WE'RE GOING BACK TO THE MOON!!!!

(butwe'regonnacanceleverythingnotrelatedtothemoonormarsincludingkeepingHubbleworkinguntilareplacementisready! Shhhhhhdon'ttellanyonehaveaniceday)

Via Bookslut:

1. Someone named Caitlin Flanagan somewhat-favorably reviews Dr. Laura's new book.

2. Someone named Maud Newton isn't impressed.

3. I'm not sure why I'm posting this, but it struck me as interesting. I find Dr. Laura to be one of the most nauseating people in American life, and pretty much purely on that basis I tend to desperately want to ignore everything she does, which is pretty much what I do. Oh well.

Darn, I'm so easily amused. At the moment I'm collecting interjections which do a fairly bad job of masking swear words or mild blasphemy.

I'm looking for ones that are fairly well known although I know that many of these are actually obsolete and tend to only be used in ironic contexts. They also tend to be identified specifically as American, British or Australian words.

Here's my current list, I've grouped them around their root cuss word.

Christ	Jesus	God	Damn	Hell
crikey cripes crums	gee jeez sheesh bejesus (scared the...) heeby jeebies (gave me the...) jiminy (Jesu Domine?) jiminy cricket jingo jeepers creepers	golly gosh gadzooks (god's hooks) drat (god's rot) zounds (god's wounds) begorra (by god) strewth (god's truth) cor blimey (god blind me) by gum (by god)	darn durn dang dashed dog gone (god damn)	heck (Surely there are more of these?)

Can you think of any others?

When we think of Internet geeks, we often think of people like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, right? Big fat shut-ins who are social misfits?

Well, according to a new study, that's not accurate. Among other things, your typical Net geek has an active social life and shuns television.

Keeping with the air-related theme as of late:

It begins with an idea. The idea becomes a sketch. Which becomes a blueprint. Which becomes a wind tunnel model. Which becomes a prototype...

...and sometimes it just stops with the sketch.



Concept Aircraft of the past.

A day on Earth is roughly 24 hours. A day on Mars is roughly 24 hours, 40 minutes. The difference doesn't sound like much, but it adds up and it's screwing up the sleep patterns of the scientists in charge of the Spirit Rover.

The sacrifices for science, eh?

(Free LA Times registration required)

If this article is to be believed, the RIAA has come up with some new strategies to deal with "pirates" whom they think may not have as much knowledge of US legal procedures as others. Hmmmmm.

(Talk about losing in the court of public opinion, eh? I wonder sometimes if the RIAA sits around saying, "Hey, this ought to make people hate us even more!")

(via Lynn Sislo)

I got 10/10 on this space quiz. I'm something of a space buff, but this one's still pretty easy, I thought.

At the end of this blog post, I found the following generalization of what differentiates liberals from conservatives:

Conservatives measure how far they are from the bottom and are mostly satisfied. Liberals measure how far we are from the top and think we need to work harder.

Anyone agree? Disagree?