“The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.”
Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are the answer. They are nontoxic (no mercury) and last 50,000 hours compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 6,000 for compact fluorescent lights. Alas, so far they can’t make them give off white light.
“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.
Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.
In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.
“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.
Note: According to the ole scorecard there on the right this is post 12,000. I am one sick puppy.
Top three:
Juno
No Country for Old Men
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The only film I’ve seen from Ebert’s top 10 is the wonderful Away from Her that might snag Julie Christie a second Oscar just 42 years after her win for Darling. (She has two other nominations.)
Many of the toys tested over the weekend contained lead levels far beyond safe levels. A red plastic roof piece from a Lincoln Logs set tested at 1488 parts per million for lead (or 37 times the AAP standard). A small plastic Fisher Price Sesame Street Bert figure tested at 5346 ppm (or 133 times the standard). A Tinkerbell pink rolling backpack tested at 533 ppm for lead, while a Cinderella princess backpack tested at 474 ppm. A Winnie the Pooh placemat contained 985 ppm.
The highest lead level was found was in a Fisher Price Flip Track crane from a plastic train set that was owned by Burner’s own 5 year-old son, which tested at 10,600 ppm, or 265 times the AAP standard.
During the two days of testing, some important patterns came to light. All of the children’s character placemats tested contained high levels of lead or cadmium; Dora, Spiderman and Winnie the Pooh all tested positive. Cooler-style lunchboxes and soft coolers tended to have high lead content as well. Parents may want to consider keeping such items in their own homes away from their children.
Overall, the campaign conducted 798 tests on 479 toys and children’s items that were brought in for testing from across the district. 56 items tested positive for lead, and of those 47 items – 10 percent of the total – contained excessive lead levels above the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended maximum of 40 parts per million. Nine items tested positive for cadmium, another toxic element.
In 2007 | Funny Video Animation by JibJab.
Thanks to Dwight Perry for the link.
Admitting that he didn’t see the march with his own eyes, he said, “I ‘saw’ him in the figurative sense.”
“The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights,” he said, “and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership.”
“I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can be,” he continued, smiling firmly. “If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term ‘saw’ includes being aware of — in the sense I’ve described.”
The questioning did not relent. “I’m an English literature major,” he insisted at one point. “When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there.”
Indeed, I missed that particular World Series.
The background to this is that what Mitt says he “saw” — his father George Romney marching with Martin Luther King — has been shown to have never happened.
The Solstice is at 11:08 tonight Mountain Time.
Today is the birthday
… of Joe Paterno. The football coach at Penn State is 81.
… of Phil Donahue. The talk show host is 72.
… of Jane Fonda. The two-time Oscar-winning actress is 70. Miss Fonda has been nominated for the best actress Oscar six times, winning for Klute and Coming Home. She was also nominated for best supporting actress for On Golden Pond.
… of Carla Thomas. Gee Whiz, she’s 65.
… of Michael Tilson Thomas. The director of the San Francisco Symphony is 63.
… of Samuel L. Jackson. Mace Windu is 59. Jackson was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
… of Chris Evert. The tennis hall-of-famer is 53.
… of Jane Kaczmarek. Malcolm’s mom is 52.
… of Ray Romano. Raymond is 50.
… of Kiefer Sutherland. He’s 41.
… of Julie Delpy. The actress, who was nominated for a writing Oscar for Before Sunset, is 38.
Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. He died in 1993.
The singer, songwriter, and composer was born in Baltimore, Maryland (1940). Zappa’s father was a meteorologist in the Army who studied the effects of weather on explosions and poisonous gases. The gas masks and chemical paraphernalia his dad brought home were some of young Zappa’s first toys. When Frank Zappa started playing atonal classical music on his electric guitar, he said that his goal was to make sounds that would cause people to run from the room the moment they heard it. He was also a political activist, and he once proposed that the United States form a fourth branch of government devoted entirely to creativity.
Joseph Stalin was born on this date in 1879. This from his obituary in 1953:
Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.
During the second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.
From the best Christmas album ever, Vince Guaraldi, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Scientists are growing more excited about the possibility of witnessing, for the first time, a celestial pool shot that would do Fast Eddie Felsen proud: An asteroid they first spotted last month may slam into Mars on Jan. 30.
The estimated odds of a hit are steadily improving — originally 1 in 350, upgraded Thursday to 1 in 75, tremendously high by space standards. Astronomers have their fingers crossed. Though they’ve seen bits of a busted comet rain down on Jupiter, they’ve never observed an asteroid-planet collision and are thrilled with what they might learn.
The hunk of rock in question, which scientists have whimsically named 2007 WD5, is about 160 feet across, roughly the size of the one that caused the “Tunguska event,” flattening millions of trees and killing wildlife over hundreds of square miles in remote Siberia when it blew up in the atmosphere in 1908 with a force equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb.
The Lede has more.
Functional Ambivalent gives Circuit City an appropriate seasonal greeting.
(A greeting suitable for all seasons, in fact.)
Here’s the cockpit of a Boeing 737-85C.
How realistic are those scenarios where someone over the radio guides an inexperienced pilot to a safe landing? .
Ask the pilot’s Patrick Smith says not at all.
He also has some interesting information about pilots’ salaries.
A friend writes in his Christmas letter that his high-school-age son named a file reallylonghomeworkblahblahblahblah.doc.
“In less than 14 months, any traditional television set still connected to its antenna will receive nothing but static, as the broadcasting industry cuts over completely to its new digital frequencies.”
Did you know this? Does it matter to you (that is, do you have any analog TVs without cable)?
In the survey, Republicans with a college degree were substantially more skeptical about global warming than Republicans without one. Democrats with a college degree were significantly more convinced global warming was a problem than were Democrats who didn’t go to college.
I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev’rything free in America
What a load of stuff that now is.
A young blonde Icelandic woman’s recent experience visiting the US.
Link via Digby.
Dick Wolf, the producer of the Law & Order shows is 61 today.
Author Sandra Cisneros is 53.
It’s the birthday of the poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago in 1954. When she was growing up, her Mexican-born father would often have bouts of nostalgia for the home country, and he would force the whole family to go back there for a few months.
She went on to college, and she later said she was lucky to be a girl, because her father didn’t care what she studied. He just expected her to meet her husband. So she was free to study an impractical subject like English. She kept writing, and one of her professors encouraged her to apply to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
But once Cisneros got there, she felt totally out of place. She said, “My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” One day, her class was given an exercise to think about the houses they’d grown up in. Cisneros’s family had only owned one house, an ugly red bungalow. Listening to her classmates describe their childhood homes, she realized that she had grown up in a completely different world. She said, ” It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice. … That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”
The French colors were lowered and the American flag raised in New Orleans on this date in 1803, signifying the transfer of sovereignty of Louisiana from France to the United States. Arguably the transfer was one of the two or three most defining moments in American history.
As ultimately defined, Louisiana Territory included most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, east of the Rocky Mountains, except for Texas and New Mexico; that is, parts or all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
“All season long football fans have asked the question: How would a team with the ninth-best record in the Southeastern Conference fare against a team with the seventh-best record in the Big 12?”
Steve Harvey lists the ten worst bowl games.
A couple of weeks ago, when the temperatures dipped into the 40s — or as we call it here in Southern California, the extremes of human endurance — I went shopping in West L.A. It was like base camp at Annapurna. High-heeled hotties had turned in their sex spurs for pairs of Merrell hiking boots. Guys were walking around in zero-degree quilted Marmot jackets. I’m sorry — I just don’t think crampons and bottled oxygen are necessary to make the traverse to the valet stand.
God knows, high-end technical gear is fun. Suunto watches, Adidas glacier glasses. I love it when people use Black Diamond trekking poles and Platypus hydration packs to assault the untamed reaches of Griffith Park. You sure don’t want Jon Krakauer writing a book about you.
A pretty cool (and useful) e-card from a lawfirm.
I’ll include more ads if I find them (no more than one per candidate).
And if any more Democrats get into the Christmas spirit, I’ll add them to the poll.
(One of two similar ads for Giuliani.)
[poll=1]
Here are the Christmas ads that the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire are seeing. Take a look (30 seconds each) and then select your favorite. You’re voting for the ad, not the candidate (if you can make the distinction).
Bill Richardson is either a Grinch or thinks the war is serious. He gets NewMexiKen’s vote either way.
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.
“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.
Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”
Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.
Follow the link to learn more about Professor Lewin and find links to his podcast lectures. An MIT education for free. Aren’t the internets grand?
From the playlist of short-story author Jack Pendarvis:
8 ) God Moves On the Water, Blind Willie Johnson. I don’t care if you’re the most committed liberal secular humanist in the world, I don’t care if you’re Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Blind Willie Johnson will make you afraid of God. He will also make you afraid of Blind Willie Johnson. There are dozens of recorded songs about the Titanic disaster and what it means. This one is the best.
Update: Here’s part of what All Music has to say about Johnson:
If you’ve never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and heartfelt commitment. Of all the guitar-playing evangelists, Blind Willie Johnson may have been the very best. … Not for the faint of heart, but hey, the good stuff never is.