NC Zoo.

Sorry. Egg-salad goes right through me.

NC Zoo, Ashboro, NC.

Here's a little bit of a review of a paper airplane competition:

In the best tradition of British inventions, this [the "Avenger"] repeatedly went into terminal nose dives in spite of complex flaps and tucks which had earned the judges' admiration.

ha.

The turkey's brining, two bags of apples and one of potatoes await peeling. Many tons of stuffing and pie are just wisps of thought yet. But there's wine as far as the eye can see. We will eat like kings, the two of us. The house-building crew across the street started hammering at 7:30 AM today, just like every other day - framing is almost complete! I expect the painters or hardwood guys will be in there on Christmas morning. A pox on them and their's. Happy T-day to the rest of you.

Glossy paper, the kind used for printing magazines with a lot of photographs for example, is usually made with a substance called "kaolin". Kaolin's a clay that's used as a filler to spackle over the little irregularities and holes left by the fibers that forms the bulk of the paper. It's also somewhat radioactive.

I spent my grade school years in Husdon Falls, NY, a little town next to a bigger little town, Glens Falls, which was just rated the 3^rd safest metropolitan area in the country. Eventually I moved to Apex, NC, a little town next to Cary, NC (both are suburbs of Raleigh). Cary has been named the 3^rd safest city with 100,000 to 499,999 people, by the same survey.

Clearly, I prefer living next to safe people.

Charles Krauthammer, who looks like Mandy Patinkin's grumpy brother, is usually someone worth disagreeing with. Nonetheless he has an excellent column today about my second favorite subject: 'Intelligent Design'.

He calls it Phony Theory, False Conflict. And it goes som'in' like dis:

Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

Yeah baby.

(via Making Light)

(repost)