The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all of the background checks, interviews, and testing were done there were three finalists - two men and one woman. For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.

"We must know that you will follow your instructions, no matter what the circumstances. Inside this room you will find your wife sitting in a chair. You have to kill her."

The first man said. "You can't be serious. I could never shoot my wife!" The agent replies, "Then you're not the right man for this job."

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. Then the agent came out with tears in his eyes. "I tried, but I can't kill my wife." The agent replies, "You don't have what it takes. Take your wife and go home."

Finally, it was the woman's turn. Same instructions, save that she was told to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one shot after another. They heard screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said, "You guys didn't tell me the gun was loaded with blanks. So I had to beat him to death with the chair."

Funny in a different way is this picture from the Associated Press coverage of Bush's inauguration. Really. I'm not making this up. I wonder what happens if you play a tape of the inaugural speech backwards?


On the other hand, I found this speech to be occasionally clumsy, but frequently moving. And I am cheered, cross-referencing, to find this out as well. As Star and I were commenting last night, having just helped dig someone's car out of a snowbank along with ~3 other stopped carfulls of Samaritans... "It's good to be Canadian."

No offense to my US reader(s), of course. This is a long post - Read the rest.

Nanoscience kicks ass. Five years - that would imply that Aria should be in late elementary by the time her cell phone (you know she'll have one) can be powered by her T-shirt.

Even SL1-grade future shock is cool. This is a long post - Read the rest.

A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsumani waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the Port city of Mombasa, officials said today.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms, was swept down Sabaki river into the Indian ocean, then forced back to shore when tsumani struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before rangers rescued him.

‘‘It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,’’ ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in-charge of Lafarge park, told AFP.

‘‘After it was swept away and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatised. It had to look for a surrogate mother. It landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together... The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, then it becomes aggressive,’’ she said.

Story stolen from William Rivers Pitt's blog... which is usually about politics. It's a strange and fascinating world... This is a long post - Read the rest.

The clock to the launch of the world's first experimental solar sail craft is ticking. March first. Results within a few weeks, one way or the other.

Holy shit. This is a long post - Read the rest.

A patient walks into his doctor's office.

"Doc, I'm really sick. I have a tumor the size of an orange growing here, I'm constantly nauseated, tired, throwing up all the time, unexplained weight loss...My dad died of cancer...and I think I might have it too."

"How do you know you have cancer?"

"Well, I have all the symptoms...Something is seriously wrong with me, Doc. Can you run a test or something?"

"Look, I'm not going to investigate your illness unless you prove to me you have cancer."

"But...that's what the test is for..."

"Do you think you have cancer?"

"Maybe. Yeah."

"Can you prove it to me?"

"Well, no...but...that's why I came here, so you can test me..."

"Then you're out of luck. Come back to me when you can prove to me you're dying."

Two good exegeses (exegesises?) of the fraud issue are laid out here and here. I strongly recommend them to anyone who has any interest in the issue - regardless of their viewpoint. No shrillness here, merely evocation of facts. I've also run across some good discussions of the distinctions between fraud and ineptitude, and when one turns into the other. If any of those see linkworthy form, I'll put it up here.

I also recommend the analysis being done by Blumenthal, on the exit poll thing. He concludes that if one posits a systematic bias of 1.9% error between poll results and votes reported, then it doesn't look like there is conclusive evidence of anything from this indicator. It remains suggestive; it just doesn't prove anything. As to discussion of where this shift comes from? He cites nonresponse error as most likely, but admits that he can neither defend nor attack this hypothesis. Nor can anybody else I can find; Armando's points in the above summation are the best I get. There's some NEP data now circulating, which will get analyzed soon; we'll probably see data from that at about the same time as the Jan. 6th showdown when a Senator will - or will not - stand up with Conyers to protest Ohio.

At a protest in Boston, this quote being played - from Martin Luther King - might put a little spine into their wariness...

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends."

This is a long post - Read the rest.