Headline du jour

Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend

What more can you say after that....

Hat tip to Proof Positive.

Titanic

More proof that American education isn't what it used to be.

Travel and Americans

From The House of Eratosthenes comes this piece of analysis:

Another thing I’ve been hearing is that Americans have a reputation around the world for being boorish, poorly-mannered, arrogant, intellectually stilted, incurious, et cetera. I’m seeing Americans criticized for reaching middle age without ever having held a passport, meaning they haven’t traveled outside their country’s borders. And it occurs to me: If these are the ones who have not traveled outside the country’s borders, shouldn’t we be looking to the enlightened, sophisticated, well-traveled nuanced-thinking blue-bloods as we try to figure out how we got our reputation? Some of them can act pretty boorish. Why blame the people who haven’t traveled anywhere?

He has a point.

Where's the Rally Bear??

Some days, you can't make up stuff like this:

Back in October, a squirrel invaded Busch Stadium during the St. Louis Cardinals run to the 2011 World Series. Fredbird let it live out of kindness, and the rodent would become so popular, it took the place of Skip Schumaker on one of his baseball cards.

Finally, the mascot has been immortalized for all time on jewelry commemorating the Cardinals 11th world championship.

This is not satire: The Cardinals made "The Rally Squirrel" part of the design of their World Series rings, which they received on Saturday. You can clearly see it in the photo, under the "StL" logo and above the crest of the bats and home plate with Chris Carpenter's No. 29. If Schumaker thought a squirrel on his baseball card was "ridiculous," what must he think of the rodent on the most symbolic piece of bling a ballplayer can own?

 Here's the photo:

Read the whole story, and more, at Yahoo Sports.  Hat tip to I Own the World.

Frightening news on "settled science"

We hear so often about "settled science".  About research that "proves".  Now comes some troubling news.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future. 

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. 

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
...
Begley's experience echoes a report from scientists at Bayer AG last year. Neither group of researchers alleges fraud, nor would they identify the research they had tried to replicate. 

But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers.

Read the whole story from Reuters at THIS LINK.

Now batting....Methuselah

Actually, it's pitching.  But since the Colorado Rockies are in the National League, he'll be batting as well.  Who?  Jamie Moyer, that is.

Moyer, entering his 25th major league season, posted a 2.77 ERA this spring and beat out 22-year-old Tyler Chatwood and 28-year-old Guillermo Moscoso for a rotation spot.  If Moyer wins one game, he will become the oldest player to win a game in the majors.  At 49 years of age, Moyer is older than eight current MLB managers and 16 general managers.

Sorta reminds me of George Blanda.

Bacon anyone?

News for the bacon lovers out there.

SEATTLE – Do you love bacon to death? Is your dying wish is to be buried in bacon?

The local company behind Bacon Salt and Baconnaise are making it happen. J&D’s Foods has created the Bacon Coffin, what they call the world’s first bacon-wrapped casket.

"Yes, this is really real," wrote J&D owners Justin and Dave in a press release. “Bacon Coffins are finished with a painted Bacon and Pork shading and accented with gold stationary handles. The interior has an adjustable bed and mattress, a bacon memorial tube and is completed in ivory crepe coffin linens."

The Bacon Coffins are available for $2,999.95 plus shipping.

In the email announcing the Bacon Coffin, Justin and Dave added, "And yeah, your (sic) right we’re probably going to hell for this one."

Of course, that coffin might be the natural progression from these:

Yep, bacon cheeseburgers inside Krispy Kreme donuts.

Say hello to your cardiologist for me.

Hat tip to I Own the World for the pointer to the King5 television story.

Obamacare Humor

Funniest line at the Supreme Court oral arguments:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Kneedler, what happened to the Eighth Amendment? You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?

For the non-ConLaw folks in the audience, the Eighth Amendment is the one that bars cruel and unusual punishment.

If browsers were weapons

Though I'm a Firefox user (and haven't really gotten to work with Chrome), I like this.

Life imitates art.

From the Associated Press comes news that should warm the cockles of Sacha Baron Cohen's heart.  It's too good to paraphrase, so here it is in its entirety.

MOSCOW -- Kazakhstan has called the playing of a spoof of its national anthem at an international sporting event "a scandal" and demanded an investigation of the incident. 

Maria Dmitrienko won a gold medal for Kazakhstan on Thursday at the Arab Shooting Championships in Kuwait, but during the award ceremony the public address system broadcast the spoof anthem from the 2006 movie "Borat," which offended many Kazakhs by portraying the country as backward and degenerate.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov told the ITAR-Tass news agency the incident "is, of course, a scandal and demands a thorough investigation, which we intend to conduct."

ITAR-Tass quoted shooting team member Oksana Stavitskaya as saying that Asian Shooting Federation president Sheikh Salman al-Sabah had apologized to the team.

"Sheikh Salman personally apologized to us. He recognized that the use of the music from the scandalous film in place of the anthem of Kazakhstan was completely a mistake of the organizers. He explained that the awards ceremony was conducted by a firm under contract," Stavitskaya said.

The Kazakh news agency Tengri quoted team coach Anvar Yunusmetov as saying tournament organizers had downloaded various countries' national anthems from the Internet.

Later on Saturday, the event's organizers in Kuwait also apologized to the Kazakh delegation regarding the "unintentional" mistake of playing the "wrong national anthem" during the awards ceremony, according to the statement published on the state-owned Kuwait News Agency.

The organizing committee, in a statement, said the mistake was corrected and the national anthem of Kazakhstan was replayed afterward. The committee expressed "deep sorrow" for the mistake and reaffirmed that ties between the sporting communities of the two countries remained strong.

Somedays the real news reads like The Onion.

Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.

Photo without comment

A campaign bus in Canada (likely Alberta):

Well done commercial

I happen to like it.  Now, if only my friends were as quick thinking.

Imagine what broke out at the hockey game

No, it wasn't a bench clearing brawl.  Instead, it was patriotism.



After the announcement that there would be no national anthem, you hear some boos.  And soon the crowd starts their own rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

Cheers to those fans in Pittsburgh.

Hat tip to House of Eratosthenes

I think I've heard that before

From Denmark comes this little compilation.



The clip comes from Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR’s Detektor. The host is Thomas Buch-Anderson.

Hat tip to Powerline.

James Q Wilson

Political scientist James Q Wilson recently passed away.  For your consideration, here is one of his thoughts on why civil servants in modern bureaucracies work and think the way they do.

First, public sector agencies are not allowed to retain earnings, and therefore have no incentive towards economizing costs. A public agency that ends the fiscal year with a surplus because of efficient operations cannot distribute those savings to its managers and employees as incentives, but rather is likely to see its budget cut for the next year on the grounds that it was allocated too much in the first place. This explains the rush to push money out the door at the end of the fiscal year whether the spending is needed or not, and why bureaucracies are so often inefficient...

How true.

Thoughts for a Thursday

This is from a pamphlet by a Presbyterian minister, William J. H. Boetcker (1873-1962) and entitled The Ten Cannots. It was originally published in 1916 but its message is very fitting to us today

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Oh, those Europeans

Steven Hayward nails it, so I'll just quote him:

Today’s comedy segment comes courtesy of the madcaps at the European Union. Picking on the Europeans has become cliché, especially when they hand you such lame material, like the EU-produced video below that is supposed to convey . . . what, exactly?  Moviegoers may think it a slightly wacky homage to Tarantino’s Kill Bill, showing that Europeans are so much more civilized because they’d sit down and charm their opponents rather than slice them up.

But the real punch line is that the European Union has withdrawn the video because it is—wait for it—racist!  As Denis Boyles comments over on NRO’s Corner, “And for all we know, this isn’t a propaganda film so much as a security breach: It clearly reveals the E.U.’s defense strategy, which is based on stern disapproval.”

So let me get this straight....the EU, which is having problems with its current fringe members, makes a video about how we get better when we get bigger.  And we can all come together by just....well, whatever.

But the use of "non-European" characters is now "racist".  How fitting for the drones in Brussels.

The name's Bond...

From the University of Pennsylvania:



These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.

More details in the description at YouTube.

Wedding News

Again, thanks to I Own the World.

A woman's place??

This label is from the inside of a pair of pants from the British clothing firm Madhouse:

I wonder what Mrs. Bear might have to say about that.

Hat tip to I Own the World.