Lakeshore

'Cause I'm me...

( Weird cars at the Oregon coast )

Remember: life is never too crazy to stop and look at a weird automobile.

It's not often I see a car I don't recognize. Especially a recent make.

Yesterday in Omaha I spotted a car badged as a Salon. It looks like a Japanese sedan, though I can't twig the make from the body lines. (And just try Googling "salon" — that term is damned near Googleproof.) ( Thoughts from you motorheads? )

Sorry for the crummy photos, but all I had was the phone cam.

Fiction and Culture

A review of the Solaris Book of New Fantasy — With moderately good words for yours truly.

Edible.com — For the truly adventurous gourmand. (Thanks to danjite.)

Where news breaks — Another cool squib from Strange Maps

Oregon attorney slaps cop with illegal parking complaint — My home town...

jimhines with some thoughts on men and rape — Somber topic, worth the read.

Science and Technology

Halftrack Alfa Romeo — :: wants ::

Sexually Transmitted Bug is the Strongest Organism — Gonorrhea-powered machines? Is this what orgone energy has come to?

Laptops as earthquake sensors — Distributed computing using the accelerometers built into laptops to provide seismic data. The Internet is so cool.

Politics and Religion

Muslim call to adopt Mecca time — Uh huh. Nice to see some clear-minded thinking from the spiritual quarter. prof_brotherton is all over it. They must get those Muslim "scientists" from the same place the DI gets their "biologists". (Thanks to danjite.)

Closing the "collapse gap" — Some vestpocket comparative analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the alleged impending collapse of the American empire. A bit on the fringe, but interesting nonetheless.

Rice, death and the dollar — A fascinating piece in the Asia Times connecting the dollar's decline to the growing world food shortage. In general, I find non-US perspectives on American politics and policy very interesting, because they tend to stand outside our baseline assumptions. A lot of Americans don't think we have anything to learn from the rest of the world (and one of them sits in the big chair in the White House), but that's just sheer nativist idiocy. (Snurched from Daily Kos)

George Will moves to the left of Democrats — George Will on the Wall Street bailouts. For once, I think I agree with Mr. Will on something. This just in: snow in Hell.

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4/22/08
Time in saddle: 0 minutes (30 minute walk instead)
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: Flood by Andrew Vachss [ Powell's | Amazon ]

DC-3 conversion van — Ok, I want this. Real bad. Real, real bad.

The Kentucky Space Program

APOD with another lovely and thought-proving image

Texas polygamist sect is accused of indoctrinating girls — "Girls in the west Texas polygamous sect enter into underage marriages without resistance because they are ruthlessly indoctrinated from birth to believe disobedience will lead to their damnation" How is this different from any other religion? That's a serious question, not snark. The followers of virtually all religions raise their children within their religious framework, and impose the moral and behavioral rules of their faith on their children. Why is this different? If you're going to give social approval to religious upbringing, where does the line fall in picking-and-choosing? From my atheistic point of view, it's all indoctrination, after all.

Pentagon institute calls Iraq war 'a major debacle' with outcome 'in doubt' — Damned liberal traitors have infested the Pentagon now. Where's Joe McCarthy when we really need him?

John McCain's tax returns — Note his wife's were withheld. I wonder how Your Liberal Media and conservative America would feel about Hillary withholding Bill's tax info.

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4/19/08
Time in saddle: 20 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 271.8
Currently reading: The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Agent Janet Reid on the value of mistakes — Interesting stuff. I'm all about daring to be bad. Our own perceptions of quality are sometimes a writer's worst enemy.

Star Trek for the dead — (Thanks to lt260.)

Evil Monkey's guide to kosher imaginary animals — Hahahahahahahahah.

Did I.B.M. Really See a World Market "For About Five Computers"? — A debunking of one of the funnier quotes floating around in .sig files.

Car defaced, with bad punctuation — The last line of this story is worth the read.

"I'm getting a ticket? For what?" — Dept. of Stupid-Americans.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s an 800mph jet car — Man...wow...I really do admire wretched excess, I guess.

Cranky business memos within al-Qaeda — (Thanks to biomekanic.)

Bush's disapproval ratings — Remember when the liberal media was all about how unpopular a president Clinton was, because his approval ratings were below 50%? Heard much about Bush's approval ratings from those dastardly liberals in the media?

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4/18/08
Time in saddle: 19 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 272.4
Currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Don't forget yesterday's open questions thread

Wuxiapedia — Translated Chinese epic fiction. Interesting stuff. (Thanks to Jacques B.)

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals — An historian looks at AH. Sort of.

Review of Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind — "When enough people share a delusion, it loses its status as a psychosis and gets a religious tax exemption instead." Hahahahahaha.

Retropolis — I am there. T-shirts for yesterday's tomorrows, baby!

io9 on galactic habitable zones — Some very cool stuff here.

APOD with a stunning shot of the night sky over Flagstaff, AZ

Should We Shout Into the Darkness? — The (supposed) perils of METI.

German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures — Must have forgotten to convert English to metric again...

Red Baron tribute car — I remember the original of this thing.

The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere —

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4/16/08
Time in saddle: 18 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 272.2
Currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon [ Powell's | Amazon ]

He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) — It is to boggle.

Heating plug-in hybrids — It never occured to me that this was a problem with hybrids. But duh, heating runs off waste heat from the internal combustion engine.

Cultured meat is on its way — I've wondered for years why this hadn't been done already. What do you think? Frankenfood or progress?

Research monkeys languish in a state of limbo — The monkeys of Abkhazia. There's a hell of a piece of fiction (or more than one) buried in this sad, awful news story.

Youngstown downsizes — A city faces up to a no-growth future. That's very unAmerican, yet very practical.

Human, Chimp Ancestors May Have Mated, DNA Suggests — Sorry, offer not valid for Young Earth Creationists and ID proponents.

100 million year old feathers found trapped in amber — Ooh, that dastardly Satan has been planting evidence again!

Polygamy case poses 'logistical nightmare' for courts — This is funny, but sad. Or sad, but funny. ETA: scarlettina points out quite correctly that there is nothing amusing about this situation. It stands at the intersection of religion and child abuse, two big hot buttons of mine. I've avoided making larger comments about this (and I've thought plenty) because virtually none of the believers among my readers will be willing to associate this behavior with theirs, while most of the non-believers already see the connections. What I do find funny is the idea of a town overflowing with lawyers, which was the gist of this article.

A movie critic talks about not seeing Expelled [ imdb ] — The story of this movie is pretty damned funny. More ID idiocy, reaching the depths even of the Dover decision. ETA: See also Expelled.

Rahm Emanuel is an idiot — "We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.). "They have got to have some skin in the game." Jeebus, even the Republicans usually aren't that stupid. I expect a little more from the (alleged) good guys.

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4/14/08
Time in saddle: 18 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 272.0
Currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Short story "Achilles, Sulking In His Buick" to Realms of Fantasy today. Which I believe makes my 10th sale/joint sale to that magazine.

(And yes, I know the LJ userpic is a Pontiac, but I didn't have any Buick userpics.)

IROSF reviews Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon | Audible ] mdash; That would be by our own anghara.

Truck spills — A photo gallery of weird trucking accidents. (Thanks to seventorches.)

Man shot by killer robot — The headline is (sort of) funny, the story is not.

Guy Robot — Robot art. :: wants ::

madrobins with some tips for hiring women in the workplace

Trader sues over 'lap dance injury'

Motorcycles are looking more human — Apparently it reduces the accident rate.

Drivers trust GPS even to a fault

GM's Firebird — Turbine cars of future past.

Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade — More academic science fiction.

Your liberal media at work — Darn those biased reporters.

Scooter Libby disbarred — Couldn't happen to a more deserving Republican. Well, actually, it could...

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3/20/08
Time in saddle: 0 minutes (sick)
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 274.6
Currently reading: Field of Fire, by James O. Born [ Powell's | Amazon ]

One last set of photos from our visit to the Hanford site. The US Navy's decommissioned nuclear reactors are stored there. We got to visit them. Giant cannisters the diameter of a submarine hull, basically, sitting in a trench what am. This is cool, right? Even cooler was ( the reactor tug, a vehicle used to tow the decommissioned reactors from the Columbia River barge dock up to the burial site. Reportedly it makes 2 mph under load. )

As usual, more at the Flickr set.

Things I learned driving to and from Seattle today.

1 — the back of a PT Cruiser and the front of a BMW Isetta are remarkably similar.

2 — Nellie McKay's song "Identity Theft" impressed me more on first hearing than anything since the closing cut of The Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera. You really need to listen to it.

Urban Collectibles — Gifts for the motorhead who has everything.

Our Friend the Atom [ abebooks.com ]

Edge of the West on Raymond Carver, editing and auctorial voice — With a pointer back to a New Yorker blog entry.

A comment on the political history of racism — Confidential to GOP in America: when the Democratic party was full of segregationists, they were conservatives. "Democrat" and "liberal" are not synonymous even now, and were far less so in earlier days.

An "air tree" — I don't what the hell this is, but this seems to have landed in Spain. I think maybe the future arrived while we weren't watching it.

The Air Car — Not that kind. Compressed air. An interesting concept, but it brings a whole new meaning to the idea of having a flat. (Thanks to ferragus.)

More about the Texas Education Agency official forced to resign over an email that called Creationism into question

Per bovil a feed for FactCheck.org — For us political junkies, of any persuasion (except the paranoid, I suppose).

Romney and pardons — This piece of analysis is probably only of interest of political junkies. (Like me.)

Top 10 Bushisms of 2007 — One thing I've never understood — why is it acceptable to have a president who talks like a junior high special ed student? It doesn't reflect well on Bush himself, on the Republican party, on conservatives in general, and on America at large. The only answer I can come up with is the signature anti-intellectualism of conservative America. A favorite liberal game: imagine the press reaction if Hillary or Obama couldn't keep Austria and Australia straight. The media would go to town on it. Bush? Lifetime free pass from the "liberal" media.

A hearse, built from a 1973 Ford Pinto wagon, late 1960s FoMoCo taillights of uncertain origin, and headlights of even more uncertain origin. We found this in the parking garage above the fluorescent pirate golf. Turns out that the driver works at the golf place. The car was converted by his dad as a prop car for the annual haunted house his dad runs — it's never been a working hearse.

( The car in question... )