Wednesday, October 31, 2007

It's a flying car update, though it seems the flying car industry prefers the term "Personal Air Vehicle" (PAV), to evidently sound less comic book-ish.

There appears to be work left to do and the cost in some cases is prohibitive, but prototypes will be in production as early as next year, with consumer versions possible by 2010.

This will represent a significant development in personal transportation possibilities in an industry that hasn't really had any meaningful technological breakthroughs since the jet engine. How is it the automotive industry has gone from this stunning 1950 Mercedes:


to this hideous dreck:



in almost 60 years of engineering and design is beyond me. If I could get my MTV in 1981, I should be able to get my flying car by 2015 or so.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Winners Only Nick wants you to eat your Wheaties!

Sunday, October 28, 2007

As the boomer population ages, it's taste buds fade away. The result? A tolerance for ever spicier foods. Expect to see more discoveries like this...
Basegirl falls madly in love...

Red does too, even if he can't actually say the words.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Of mice and hardships...
I try to stay up on space and NASA news as best I can; there's an awful lot going on in the private sector that you never see in news publications.

Here then is your space headline of the week...

And that's pretty much the thing with space travel, isn't it? No margin for error.
Man, I love pizza. And sometimes I think the reason I can love it so much is that I don't really have it too often, maybe once every two or three weeks.

So would I enjoy this?


Hard to say. Doesn't look very appealing, but I'd certainly give it a fair try. (Directions at the link.)

For those of you not so quirkily adventurous, here's the latest Carnival of the Recipes.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Hey, have a little red wine with that e. coli -- you'll be just fine...
Red is worried that he may have his furniture repossessed. Basegirl is far more sanguine. Me? I'm somewhere in between.

Ha. Just noticed the Repo Man reference in Red's post. Saw that movie about 8 times. Even own the soundtrack. In the original vinyl! Classic stuff -- one of my collectibles that's going to be specifically itemized in my will.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The funniest thing you'll see today: Having obviously grown tired waiting for a flying car, one adventurous doofus launches himself very nearly into outer space in a contraption quite possibly designed by Wile E. Coyote.
Another fine example of the brilliance of October: The Commando!

Friday, October 05, 2007

As a follow up to the Robert Kaplan post yesterday, he's released a somewhat lengthy but indispensable analysis this morning on the future of America's ability to project power with it's navy through the next century. He's not particularly optimistic...
Seinfeld gets dumped for an even richer guy, and Jackie is bitter that she can't get a shot at Jerry. Or George. Or even Newman.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Scary science alert: deady germs sent to space come back even more deadly. Niiice...
I've been a huge Robert Kaplan fan for the better part of 15 years. I own many of his books, and the ones I don't own I've checked out of my local library. In fact, one of his books, Warrior Politics (Why Leadership Requires a Pagan Ethos), enjoys a permanent place on my night table where I'll sometimes read half a randomly selected chapter before sleep. (Shh - don't tell my youth soccer club.) His article "The Coming Anarchy", written originally in 1994 has proven to be the most prescient writing of it's kind, and elements of the article continue to ring true to this day.

So when Kaplan opines on a subject, I pay close attention. His piece in today's Wall Street Journal is one of those don't-miss editorials that surfaces now and again, as he riffs on heroes and victims, love and respect, pity and debasement, and the media's role in the crumbling of the nation-state.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

The gang over at Why Homeschool have put together a fine edition of The Carnival of Homeschooling, Soccer Edition. Be sure to scroll through the many fine articles, tips and advise on offer.

I particularly like the 3 things they urge you to say to your player before and after matches, and I can say I've been saying approximate variations of those things for years.

But what this made me think of, strangely, is the sad saga of Hope Solo and the US women's national team. The story has nothing to do with Hope and everything to do with coach Greg Ryan in what can only be described as a massive coaching blunder. And I, for one, loved Hope's comments after the debacle against Brazil. Unfortunately, Hope's impetuous comments gave Ryan the cover he needed to survive another day, as criticism deflected from coach to player. You can thank (or blame) the media for that, as ever, but at least a couple of correspondents got it exactly right: Ryan alone owns this calamity, and scapegoating Hope won't change that.


October. Quite possibly my favorite month. Lots of reasons for that, and Red disseminates on one major component of the overall fineness of October: "intensified intensity"...