Another one bites the dust

RIP Trevor Bolder.



David Bowie with  Jean Genie in 1973 on Top of the Pops. The one with the harmonica riff from David at the end.

Fanks.

From around the web

In an article about the Colorado shooter, the Examiner writes:

The legal definition of insanity in Colorado is "the ability to distinguish right from wrong, caused by a diseased or defective mind." 

I'm sure it isn't.  The inability perhaps, or, the definition of sanity is the ability to distinguish right from wrong, or something.  The definition in the article is hopeless.

I'd leave that in the comments except it requires Facebook to sign in.  The ghettoization of the famous web 2.0 is unbelievable. Why any adult would need to join a high school facebook page to comment on a news rag is beyond me. I'll stick with web 1.0. Actually, I'd have been happy with Usenet and the Examiner could have remained on paper, or whatever it used to be.

When it had sub-editors.

From around the web

An occasional series.

I know the Dow Jones has been crazy all year, but I didn't know it was this crazy. (The graphic is usually an easily read trend chart.)




I went to the Chicago Sun-Times to read an article on the increase in middle age suicides, and this is what it looked like.



The article begins:

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis, the government reported Thursday. The trend was most pronounced among white men and women in that age group. Their suicide rate jumped 40 percent between 1999 and 2010. 

 But much more scarily, the picture is of the Terminator and the caption reads:

Machines such as the ones seen in the movie "Terminator Salvation" could one day make humanity wish they'd never crawled out of the primordial goo. 

 What?! No wonder the suicide rate is peaking! Is there no hope?   (Bored sub editor, maybe?)

Blue Grandis

This is Fatty, my 15 year old Phelsuma madagascariensis grandis, or geico gecko as they are known nowadays.

Fatty, like almost all grandis geckos, is lime green with red spots on his back and red markings on his face. However, he's been outside for a week or two and it's currently very sunny in Southern California. When he's suntanned, his skin is blue.



I've never seen a blue grandis before - the intensity of the color rivals that of my Phelsuma guimbeaui, Heidi. I don't have a picture of Heidi because he is aptly named and I've never gotten near him with a camera in my hand.

Thatcher memorials pour in

The BBC under the headline Margaret Thatcher funeral attended by 'Essex Man' (which sounds like an Onion headline, or a perambulatory Neanderthal skull) paying his respects to Baroness Milk Snatcher:

But it was the speech Lady Thatcher delivered the day after the bomb that he remembers most vividly.
"The speech was magnificent. There was an explosion of support for her," he said.

Yes, but a little earlier there had been an explosion of non-support for her, right? That's what a bomb is.

"No such thing as Thatcher" - Society

I see Leeds denizens thronged by their millions to the city center to watch Maggie's funeral on the big telly.

You'd think they'd be more grateful. Leeds municipal buildings (like the one on the right) used to be coal black from all the coal smoke and coal dust shed by the thousands of coal-black miners. Now, not so much.

This person did turn up to the funeral though.

Talk about drawing attention to yourself.

If they'd had bonnets like that in Star Trek, people would have said this skiffy stuff was too far fetched to take seriously.  Yet this person (singer Katharine Jenkins, apparently) appears to be alive and even conscious, and so there's a possibility they actually chose to wear it. It's a mystery.  (It's from the Guardian's picture live-blogging of the celebration, here.)

Man finds his "dog" is actually a weasel shock

A bit of deja vu this morning when just about everywhere exploded with the news that in Argentina's Buenos Aires, ferrets on steroids are sold in the market as toy poodles.

As a long-term reader of alt.folklore.urban and the Jan Harold Brunvand books, I knew this was a variant of one of the oldest urban legends of all - in fact, it's "The Mexican Pet", the title of Brunvand's 1986 book. He collected a similar story "in the wild" in 1983. Snopes has the details from the book and more:

  [Brunvand, 1986]
A woman from La Mesa, California, went to Tijuana, Mexico, to do some shopping. As any visitor to this border town knows, the streets near the shopping areas are populated with stray dogs. The woman took pity on one little stray and offered it a few bites of her lunch, after which it followed her around for the rest of the afternoon.

When it came time to return home, the woman had become so attached to her little friend that she couldn't bear to leave him behind. Knowing that it was illegal to bring a dog across the international border, she hid him among some packages on the seat of her car and managed to pass through the border checkpoint without incident. After arriving home, she gave the dog a bath, brushed his fur, then retired for the night with her newfound pet curled up at the foot of her bed.

When she awoke the next morning, the woman noticed that there was an oozing mucus around the dog's eyes and a slight foaming at the mouth. Afraid that the dog might be sick, she rushed him to a nearby veterinarian and returned home to await word on her pet's condition.

The call soon came. "I have just one question," said the vet. "Where did you get this dog?"

The woman didn't want to get into trouble, so she told the vet that she had found the dog running loose in the street near her home in La Mesa. But the vet didn't buy it. "You did not find this dog in La Mesa. Where did you get the dog?"

The woman nervously admitted having brought the dog across the border from Tijuana. "But tell me, doctor," she said. "What is wrong with my dog?"

His reply was brief and to the point. "First of all, it's not a dog — it's a Mexican sewer rat. And second, it's dying."
 

---

I guess in the modern variant, the man actually pays for two of them. No one seems to be saying how he found out his weasels (or ferrets, or giant rats - the reports vary) were not actually dogs.

Margaret Thatcher dead

Hooray!

Tip of the hat to Aqua for reminding me of this song. 

Human Brainome Project

Apropos yesterday's comment about the BRAIN project, I was listening to the radio on Wednesday and they interviewed someone or other in the Brains Community who said, "The human brain is the most complex  object in the universe."

Is it? Is that some sort of guesstimated fact, or is it one of those things like "humans only use ten percent of their brains" and "turkey makes you sleepy because tryptophan and BRAINS" that everyone knows but are bullshit?

Surely a whale's brain, being larger, is more complex? And what about those four-square mile funguses and Pando? Or does it only count if the complex object in question has developed Auschwitz, the atom bomb and Kim Jong-Un?

Emo Philips: “I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

The Brain Initiative - I know the answer already

President Obama has called for a Brain Initiative - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Apparently a whole hundred million dollars has been allocated to it, whatever "it" is. I have to say it sounds like something dreamed up by some president from Idiocracy. I can imagine the scene:

President: I need something megabig, for my legacy. Like the War On Drugs, War Against Cancer, War On Terror... 

Advisor (in a whispered aside): Does he know we aren't winning those? (Out loud) The Apollo moon shot project, sir? Mapping the human genome? 

President: Exactly. One of them. Or one like them. I want the biggest thing ever. What's the greatest mystery of all? 

Advisor 2: God, sir. 

President: We can't solve God. It says so in the Bible. 

Advisor 3: Women? 

President: Good one. "The Human Women Project." Wait, women might not like being seen as a problem to be solved, even though they are, hey fellers? And they have the vote, so no. 

Advisor 2: The Greatest Mystery Of All is...The Yooman Brane! 

President: I love it! The Human Brainome Project! My legacy is secure! Get someone at NIH on to it, will you?

(The answer is 42.)

Swallows Day Parade 2013 - more pictures

Some more views of the San Juan Capistrano Swallows Day parade on March 23rd, 2013.

The latter part of the parade route. Who knew I lived in such a beautiful city?


Big horses that remind me of Roman statues.



Slightly smaller horse.
See also yesterday's post.

Swallows Day Parade, 2013

It's always nice and warm at the San Juan Capistrano Swallows Day Parade.  There's always great food to be had and we're always invited to at least one party, to which I send my party reviewer who unfortunately does not have a blog but remarked privately that the Pig Roast this year was fantabulosa.

The parade was as wonderful as usual. It's the largest non-motorized parade in the US, which means the Shriners have to pull their little hat behind them on wheels - no miniature cars for the Shriners!

We had the original inhabitants (as far as anyone knows) of SJC, the Acjachemen nation.


We had the Mexican Cowboys, who were second. And had the pranciest horses.


Then SJC had a wave of northern European cowboys. (These are cowgirls, the Winchester Widows.)


We had the Aliens. I'm not sure the aliens were actually inhabitants of SJC at any time but they threatened to blow us up with the Death Star if we didn't put their picture in.


And we had the newest inhabitants of SJC, the Mexican Chinelo dancers. (See yesterday for close ups.)
I also got a lot of shots of horses - dancing horses, cart horses, foaming-at-the-mouth horses, and even miniature horses that were knee-high. I'll look through those and put them up somewhere too.


Edit to correct "Chinelo".

Fiesta de las Golondrinas, 2013

Today was the San Juan Capistrano festival of the swallows. It's a vernal equinox festival, or if you prefer, St. Joseph's day, or if you're a local, it's the day the swallows fly back from Argentina to nest in SJC.

The swallows actually arrived a few days ago. Here's a couple of photos of the Swallows Day Parade.



More to follow tomorrow.

Meteorite

Woke up in the middle of the night to check Twitter and see the planet has been hit by a meteorite. You don't get that every day.  Came down over Russia (why is it always Russia?) Four hundred hurt, mostly by broken glass and debris, and the roof of a factory collapsed.

Ah, Russian dashcams:



(One video was removed by user)


You might want to turn the sound down at about 13 seconds for this one.



My learnings from that are as follows: If something travelling at many times the speed of sound goes overhead completely silently, don't stand near plate glass windows until *after* the sonic boom arrives.

There were clearly two fragments travelling together. There seems to be substantial confusion about whether they actually exploded or it was just the shockwave that did the damage. We hear that there is an 'impact crater' in the ice of a lake but I guess we'll know more when I get up again in the real morning.

There's another one due in a few hours, size of an Olympic™ ® swimming pool (who estimates hurtling sky rocks in units of 'the swimming pool'? Bloody astronomers) but this is slated to miss the planet by about 17,150 thousand miles which sounds like a lot but is less than the mileage on what I think of as my new car.  And is closer to Earth than our communications satellites.

Also, the Pope recently resigned. Does he know something we don't know? Any Mayans want to comment?

Full Moon setting, January 28th 2013

Taken from my yard in So Cal.