The always-erudite and readable Mark Steyn traces the surprising and convoluted history of one of the best-known songs of the 20th century: The third take almost collapsed at the outset as the unrehearsed musicians dithered and fished for the key, but once they started cooking, the song was glory bound. ‘Mbube’ wasn’t the most remarkable […]
The first woman to win a Silver Star since World War II: Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester fought her way through an enemy ambush south of Baghdad, killing three insurgents with her M-4 rifle to save fellow soldiers’ lives — and yesterday became the first woman since World War II to win the Silver Star medal […]
No, not on Earth – on Mars. A growing number of people are raising a stink about global warming, claiming that mankind is causing the world we all share to heat, by some claims, to a point that will cause a climatic catastrophe. Now a bit of a hint from Mars: Mars, too, appears to […]
For all of you burka fans out there (short German intro with a song)
I found an on-line game, Geosense, which allows you to test your knowledge of world geography by locating specific cities in specific countries on various maps (world map, Europe map, US map, etc.). Your score per city is based on how close you were and how quickly you answered; you play in rounds of ten […]
First off, sorry to all for not posting for such a good stretch of time. If you have been reading my posts here, you know that I have been anticipating some significant changes in the status quo of the US economy. Last summer I started to get the notion that things were out of control […]
I love it when I see someone actually crunch the numbers. In these two articles, Randolph Harrison at Capitalism 2.0 applies real-world financial analysis to the Second Life economy — and decides that it matches the characteristics of a high-yield investment program, if not an all-out Ponzi scheme. Here are the articles: Second Life: Revolutionary […]
I have long felt that Rudy Giuliani is our best bet for the 44th President of the United States; quite frankly, I would vote for him regardless of what party ticket he ran upon. The reasons are quite simple: We’re at war and will be for the foreseeable future. Guiliani was nearly killed in the […]
The Daily WTF is one of my daily reads. Subtitled “Curious perversions in information technology”, it allows readers to submit wretched source code examples, IT development horror stories, and similar cringe-inducing true-life accounts. (It’s fun to read the comments on source code postings; they bring to mind the old joke, “Q: How many programmers does […]
OK, so I praised a simple dungeon-crawl game that can be completed in 30 minutes. You may ask, why? Well, here’s this report (in the New York Times, no less) by Seth Schiesel about The Burning Crusade, the new expansion to the massively-multiplayer on-line role playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft: The big draw in […]
