The Pig Wins

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about George Bernard Shaw's advice: Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. The context was the Obama administration's fight with Fox News.

Today the pig (Fox?) is grinning because the Mao-quoting White House communications director Anita Dunn, who first declared war on Fox, is quitting.

What A Croc

Via MSN Money:

Porsche is suing shoe company Crocs (CROX) because it doesn't like the way the company named one of its product lines the Crocs Cayman. That's because it would be so easy to, you know, confuse a luxury sports car with a rubber shoe.

Hotmail, Other Users, Got Phished

Last month, thousands of Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo users got phished. They were tricked into giving their passwords to a hacker who then uploaded them to an open website. An analysis of the published list shows some spectacularly foolish passwords and gives some hints on password security. From The Register:

The most common single password in the sample of 10,000 purloined Live ID login credentials ... was "123456", something only marginally more secure than the traditional favourite "password".

Perhaps it should be no surprise that someone who thinks "password" is a good password would also be easily tricked into giving it away.

Army Lost In Sand Storm Discovered - 2500 Years Later

From Discovery News:

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

Pushing A Dumptruck Out A Fourth Floor Window

Via the Wall Street Journal: How did the dumptruck get up there? That is, up on the fourth floor of an abandoned Packard plant in Detroit? Nobody's saying (if you look closely there's an old Chevy breadvan up there too). Anyway, it had to come down, and these folks were just the ones to do it. Poor old dumptruck.

Anvil Shootin'

World champion anvil shooter Gay Wilkinson demonstrates how to blow an anvil sky high with black powder. Woohoo.

The Berlin Wall

November 9 is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in eastern Europe.

Commemorating the anniversary, the Wall Street Journal has created this interactive time line that is well worth your time.

The End Of Disc Media?

Discs of some description have carried music and movies for over a century. But with advances in solid state memory and miniaturization, discs are done.

This week, Paramount Pictures announced it will deliver full-length feature films on Kingston flash memory products. Goodbye DVDs, hello USB and SD cards. But read the comments. Do consumers really need this?

Learning Lego Language

According to writer and Lego Dad Giles Turnbull, it turns out families have their own individual systems for naming Lego parts. Who knew? I thought everyone called it a clippy bit.

Great chart. One could print it off and toss it in the Lego bin.

Bird Drops Baguette - Hadron Collider Shuts Down

A bird has dropped a baguette into the Large Hadron Collider causing overheating and shut down of the system yet again.

As PopSci reports,

With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

Update: Much more technical detail at The Times. Very geeky.

Not Presidential

Boy have I ever taken flak these last 12 months for saying out loud that Barack Obama is not presidential. And that's been from Canadians! But if you ever needed iron-bound proof, this totally surreal clip is it:



Things are at a pretty pass when even your hometown mainstream media are calling you out for your "frightening insensitivity":

The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective. But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks.

Galloping Gertie And Sturdy Gertie

Here is a great high school video project produced in 2007 on 'Galloping Gertie', the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge that failed in spectacular fashion on November 7, 1940.

The video was produced by students Koyo Kim and Raluca Ifrim and took first place in the Junior Group Documentary category at the 2007 Washington History Day competition.

A New Ocean Forming In Ethiopia?

Via Watts Up With That, this is fascinating news from the University of Rochester. A 35-mile long rift that opened up in the Ethiopian desert in 2005 is now confirmed as the beginnings of a new African ocean. How cool is that?

Anthony wonders how long it will be before we see emails from beachfront land speculators in Nigeria and Ethiopia. He also comments that this is another example of Planet Earth doing pretty much what it darn well pleases despite our protestations.

Canada Votes To Repeal Federal Gun Registry Law

MPs voted 164-137 yesterday to repeal the failed billion-dollar Canadian long gun registry. The 33 vote margin signaled considerable support in the opposition parties beyond Stephen Harper's minority conservatives. The bill to repeal still has to go to public hearings, a second vote in parliament and then to the Senate.

Candice  Hoeppner, the conservative backbencher who sponsored the bill to repeal said, "Unfortunately, the long-gun registry didn't do anything to stop criminals from having guns. It was a huge waste of money and it targeted the wrong people."

More details at the National Post.

Leftists Out-Of-Sync With Reality?

In the Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon writes about how history is pulling away from traditional leftist paradigms:

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?

Simple: She's a liberal.

Germany Furious With GM

After vacuuming 1.5 Billion Euros out of the German treasury in bridge loans, General Motors has decided not to sell Opel to Magna after all. Naturally the Germans are furious. Seems like GM finally figured out that selling Opel to the Canada/Russia Magna-Sperbank consortium would deliver state of the art GM small car technology right into the hands of the Russians.

UPDATE: Magna shareholders appeared relieved early today. Shares of Magna International Inc were up more than 7% on news of the GM Opel fiasco.