Better than Most Musicians

Sure, at first this



just seems like a guy making farty noises with his hands, but give him a minute or two to blow your mind by playing Classical Gas pretty damn accurately with those farty hands. Amazing, if you ask me. Do hit the Youtube page link for other manualist action (yes, making farty noises with your hands makes you a Manualist) in the suggestions bar to the right of the screen. Awesome is the only word that fits.

That's Not Good

Well that sucks. I loves me some Coca-Cola. Now what the hell am I supposed to drink, iced frickin' tea?

I Didn't Know that Was Possible

From the Kircher Society, a gorgeous collection of origami by a gentleman named Richard Sweeney in a Flickr set that is utterly amazing.

I remember making origami on rainy days as a kid, my sisters were much better at it than I was but I did enjoy it and made some fairly decent swans and such. I never imagined anything like this was possible, and if I understand Mr. Sweeney's explanation, he didn't have any formal training in origami before he started to mess around with paper. All the best innovations come from people like that, people who don't care what has come before, who view the past as a prison that limits the future.

Good and Good for You

The Anchoress does the heavy lifting for us. Required reading for just about everybody.

I'm a Dork

I get such a kick out of this:



That has to be my second favorite National Anthem rendition. This



is my favorite of all time.

Convergence

How cool is this? It's a picture of a Swedish logging site from the air, won some kind of wildlife photo award. I stole it from McSweeney's, right here to be exact. Scroll down and hit one of the numbered links below (where it says "other winners") for more convergence photos.

Dear Jimmy Carter: Shut the F*ck Up

I've never hated a former politician as much as I hate Jimmy Carter. Easily the worst president of the last 100 years, he's now the worst ex-president in American history. Jimmy, please have a stroke or other medical incident incompatible with you being alive.

Tiny Cutie

It's weird to remember how small and fragile Sabrina used to be. Today she's solid as a rock and tough as nails, and she's so good at athletic stuff that we don't worry about her in groups of older kids. I remember being scared to hold and carry her, being scared to change her diaper, because she was just on a whole other scale of tininess and fragility than anything I had ever dealt with. Babies are heartbreakingly vulnerable at this stage and I found it utterly terrifying pretty much the whole time. I obsessed about the tragic possibilities, and I worried every second I held her, carried her or led her by the hands that I would injure her inadvertently just by not being gentle enough.

Which was ridiculous, of course, but you couldn't have convinced me otherwise. So it's nice now that she's solid, athletic and tough and I don't have to treat her like a cracked egg. Yay Sabrina!

Look What God Can Do

A comprehensively horrifying collection of Greensburg, KS twister coverage here at Tim Blair's, where he correctly points out that if a 40,000-lb. oil tanker gets thrown about like a twig, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the local 1,000-lb. meteorite is missing. See the aerial pics at bottom of Tim's post for a serious shock.

Here's hoping God will forgive me for mocking him and Oscar Winner Jennifer Hudson in the title of this post.

Wonder Baby

So let's review what's new with Sabrina the Wonder Baby: many new physical abilities, most of them frightening-looking; drumming in rhythm with Daddy, Mommy or music; dragging both of us onto the dance floor (meaning wherever the music's playing) whenever she wants to dance, which is pretty much always; lots of new words, and all the animal sounds to Old MacDonald at the right times; spinning around in both directions until she's unable to stand up; eating spicy food and not crying; and this week, having a cold that's keeping Daddy up for the last three nights. Gosh I'm tired.

That reminds me, two days ago I was showing a house and the guy who lived there, who should have gotten the hell out instead of shadowing us like Gollum the whole time, was an engineer who had experienced some sort of religious conversion and was pitching it all to become a Christian counselor. Of course I ended up saying G*ddamn three or four times and a couple of other blasphemies. I don't know that God minds, but I imagine the guy who just renounced material wealth to worship full-time probably does.

Picture by lovely and talented sister Genie.

Weng Weng Can't Be Stopped

Or is it Wang Wang? I did myself and the rest of the world a great injustice when I failed to post this the day my little sister Patsy sent it over:



They just don't make films like that any more.

Who'd a Thunk It

Wait, Al Gore's carbon offset fantasy is a scam? You're kidding:

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

Well, what a surprise. A fake problem with an even faker solution that makes Al Gore and his buddies rich. How could that possibly go wrong?

That's What I Call Asskicking

Geekologie is right, this is the best unedited fight scene I've ever seen in a movie, starring Tony Jaa of Ong Bak fame. Just a joy to behold:

Kissy Girl

This isn't the best picture of Sabrina, but it does chronicle her foray into kissing banditry. Sometimes she runs between Mommy and Daddy, bestowing kisses lovingly, for minutes at a time. It's just about the best thing ever.

She's also a big hugger right now, and seems to want to hug other kids, some of whom don't really want a hug. Which can be kind of heartbreaking, watching your daughter try to hug another kid and get knocked to the ground in the process. Fortunately Sabrina's such a trouper that it never bothers her, she just gets up and keeps trying to hug the kid.

Super Girl

Guess who caught a ball for the first time yesterday? We had been playing around with a little Nerf football the night before, and although she could fastball it off my breastbone from 5 feet away very consistently, we haven't really tried to get her to catch anything yet, so I tossed it to her about 15 times gently. On the last five or so I noticed she was closing her hands a little earlier each time, but she got tired and wanted Mommy after that so I took her upstairs to bed. Then the next morning, as she was eating some mango, I threw it gently at her chest, and as she was closing her hands a little late, it bounced off and hit her hands, and she caught it.

God I love first-time experiences with Sabrina, every one is such a wonderful gift and I'll remember them all forever.

UPDATE: I forgot, this pic was taken by my lovely sister Genie, who lost a good friend last week. Send her your love and prayers.

Now I'm Thoroughly Confused

Ever since my father explained that trees, or at least older trees, don't do much of the CO2 scrubbing that we imagine they do (saplings are a lot more helpful than 200-year-old behemoths, for example, and the grass under a big old tree generally does more for the "environment" than the tree itself does), I've been alarmed by how little the average person truly knows about any of this environmental stuff. It's not obvious to me that many people understand even a small slice of the Global Warming puzzle, and who really knows if trees help at all. No, seriously:

Before compact fluorescent light bulbs and ethanol, the first line of defense against global warming was planting trees.

Forests, after all, cool the atmosphere by drinking in carbon dioxide from the air. A new study, however, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that forests' other climatic effects can cancel out their carbon cleaning advantage in some parts of the world. Using a three-dimensional climate model, the research team mimicked full global deforestation and also studied the effects of lear-cutting in different regions of latitude, such as the tropics and boreal zones. Apparently, these natural carbon sinks only do their job effectively in tropical regions; in other areas, they have either no impact or actually contribute to warming the planet. In fact, according to this model, by the year 2100, if all the forests were cut and left to rot, the annual global mean temperature would decrease by more than 0.5 degree Fahrenheit. (Emphasis mine)

This is Scientific American, mind you, not exactly a supporter of the Bush administration or big business. And if you think that's confusing, read this:

Trees perform three major climate functions: They absorb carbon, which they pull from the atmosphere, creating a cooling effect; their dark green leaves absorb light from the sun, heating Earth's surface; and they draw water from the soil, which evaporates into the atmosphere, creating low clouds that reflect the sun's hot rays (a mechanism known as evotranspiration that also leads to cooling). These three factors—the second two being largely ignored in climate models up to this point, according to Caldeira—taken together created very different results in the primary latitudes studied: the equatorial tropic zone; the midlatitudes that include most of the U.S.; and the boreal areas, which are subarctic and include much of Canada, Russia and the northern extremities of the U.S.

In all three regions, forests dutifully perform their task of sucking carbon dioxide from the air, but light absorption and evotranspiration vary wildly. In tropical zones, forests have a significant, overall cooling effect. The soil is very wet and, so, via evotranspiration, the trees are covered by low-lying clouds that create a small albedo (power of light that is reflected by a surface). In nontropical areas, Caldeira explains, "the real significant factor is whether there's snow on the ground in the winter." If a forest covers a snowy expanse, "that has a strong warming influence," he notes, because of little cloud cover resulting from less efficiency in evaporating water. The poor cloud formation coupled with the intense absorption of light by the trees "far overwhelms the cooling influence of the carbon storage," he says.

Action Baby

This fine picture was taken by Sabrina's cousin Amber, who picked exactly the right moment to capture this slide. You can see me in the background, just having launched my daughter a little faster than she could go without me, and you can see how happy it makes her. Such a daring child, I fear Mommy's going to have a rough rest of her life worrying about the adventures of Sabrina.

Soon our little girl will graduate to the big kid slide, and that should be all kinds of fun. Anything but the big kiddie castle, built so adults can only enter by crouching down in the most unpleasantly uncomfortable way. Sabrina's not big or skilled enough to deal with the winding staircase and other dangers, so one of us has to murder our lower backs while supporting her throughout the damn thing. I want to burn it down.

Inside the Fuselage

Sabrina loves the little park near our house, and this tunnel leads to her favorite slide, which she loves to be pushed down so she can get a little more speed out of the deal. I haven't found her limits very often, I think I scared her pretty good once going too fast in the stroller (I've rarely felt like such a jerk, although apparently it wasn't too traumatic) but that's pretty much it. She cries when she falls or when strange people try to touch her, but that's it.

As much as I want to leave her alone while she's trying to do physical things, I have to admit I love being part of her adventure. As a former daredevil, I have a decent sense of when she's really in trouble and when it just looks dangerous, and I try to help her avoid disastrous consequences without denying her the chance to fail, because some lessons must be reinforced by pain to be truly learned. By which I mean I only catch her when it's going to be a bad fall, with blood and head injuries.

More park fun in a moment.

The Ephemeral Nature of Art

This may be the most interesting thing I've posted on this blog. There may be some Photoshopping involved, but even so, smoke art is amazingly beautiful, in the same way that fire is beautiful in and of itself. The art part is an unexpected bonus.

'Cause I Got Into a Fistfight

That isn't really the reason Sabrina has steak on her head, but it sounds cool. She just gathered up the risotto, steak and spinach and made a jaunty little hat that I hope will become popular with the young folk. Maybe this simple act will usher in a new era of meat-based headgear, first on the runways of Milan and Paris, and eventually on aisle 38 at WalMart.

And when that happens, remember: it was Sabrina's idea, and she'll punch you in the nose if you say otherwise. Look at those dukes. They'll getcha.

That's Just Cruel

Poor Florida Gator basketball star Joakim Noah (son of Yannick Noah, '80s-era tennis star). As if it weren't enough that he's become the subject of thousands of mean-spirited photoshops, now the Thighmaster has done a separated-at-birth on him that can only be described as comprehensively brutal and hilarious.

I Want One, pt. 3

But honestly, who wouldn't? My birthday is Dec. 13, by the way. Hint, hint.

Wayback Friday

Fred probably remembers this moment in 2002, I think the yellow thing was a part of some stuffed animal. I remember Fred being unhappy about it, that's for sure.

Trying to rest today, I've been working like mad and am having a nice month of March, but my body is failing and I need to stay on the couch today if I don't want to come apart completely. Which will be difficult considering how much work there is to do. We'll see what happens.

It may well be that I will need a neck fusion before too long. I really don't want to have to do that so soon after my lower back surgery, but that's probably the way it is. Damn you, extreme sports!

Mmmm Hmmmm

Heavy stuff over at One Cosmos today. Heavy and true:

Now, it seems to me that the left is King Midas in reverse, in that it destroys whatever it touches and reduces gold to excrement, whether it is institutions, countries, cultures, or individuals. I realize this sounds harsh, but I believe it is self-evident, since we can see the disastrous outcome of leftist ideas before our eyes. It's not as if the results are hidden, because whatever the left controls goes through a predictable process of degeneration and decline.

For example, we all know that our educational system is a mess, the reason being that the left has had complete control of it for some 50 years, to such an extent that neither political party can avoid using leftist assumptions to tackle the problem.

I'm guessing that the U.N. probably started out with noble liberal ideals and not completely cynical leftist ones. Perhaps not. But in any event, it was long ago taken over by leftists and has become the biggest and most illiberal institution on the planet. Imagine an even remotely liberal U.N. If such a thing existed, there would be universal condemnation of Iran or North Korea. They would be completely isolated from the civilized world. In fact, any country that sided with them would be tossed out of the U.N. and isolated as well. The big mistake of the U.N. -- which is the universal mistake of leftism -- was having no standards for membership. It is a sick joke that members of the U.N. are given rights and privileges that they would never grant their own people. Among the Saudis, only their diplomats are allowed to vote, drink, and patronize the most expensive blonde hookers in Manhattan.

The left has also controlled most of the major urban centers for the past 40-50 years -- including, most infamously, New Orleans. I frequently visited New York before Rudy became mayor, so I know what it was like when the left was in total control. It's not as if the differences could only be detected in abstract crime statistics and the like. The entire vibe of the city changed. And yet, I well remember liberals routinely referring to Giuliani as a fascist and cretin. Imagine if New York had been allowed to continue sliding down the path it was headed in the early 1990's, with more leftist solutions applied to the problems resulting from leftist solutions. (emphasis mine)

I can't argue with a word of that. Or of this:

Because of the thought-control of the left, one can hardly discuss these matters without being regarded either as racist or condescending, but I think that blacks made America's greatest artistic contribution to world culture in the form of the various idioms of music they produced during the 50 years or so between about 1925 and 1975 -- gospel, jazz, rhythm & blues, soul, and various sub-genres of jazz such as dixieland, swing, ragtime, boogie woogie, bop, hard bop, post-bop, modal, and other distinct variants. Not only is my life spiritually enriched every single day by this art, but it is difficult to imagine what my life would be like without it. It would be such a deprivation.

What happened to it? Why did black creativity take off in the 1920s and continue through the 1960s, only to go into decline after the mid-'70s? Speaking only of the music, how could something so beautiful transform into something so barbarous and ugly within a single generation? How do we explain the devolution from Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg, or John Coltrane to Ludacris, or Dinah Washington to Michael Jackson?

More generally, why did black culture produce such timeless and transcendent excellence before leftists began meddling with their culture? Prior to the 1960s, the black family was known for its strength and stability in the face of adversity, not its fragility in the midst of abundance. I have spoken to many blacks of the older generation (now in their '60s and '70s), and all agree that educational standards have declined dramatically since segregation ended. Obviously, this is not because segregation ended, but because that is when blacks were subsumed into the white leftist educational establishment and designated victims, so that the same standards need not apply to them. This is another fine example of the illiberalism of the left. (emphasis mine)

Some of my closest friends are leftists, and I just don't get it. It's not about feelings, it's about results. Leftism doesn't produce the results any of us want. Isn't that the only thing that really matters in this debate?

Hell to the No

Holy jeez this chick is spooky. Those really are her eyes, it's not anime or something done with Photoshop. Check her out here, some of those modeling shots are downright creepy as hell.