I swear this picture isn’t a setup. We just walked into the living room and discovered Sasha like this:

Heh. Well, you know what they say. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a cat.

P.S. In keeping with the “lolcats” phenomenon, perhaps the caption should be: “IM ON UR MAC RITIN UR BLOGZ.”

Just a random shot of Jay walking his basset hounds (a.k.a. Robbie’s short-legged buddies) the other day:

Release the hounds!! :)

I for one welcome our cigar-shaped brilliant white light overlords.

P.S. Speaking of spacecraft… the Space Shuttle Atlantis is about to land in California.

UPDATE: The Shuttle has landed safely.

Becky and I just got back from West Town Mall, where we watched Evan Almighty at Regal Cinemas. It was okay, but not great. It had its moments, but among other things, it suffered from a problem that I think an increasing number of movies, especially comedies, are suffering from these days: overexposure in its own trailers. I felt like I knew 80% of plot, and had heard at least 50% of the good jokes, before I even walked into the theater. Memo to Hollywood marketers: when you give away a bunch of your best laugh-out-loud moments in the trailer, your movie turns into a collection of mildly amusing scenes that everybody already knows the punchlines to, thus seriously diminishing the viewing experience. Save some stuff for the actual movie!

It also suffered from a plot problem that bothers me in many works of fiction: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which people will disbelieve supernatural, paranormal or spiritual interpretations of observed events that blatantly have no plausible earthly explanation. This is something that’s bugged me about the TV series Kyle XY as Becky and I have gotten caught up on the first season on DVD, and it bugged me about Evan Almighty, too. I’m sorry, but if a previously normal guy suddenly started being followed around by hundreds of animals — wild animals with no business in the D.C. area, no business behaving in a docile fashion, and no business traveling in pairs — my reaction when he explains that God told him to build an ark because a flood’s coming wouldn’t be, “Haha, that guy’s a coot, clearly there’s nothing unusual going on here, la-di-da.” It would be more like, “Hmm, well, that seems outlandish. On the other hand, he’s being followed around by hundreds of inexplicably docile wild animals, traveling in pairs… and his facial hair is growing at a literally impossible rate… and he’s been surrounded by a demonstrable series of extremely odd coincidences involving the numbers 614 (as in Genesis 6:14)… and his clothes just magically changed themselves, like POOF!, while the cameras were rolling and he was on live TV… so, while his explanation for these events sounds a bit batty, I actually can’t think of a better one… maybe he’s not so crazy!”

Oh, and the fact that he supposedly ran for Congress while still a news anchor bugged me a little bit — no conflict-of-interest issues there! — but that’s probably just me. :) On the bright side, Morgan Freeman is great as God, again.

In any event, the trip to the mall was worth it just to get a peek at the new, drool-worthy storefront display at the Apple Store:

Mmm… giant iPhone.

Not like I’m actually going to buy one, but still… it’s cool.

According to the article in The Irish Independent, Tony has been a closeted (not to say, Cloistered :) follower of the Faith for a long time, but feared to make it Official whilst still PM because of potential constitutional difficulties:

Tony Blair is “certain” to become a Roman Catholic shortly after he steps down from office next week, friends of the British PM have said. They believe it will happen “sooner rather than later”.

Mr Blair is likely to discuss his conversion with Pope Benedict XVI, with whom he will hold talks in Rome tomorrow after attending his last summit of European Union leaders in Brussels.

…There have been persistent rumours that the Prime Minister would convert to Catholicism but Downing Street has always insisted that he remains a member of the Church of England.

Now friends say Mr Blair will formalise his already close affiliation to the Catholic Church. They say his “spiritual guide” in making the decision has been his wife, Cherie. They have brought up their four children as Catholics.

…It is believed that Mr Blair decided to remain an Anglican while he was Prime Minister because of the possible legal and political difficulties of converting while in office.

Although Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister, the church has said there would be no constitutional bar to Mr Blair joining while he was still in office. But some lawyers believe the 1829 Emancipation Act, which granted civil rights to Roman Catholics, may still prevent a Catholic from becoming Prime Minister. It says that no Catholic adviser to the monarch can hold civil or military office.

…As Prime Minister Mr Blair has been cautious about his religious beliefs. As Alastair Campbell, his former director of communications, once famously said: “We don’t do God.”

Read the whole lot.

PS: In other news of British spiritual practices :), the Ministry of Justice has created its own home team of morris dancers ~

A team of morris dancing civil servants from the new Ministry of Justice have been given permission to call themselves the Lord Chancellor’s Folk.

The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, gave the go-ahead after considering a two page report prepared by an official in his private office.

…In the two page submission, leaked to The Times newspaper, a member of Lord Falconer’s private office briefs him on the history of morris dancing.

The document says the newly-formed Ministry of Justice group dance in the Cotswolds’ Tradition and in the Barmpton Style, which involves the “use of handkerchiefs and sticks”.

…It adds: “Morris dancing is currently one of the Icons of England on the Department of Culture, Media and Sport site, alongside a cup of tea, a stiff upper lip and a bowler hat.”

….a Ministry of Justice spokesman denied time had been wasted on the issue and said staff members were entitled to a hobby.

[Spot on. / ~ the civilservantpensioner guestclogger :]

…The Ministry of Justice has recently been under fire after Lord Falconer announcing 25,000 prisoners could be released early on licence to ease prison overcrowding in England and Wales.

View the whole dance. :)

Just last week, as Becky and I were watching the Simpsons movie trailer for about the 30th time (before Surf’s Up), we were saying they’d been running that particular trailer for too long and really need to come out with a new one. Well, they finally did. (Hat tip: Andrew Hiller.)

Dozens of Constitutional Law professors’ heads just exploded. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

UPDATE: Here’s the exact quote: “The [House] Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, you exempted the Office of the Vice President from the presidential executive order that establishes a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified national security information. … The National Archives has informed the Committee that your office intervened to block the inspection. According to a letter that the National Archives sent to your staff in June 2006, you asserted that the Office of the Vice President is not an ‘entity within the executive branch’ and hence is not subject to presidential executive orders.”

(Hat tip: Think Progress, via Ana Marie Cox’s Swampland, via Technorati.)

UPDATE 2: Here’s the letter from the National Archives to Cheney’s office, which the Oversight Committee (specifically, chairman Henry Waxman) is quoting from. Assuming the director of the National Archives, J. William Leonard, is accurately characterizing the position of Cheney and his aides, it appears their theory is based on the fact that the Office of the Vice President “has both legislative and executive functions.” That’s true, in that the VP is also the President of the Senate, but I think it’s fairly obvious that he’s an executive-branch official with certain legislative functions, not the other way around (which would be unconstitutional anyway), and certainly not neither; he can’t be neither. He’s not his own branch of government, for heaven’s sake.

UPDATE 3: The Democrats respond.

A new, experimental long-range forecast from the UK Met Office (the British equivalent of the National Weather Service) says we can expect a slightly below average hurricane season. Whereas previous forecasts have called for as many as 15 named storms in 2007, UK Met is predicting just 10, including the two that have already formed (Andrea and Barry). That would be the same number as last year, and two below the average of 12. If the forecast is borne out, 2006-07 would be the first two-year period with 20 storms or less since 1993-94 (when there was a total of just 15 storms).

This news comes on the heels of the latest La Niña developments, reported a few days ago by Margie Kieper:

After months and months (since…February?) of the weekly, “Subsurface conditions and recent CFS forecasts indicate a possible transition to La Niña conditions within the next 3 months,” today [NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center] has finally replaced it with:

Recent trends in surface and subsurface ocean temperatures indicates that ENSO-neutral conditions are likely to continue during the next 3 months.

If a La Niña does develop, it won’t be in time to affect the [Northern Atlantic] hurricane season. The bad news: don’t discount ENSO-neutral conditions. [”ENSO” means “El Niño/Southern Oscillation.” -ed.] In terms of ramping up / dampening hurricane seasons, only strong El Niño events have a significant effect on dampening the hurricane season — busy years can occur in both La Niña and ENSO-neutral conditions (for example, 2005).

Really, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. This long-range hurricane prediction stuff is an inexact science, and anyone who pretends otherwise is kidding themselves. So many factors, like the amount of Saharan dust, can have such a huge influence — or none at all. It’s not like anybody predicted in advance that there would be 28 named storms in 2005… or 10 in 2006.

Something else to keep in mind: it doesn’t necessarily take an active season to cause a lot of death and destruction. The costliest pre-Katrina hurricane in U.S. history, Hurricane Andrew, occurred in a season, 1992, with just seven named storms. But nobody remembers that. They remember this.

With one week until the iPhone debuts, The Onion gives us a sneak peek at some of its key features. Heh. (Hat tip: Briandot.)

(Note the guest-blog.)

According to The Greek Mythology Personality Test, I’m Prometheus:

“You are most like Prometheus, and you probably knew that before you even took this test. You probably aren’t deliberately altruistic, but you still tend to do things that benefit everyone, even at great expense to your health and personal relationships. You aren’t ruled by your emotions, but you still have a strong sense of justice. You make good descisions, but they can sometimes backfire (and this isn’t due to a flaw in your reasoning, but due to faulty premises instead).

You are very reasonable, you understand systems, you can quickly pinpoint flaws and you know how to correct them. You pride understanding and knowledge above everything else, and your greatest fear is to appear to be incompetent. You tend to be contemptuous of authority, but you don’t accept leadership roles yourself until everyone else has demonstrated their own incompetence.

You’ve built a very specific skill set. You know exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are, and you pride yourself on this kind of self-knowledge. You distrust tradition, which you see as arbitrary, and you rely instead on your own judgements. You also pride yourself on your pragmatism. You’re also a very private person.

Most of all, people think you’re arrogant, but screw them! They’re the ones who benefit from your ideas and discoveries, and if they took the time to understand why it is that you say and think the things you do, they’d realize that you only appear arrogant because you are exactingly precise when it comes to your area of specification, and most of all because, when you don’t know something, you don’t have an opinion about it (unlike most of the loudmouths that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis).

Relationships are your kryptonite. It isn’t that you don’t want them — in fact, you would very much like a very close relationship with someone who understands you. They’re just the one thing in the world that you’re naturally bad at.

Famous people like you: Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, Issac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Erwin Schrodinger
Stay Clear of: Apollo, Icarus, Hermes, Aphrodite
Seek out: Atlas, The Oracle, Daedalus”

Drudge just put up a siren for this AP article:

The Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere, The Associated Press has learned.

President Bush’s national security and legal advisers are expected to discuss the move at the White House on Friday and, for the first time, it appears a consensus is developing, senior administration officials said Thursday.

For those of you who are into college sports recruiting, you’ve probably checked out a player or two on Tennessee based Rivals.com. With a new CEO in place, Yahoo! just inked a deal to purchase the site. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition could be an indicator that Yahoo! is taking a step toward further expansion, driving in an additional 2 Million+ users of Rivals.com into Yahoo!land. The biggest of the potentially huge deals, could find Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp trading MySpace.com for a 25% stake in Yahoo!, which would be a huge boon to Yahoo! as it tries to truly make itself a “one-stop shopping” destination for online users.

U.S. military reports the deaths of 14 troops in Iraq in the last 48 hours, including 5 in a Baghdad roadside bombing Thursday.

Visit CNN for the latest.

By popular demand, here is the much-discussed Hillary Clinton campaign ad spoofing the Sopranos finale. (If you have the Sopranos finale TiVoed but haven’t watched it yet, and have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about it, you may not want to view this clip.)

Heh.

What do you think? Funny? Stupid? Weird? All of the above?

As happy as I am to have my computer back in good working order (knock on wood), I still wish I understood what exactly happened to it last Wednesday, and how the heck it magically fixed itself en route to the Apple repair center in Houston.

The loud popping noise that precipitated last Wednesday’s apparently catastrophic system failure — which turned out, mysteriously, to be temporary and self-repairing — sure sounded like a short-circuit or something similar, and the computer’s subsequent refusal to power up (regardless of the power adapter being used) was consistent with that diagnosis. But fried motherboards don’t just un-fry themselves, now do they?

Anyway, the lack of answers makes me nervous that the same thing might happen again, so I’m looking for any clues I can find as to what exactly occurred. Apropos of which, there were a couple of weird anomalies that occurred last Wednesday, prior to the “pop” and shutdown. They don’t seem relevant to what ultimately occurred — they seem software-ish, rather than hardware-ish — but who knows? Maybe our resident techno-geeks can construct a theory. Details after the jump.

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