Last night we visited our friend Walter and Elizabeth for dinner. For the post-dinner entertainment, I brought several DVDs, and among them we selected the copy of Mad Max I'd borrowed from the local library. It had a little something for everyone: Insane car stunt action for me; a very young Mel Gibson for my lovely wife. Here are reviews at Cold Fusion Video Reviews, And You Call yourself a Scientist!, and Dante's Inferno.
The local paper reports that a measure to adopt Daylight Savings Time has finally -- after three decades -- passed the Indiana Legislature.
Daylight-saving time is coming to all of Indiana for the first time in more than 30 years.
In a history-making drama, the Indiana House voted 51-46 late Thursday to pass the controversial issue, which has dominated the legislature, coffee shops and kitchen tables for four months.
Gov. Mitch Daniels, who made passage of the time change one of his top economic priorities, will sign the bill soon so that on April 2, 2006, Hoosiers will join people in 47 other states in turning their clocks ahead one hour.
The climactic vote at 11:36 p.m. came after a half-hour of emotional testimony, in which lawmakers on both sides of the debate brushed away tears. They had fought about the issue all session. Some argued the changes are needed to boost Indiana in a global economy and erase the state's backward image. Others called it an unnecessary intrusion in Hoosiers' lives.
Lawmakers had been deadlocked in the House all day.
The bill -- Senate Bill 127 -- had come within two votes of being killed earlier Thursday, when the House voted 49-48 against the time change.
But after 12 hours of behind-the-scenes pleading -- supporters called it persuasion; opponents called it arm-twisting -- backers believed they finally had locked up the requisite 51 votes.
"Now is the time," said House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis. "Today is the day. Let's do it."
[T]o sell his tax cuts, Bush implied that anything under $100,000 was “low income.” Now, to sell his Social Security package, anything over $20,000 is “better off.”
"We knew that coffee kept us awake. Now we know why," says researcher Robert Greene, MD, PhD, in a news release.
...Caffeine blocks a brain chemical called adenosine, which prompts feelings of drowsiness, Greene reports in the April 21 issue of Neuron.
Ordinarily, brain cells release adenosine when they're overworked. Brain cells have a demanding job. They have to run the body, process information, and communicate with other brain cells constantly. Sooner or later, they need a break. That's when the brain starts pumping out more adenosine.
"More and more adenosine is released and feeds back onto the cells to quiet them down," says Greene. "It's like telling them, 'You guys have worked too hard. Take it easy; refresh yourselves.'"
When caffeine thwarts adenosine, go-to-sleep signals get derailed until caffeine's effects wear off.
For someone whose early-to-rise schedule makes for some unwelcome drowsiness in the evenings, this news is fascinating.
I've posted this awesome app that lets you remix music with sound clips and images from Bruce Lee movies before, but it's so darn cool I thought it worth a repeat.
Yesterday the L.A. Times ran a spooky story on police who try to trace sexually abused children by examining for clues digital photos traded among pedophiles. Even more disturbing for me than the comment by one of the officers that most of the pedophiles they've nabbed have been Star Trek fans (wha...?) is the revelation that the same children have appeared in a series of photos over time, while the unit has tried desperately to narrow down their location.
Tbogg puts a hilarious smackdown on a recent announcement by right-wing bloggers that they're planning to form their own, I kid you not, "news service."
Yes. This would be a "news service" if by "news service" you mean a loosely confederated group of individuals who don't necessarily go out and cover events so much as read the traditional news sources about them and then they...retype it. God knows you can't find that on the internets.
It was as if Bruce Springsteen invited 5,100 of his closest friends over for a while to listen to a few tunes he had put together in his spare time. But the setting was a packed concert hall at the downtown Fox Theatre.
Springsteen performed 27 songs Monday night, including most of the 12 new songs from his latest release "Devils and Dust," which was recorded without the E Street Band.
...Springsteen, dressed in a black shirt with rolled-up sleeves and jeans, had a harmonica around his neck, a couple of microphones, a guitar, a piano, speaker monitors, a dimly lit beaded lamp on a table and an old-style chandelier. A stagehand brought him several guitars over the course of the night.
The 2 1/2-hour concert marked the first in a 13-city North American acoustic tour. Springsteen will perform in theaters and in arenas scaled down to a theater format. This is his first solo act since the "Ghost of Tom Joad" tour in 1996-97.
Several years ago, I was fortunate to catch Springsteen at the Louisville Palace on the Ghost of Tom Joad tour -- just Bruce, his acoustic guitar, and a harmonica.
One of the first songs I started playing after getting my copy of Dance Dance Revolution last June was a track called "Cutie Chaser" -- its image of a puppy-like anime character in a policewomans's uniform was just too kawaii to ignore. Yet even as I began to develop some marginal competence at other, more difficult songs, the coveted "A" rating -- indicating a maximum combo with nothing less than a "Great" or "Perfect" -- eluded me. Time and again, a slight misstep would result in a single "Good," reducing the A to a B.
Until tonight, that is. After blowing it with one -- one! -- "Good" twice in a row, I finally mastered the step pattern on the third try, and earned my A. w00t!
Last night, I didn't get much opportunity to watch a movie, as I was hastening to post my Hitchhiker's Guide review. As is often the case when I don't have that kind of time, I popped in something short and episodic, and that usually means anime. Last night, I put in my Volume 1 DVD of Fruits Basket and let episodes 4 through 6 play as I typed. My lovely wife was watching, and I was touched to see that she teared up a bit during Episode 6. Her sentimentality is one of the many things I love about her.
Cheered by tens of thousands of onlookers, the world's largest jetliner touched down Wednesday with puffs of smoke from its 22 outsize wheels, ending the historic maiden flight for a plane that Airbus hopes will carry it to market dominance.
The A380's four-hour sortie past the snowcapped Pyrenees removed any doubt that the behemoth capable of carrying as many as 840 passengers is airworthy. But it did little to convince skeptics, led by U.S. rival Boeing Co., that the plane will prove profitable.
About 30,000 people watched the takeoff and landing, police said, many from just outside the airport perimeter, where whole families spent the night awaiting European aviation's biggest spectacle since the supersonic Concorde's first flight in 1969.
Applause reverberated across the airfield and adjacent Airbus headquarters in this town outside the southwestern city of Toulouse as test pilots Claude Lelaie and Jacques Rosay emerged from the big white plane with a blue tail, waving happily, with their four fellow crew members.
The number of serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled last year, according to U.S. government figures, a sharp upswing in deadly attacks that the State Department has decided not to make public in its annual report on terrorism due to Congress this week.
Overall, the number of what the U.S. government considers "significant" attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record of around 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides who were briefed on statistics covering incidents including the bloody school seizure in Russia and violence related to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir.
Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22 attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year's total -- a sensitive subset of the tally, given the Bush administration's assertion that the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S. handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last summer.
The State Department announced last week that it was breaking with tradition in withholding the statistics on terrorist attacks from its congressionally mandated annual report. Critics said the move was designed to shield the government from questions about the success of its effort to combat terrorism by eliminating what amounted to the only year-to-year benchmark of progress.
Although the State Department said the data would still be made public by the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which prepares the information, officials at the center said no decision to publish the statistics has been made.
The controversy comes a year after the State Department retracted its annual terrorism report and admitted that its initial version vastly understated the number of incidents. That became an election-year issue, as Democrats said the Bush administration tried to inflate its success in curbing global terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Phil Carter is less than impressed with the recent whitewash investigations into who is responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
In the Army's leadership schools for officers and sergeants, the doctrinal manual preaches quite a different result from the outcome of this investigation. Bottom line: commanders (and NCOs) are responsible for everything their unit(s) do or fail to do, period. A commander, especially a general officer, is not just responsible for those things he/she ordered, but for those things that he/she knew about — or should have known about. This is the essence of the mantle of command...
...Today's news represents both an abandonment of this principle and the abdication of responsibility by the Defense Department and the Army. The question is not whether these officers actually directed the abuses or participated in them; rather, the question is how they acted as generals and leaders to facilitate the abuses, fail to prevent them, or fail to stop them. That is the standard to which commanders are held, and that is the standard which is not being enforced here today. I dare say that this story sends a staggeringly bad message to the soldiers and junior leaders now on the front lines: we will hold you, your sergeants and your lieutenants responsible for their actions, but we will not hold your colonels and generals responsible for theirs. It is hard to see how that message can possibly support the "good order and discipline" which is so essential for maintaining an effective fighting force.
I share Carter's outrage, and wonder how much this egregious abdication of responsibility will degrade the capacity of the United States armed forces. That the widespread abuse of prisoners occurred at all is a black mark on the military's honor. That the military seeks to pin the responsibility on lowly troop and NCOs only compounds its shame and dishonor.
