Current Affairs

With every news organization in the world writing about bailouts and meltdowns, I'm glad I still have my Newsweek to keep me up on the really important stuff:

Well, duh:

Mankind's very survival depends on the future exploration of space, said NASA chief Michael Griffin in an interview with AFP marking the 50th anniversary of the US space agency.

This journey, said the veteran physicist and aerospace engineer, is full of unknowns and has only just begun.

In case you haven't been paying attention:

In Washington these days, an 11-figure expenditure barely attracts notice.

Dude, guv sz no txt whi drv. bmr!

Drivers caught using their phones to write, read or send messages will be hit with a $20 ticket the first time and $50 on each subsequent offense. The penalty is a base fine, which is uniform across the state, but does not include the fees added by local municipalities.

A $20 ticket? Boy, that's probably like, you know, two or three days of txt cst.

Roger Ebert posted an article, "Creationsim: Your questions answered," on his blog as a bit of satire. Anybody who knows the least little thing about him will know this was not meant to be straightforward. But there were thousands of comments on his site and throughout the blogosphere  reflecting the widespread conviction that age and/or illness had turned him into a Creationist or a lunatic.

The title of this piece -- "The right way to slack off at work" -- makes it seem like a primer on how to be a bad employee. But it's really about how to cope with being in a downsized company in which you might be doing the work previously done by several employees:

Further evidence that I might have been spirited away to a different universe in my sleep:

Last week one of our colleagues from the San Francisco Bay area
brought to our attention billboards being erected in the area as
part of Kaiser Permanente's Thrive ad campaign. These billboards
boldly state, "Beat Obesity With A Stick". The background which was
very difficult to see, especially from a distance, turned out to be
sticks of celery.

Many of us in the size acceptance community have been physically and

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ6xBaZ92uA]

And I thought we had hit the economic bottom when it was reported that a drug dealer was adding a gasoline surcharge to the price of his dope:

The Dow Jones industrial average rebounded a bit Tuesday, but the true index for measuring hard times - the High End Girlfriend Index - was off the charts.

Move it along, old-timers, move it along:

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.