First Looks category archive

Sauce for the goose.

This really is overreacting to a twit.

The CairnGorm Mountain ski centre in the (Scots–ed.) Highlands will be closed for the day – because of too much snow.

After a two-day blizzard, the operators have had to bring in huge caterpillar vehicles and snow blowers to try to clear the approach road and the slopes.

Climate change deniers, don’t get your hopes up. Extreme weather is a predicted result of global warming as changing temperatures disrupt established weather patterns.

(with apologies to Santayana) are Republicans:

This is why the GOP in its current state cannot be allowed to govern. There is for them . . . no disaster so great that it can penetrate the armor of received wisdom that passes for the best of “conservative” thought by our friends across the aisle. If you don’t need to prove what you know is true, then there is no reason to check to see if the policies that flow from that “knowledge” actually, you know, work.

(snip)

The GOP approach to public life has not changed in a generation: lower taxes, less regulation. That’s it. But, as everyone with a pulse knows, we tried that for the Bush years. It left us, as we know, with a catastrophic economic crisis, an enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich, wars dishonestly begun and incompetently managed and all the rest.

Up the road aways, there has been one of those periodic kerfuffles about self-important blowhards inflicting meaningless empty invocations on an inattentive public opening public meetings with prayer.

A summation from a letter to the editor.

This is the warship that was built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center.

At least it’s still under warranty:

Less than three months into its operational life, the dock landing ship New York must undergo repairs to replace faulty engine parts, the Navy said.

You can’t make this stuff up:

The Siemens (institutionalized corporate-level international bribery–ed.) case, which was announced in December 2008, resulted in the largest corporate fine ever paid, $1.6 billion to authorities in the U.S and Germany. The investigation struck terror in the hearts of business executives in the U.S and Europe who came to realize that they faced both the prospect of huge criminal and civil fines and that they might also go to jail if it could be shown their employees or agents engaged in overseas bribery.

Yet, as traumatic as such cases are for private companies, defending against them have become enormous profit centers for lawyers and accountants.

The legal fees for the Siemens defense alone, handled by Debevoise & Plimpton L.L.P., based in New York, were in the hundreds of millions.

Why can’t the stuff they sell in American grocery stores taste like the real thing?

Via Susie:

Q. What’s the difference between a cow and 9/11?

A. Rudy Giuliani never learned to milk a cow.

One of the finest persons I have been privileged to know and to work with.

More here.

My weekend has fluwn away.

Addendum:

72 hours of feeling like a truck ran over me.

Not.

I have spent the day in the La-Z-Boy hoping that my chills would turn into a fever, because fever’s break and chills don’t.

So, rather than look forward with the hope that 2010 will be better, I decided to look back, to awaken childhood New Year’s terrors from days gone by.

Click to go below the fold. If you dare.

Read more »

Go here, watch the vid, and guess what those hands will be doing.

A glimpse of stocking could be something shocking.

Or not.

I wrote up my neatest Christmas gift in years at Geekazine:

Part I.

Part II.

Click or double-click or right-click each picture for a larger image, depending on your browser.

Looking west towards the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. The near bridge to the right of the picture crosses the Intracoastal Waterway; the far bridge to the left of the picture, known as the “High-Level Bridge,” crosses the North Channel of the Chesapeake Bay.

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I am certain the student was driving. 15 mph all the way out of the neighborhood.

McClatchy:

. . . some public-safety officials say those efforts are now being thwarted by technology, with drivers now using text messaging, Twitter and other tools to keep each other informed about the location of sobriety checkpoints.

There’s eveb an iPhone application specifically designed to identify checkpoints, according to Sgt. Dave Gibeault, head of the Fresno Police Department’s traffic unit.

. . . on cellphone etiquette, in a newspaper column about cellphones on airplanes.

Flourtown resident Linda Phelps proposed: “I have decided I am going to listen to every phone conversation I hear and make a comment about it – not about the person speaking on the phone, but a comment in the context of the conversation. It might be in the form of a question or a suggestion – just something that allows the talker to know that I know his/her business. . . .”