"During a campaign event, Newt Gingrich was bitten by a penguin. It was feeding time and Newt and the penguin were fighting over pieces of squid."
–Conan O'Brien


Please, someone make a video of this in claymation or somesuch.

This one goes out to the Captain, who loves maps and politics:  (from http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_357_19-things-college-students-suspect-about-real-world_p19/#13)

Drive: Rotten Tomatoes described it as a perfect blend of art-house movie and action flick, but it was actually a very bloody violent mobster movie.  Fortunately, the film gave me occasional breaks from the bloodshed to zoom in on Carey Mulligan's dimples.  This movie had the plot (essentially) of Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Diego Garcia with a bit of No Country For Old Men thrown in.  It was OK, but failed to live up to the hype.

A Dangerous Method: I have to see any Cronenberg movie, and with Strider playing Freud, it promised a fun time.  But in the end it was a surprisingly flat talkie about Jung and Freud's friendship and dissolution.  Don't see it to learn anything about psychology.  Do see it if you want to see Keira Knightley play a true masochist.  I found it to be Cronenberg's most normal movie, and that is not a compliment, especially after his recent excellent movies eXistenZ, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises.

Both movies put me in earshot of older folks who talked through the movies, at volumes that in their deafness they thought were reasonable, but forced me to shush all of them.  People suck, and I should stick to rentals.

He has been great on so many levels. First he was a Bill O'reilley clone who took it to its comedic extreme to mock it mercilessly. He did it right to Bill's and W's faces directly too.

Nowadays he seems to be channeling the Smothers Brothers in their most subversive fashion. With his chiseled looks (Church of the Subgenius-esque) he has provided the best TV platform for political progressives. He has them on regularly, and gets away with it by being "hostile" to them and their views.

Now, he's been trying to exploit the worst laws in the worst ways possible to show how terrible the laws are. Here's his superpac essentially campaigning against the existence of superpacs:
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/01/19/colbert_super_pac_attacks_colbert.html

And most impressive of all, he's able to be consistently funny (sorry Stewart, you're mostly a straight man) while doing all of this.

(I'm not sure what people mean by "TV"-- I think that must be some old obsolete platform. I watch Colbert on hulu.)

I came in to this book with one thing on my mind: Tyrion. He cast a huge shadow over the last book, A Feast For Crows, which was so much poorer for his absence. In fact, I found AFFC to be a disappointing book, but I blamed it on the fact that the book only dealt with my least favorite characters. In ADWD, we get large servings of Tyrion, Danaerys, and Jon Snow, which made me optimistic. Unfortunately, not only did the author stick with every minor character ever introduced, but he felt the need to introduce too many more. The characters just weren't vivid, the dialogue was unmemorable, and the overabundance of plot threads advanced too slowly.

After 940-something pages of what he meant to include in the last book, I was just exhausted to read so much to have so little happen. Which was my complaint about AFFC too.

Seeing this picture and appreciating our First Lady, my inner Corporal Hicks is desperately saying, "Put her in charge!"

Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies


Despite my nickname, I haven't studied galaxies nearly enough. As a Carl Saganist, I emphasize a galactic perspective, but what do we really know about galaxies?

Here's some starting info that I gathered today:

Earth's solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains 200-400 billion stars. Our sun orbits the Milky Way about every 225-250 million years.

The Milky Way and Andromeda make up a binary spiral galaxy system at the center of our Local Group, which contains about 30 galaxies, many much smaller than ours.

This Local Group is part of the Virgil Supercluster of about 100 galaxies.

There are approximately 200 billion galaxies in the known universe.

Our universe is estimated to be 13.2 billion years old.

Hey everyone,

I'm now on Google+, which is basically like facebook except that it's better because it's not facebook.  Feel free to find me there.