Island Passage

I love cool stuff, but I hate a computer desktop cluttered with widgets and I am cheap. These contradictory impulses are all satisfied by my latest, coolest acquisition: EarthDesk . I started out with it configured in equirectangular: But now I am keeping it mostly set to globe: For extra bling, I added a starfield, taken by the Hubble telescope, behind the globe. So now my desktop looks like this:

Back during the Cold War, kids, I used to listen to Radio Moscow on the old short wave. They were rather entertaining. (Radio Peking was just sad, constantly listing statistics about the number of trucks produced in the last two quarters.) Radio Moscow would play lots of great symphonic music and interesting folk music from all over the Soviet Union. But the most entertaining segments were "Moscow Mailbag" (where an announcer read letters from CPUSA members scragging the US and praising the workers paradise of the USSR) and the world news segments on the US. Radio Moscow of course had nothing good to say about the US. They would breathlessly report crime statistics and news of obscure civil rights trials. Every report of a trial would mispronounce the term "prosecuting" to "persecuting." Well, Putin's Russia has fallen back into this "no good news" pattern, posting this story with the graphic above: " USA plunges into poverty " The ...

Glenn admits that he wants the robot from Lost in Space . I, however, have always wanted Robby, from Forbidden Planet . In Iraq, the problem is "Too Many Targets, Not Enough Robots ".

Is Fred! dead? Not if there is that holy grail of political junkies, the brokered convention.

Sigh . I kicked Fred's campaign a few bucks and talked him up among the small circle of people with whom I feel comfortable talking about politics. You know, just once I wish that my particular fringe candidate would last long enough for me to actually VOTE FOR THEM. UPDATE: I guess this makes me a Romulan .

Other than an occasional wry remark, I don't even try. This is why : This is like watching Steve Hawking goof on about singularities. I'll stick to commenting about my sad life.

I haven't been very active on this blog lately. Odd, considering the just-completed Christmas season is ripe with spare time and lots of emotional and memory triggers. But I am careful about what I write in this venue. I generally don't discuss work, family details, or specifics of my personal associations. And here is why . Whether they like it or not; and whether they realize it or not, nearly every person who uses the Internet creates an online reputation which reveals details and conveys an impression independent of the actual truth. I describe some of the issues associated with an online reputation at Pajamas Media . There are companies which will sell you reports describing how you "look" on the Internet. There is now an industry devoted to finding, deleting or modifying information about us on the Internet. Don't believe they can do it? Why, check out their online reputations! Personal reputation is influenced in unexpected ways. Back in the mid-1980s I w...

Some men, in a vain attempt to recapture their long-lost youth purchase toupees, open-necked shirts, and red convertible sports cars. I have my hair, like my present wardrobe, and don't have the money for a new car. I do, however have the money for this: My goal is to regain the facility that I had in college. Weep for my wife, as I spend the next few month getting my embrochure back into shape.

This was a tribute to one of my very best friends. I posted it to forum for old alumni, GaneshaHighSchool.com . Jeff Meisch was my best friend through High School and into my first years of college. We were opposites in many ways but shared the alienation of being outsiders to the popular crowds at school. We were Marching Band geeks. We both had crushes on Joyce Wright (Dery). We were a Mutt and Jeff team (and Jeff often pointed out that he was, after all, Jeff .) I was tall and thin, Jeff was short and round. While I looked at the world like a wounded puppy dog, Jeff affected and air of sophisticated cynicism. I was Art Carney , Jeff was Jackie Gleason . Gleason is tremendous; if you’re my age you grew up with Gleason as the TV variety show fellow with the away-we-go schtick. You learned about the Honeymooners later, at which point your appreciation expanded greatly. Gleason had that same skill Roscoe Arbuckle possessed in such amazing quantities: lightness and grace. But Gleason had...

The headline reads: Too Much Sugar-Free Gum Linked to Severe Weight Loss Does this seem like bad news to Wrigley's? I can just see overweight people thinking, "Hey! I didn't know it was that good!"