…and I already have a category I’ll never get to use: Dick Cheney’s Miracle Heart. 5 heart attacks, first at 37— and now, he may have no pulse.
I shudder to think that my father’s pardon could have been physically near the general area where this photo was taken.
I was disgusted earlier this week by the size of the Goldman Sachs fraud settlement— amounting to about 3.4% of their 2009 bonus pool— leaving me primed to jump on this Elizabeth Warren bandwagon. I like the idea of Obama using this as his opportunity to make an M Night twist and not only tap Warren for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but simultaneously clean house and can the cronies Geithner and Summers.
It’s a pretty elaborately constructed fantasy world I live in. Meanwhile, in the real one, Glenn Beck gave a Jesus “was a conqueror” and “make the Jews pay” speech and prostitute patron David Vitter is gobsmacked at the idea of Rachel Maddow exhibiting femininity.
A guy told me really excitedly this winter that the solo album from the Sigur Rós lead singer was going to be the album of the summer— that you’d hear it blasting from the car of anyone who’s cool. He was so excited and it made me really happy to hear someone evangelizing a current album instead of just slamming the incessant cesspool that pop music has become. I went ahead and bought it when I saw it in a store a few weeks later and— I don’t know. It’s pretty structurally clever in some places but that never really means anything for listenability; just ask Captain Beefheart. Obviously, Go is a lot nicer to listen to than Trout Mask Replica— some of the operatic swells have a great galloping panchromatic beauty to them— but then you realize it’s because you’re riding astride an armored unicorn, straight for the heart of Care-a-Lot. It’s music I feel like I’m going to get beaten up for listening to— which makes it kind of hard to listen to.
Anyway. My Auditory Enjoyment Index has been out of commission since I accidentally listened to that new LCD Soundsystem album grading lab finals. Confidential to James Murphy— making it sound like you sampled “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” is not a blank check for lines like
As night has such a local ring
And love and rock are pickup things
And you know it, yeah, you know it
Yeah, you know, take
People are paying attention, man. We haven’t all had enough Pabst to get lost in the handclaps.
Here’s my Summer Jam:
One of the first things I ever put on the Internet was an America Online-hosted memorial marking the passing of Wee Willie Wolfman. I once saw Willie vivisect a pigeon in the time it took you to read the word “vivisect.” My Dad bought him specifically for his breed’s rodent murdering proficiency. He developed a gimp walk but stubbornly lived on as his rear third seemed to develop leprosy. He was awesome-
but not beyond compare. There are truly singular dogs out there and- on occasion- we talking monkeys are fortunate enough to share our lives with that of an exceptional canine. Here’s to Shillelagh and those of us lucky enough to have known the furriest Clint Eastwood warrior monk street urchin out there.
In just a few weeks it will be a whole year of marriage.
So far it’s been tremendous and wonderful.
I am still very excited for the future.
Yay love!!!!
An ESA mission made a flyby of the largest asteroid yet visited by human spacecraft.
There’s some pretty cool pictures on the ESA website— but I wanted to show off something that caught even my sleepy eye. Check out these subparallel grooves from another set of Rosetta images:
It took some looking, but I eventually figured out where I’d seen those grooves before.
That’s Phobos— one of the moons of Mars. (It’s mostly visible light, if you’re wondering; some near-infrared as well). You can see those same sorts of grooves, which used to be blamed on Stickney Crater, which the big dimple near the bottom right— those are landslides on its crater rim! A 2006 paper mapped them to show the grooves fall into 12 general age groups and hypothesized they could represent scoring from regular deliveries of ejecta from impacts next door. But Lutetia is a wandering asteroid… what would score it with crater chains on a regular basis? The main belt is far too capricious a place to expect such precision. It’s not like the Empire Strikes Back in there.
Sam and I are hitting in the streets to patronize a local establishment but, man, were we happy to read this story before leaving the house—
(Sheriff Joe) Arpaio has launched — either on his own or in conjunction with the county attorney — high-profile criminal investigations against a who’s who of Maricopa County politicians and officials. The list includes the mayor of Phoenix, a former police chief, two members of the board of supervisors, Superior Court judges, and even a former state attorney general.
The charges have included public corruption, misuse of taxpayers’ dollars, bribery, rape and even child molestation. What all these investigations hold in common is that they were launched with great public fanfare, but rarely resulted in convictions. Among the investigations recounted in this report, the only conviction has been on the misdemeanor charge against Dowling.
Nail him to the wall, federal grand jury! What an asshole.
(Phoenix Mayor Phil) Gordon came under Arpaio’s scrutiny, he says, after speaking out against the sheriff’s neighborhood sweeps to round up illegal immigrants.
The mayor says he received a torrent of records requests from sheriff’s investigators, and he was later told that he was under investigation on possible child molestation charges. Gordon says the sheriff “bragged that he was watching my office from his office with a telescope.”
Meanwhile— have you ever seen a cross-section of what the Seattle deep-bore tunnel would look like? What a beast!
The picture’s from the WSDOT geotechnical report. Thanks to Dominic for the link!
Sam and Devin dot com 