Here we go again
That Heads link has some fan footage of a show in 79 - just the four of them. Pretty cool. Tina's really rocking it.
Those weren't bulls-eyes! They were the things surveyors see when they look through their transits!
How odd that Sarah Palin's graphic designers would use a visual metaphor that nobody in the world has ever used before but which happens to look exactly like a visual metaphor that everybody understands (and which Palin regularly uses in speech). Also odd that nobody knew they weren't bulls-eyes until today.
She is truly an imponderable creature.
Cruising along... Oh shit, a tree, turn left! (turns to your right, plane's left, loses speed) Oh shit! No, the other left! (turns to plane's right, loses more speed, noses down) Oh shit! Climb! (nose goes up, but the rudder's still to the plane's right, so you start to pitch over) Fuck! Rudder left, just a little! (plane levels, but it's going too slow, air stall coming up in 3...2...1) Oh shit! Elevator is still up, which means you can't get enough speed to pull out of the dive you're in. Elevator down, falling fast now. Pull up! (up it goes! misses the ground by inches, little engine screaming) No, not that much! Stall. Spin. Crash. Arrgh! (elapsed time, 4 seconds)
Also: a plane weighing less than 3/4 of an ounce, running on an electric motor smaller than a honey bee, can easily snap a steel propeller shaft, if you land nose-first.
Learn anything interesting lately?
Ross Douthat laments the Congressional GOP's Day 1 failure to deliver on its promise to cut $100B in spending:
Hugely depressing, but hopefully hugely instructive as well. The pledge to cut $100 billion was always more of a symbolic sop to the Tea Parties than a real step toward fiscal discipline.
Did the rubes know it was "symbolic" ? I doubt it.
You can’t have fiscal responsibility if you keep entitlements, tax expenditures and defense spending off the table, and the fact that these realities have been exposed in the very first week of G.O.P. control, thanks to the peculiarities of the fiscal calendar, is probably good news for fiscal conservatism. The sooner we get certain fond illusions out of the way, the better.
Yes, now that the GOP has won the election, it no longer needs the services of the lie that the Democrats want to cut Medicare, Social Security and defense spending. Now that the rubes have been sufficiently fooled, the GOP can get down to the business of doing exactly the opposite of what voters elected them to do!
Good plan, Douthat!
The belief that vaccines cause autism got its start in 1998 with a paper in the Lancet authored by Andrew Wakefield. We've known for a long time that it was a piece of crap: it used a nonrandom sample of 12 children, it depended largely on observations by parents, it was marred by egregious conflicts of interest, and in 2004 it was renounced by 10 of its co-authors and retracted by the magazine. That's all bad enough. But it turns out that it was even worse: the paper was an outright fraud from start to finish.
Top 20 results in a Google search for * " would be a great band name":
And now you know!
I really like "Stabbing!" and "Subduction Denialists", though the latter is a bit unwieldy.
A few of these were top results in the last round, too.
This guy (Gerry Rafferty, who died yesterday):
Co-wrote this song: