Current Affairs

Best visual of the bone-headed "photo op" staged in New York, from the Perfunction blog. At left is the photo op, at right the real thing on Sept. 11, 2001:

An important swine flu update as a valuable public service for readers of this blog!!!!

1. If you're the least bit suggestible, this is probably a bad time to read "The Stand."

2. Wash your hands a lot, and don't go to Mexico.

You're welcome.

Ah, man. My car's gonna be an orphan:

Not the usual snideness about Earth Day today, just a point that the Us vs. the Earth mantra got old a long time ago. This guy, who thinks it's time to dump Earth Day, captures my sentiments pretty well:

I don't worry about the earth. I'm pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I'm very certain the earth doesn't worry about us.

Let's make this a national project. Even if it was Richard Daley's idea, it's still a good one:

Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, Illinois, has declared Thursday as "Talk Like Shakespeare Day" to celebrate the 445th birthday of the man many consider the greatest playwright in the English language.

While the bard's actual birth date is not known for sure, many scholars think it was April 23, 1564.

Oh, lookee! The FBI is out trying to catch of those nasty right-wing terrorists Janet Napolitanao warned us about:

Joining the ranks of  Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the FBI has added animal rights extremist Daniel Andreas San Diego to its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, becoming only the second American citizen and the only domestic terrorist to ever appear on the list.

Hallelujah! I have nothing to worry about now, since Sen. John Kerry has my back:

Senator John F. Kerry will hold hearings in Washington next week on the financial problems facing the newspaper industry, as dwindling advertising dollars push many US papers to the brink of closure.

[. . .]

After all these years, could it be that my whole life has been built on a lie? The girls don't all get prettier at closing time?

The phenomenon is known as beer goggles - the fact that men tend to find women more fascinating after a few pints of bitter or lager.

For generations, young males have been explaining to friends that their odd choice of female company was down to alcohol.

I can't quite make myself believe this is the tragedy the speaker says it is:

MUNCIE -- Not all of the Midwest's small cities will survive globalization, according to the keynote speaker at the sixth annual Small Cities Conference late last week.

They won't exactly disappear, said Richard Longworth, a former foreign correspondent for The Chicago Tribune and United Press International.

The announcement of President Obama's high-speed rail initiative has given new energy to people in this area who've long dreamed of transforming Indiana and the Miwest with that mode of transportation. We should be careful to take all the hype with several grains of salt. Such rail lines are unlikely to take many cars off the road -- they're more likely to replace for-profit commuter airlines. And they aren't likely to be as environmentally friendly as advertised.