Today’s iPhoto gallery features some very cute kitten-and-stuffie scenes:

Awwwww. How cute.

Also, Becky gave me a ride home from work this afternoon, and we caught a car-pool-lane fraud in the act:

Unless that guy has a midget riding in the passenger seat next to him, he clearly does not belong in any HOV lane. What’s more, he cut Becky off to get there, illegally merging across a solid white line. Are you seeing this, Arizona Highway Patrol? We got his license plate number right here! :)

First Chris, then Adrienne, now Becky. All my blog-children — and, uh, blog-comment-children — are leaving the roost! Whatever you call the blogger equivalent of empty-nest syndrome, I have it. :)

But no, in all seriousness, Becky isn’t leaving. She’ll still be posting on the SHA girl blog, too. She’s just giving herself an outlet for additional posting — a separate solo blogging career over at discardedthought.blogspot.com.

“The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought,” she calls it. What’s a Valkyrie, you ask? So did I! She found it in the dictionary, or something. :) Apparently it’s some sort of Old Norse thing… “any of the maidens of Odin who choose the heroes to be slain in battle and conduct them to Valhalla.” What that has to do with “the intellectual cud of a disgruntled grad student,” I have no idea. I guess you’ll have to ask Becky… once she gets commenting set up.

Anyway, check it out!

The nation’s terror alert was temporarily changed from “yellow” to “cardinal and gold” Wednesday when Tom Ridge visited USC.

Okay, maybe I’m making up the color thing. But Tom Ridge really did visit USC.

Hey Andrew, Chris, somebody, would you please Fisk Howard Dean’s foreign policy for me, or give me a link to someone who has done so? Because you know what? At first glance, a lot of it seems to makes a lot of sense. Not as much sense as Lieberman… but a lot more sense than Bush.

Hmm. I wonder what this is all about.

The temperature in Hartford is 1 below zero right now, according to weather.com. The dew point is minus-22. The wind chill? A balmy 25 below.

It’s also -1 degrees — and snowing — in Buffalo.

Here in Mesa, AZ, according to the digital thermometer that Becky got me for Christmas, it’s 58. Above zero. :)

UPDATE: It’s now just after 11:00 PM Eastern time, and the temperature in Hartford is 3 below zero. The official forecast low is -5; seems like it might get even a bit lower than that.

Still -1 in Buffalo. Lame. Hartford is way cooler. So to speak. :)

Carol Moseley Braun dropped out of the race for president today, and asked her supporters to “stand instead for Howard Dean.” Instant polling suggested that at least six of Braun’s seven supporters nationwide will, in fact, vote for Dean. :)

UPDATE: ScrappleFace: “Braun Drops Out, Helps Dean Find Blacks for Cabinet.”

Today’s lunch-break blog update deals not with affairs of state, but with news from the heavens: the Mars rover Spirit is officially roving!

Space.com reports:

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Spirit Mars rover has wheeled itself onto martian landscape, leaving its stationary lander that served as the robot’s home base for 12 days on the red planet.

The Mars Exploration Rover was commanded by the click of a mouse button to exit down a lander petal at 12:21:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST). It was ordered to head in a north-northwest direction. The six-wheeled robot is now resting in the stark, rock strewn and geologically rich landscape that is Gusev Crater.

According to NASA, “Jet Propulsion Lab engineers played Baha Men’s ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ in the control room as they watched new images confirming that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully rolled off its lander platform early Thursday morning.” Heh. Them nerds is silly.

Anyway, the rover sent back a picture (seen near the top of this post) of its forward-looking view of the Martian surface, and also this picture looking back at the lander and at its own tracks in the soil:

Pretty neat! You can get more, of course, on the official NASA site for the Mars mission, including the complete collection of raw images from Spirit. A few selected cool shots:

(Is that a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on Mars? :)

UPDATE:
…It was oh, such a treat
When she moved several feet
And they call her the Martian Rover! :)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Google is celebrating the rover’s accomplishment with a new logo at the top of their homepage:

Hee hee hee.

Well, this is good.

This Dean supporter says John Edwards is gaining momentum, and this blogger thinks it will continue. Interesting.

Meanwhile, here in Arizona, it’s a two-man race between Dean and Clark, according to the latest polls. That’s no surprise; both have been advertising on TV heavily. Of course, so has Lieberman, and it hasn’t helped him much. (sigh)

But I guess Lieberman’s TV campaign here has just started, whereas the other two have been fighting an “air war” for a while now. So, according to the article, Joe’s people hope his distant third-place standing will improve between now and Feb. 3. Well, like Aragorn says, “There is always hope.” (Note that he was saying this before the utterly hopeless battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. The moral of the story? Joe Lieberman can win, provided he is rescued at the last minute by the unexpected arrivals of 1) a bunch of Elves, 2) a recently resurrected wizard, 3) an army of several hundred horsemen charging down a hill with a 70-degree incline, and 4) a forest of deadly talking trees. :)

Anyway, the key for Dean may be turnout among people my age. The under-35 age group is where Dean’s strongest support comes from, but it also happens to be the most fickle. Indeed, Dean leads Clark 29% to 26% among all Democrats in Arizona, but Clark leads 34% to 26% among likely voters.