It Makes Me Happy

A special shout-out to Titivil, who pointed his readers (including me) in the direction of this video, which has made me happier than just about anything else this week.

It only gets better and funnier on multiple viewings.

Better Than the Iditarod

The missus' godfather is doing what has to be one of the coolest things on earth right about now. It's called Finnmark 2007. While on its dog-sledding trek across the Lapland of Scandinavia, the team will be focused on studying the early victims of climate change, i.e. the Sami. The human response to the effects of global warming, after all, will become increasingly important to understand.

A secondary purpose will be to record snowflakes for NASA's snowflake database. How badass is that?

Be sure to check out the diary of the ride, which has just begun and continues through April 10. The photo of the Northern Lights is pulled right from the diary, and the missus' godfather is one of the regular bloggers from the expedition. The man is sixty-five. While he's got more hair than me, I would consider him bald. His effectiveness is without question.

All About Me and You

I've spent much of my spare time since the holiday known by Christians as Christmas doing two things:

The first is filling my iPod. This is time-consuming because my iPod is considerably larger than my computer (in terms of memory, not physical size). So I load a CD, transfer it onto my iPod, then erase it from my computer again. There's probably an easier and quicker way, but since I don't know what it is, this is how I'm doing it.

The other has been the retooling of B&E, which I mentioned in a previous post. Blogger is no longer in beta and can do things it couldn't before. So I've now labeled most of my previous 750+ posts with headings. Hilary, for example, has been wanting to read just my baseball writings for years. Now she can. In fact, if she wants to relive the play-by-play of my Mets live-blog during the playoffs, she can click on "Mets." Or if she wants to read all my non-Mets baseball writings, including my own baseball-playing adventures in Vermont, she can check out the entries labeled "baseball." Hilary will never be without my baseball writings again.

There are still some problems, though, I must admit. The archives, for example, don't seem to link to the archives. This is a problem.

I've also added a few links. Under "Bald Links" you'll notice two old links renamed. And I've added Frank Dodge and Ali. I've never met Frank in person, but I'm assuming he's bald. If he's not, he has my apologies, and I will alter the location of his link sometime in 2009, when I get around to it. The other bald link is Ali. I went to high school with Ali, and for reasons I can't quite recall, we used to tease her about going bald. She wasn't remotely going bald. But I wanted to even out my list of bald links, so for our purposes, Ali is once again going bald.

Under "Effective Links" I finally updated Ballpeen Hammer's name to Virgil. And I added a link to The Nation because everyone should read The Nation.

Then I added some "Topeka Links" for my Kansas people. Most of you know that I grew up there, and these are the people who (with one exception) knew me then (Ali was among us, of course, but it's funnier to keep her under "Bald Links"). Early Adopter is actually a New Yorker now, but we knew each other back when we looked alike. And Early Adopter, let's not let our current greatness cause us to forget our humble beginnings, eh?

Current greatness. That's a good one.

Sorry, Virgil

I keep forgetting that my links are all out-of-date. Virgil is, in fact, the Ballpeen Hammer link to the right. He changed the name of his blog about a year ago. Click on the Ballpeen Hammer link to the right, or follow this link for your convenience.

Holy Calamari!

It's an age old question: What does one do if it's raining squid? Fortunately (and finally), Ali has an answer.

A Clean, Well-lighted Blog

As I'm continuing to do the work required by my soon-to-end part-time job while simultaneously looking for a job that will continue into the forseeable future, I'm short on posting time today.

Instead I direct you to one of my links. Virgil is a long-time link over to the right (although it hasn't been updated since its "Ballpeen Hammer" days), and I feel he's on a particularly good roll recently with the quality posts. He's clearly feeling inspired by the Dutch people's Nethers in Holland.

I miss his presence in my 'hood for this prolonged absence, but his blog is making me happy during the dark days of my job hunt.

While I'm at it, here's a long overdue shout-out to one of the finest snack reviews I've ever read, also from among the links to the right. I shall never eat the Nobby's, thanks to the muscular prose of Titivil.

Nuking Iran?

Once again, Seymour Hersh freaks my shit out.

How 'bout a Shitload of Links?

Having paid considerably less attention to the media over the past week, I woke up this morning in awe of the goings-on. So here are a few topics upon which I might have commented further, had the hecticity of my life been a tad less, uh, hectic. Many of these little links come via The Huffington Post, a useful site for culling stories liberals might be interested in...

-- Dubya likes to spy on us.

-- Bushie Hearts DeLay.

-- Former Dickhead of the Week Jack Abramoff paid for editorials coming out of the right-wing think tank, Cato Institute, resulting in, like, a real resignation and shit. As a sidebar, BusinessWeek online refers to Cato as "libertarian" and not "right-wing." I guess if you're a pro-business publisher, you don't necessarily want to refer to a philosophical ally as extremist.

-- Trent Lott is rearing his fat, racist head again.

-- Ford has decided that maybe there's more money to be made from the Homos than the Haters.

-- The actor who played everyone's favorite fictional Chief-of-Staff, Leo McGarry/John Spencer passed away yesterday.

OK, well, I'm gonna get back to work now...