Correction

An alert and knowledgeable reader informs me that "radar" stands for "Radio Aid to Detection And Ranging."

Tuesday Beakful of Knowledge

Radar originally stood for RAdio Detection And Ranging. Similarly, sonar started as an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging.

You know you've been playing too much Tetris when...

...you close your eyes and see falling Tetris blocks on the inside of your eyelids. I think I am way beyond that now. I've started mentally dropping Tetris blocks into the ragged right margins of left-justified text to clear lines.

Gotta Get Me One of These

Emp. Peng. reminds me that we have nowhere to put the Blue LED Faucet Light, no matter how cool it is or how useful it might be for illuminating nighttime trips for a glass of water. The bathroom faucet is too short and the kitchen faucet is occupied by the Brita filter. Still, the idea of having blue illuminated water is appealing. Much more appealing than the orange-brown water situation we recently remedied.

Monday Beakful of Knowledge

I'm lightening up this week. The theme will be words that started out as acronyms and what they originally stood for.

Scuba: Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

Weekend Beakful of Knowledge

Most planets don't experience total solar eclipses with the pretty corona shots (like this one). Those are only possible because the moon and the sun appear to be approximately the same size in the sky. The moons of Mars are too small to produce total eclipses on the planet

Also, it helps to have a moon. Mercury and Venus do not experience solar eclipses because they have no moons to get between them and the sun.

Friday Beakful of Knowledge

Yesterday, I promised to explain the astronomical significance of the Tropics.

The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn mark the latitudes where the sun is directly overhead on the June and December solstices, respectively. Between those two latitudes, at some point during the year, the sun is directly overhead. North of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the sun is never directly overhead; its highest point at noon is something less than 90 degrees from the horizon. In winter, the angle of noon is lower, and in summer, the angle of noon is higher.

The word "tropic" comes from the Greek word "tropikos," meaning "to turn." Because the sun appeared to turn around on the solstices--on the winter solstice, the angle of noon stopped descending and headed back up in the sky, vice versa on the summer solstice--the word also came to be synonymous with "solstice." Hence, the latitudes of the solstices became the Tropics.

The reason they are called the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn brings us back to precession of the equinoxes. The two Tropics were named about 2000 years ago, when the sun appeared to be in the constellation Cancer on the June solstice and in the constellation Capricorn on the December solstice. Because of precession, the sun is now in the constellation Sagittarius on the December solstice and in Gemini or Taurus on the June solstice. The June solstice position crossed the official astronomical boundary into Taurus about 25 years ago, but the official and traditional boundaries differ; according to traditional boundaries, the June solstice is still in Gemini.

Beak Addendum-Sidereal and Tropical

Tropical, in today's Beakful, has nothing to do with pina coladas under a palm tree on a white sandy beach with comely ladies in bikinis. There is an astronomical reason for the latitudes around the equator being called "the tropics," but you will have to wait for tomorrow's Beakful to find out.

To clarify the difference, Tropical is basically solar time, while Sidereal is based on observation of the stars.

The differences add up to about 21 minutes a year, meaning that Tropical and Sidereal observations of the sky sync up on a cycle of about 26,000 years--and we're back to precession of the equinoxes.

Thursday Beakful of Knowledge

Precession also causes the equinox and solstice points to drift across the backdrop of stars, including the constellations that cross the zodiac. The zodiac is a line in the sky that one gets by extending the plane of the solar system (all planets except Pluto orbit on approximately the same plane) into space. Astrologers extend the zodiac zone about 8 degrees above and below that line for purposes of noting planetary alignments and such. That's about 16 times the width of the full moon.

Tropical astrology, the type used in most newspaper horoscopes, uses the solstice points of the first millennium. Since then, precession caused the astronomical solstice points to drift almost a full sign.

The dates of the Sidereal zodiac, practiced by Indian astrologers, adjust to account for precession. This adjustment means that a person’s sign under Sidereal astrology, which may not match the sign of the Tropical zodiac, more closely matches the actual position of the stars.

Both Tropical and Sidereal astrology divide the zodiac into 12 equal segments and assign each segment to a sign based on the constellation that is now or was in that general region of the sky. However, the actual constellations are not uniform sizes, and the amount of space on the zodiac is not equal. While astrology allocates 30 degrees for each sign, the constellations occupy more or less than that. In addition, a thirteenth constellation, Ophiuchus, lies on the band of the zodiac, a fact noted by Ptolemy in the second century and generally ignored by most astrologers.

This link has a handy chart of dates for the signs of the Tropical and Sidereal zodiacs, as well as the dates the sun crosses the official astronomical borders of the constellations on the zodiac.

“Zodiac” is good for 18 points in Scrabble. The word comes from the Greek words for “animal” and “circle.”

Penguin News

The first penguin chick has hatched at Malaysia's Underwater World Langkawi. The African Penguin chick is being kept in an area accessible to only authorized keepers, out of concerns of avian flu. Three other African Penguin eggs are still being incubated at the park.

Ten Gentoo penguins have been named and moved into their new homes at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina. The penguins--now christened Alex, Bosco, Caroline, Hallie, Harmony, Jack, Maddie, Oreo, Orlando and Zoey--originate from Sea World Orlando, and have just recently come out of quarantine to join the rest of the exhibit, which features Rockhoppers and Kings.

Wednesday Beakful of Knowledge

Because of precession (see yesterday's Beakful), pole stars are not permanent. Polaris, the current north star, will eventually lose its navigational usefulness as the direction that the north pole points starts to drift away from it. Our next north star will be Gamma Cephei, aka Errai, a binary star known to have a planet. You have about 900 years to wait before the pole stars change over, and another millennium beyond that before the north pole points most closely to Gamma Cephei.

There is a south star, Sigma Octantis, but it is too dim to be of much practical use in navigation. In a couple millennia, the southern hemisphere will get a better pole star.

Mars currently has a south star, Kappa Velorum.

Tuesday Beakful of Astro-Knowledge

The Earth wobbles slightly (about 23.5 degrees from vertical) on its axis, due to the same forces that make a toy top wobble slightly as it spins. The technical term for the wobble is "precession," and it takes about 25, 800 years for the earth to complete one precession cycle, where the projection of the Earth's axis traces out circle against the backdrop of the stars.

This phenomenon has two practical effects for Earthlings. First, the pole stars change periodically as the axis traces out that circle. Second, the signs of the Tropical Zodiac (the one used for most newspaper horoscopes) drift out of sync with the position of the sun on the Zodiac. Details on both in future Beakfuls. Stay tuned to find out what your actual astrological sign is.

Equinotical Beakful of Knowledge

The vernal equinox occurred at 6:26 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time today, marking the official start of Spring. Astronomically, the equinoxes are when the sun crosses the plane created by extending Earth's equator out into space. The two equinoxes are also the points when the Earth's rotational axis, which is tilted with respect to the plane of Earth's orbit, is perpendicular to the sun, pointing neither toward the sun nor away from it. The practical upshot of that here on the surface of the Earth is that day and night are equal in length. From now until the summer solstice, days will get longer, and until the autumnal equinox in September, there will be more light than dark, at least in the Northern hemisphere. While the equinoxes are often thought of as being days, actually they are only a moment.

Nothing about the vernal equinox makes it any more amenable to standing an egg on end than any other day of the year.

The word "equinox" gets you 23 points in Scrabble.

Random Thought of the Day

The Star Trek series included several examples of Klingon Opera. What do you suppose Klingon Top 40 sounds like?

Weekend Beakful of Knowledge

The Pillsbury Doughboy is, or at least was, married. In the 1970's, Poppin Fresh was joined in advertisements by his wife, Poppy Fresh. Poppin was originally voiced by Paul Frees, who has far too many credits to mention. When Frees died, the voicing was taken over by Jeff Bergman, who also supplied the voice for Charlie the Tuna.

Though there is some disagreement about who at the ad agency actually conceived of the idea of Poppin Fresh, one of the first people to commit Poppin to paper was Martin Nodell, better known as the comic book artist who created The Green Lantern.

Friday Beakful of Trivia

The horse who played Mr. Ed started off life named Bamboo Harvester. He was foaled in 1949 in El Monte, California, a short trail ride from where yours truly was born.

Thursday Double Beakful of Knowledge

"His Master's Voice," the painting that became the RCA Victor logo, featuring Nipper looking into the horn of a phonograph, originally featured an Edison-Bell wax cylinder phonograph and a black bell (contrary to legend, there is no indication that it originally showed Nipper and the phonograph at a funeral). No wax cylinder record company wanted to buy the painting, so Francis Barraud painted a Gramophone with a brass bell over the Edison phonograph when he sold the painting for £100 to the Gramophone Company. The original "His Master's Voice" hangs at EMI's headquarters. Barraud was commissioned to paint 24 copies of the work for the Gramophone Company. The image and the phrase "His Master's Voice" are both trademarked.

As for Nipper, he started off as a stray mutt from Bristol, England. He was owned by Francis Barraud's brother, and Francis inherited the pooch upon the brother's death. Later, Nipper went back to the brother's widow. Nipper is said to have gotten his name from his habit of nipping at ankles. He died in 1895 at age 11 and is buried at Kingston-upon-Thames, in what is now the parking lot of a bank.

Tuesday Beakful of Knowledge

Though the first record to "go gold" was the soundtrack to Oklahoma!, the first Gold Record was given to Chattanooga Choo-Choo by Glenn Miller, and the award was made from one of the masters for the album, lacquered in gold. The official Gold Record award is now given by the RIAA, and the records in the award plaque are often not copies of the album receiving the award. That was true even before the decline in popularity of vinyl records.

Happy Pi Day

...Unless you are a DD/MM/YY date format user, in which case today is 14/3, and you have your choice of celebrating Purim or one week until the vernal equinox (note: Purim has better pastries). However, for those of us on the MM/DD format, today is 3/14. Mark your calendar: in nine years, we get 3/14/15 9:27. Party down with all things circular. The DD/MM folks will have to wait for January 3, 2042, when the date will be 3/1/42. If we go to decimal time in the next 35 years, they can celebrate a year early on 3/1/41 at 5:93.

Monday Beakful of Knowledge

The mountain goat is more closely related to antelope than goats.

Porpoising through Current Events

Don't eat this yellow snow, either. Yellow snow is common enough, but the yellow snow in South Korea was falling that way. Yellow dust regularly blows in from the northern Chinese desert, and this time the dust storm met up with snow flurries. Officials warn that the yellow snow presents a health hazard, being somewhat more toxic than standard yellow snow.

Friday Beakful of Knowledge

The first "bug in the system" was a moth that found its way inside a computer. The moth carcass is now housed in the Smithsonian.

Tuxedo Junction

We went to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra tonight. The band was great. I should have suspected something about the audience, though, when the tickets misspelled "Glenn." About 90% of the audience was of an age to have possibly seen the Glenn Miller Orchestra when it was led by Glenn Miller, so one would think that they would be able to handle a well-cued sing-along to "Pennsylvania 6-5000." Not so. Apparently, the bulk of the audience forgot the words. That's saying a lot, since there are only four words to "Pennsylvania 6-5000," and they are (get ready) "Pennsylvania six five thousand." Well, there are five words if one counts the final line, which is "Pennsylvania six five oh oh oh." The only song with easier lyrics is "Tequila." Nothing contrasts with the authentic acoustic big band sound like 1,200 people not singing along.

Thursday's Beakful of Trivia

Jane Barbe, the voice behind phone messages such as "At the tone, the time will be..." and "Your call cannot be completed as dialed," was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and her normal speaking voice had a southern drawl.

In the Craw: Lime Jelly Beans

I love Easter. Not so much the holiday, which I do not celebrate, but the candy. Easter has the best original candy of any holiday. Later, I will go over the science lesson that can be had microwaving Peeps. Now, there is a much more serious problem plaguing Easter candy: the green jelly bean flavor reassignment. The lime jelly bean appears to be going the way of the dodo. Of a dozen different jelly bean brands and flavor mixes at my local grocery store, only one had not reassigned the green jelly bean to Green Apple flavor.

Penguin News Roundup

As posted previously, March of the Penguins won the Oscar for Best Documentary. The filmmakers accepted carrying life-sized plush Emperor penguins.

A library in Missouri has moved the children's book recounting the true-life tale of male penguins Roy and Silo, residents of the Central Park Zoo, adopting an abandoned egg. Such egg adoptions are known to occur in the wild. In response to complaints by two parents while the juvenile fiction work was shelved in the juvenile fiction section, the book is now shelved in the nonfiction section, where children never go unless they are looking for references for a school report.

Wednesday's Beakful of Trivia

One of the co-inventors of the car radio, William Lear, also invented the eight-track tape player and the Lear Jet. The other co-inventor, Elmer Wavering, developed the automobile alternator, which makes power windows and air conditioning possible.

Tuesday's Beakful of Useless Knowledge

Bubble gum's traditional pink color came about because that was the only color food dye available when the first batch was mixed up.

The Blog, She is A-Changin'

Thanks for bearing with me during the recent lull in posting. I have made a few subtle changes to the design of the page. The most obvious change you will notice is I intend to return to daily blogging with a legitimate publishing schedule. Check back daily for a Beakful of Trivia, and weekly features. Wednesdays will bring you the Penguin News Roundup and Fridays bring Porpoising through Current Events. I am setting Fishing the 'Net, Slender Walk Tips, Stuck in the Craw, and From the Rookery on ice floes to float through the week. Other items of interest will appear at randomly to keep everyone from getting complacent.

Changes

Watch this space for some changes in the coming week.

Penguins in the Arts

Woo-Hoo! March of the Penguins won the Academy Award for best documentary. Not that the news comes as much of a surprise, nor did the penguin/tuxedo joke in the acceptance speech. I did like the life-size stuffed penguins.

Bribery

There is an anecdote told of a comic book convention where Sergio Aragones was scheduled to be on two panel discussions that were to be held at the same time, on different floors of the hotel. Rather than disappoint any fans, he started off at one panel, and at a convenient moment, slipped under the table, crawled out, took the elevator up to the second panel (doing sketches for fans in the elevator on the way up), and slipped into the second panel. At a convenient moment in the second panel, he slipped under the table and out of the room, did some sketches for fans in the elevator on the way back down, and crawled back up to his seat at the first panel. I have seen Sergio work; I have no doubt he could pull that off. However, when he was announced as a guest at two conventions on the same weekend, I was less confident. He could do panels on two different floors of a hotel at the same time, but how he would manage cons in two different time zones was another matter entirely.

One of the two cons is near me, and we considered going if Sergio was going to be there. So, I sent a message to an email list frequented by ME, who should count Sergio's schedule as one of his many areas of expertise. In the message, I offered to sweeten whatever pot the Motor City Con was offering Sergio by volunteering my services as amateur booth babe, me showing up as one of his characters, and homemade cookies. According to ME, Sergio will be at Motor City, and though this was decided before my offer, I will still make good on the package. I am still waiting on the cookie preference.

Useless Product Innovations

Americans have become so overly bloated that now even our paper products need plus-size accommodations. Charmin has come out with a roll of toilet paper so big it requires an adapter just to fit in the bathroom. The Mega Roll holds the TP of four regular rolls, giving it a girth beyond the capacity of the standard TP holder. Charmin bills this innovation as the answer for those who are tired of changing the roll so often. Really, here. Changing the roll? On the continuum of housework drudgery, changing the roll of TP barely registers. Now, if they could come out with something so I don't have to dust my ceiling fans or clean dead bug carcasses out of the light fixtures as often.

Happy Birthday!

I am a day late wishing my niece Annike a happy birthday, but only because I just found out today, as she was born late last night.

Penguin News Creche

Researchers have found a new colony of Emperor penguins, boosting the worldwide Emperor population to about 200,000 birds spread over 46 colonies. The colony featured in March of the Penguins is within earshot of a French research station. By contrast, the new colony is on the edge of an island in a rarely-traveled part of the continent.

The parents of Toga, the Jackass penguin chick peng-napped just before Christmas, have hatched another egg. The new chick is being sent to South Africa, the native habitat of the Jackasses, to be introduced to the wild. Before you pity poor Oscar and Kyala for not getting a break in raising a chick, that was where Toga was headed prior to his peng-napping. Rather than spending life as an exhibit in a zoo, the new chick will be released into the wild to do its part in buoying up the wild penguin population.

Penguins are featured in the current issue of Mental_Floss magazine. A 2-page spread discusses the penguin inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, including their stint as fuel for the whalers' rendering vats (who would have guessed penguins were flammable?) and their current use of minefields as nesting areas. Penguins, unlike humans or sheep, the other two big populations on the islands, are not heavy enough to trip the mines. International treaties call for all minefields to be cleared by next year, but some in the Falklands have proposed clearing an equal number of land mines in a higher-risk area elsewhere on the globe and leaving the well-marked Falkland Island minefields to the penguins. Apparently, land mines are an effective deterrent to tourists getting too close to nesting penguins.

Movies, or There's One Born Every Minute

We went to see the new Pink Panther remake this afternoon. Funny movie, but nothing terribly special except the title sequence, which was among the best in a movie. They brought back the Friz Freleng/David DePatie animated Pink Panther. I must admit, it was a little odd hearing the Pink Panther theme in its native habitat. I've heard it played on a pipe organ in a pizza parlor, on the cartoons, and as the alarm tone on my PDA warning me to get going to appointments, but this was the first time I had heard Henry Mancini in the theater.

About seven minutes into the preliminaries, we realized we had just paid $5 (matinee) for the privilege of watching a 15 minute block of ads, followed by an hour and a half of product placements. The placements weren't as obvious or prolific in Pink Panther as they have been in some movies, but I spotted a few. We got in just in time, or we would have seen the parade of on-screen ads for local vocational schools and real estate agents. Advertisers don't have to worry about us skipping commercials until we stop paying to take our dates to see them.

Gimme A Break

The septugenarian shot by Vice President Cheney was released from the hospital today. Upon his release, he made a statement that included, "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with."

If the guy hadn't just gotten a face full of birdshot, someone ought to slap his face for that one. He got shot, and he's the one who is sorry? What's that about, mea culpa for being between you and your squab? He's acting like a beaten spouse apologizing for getting in the way of a fist. Shouldn't the guy who did the shooting be the one apologizing? Sure, he said it was the worst day of his life, but that's still not "sorry."

Recommended Reading

Wired news, on the decline of English. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Gizmo Alert

I want one of these.

Trained Seal

Well, the puddle didn't stop, and it wasn't the seals. The bottom of the pressure tank had cracked. I now have a brand spanking new pressure tank in a pretty shade of blue.

The Other Shoe Drops

I had a feeling I should not have fixed the sink sprayer. It took a while, but the house has settled on what will break next. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. Water is coming out of part of my well pump that is not an approved H2O exit vector (specifically, the bottom), and killing power to the pump doesn't stop it. I think it is colluding with the water softener next to it, or at least is spying on the water softener's clock, as this started promptly 5 minutes after the plumber's regular business hours. For the moment, there is just a puddle working its way toward a floor drain, so I'll bide time and see if it stops on its own or if I have to call the plumber first thing in the morning.

Valentine's Eve

The floral department of the grocery store looks like someone vomited a gut full of desperation between the produce and baked goods. For goodness sake, they're selling potted orchids in Ohio where it is 27 degrees out. Masses of roses, the likes of which are not seen outside Pasadena on New Year's, sprawl all over the aisles. With all those hearts, I had to double check that I was at the market, not a cardiac ward. Balloons, teddy bears, chocolates, those nasty Necco wafer conversation hearts--oh, what lengths guys will go to.

Note to the guys: while lingerie makes a nice gift, don't mistake it for a gift for her.

Penguin News

Gay Penguins Not Falling For Swedish Hookers

A German zoo with a collection of the endangered Humbolt Penguins ran into a problem when six of its ten males paired off together into same-sex couples, leaving only 4 with any interest in perpetuating the species. Last year, in an attempt to get some chicks born, zookeepers called in some ringers: female Humbolts from Sweden. The resident same-sex couples are having none of the Swedish call-penguins, though. The problem, according to the zoo's director, is that the females are too shy to break into the pair bond between the males. Solution: get trampier penguins.

Best Ad

Didn't watch a second of the Super Bowl. Have managed to catch most of the ads online, though, and I dare say that this one is hands-down the best.

Dueling Banjos

Broke out the banjo and started playing around with it a little. So far, I have learned:

1. A banjo is heavier than it looks.
2. Pickin' drives the cats nuts, except for the one who is nuts to begin with. She just sleeps through it.
3. I still can't read music very well.
4. It is impossible to turn pages in the lesson book wearing a thumb pick.

Groundhog Day

Happy Groundhog Day, and the kickoff of Marmota Watch '06. Phil, over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania officially says six more weeks of winter. Woody, the groundhog living under my barn has not shown his face yet. I don't expect he'll come out of hibernation for a few weeks yet, and won't start hanging around full time until the fruit ripens. Phil may get all the media attention, but I think Woody has the better gig. Woody doesn't get to be a Beanie Baby, but he also doesn't have to wake up six weeks before winter ends for a photo op.

Headlines that Write Themselves

Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell and Pizza Hut has signed on as the sponsor for the Kentucky Derby, which will, for the next five years, be knows as The Kentucky Derby, Presented by Yum Brands. Now, a fast food conglomerate sponsoring a horse race is just asking for some distasteful jokes. A fast food conglomerate named "Yum," now, that's even worse. When you add in that Yum Brands also owns KFC, I think we'll just be phoning in the Kentucky Fried Derby jokes for the next half decade.

All The President's Near-Stalkers

So, Cindy Sheehan got arrested last night and hauled out of the House of Representatives chamber shortly before the State of the Union Address commenced. You will forgive me if I lack a much sympathy. Certainly, the handling of the entire situation leaves much to be desired, and the situation was arguably a violation of the Constitutional right of all Americans to get their panties in a bunch in the time and place of their choosing. However, Ms. Sheehan did not just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. She knows, better than many, how this particular incarnation of the government views dissent. She must have realized that there was no way on God's Green Earth they were going to let her sit 6 rows behind the First Lady wearing an anti-war t-shirt, particularly when dress code for the evening was full business attire.

I can't be the only one who has noticed that she's toeing a line about a hair's breadth from the legal definition of "stalking" under the laws of both Washington, DC and Texas.

Penguin News Roundup

Study shows Magellanic penguins quickly get used to tourists and show no immediate deleterious effects of being gawked at by the humans. Magellanics live in coastal areas around the southern part of South America. The researchers are still unsure of the long-term impact to the penguins.

Penguins maintain their box-office power. Warner Brothers Studios will release Happy Feet in November. According to IMDB, it is a movie about a tapdancing Emperor penguin. The trailer, available here, combines on the only two good parts of Madagascar: the penguins and the dance number done by the lemurs. On the plus side, the animation includes several different, recognizable penguin species. Since the animators were nice enough to do that, we'll overlook that they mix Adelies and Rockhoppers, which nest on the ice-free coastal areas, with the Emperors, which nest on the fast ice.

WTF!?!

I just read the following sentence in a USA Today article on the popularity of the movie Brokeback Mountain:

"Gay cowboys are the new penguin."

I have to go now and find something--anything--else to think about. If I let that sentence rattle around in my head much longer, my brain is going to explode and leak out my ears.

How (whatever)-ist are you, really?

The problem with surveys to determine how biased we are is that we are smarter than that. We know the right answers to all those questions about how we feel about races, genders, religions, ethnic groups, disabled or overweight people, etc. In short, we answer questionnaires as we know we should feel, not necessarily as we do feel.

The Implicit Association Test gets around that by operating on the basic principle that your mind works faster when you are doing less mentally straining tasks. On the surface, these tests are all one task: sorting words or phrases into two groups, and to make it even easier, they tell you the groups up front. For example, the test for skin tone preference has you sorting drawings of light-skinned faces from dark-skinned faces, and positive words like "happy" and "laughter" from negative words like "hate" and "pain." If you end up sorting faster when asked to put light-skinned faces in the same column as positive words than when asked to put dark-skinned faces with positive words, you have an implicit bias toward lighter skin because your brain has to think a little more to pair up dark and good. It's very hard to fool the test.

On the ones I have done so far, I show a strong preference to women being in the home and men in the workplace, am pro-Semitic, and show a slight preference for lighter skin tones. No real surprises there, except that I didn't think my housewife bias was as strong as it apparently is. More telling than anything are the tests I am reluctant to try because I'm not sure I want to confirm what I suspect are the results.

National Gorilla Suit Day

Next Tuesday, January 31, is National Gorilla Suit Day. In what I am sure is a coincidence, that is also the day President Bush is delivering the 2006 State of the Union Address. Watch it at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN--the address, which will probably involve many primates in suits, but few in primate suits.

Must Be Something About the '80's

I used to drive a 1984 Pontiac Firebird. I should have known something was up when the brake lines snapped in half on my way to get the title inspection at the sheriff's station. Among its other faults, it had a habit of stalling if I tried to turn a corner while going uphill. My parking brake was a brick, and the "P" on the gear selector was purely decorative. Needless to say, there was a time I knew the flattest route between any two points in Omaha, Nebraska, as well as all the level parking lots. Worst of all, that car seemed to have a minimum number of things that had to be broken at any given time. If I fixed one, another problem would inevitably crop up within days.

My house was built in 1981, and I am beginning to think it has that same problem. The parking brake works, but as soon as I fix one thing, something else breaks. Yesterday afternoon, I finally figured out that whole retaining nut thing and got my bathroom sink drain cleared. Yesterday evening, as I was washing dishes, the sink sprayer snapped off in my hand. If I didn't need my kitchen sink, I would hesitate to fix that, as I fear what will go next.

Obvious, but Interesting Study

A study by Emory University confirms what we might have suspected for some time: there is precious little reason in partisan politics.

Shortly before the last Presidential election, researchers plunked committed Democrats and Republicans in fMRI machines to record brain activity as it happens. They then fed them statements from George W. Bush, John Kerry, and neutral male figures like Tom Hanks, and asked the study participants to mentally resolve obvious discrepancies in several statements made by each man.

What they found:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues will present their findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Jan. 28.

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

...

Behavioral data showed a pattern of emotionally biased reasoning: partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Importantly, in both their behavioral and neural responses, Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush.

While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.

Another finding in the study shows this occurs outside conscious awareness. For some reason, I do not find that comforting.

Penguin News

The parents of Toga, the African penguin chick stolen from a zoo just before Christmas, are expecting again. Their egg should hatch in about 7 weeks. Life goes on.

The keepers at Amazon World have given up hope that Toga will be found alive. The reward is still out there for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the heartless penguin-nappers who would steal a chick right out from under his parents.

People Watching Paradise

My laundromat is frequented by some people who are very interesting to watch. On Monday, I was there with the lady little person (I would guess she's about 3' 8"), the polite older-middle-aged man who looks like Morgan Freeman, and the man who quietly holds conversations with the voices in his head while he waits for the dryer. I should note that the latter is one of the least disconcerting people I do laundry with. He's far more courteous about it than the people yammering on at top volume into their cell phones.

Make Your Own Radio Station

I've been turned on to a wonderful music site, www.pandora.com, that allows users to create their own internet radio stations based on the types of music they enjoy. The company has a team of 30 musician-analysts who work out a few hundred musical attributes of every song in their library, currently around 300,000 songs. For starters, you input an artist or song you like, and the site streams songs with similar musical attributes. You can provide feedback if you particularly like or dislike a song, and the site will adjust the programming accordingly. By selecting music based on the musical attributes rather than, say, "oldies" or "top 40," they manage to provide an interesting mix of songs and artists you might otherwise not have given a second thought to. I probably would not have considered anything by R.E.M., but it came up on my station based on The Monkees (subtle vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, male vocalist, and major key tonality), and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I have another station based on "Dueling Banjos." Doesn't everyone occasionally like good bluegrass instrumentation, heavy on the pickin'?

Violence and Mayhem

The problem with making "family friendly" television programming is that families often include both adults and children. Now that cable companies have bowed to pressure and rolled out Family Tiers populated with channels devoid of objectionable content, politicians have discovered that (get ready for this) grown-ups may occasionally like to watch programming not suitable for their 6-year-olds. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought one of the side effects of having children was loss of interest in any entertainment more mature than Barney and Friends. But, as it turns out, parents are still adults and sometimes like to indulge adult interests, which brings me to some senators' objections to the Family Friendly Tiers because they exclude the violent, beer-sponsored, pro-gambling fun fest that is ESPN. So, for those keeping score, bare female midriffs over micro-miniskirts are not Family Friendly Viewing unless they are accompanied by 22 large men trying to crush one another on a program sponsored by a beer company.

Also in the article linked above, Brent Bozell, head of the Parents Television Council called the TV ratings system "an inconsistent, arbitrary, and capricious mess." I have an idea that will solve both our problems. Since the Parents Television Council already sits around watching TV all day and counting the number of times their delicate sensibilities are offended, let's bring them into the process earlier. Let them watch every moment of television programming and every advertisement before it gets put on air, and have a panel of them agree on a rating for each show and ad. They wouldn't get to veto anything, but they would be able to make sure a consistent and non-arbitrary standard is applied to rating the programs in accordance with their Family Values. Given the 500-odd channels available, that should keep them too busy to file carbon-copy complaints to the FCC every time someone says "dick."

Duh!

Study: Wine Drinkers Have Healthier Diets than Beer Drinkers

Seriously. Who funds these things? I have some beachfront property I'm looking to get rid of, and I would like to talk to them. The study examined random purchases at Danish supermarkets, categorizing them by the type of alcohol (if any) purchased, and comparing the other items purchased with wine, beer, a combination of wine and beer, or no alcohol. After analyzing 3.5 million purchases, researchers found wine purchases were accompanied by fruits, vegetables, low fat cheese and poultry, whereas beer purchases were more often accompanied by sugar, cold cuts, chips and pork.

I don't suppose anyone thought to just look at chicken marsala versus beer battered--well, so many things can be beer battered and deep fried.

That Explains A Few Things

I just Googled "Boneless chicken wing" (one of the few searches that doesn't come up with links to women in varying stages of undress). It seems that most allegedly boneless wings are actually standard-issue chicken meat formed into a vaguely winglike shape, breaded, then smothered in spicy sauce. So a boneless wing is less of a wing and more of a tarted up chicken nugget. I haven't seen food PR this good since the ready-to-microwave potato.

What Will They Think of Next?

So this is what I miss by not watching television commercials. Someone has invented boneless chicken wings, and people are apparently paying real money for buckets of them. Boneless wings? Chicken wings are already nature's joke meat. The meat on them adds up to something slightly less substantial than a strand of twine. My chicken anatomy expert will no doubt correct me, but I'd think that if you take the bones out of a chicken wing, you would be left with some flappy skin and just enough stringy meat to get stuck in your teeth. Better off just sucking down the marinade by the spoonful.

Here I Come to Save The Day

I went out to the barn today to exercise the lawnmower. After I managed to crank the engine over, I started hearing a squeak. Actually, several squeaks, followed by the pitterpatter of little rodent feet. Apparently, four or five mice have decided to winter over in the rafters. The engine noise sent them scurrying down the support beams, across a shelf, and off in the general direction of the tack closet. As long as they don't try to move into the house.

Age of Unreason, Part II

For those not reading the comments, I will re-post the anonymous one from "Age of Unreasonable."

This was tried in the late 60's and unfortunately not every 18 year old could pass muster. That is why liquor can not be consumed until 21. There were many crazy auto accidents and other stupid acts that resulted in loss of life.

I do appreciate the thoughtful comments people leave here, especially the ones I might not wholeheartedly agree with. Post anonymously if you like, or feel free to use a comment pseudonym.

Since the late 60's were about a decade before my time, I will take the author at his or her word about the unfortunate effects of allowing alcohol consumption at age 18. The liquor-soaked bacchanals of many contemporary 21st birthday celebrations are not what I would consider the hallmark of maturity, either. No matter what the age, there will always be some who cannot handle responsibility right off.

I proposed that the age of legal adulthood be set at 18 not as an assessment of maturity. Relative preparedness for responsibility rarely correlates with the minimum legal ages set for it. The voting age was changed to 18 to match the military conscription age, not because 18 year olds are emotionally mature enough to pick a world leader. I chose 18 because my overall proposal is that there be an age where, across the board, someone is considered an adult, and the age limit would apply to every right and responsibility given to an adult. I could have gone with 21, but I doubted many parents would favor a 3-year extension on the time before they can start nudging their offspring out of the nest.

Age of Unreasonable

Ann Onymous clued me in to a measure in Washington (state, not DC) aimed at raising the legal gambling age from 18 to 21, on the grounds that 19- and 20-year-olds lack the cognitive abilities to gamble. Ann O. points out that those same people who supposedly lack the cognitive ability to decide whether to hit with 17 showing are still allowed to join the armed services, where they are increasingly likely to have to make a split-second decision about whether to kill someone or not.

Unfortunately, the suggestion to increase the enlistment age to 21 is not likely to fly for several practical reasons. The armed forces are hard up for recruits as is, and 17-18-year-olds are concentrated in convenient mandatory schools where they are accessible and for the most part lack other commitments. My solution to this problem of varying minimum ages would be to unilaterally declare that at age 18 one has all the rights and responsibilities of an adult. People are bound to make mistakes as they transition to adulthood. Sweet Mary, some politicians are claiming "youthful indiscretion" well into middle age. Young adults might drink too much, get into debt over their heads, crack up a car or two, sleep with or even marry someone they later regret, take up smoking, or do any number of unwise things. Making stupid mistakes is simply part of growing up. We do no one any services by stringing out the process by staggering the ages at which they can legally make those mistakes.

Varying minimum ages leads to an odd mix of what young adults can and cannot do. When I visited Las Vegas at age 20, I could have legally gotten married in any of the casinos' wedding chapels, but it was a crime to go down the hall and put a penny in the penny slots. Taking the minimum ages as a measure of the maturity required for certain acts we find:

• Driving solo and aborting a pregnancy require the same level of maturity (16 for both in most states)
• Depending on the state, casual sex is equal or less cognitively taxing (age of consent is 15-18 depending on the state) than marrying without parental consent (18 nationwide)
• Buying a new car (18) takes less maturity than renting one (25)
• Renting a car is cognitively equivalent to representing a district in the US House of Representatives (both 25)
• Gambling as a day trader in the stock market (18) takes less cognitive ability than gambling at the craps table (21)

Update

At least the gas in my uphustory was not in vain. We got just enough snow for me to road test the snowblower, and it is functional. I may need some practice to get the hang of plowing deep enough to get the snow without flinging bits of my gravel driveway around. This brings me to the second Snowblower Lesson Learned the Hard Way: check wind direction before you start up the snowblower. I will accept snide remarks only from those who knew that a snowblower shoots the snow 4-5 feet up without ever having seen one in use before.

Gender Equality

Amid criticism of coming late to the issue of gender equality, Senator Ted Kennedy just renounced his affiliation with a Harvard social club for men. Meanwhile, women-only fitness clubs are sprouting on just about every corner and no one bats an eye.

Today's Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Never put a snowblower with a full tank of gas on its side in the back seat of your car, even if that is the only way it fits in the car.

I can hear the sound of the collective forehead slap now, and the fevered sound of typing to give me all manner of excellent suggestions about how to get a snowblower home from the repair shop when it doesn't fit in the trunk. I could have used those a half an hour ago.

Penguin News

The University of Houston is studying how penguins waddle. The researchers say the study is to help further understand locomotion in general, possibly aiding in robot movement or helping the elderly walk without the aid of walkers. Me, I would come up with any excuse to watch penguins waddle all day. They had to use the second-largest species, the King Penguins, as other species commonly held in captivity are too light to register on the pressure-sensitive mat used to record waddle data.

Best part: they have video (Quicktime file)

With Luck, This Now Blows

In the latest chapter of the Saga of the Driveway, we obtained a secondhand snowblower that had one minor problem: the engine would start just fine, but as soon as you set it to snow and put a load on the engine, it would stall. Although I am getting to be more handy around the house, I am not yet to the point where I am comfortable rebuilding a carbeurator, so I took it to a local small engine repair shop. The man writing up the work order assured me that, as long as it was strictly an engine problem, they should be able to fix it. However, they had no way to test the repairs since the last of the snow melted a bit more than a week ago. If there were a foot of snow out, he said, they could test it, but not now.

Yeah. What sort of idiot takes a snowblower in for repairs between snowstorms? Being prepared is so inconvenient.

Swedes Are At It Again

The country that brought us the three point safety belt, daytime running lights, side impact airbags, rear-facing child safety seats, laminated safety glass windshields* and moose-avoidance tests is at it again. The latest automotive safety innovation out of Sweden: the female crash test dummy. After only 56 years of crash tests, someone has figured out that female bodies have a few differences from male bodies, other than a lighter average weight and the presence of bosoms, and that some of these differences may affect how the bodies deal with an impact.

*-That may not seem like a big deal until you put your head through the car window in an accident and don't shred your face. I speak from experience.

Intelligent Design, or Lack of

A school in California is looking to teach a course on Intelligent Design as an elective philosophy course instead of as a component in science class. That, I would say, is a positive development. Unfortunately, their course outline seems to lack anything close to the level of intelligent design that supposedly created the universe. I guess having an intelligent designer does not automatically make one intelligent.

Note to teachers: if a guest speaker’s bio contains a closed date range immediately after his name, (e.g. “Francis Crick, 1916-2004”), that means he is dead and very likely declining future invitations for speaking engagements.

As snarkiness is unbecoming, I will stop now.

The Thing About Intelligent People Is, They're Really Not That Bright

An article in Live Science proclaims, "Geniuses Are Just Like Us."

I had to amend the headline when I posted it to an online forum of Mensa members, but the point is that smart people are still just people, and have all the same problems. The article highlights some of the personal problems and foibles of intelligent folks. Einstein ran around on his wife, Isaac Newton hated his stepfather, that sort of thing. I would question whether working on physics lectures in a strip club qualifies as "just like everyone else," but I suppose the point is that Richard Feynman went to such establishments, not what he did there.

I would love to know where the idea came from that highly intelligent people are somehow immune to having normal personalities. Everyone says I'm smart (me, I'm not so sure, but that seems to be the general consensus), yet I do more stupid things than anyone. Probably more than 3 anyones put together. For starters, I once confused the apple cider and the milk in the fridge and ended up mixing apple juice in my coffee.

Signs

The sign in front of my local produce market is advertising a sale on "Diet Celery," leaving me to wonder if, for all these years, I've been eating the regular, fattening celery.

The Completely Missing The Point Award

For most of us, "catch and release" implies release alive and possibly not into a bonfire. An 81-year-old man in New Mexico had other ideas, and after trapping the mouse that had gotten inside, he released it into a pile of burning leaves. Alive. The mouse, understandably not keen on this development, took off running, but not before it caught fire. The flaming mouse ran toward the house, and to make a long story short, the man did the interview for the article from the motel room where he now lives.

Language Hole

English needs another word. In the way that "Grooism" perfectly encapsulates the idea of "an act so stupid your remaining brain cells commit suicide out of sheer embarassment," we need a word for "the point in a discussion where any attempt to rectify a misunderstanding will only make matters worse."

I'm at one of those places in a discussion elsewhere on the internet. The next time I make a mildly off-color comment, you can be sure I will clarify when it is not born of personal experience. There seems to be some confusion on that point, and I'm now at the point described above.

Irony of the Day

Just finished watching last night's Daily Show interview with Pierce Brosnan in which he mentions that he is working on a new Western, Seraphim Falls, with Liam Neeson. I, for one, can't wait to see what happens when a writer/director casts the lead roles in post-Civil War with star actors from Ireland and Northern Ireland. It does lead one to wonder whether there are no decent American actors left. I take that back. The rumor that Liam Neeson will be playing Abraham Lincoln in an upcoming Steven Speilberg movie should erase all doubt. That guy's dialog coach must make a small fortune.

Jack of the Box

I managed not to get run over while I installed the new mailbox. The flaw of curbside mail delivery is that one has to spend some time in the middle of the road to put up a new box. The new box is a sturdier version of the last one, with the top attached with bona fide screws instead of some cheap plastic pegs. The other styles of boxes in stock at Home Depot would have required setting a new post into the ground, and the ground is still frozen. I think I'll see about encasing the new box in a concrete pillar or a brick column come spring when it warms up and dries out a bit. That might not keep people from knocking the box off again, but at least they won't leave an encounter unscathed.

On a completely different subject, the new Energizer battery commercial features penguins.

Odd Development

Today has become more interesting than I expected, and earlier. After checking my email, I looked out the front window to see if the trash had been picked up yet, and discovered that my mailbox is missing. There is still a post there, but the box is gone.

Three Day Weekend

Both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and emergency contraception have a window of 72 hours after the fact to sort the paperwork out. President Bush came out saying the need to act fast sometimes necessitates circumventing the paperwork of obtaining warrants. Women's health proponents argue that, with only a 72-hour window for effectiveness, obtaining a prescription can cause a dangerous delay.

Am I the only one seeing some common ground here? Even if it is only the pains of sorting out paperwork over a 3-day weekend, that is something to build on.

In the News

An Italian court will decided if Jesus existed.

Tech Help with the New Year's Resolutions

Here is a web page with step-by-step instructions for creating an Excel document to help you track your progress toward a goal. It walks you through creating a spreadsheet to enter your data and a chart that will show your progress so far and projects whether, at your current pace, you are on track for meeting the goal. The instructions are set up for an aggregate goal, using the example of "run 250 miles this quarter." That is useful for such goals as my effort to write a 100,000-word novel by the end of February. I had to do some minor tweaking to make the format work for some of my other goals

Which brings me to the other reason this is useful. It requires setting goals with specific endpoints, time frames for completion and objective measures of progress. "Get in shape" is a wishy-washy goal. "Lose x pounds by October 31" is a solid, measurable goal. It also allows a little wiggle room. If I don't write all of my 1,786 words one day, I can still be on track by writing more the next day. The whole goal doesn't fly out the window because of one setback.

Cinematic Penguins

2005 was a good year for penguins at the multiplex. Madagascar, with its penguin-centered subplot that should have been the entire movie, was the top animated movie of the year, and March of the Penguins was the year's top documentary.

New Year's Viewing

We finished watching our Star Wars marathon. Very cool. If you own the saga, I highly recommend making a weekend of an in-order viewing. The movies really do play differently when it is Return of the Jedi and not Revenge of the Sith that ties everything together.

We also watched the TiVoed episode of Deal or No Deal. For a simple game show with no trivia or puzzles, it is oddly engrossing. I am anxious to find more episodes, not because I want to see it played, but because I think I can figure the whole thing out if I have a couple more episodes. They pick one of 26 briefcases presented by a bevy of attractive ladies. Each case has a dollar amount, ranging from $.01 to $1,000,000. The contestant then decides, after opening a number of cases, whether to stick with their original case with the unknown amount or to take an offer by the show's producers. In the episode we caught, the contestant passed up an offer of $138,000 because there was a 1 in 5 chance she could have had $500,000 in her case. She ended up going home with $25,000. That is a nice chunk of change even after taxes, but I imagine her marital bliss will be hampered for a while by arguments over "We could have had $138,000 if only...!"

The player on the episode we saw obviously had the mindset that she still had a chance at the highest value still in play, and any offer she took below that was costing her money. She seemed to forget that to get the largest dollar amount, she would have to play the game all the way out to the last case. I would go in assuming that I had the lowest amount still in play and plot my strategy accordingly. I would say that, depending on how many high dollar amounts are left in play, either the third or fourth offer is the logical stopping place. When the producers make the fourth offer, there are 8 amounts still left in play. Even if 2 of those are the big ones, that is still only a 1 in 4 chance of doing better. I'll take that, even if there is a chance of doing better if I were to play the game out longer. This is why I would make a terrible contestant on the show. The suspense seems to come from contestants who have never listened to Kenny Rogers. They will also need a smattering of contestants willing to go all the way to keep ratings up.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2006, everybody!

We're taking advantage of the long holiday weekend to watch the entire Star Wars saga. Very interesting to see it all in order starting with the prequels. I'll report after we get through Episode 6 tomorrow.

News Roundup

A 19-year-old PETA staffer changed his name from Chris Garnett to KentuckyFriedCruelty.com to protest alleged mistreatment of animals by KFC. A statement by fellow PETA supporter Pamela Anderson says "I'm sure Chris can't wait till KFC stops torturing chickens so he can change his name back." No details on what humane procedures the group would like implemented while the chickens are parted out and deep fried in a crispy coating with 11 herbs and spices. Also, no mention of any inhumane treatment of potatoes and cole slaw. Where is the outrage over biscuits?

Guppies go through menopause. The subject is intriguing, but the article authors could probably have found a better phrase than "raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all."

Researchers spice up cow manure. One of the active ingredients in thyme neutralizes the odor and bacteria in cowpies, which could lead to breakthroughs in large cattle operation sanitation. Apparently, oregano also works. Yes, I know thyme is an herb, not a spice.

Police officer attacked by a pack of angry chihuahuas. Insert your own Taco Bell joke here.

New Year's Resolutions

I'm not big on the New Year's Resolutions. I prefer hitting the post-resolution sales and resolving change around Groundhog Day (note to self: run marmota check Feb. 2). This year, I made a resolution at the end of November to get myself into a shape besides round. If you are making a similar resolution, allow me to shamelessly plug the following. I have no commercial ties, or at least none that involve money coming to me from them. I use these and have found them helpful, to the tune of 6 pounds and one pants size.

e-diets. This is an online diet site. For a small monthly fee ($12, I think), they plan healthy menus for you and provide recipes. What makes this different from any other diet plan? It is flexible and it is not weight-loss oriented as much as it is geared toward instilling good nutrition habits. They encourage substitution, so if you don't like pita or there is no way you are shelling out for fresh blueberries in December, you can substitute another bread or fruit. You never have to eat anything you don't like on this plan. I mean that. If you don't like fish or tofu, it will create an entire varied menu selection without those items. There is a wide selection of home-cooked meals, convenience foods, and what to order at fast food restaurants, which allows you to cater to your schedule. Best of all, the weekly menus come with a shopping list that includes everything you need down to the parsley.

Push. Customized workout DVDs delivered to your mailbox every month. You choose among trainers and specify focus areas and length of workouts. Based on your fitness level and goals, they compile a disc of workouts just for you.

Top 50 Robots

Wired Magazine lists the top 50 robots of all time. To their credit, only 18 are fictional. There is an excellent picture of #40, Elektro and Sparko, whom I discuss here. Wired mistakenly calls him "cable-controlled." It's an honest mistake. Elektro runs on AC power, so a cord runs from his heel to supply the current. Strictly speaking, though, he is voice controlled.

Geek Gifts

Emp. Peng. got me an ionic hairbrush. Basically, it is a brush with a small Ionic Breeze air purifier built in behind the bristles to shoot purified air through the hair as I brush. Weird, but it does pep up the hair and take out that used hair smell. Since I have enough hair for myself and four bald men, that takes some doing. We found out, entirely by accident, that the brush also will turn off the touch-activated lamp from a distance of 3 feet. That was almost as funny as the time we found out why one should never have the bedroom lamp attached to The Clapper when one has a chest cold.

I got him an Alien Clock. The clock on the page there reads 12:59.

Merrappy Whichever

If you are celebrating or preparing to celebrate a holiday, have a merry/happy one.

Pengnapped!

A penguin chick was stolen from a British Zoo over the weekend. No, this isn't the hoax about some little kid sticking a penguin in his backpack and bringing it home. Amazon World has confirmed that their 3-month-old jackass penguin* is missing. Fear is that someone got enamored with March of the Penguins and decided a live chick would make a great Christmas gift. They're in for a big surprise, since the penguin will not likely survive to Christmas without the special care of its keepers. If it does manage to live, the recipient will soon find out that, contrary to Madagascar, penguins are not in fact cute and cuddly. They bite, and if they think pet hair is a cleaning problem, wait until this thing fledges.

I suppose I should take this opportunity to clarify that I had nothing to do with this. I do not know the whereabouts of this unfortunate chick. I have never been to the Isle of Wight, where the penguin was snatched, nor do I know anyone there.

*-That really is the common name for the penguin. They have a very distinctive bray-like call. For the prudish, they are also called Blackfoot penguins or African penguins because their feet are black and they are native to the African coast.

Study Says...

A new study shows that people eat more in the fall and winter. "Winter variations may be partly due to the 'calorie dense' foods consumed during the holidays, [study author] Ma notes." No kidding. I'll invite the researchers to my house for Thanksgiving, the meal where I use a full pound of butter just for the stuffing, mashed potatoes and yams.

Also, we exercise less in the winter. No conjecture from the researchers on why, but I'll venture that it might have something to do with a lack of desire to go jogging when it is 2 degrees fahrenheit outside (actual current thermometer reading).

Who are the people who fund these and where can I apply for several thousand dollars from them?

Everyone Dreaming of a White Christmas, Grab a Shovel

Going grocery shopping was not, in itself, a problem. Trying to get back up the driveway, on the other hand, will henceforth be known as Mistake #3. Owing to a series of partial thaws, followed by 12 degree nights, our sloped gravel driveway is now a sloped gravel ice rink. Still, we figured with a little kitty litter for traction and enough momentum, we just might be able to park indoors. I'm not sure if the kitty litter would have worked. We never quite got that far. We never quite got past the snowbank at the edge of the lawn. We also learned Murphy's Law of Getting Your Car Stuck in a Snowbank on Your Own Lawn: it will happen right as your neighbors come home to witness your ineptitude.

As soon as we got the car dug out and the groceries packed up the driveway, I went online and ordered a blowtorch so this doesn't happen again.

Heads Up!

It's almost time for the annual NORAD Tracks Santa Night (some may know it as Christmas Eve). Here's the video promo, with some of last year's Santa footage.

Penguins in the News

To keep the king penguins annual winter weight gain in check, penguin keepers at the Asahiyama Zoo in northern Japan have implemented twice-daily walks around the zoo grounds. No word on the peng-lates classes.

Amish Internet Sex Scandal

The story starts with a lonely, 75-year-old Amish widower looking for what we will euphemistically call "companionship" in the personals. He found a 35-year-old Cleveland prostitute, who met with him about 6 times. That works out to $10,000 per visit with the $67,000 that the prostitute and her boyfriend got out of the Amish man after convincing him that incriminating photos of him were on the internet. Note: I understand many women consider buggy rides romantic, and I've known a few women who will provide "companionship" after little more than a couple dinners out.

The story is all in this article.

Seriously, though: convincing an Amish guy there are naked photos of him and a hooker on the internet? Why not just go throw some dynamite in a barrel full of fish? There are easy marks, but pinning an internet sex scandal on an elderly Amish guy? That's just phoning it in.

That's a Bold New Look, All Right

Between my bank and my grocery store sits a Taco Bell. Since it remodeled last summer to come in line with the chain's new gold, magenta and blue color scheme, the restaurant's message board has declared, "Come see our bold new look!" The sign still says the same thing, but as I drove by today, something about the restaurant's decor seemed different. The roof was in the dining area, and one whole side of the building was burned out. According to the newspaper, the fire happened a bit past 8 o'clock last night. The other side of the sign still says, "Now hiring."

Religious Officially Lose Moral High Ground on Christmas

The New York Times reports that several churches plan to be closed this year on Christmas. Why, you may ask, would a house of worship lock its doors on the second most important holiday on the religious calendar? Because this year Christmas falls on a Sunday. You know, the day most Christians observe as the 10-commandment-mandated sabbath. The day people are supposed to refrain from secular pursuits and contemplate God, coinciding with the celebration of the birth of the religion's central figure, apparently is a day that churches have decided it is not worthwhile to offer observances.

Come to think of it, this also negates their moral high ground on the display of the 10 Commandments in classrooms, courthouses, and other public places. Here's the deal: they can display them after they manage to get their houses of worship to follow them regardless of inconvenience.

For Boobs, By Boobs

Just what the world needs: a tinfoil hat for the mammaries. A Taiwanese inventor has patented an innovation in brassiere technology to block electromagnetic waves. The proposal is to add an intermediate layer to bra cups comprising 75% cotton fiber and 25% stainless steel. News flash: underwires are bad enough. I'll let my bosom keep getting good AM radio reception before I stuff my bra with a Brillo pad.

Robots (and one gratuitous emu)

Technology saturates life these days, but have you ever seen a real robot in person? Think about that for a second. Robots are mostly confined to industrial uses. Unless you count the three days I owned a Roomba, I've never shared breathing space with a robot.

Until today. I met Elektro. He is over 7 feet tall and walks freely. He can talk and his mouth syncs with the words he speaks. He can even exhale to inflate a balloon. He is voice controlled and can distinguish a limited range of colors. Oh, and he does this without a single chip or microprocessor. He has to. He was built in the 1930's, serving as Westinghouse's centerpiece for the 1939 World's Fair.

Elektro lives in a museum here in Mansfield as part of an exhibit on the family robots Westinghouse created from the late 1920's through the 1940's. The first, Televox, invented in 1927, could call a preselected telephone number to reach its owner, answer the phone, and manage a few switches to control certain actions in the house remotely. In short, the internet-enabled toaster predates the internet by almost a half century. Elektro himself is still fully functional, except that the motors that move his legs are not installed so he could not walk even if he were connected to the power supply.

The way the museum exhibit is laid out, one doesn't immediately notice Elektro, which is quite a feat to accomplish with something that is 7-foot-six, silver, and has footprints the size of a coffee table tome. The floor layout draws one first to a non-functional replica of Televox, some photos and documentation of the other early Westinghouse Robots, and a taxidermied emu. You read that right: an emu. Really. I still don't understand what the emu was doing there. When I turned to ask the curator, that was when I saw the gleaming seven foot robot behind him. He looks like something out of Metropolis. That was an omigawd moment.

I've written this all about "him." In the room with Elektro, it is amazing how quickly and naturally one falls into speaking of "him" and relating to him on human terms. Noticing a dent in his left foot, I commented to the curator, "He looks like he stubbed his toe," even though the lack of toes is quite apparent. I asked, "Can he see?" knowing that the technology for vision was in its infancy at best back then (he can distinguish between red and green).

Evangelical Christians: Christmas not Commercialized Enough

Does anyone else remember when the alleged problem with December was that Christmas was that a sacred holiday was being co-opted by department stores just to line their coffers? Seems the new problem is that stores are not sufficiently exploiting Christmas.

Jerry Falwell is spearheading a campaign that includes lawyers sending letters to organizations that don't secularize Christmas enough. According to the president of another group involved in the effort, "We'll try to educate, but if we can't we'll litigate." Did I miss the memo where the meaning of Christmas was changed to "celebrate the holiday or we'll haul your ass to court!"?

The Catholic Rights League has called off a boycott of Wal-Mart, instigated after the employees wished people "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Apparently, they were satified when someone lost her job and had to retract an entirely truthful statement.

Bill O'Reilly has a whole list of stores he wants shunned because they're not using the word "Christmas" to attract the commercial feeding frenzy of December.

The American Family Association posts an online form for people to register their offense at the lack of commericalization of Christmas by major retailers. It is billed as a petition, but no mention is made of when or to whom the group is submitting it.