I find Jon Stewart’s impression of Glen Beck pretty great, unnerving for sure, but still great. Gotta love those inane FOX news chalkboard moments.

I’m not sure why those responsible for erecting a statue to a beloved children’s television icon would design a scary, craggy monster looking statue; but then again, this is Pittsburgh (I have no factual basis to make that claim)?

The six-year project was unveiled on a drizzy day yesterday with the 11-foot bronze statue as a center piece to a children’s tribute area.  Still.  Did NO ONE look at the statue?!?  It is as frightening as the actual Fred Rogers was comforting and inviting.  It looks like the mythical Jewish rock Golem.

This sucks: “In 2005, newlyweds Julie and Mike Boyde of Ambridge, Pennsylvania spent their wedding night at a bed and breakfast, where, for the first time since becoming a couple, they had intercourse without a condom. Immediately afterward, Julie was in excruciating pain. Doctors would eventually diagnose her with a rare and incurable disorder known as seminal plasma hypersensitivity, meaning Julie is allergic to her husband’s sperm.”

She goes on to say on a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is about an eight or nine for a full 24-hours after intercourse.  I don’t know if she’s using my pain scale (10 being decapitation, one being napping in a field of daisies), but this allergy sounds pretty awful to have.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about the tragedy at Fort Hood yesterday except that the media’s handling of the event (blaming PTSD when he’d never been to combat, forcing events to fit into their narrative, the thinly veiled notion that he’s actually a terrorist or that jihadists have infiltrated the military) has been specious at best and at worst yet another reason to never watch network news. 

Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

We know Afghanistan is a bad situation, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe.  It’s not a situation that decayed over night, which may surprise some who only watch the evening news. 

Still, it’s hard to have an sort of understanding about the country and the war.  Luckily, my good friend Zack served a tour of duty there, came home alive, and was able to shed some light on the complex nature of Afghanistan. 

However, if you don’t have a friend like Zack, then let me suggest you read this extensive analysis by Spencer Ackerman.  It’s really long, but at the end of it you’ll be much better informed about the whole situation regarding the strategies, the decision makers, and what the possible outcomes could be.

Good god, if there is anything more frightening than a bear, it’s the hairless variety.  Leipzig Zoo vets have been unable to determine what caused Dolores and all other female Spectacled Bears in captivity to suddenly go bald. “Some experts believe it could be due to a genetic defect though the animals do not seem to be suffering from any other affliction.  The bears, which originate from South America,  normally have fluffy dark brown fur and would now be growing a thicker fur coat to keep warm during the winter.”

Update: Yup, just as creepy when they are seen in motion.

Above is our Sun, “photographed using a special filter which matches the specific shade of red light emitted by hydrogen gas. The image was then inverted to enhance the visibility of the Sun’s chromosphere, giving it the ominus blue glow seen above.”

[via & via]

“It’s still a passive activity,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, told the New York Times.

Which means that people with DVRs still sit through commercials because they’re too lazy to use a remote.  With 1/3 of US households watching television through their DVR, when factored into ratings, many shows are increasing their viewership in the  range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent.  The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

Shocking!  But there it is.  Only now have networks come to realize that just because people watch television shows on time delay or on the internet doesn’t mean that people aren’t watching shows.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but I guess it does take a television executive about three years.

Author Jon Krakauer discusses the aftermath of Pat Tillman’s death and the lies of General Stanley McChrystal: “After Tillman died, the most important thing to know is that within–instantly, within 24 hours certainly, everybody on the ground, everyone intimately involved knew it was friendly fire. There’s never any doubt it was friendly fire. McChrystal was told within 24 hours it was friendly fire. Also, immediately they started this paperwork to give Tillman a Silver Star. And the Silver Star ended up being at the center of the cover-up. So McChrystal–Tillman faced this devastating fire from his own guys, and he tried to protect a young private by exposing himself to this, this fire. That’s why he was killed and the private wasn’t. Without friendly fire there’s no valor, there’s no Silver Star. There was no enemy fire, yet McChrystal authored, he closely supervised over a number of days this fraudulent medal recommendation that talked about devastating enemy fire.”

This takes nothing away from the sacrifice Pat Tillman made for this country, but it does call into question the man in charge of turning Afghanistan around for other US Troops.

I still don’t understand the half of it, but it sounds downright sinister when you read how they sold off their toxic assets and took out insurance, aka “credit default swaps”, to protect against a potential market crash.

Yesterday, the President announced the end of a 22-year ban on travel to the United States by people who had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS, fulfilling a promise he made to gay advocates and acting to eliminate a restriction he said was “rooted in fear rather than fact.”

Now he just has to work on that don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

Science rocks.  If I were a school superintendent I would put tables like this all over every school in my district.

Update: In 2003, Wake Forest University students Nazila Alimohammadi and Anna Clark built this picnic table.

The two women students created the sculpture as part of a public art course taught in the fall by David Finn, associate professor of art. Students in the class were paired up and assigned to work with campus organizations in creating works for public display. “We wanted our project to be fun and functional without a lot of emotional or political content,” Clark says. An aspiring dentist, Alimohammadi had taken several chemistry classes and suggested working with that department. They devised their “Periodic Table” concept — a pun of the familiar Periodic Table of Elements configuration — and the department responded enthusiastically. Alimohammadi did the structural steel work and Clark hand-painted the surface tiles. The piece, which was dedicated in an informal picnic ceremony on April 15, is accurate in every detail, right down to the auxiliary lanthanides and actinides tables that constitute the table’s bench.

[via & via]

We took notice when Google first announced they were going to add a music search function.  If you haven’t seen the music search feature yet in your searches, you will; they are rolling it out slowly.  However, you can test it out here.

I’m not terribly sold on this, but it’s a step in the right direction.  What I’d want is something that searches for Mp3s like the Hype Machine, as well as torrents.  But I understand the legality involved with both of those practices and how that functionality isn’t in Google’s best interests.