in that picture.)

John Hodgman attempts to find out whether Obama is a true nerd.

14 minutes of comedy.

I have long opposed the eating of raw cookie dough, a crime worse than eating veal.  And today I read this headline:
Nestle Cookie Dough Tied to 66 Illnesses From E. Coli

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the accidental killing of civilians in Afghanistan has become one of the military's greatest strategic problems in the faltering war.

54 minutes long.  He gets into specific budget numbers at around 40 minutes.

http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001843/

Good article, responding to the Republicans continuing to tease me when warning about Obama instituting "European Socialism".

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/6/16/743092/-Senator-McConnell,-YOU-picked-the-battleground!

OK, so I haven't created my album yet,  but I have some great names in mind, so I wanted to type them here (date stamped and everything) to claim dibs on them.  I will eventually create electronic music under the name Cyclonic Action, my first album will be called Data Integrity, and it will be published on the Lounging Ninja label.