This one’s a little sad, but kind of funny in its dark way. Apparently the Google Maps car ran over a deer in upstate New York and captured the whole thing on video.
What I find interesting is that the car was going fast enough to hit a deer and kill it. I always assumed it kind of crept along with its hazards on, but apparently it moves at speed.
Three versions of Baby Got Back (by Sir Mix-a-Lot). My friend Jen exposed me to Jonathan Coulton today (he’s very talented and very funny), and his thoughtful acoustic version of this timeless classic brought up a couple videos on YouTube.
Gotta love YouTube.
Jen’s original recommendation was Code Monkey (here’s a live version), a Jonathan Coulton song about being a VB programmer.
The National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits. They’re using the dollar sign spot for the moment, and will soon add more digits to the sign so it can track up to a quadrillion dollars. Lordy.
CNN’s headline tickled me this morning. Ike’s going to maybe kill some of us a bit! Ike will certainly maybe be bad! Run for your lives!
I know, I know, a hurricane is nothing to laugh at. But the headline just seemed so, well, uncertainly sure.
Our stellar VP has done it again — he’s proven himself to be one of the most compassionate people in D.C.
I like how he apologized for it later, but RIGHT after he said it acknowledged that he can say that kind of thing because he’s not running for office anymore. Because, you know, that’s really the only reason to refrain from saying butthead things like this.
As if poker as a sport wasn’t strange enough, now there’s Extreme Ironing. People go to the ends of the earth and take pictures of themselves ironing. You know, this may be the best example I’ve seen in a while of what the Internets can bring to all of our lives.
My friend Doug will do anything for a shot. Case in point — while the rest of us go inside when it begins to hail, this is what you’ll find Doug doing.
But with all due respect, Doug’s got nothing on photographer Ryan McGeeney. At the Utah state high school track and field championships, he wandered into a restricted area reserved for the javelin throw. He was, predictably, hit by a spear at a high rate of speed. Luckily it kind of rug-hooked him under the kneecap and didn’t do a lot of damage. But while he was being tended to he just started clicking away, getting a point-of-view shot of what it’s like to be tended to after being speared at a distance by a high school student.
Doug, don’t take this as a challenge. It’s merely a cautionary tale — keep that other eye open, too. 
So for years I’ve been saying that if I were ever chased by the police, I’d want a fit cop to be chasing me — I don’t want one who pulls up lame after ten feet and just shoots me in the back instead. Apparently Jody Weis, Chicago’s relatively new Superintendent of Police (yes, his name really is Jody), feels the same way. He’s been implementing a new fitness regimen for officers to get everyone back in shape, and now apparently tubby officers won’t be issued the bigger weapons Chicago just ordered to fight the homicide rate. I think it’s great — police officer is a unique job in that you can go years without having to REALLY exert yourself, but suddenly it can be a matter of life and death whether you can run 100 yards. And if they get to play with the big guns if they eat carrots and jog, so be it.
The Vatican’s astronomer is saying that God may have created alien life out there. I’m still confused about whether God created everything 10,000 years ago or if He just created us 10,000 years ago.
In preparing my sarcastic blathering for this post, I did a bit of Wikireading about Creationism (having been rightly dressed down earlier today on Slashdot about some of the gaps in my knowledge about the Church of Latter Day Saints). Turns out there are several levels of Creationism, and only one has this goofy 10,000-year idea (did I say “goofy”? I meant “quaint”). Most of the others all espouse the scientifically accepted age of the universe with varying degrees of Divine intervention to get various balls rolling. It’s fascinating reading — if I had to believe in Divine anything, my vote is for Theistic Evolution. It seems to basically say that science is right about everything, assuming that God got the party started.
The Intelligent Design movement is interesting, though. Its basis is partially political, but it’s also surprisingly hocus-pocus. The idea seems to be that some things are too complex to be explained, and therefore must be explained by a concept called Irreducible Complexity. There seems to be no clear indication of when the universe began, but they seem to believe that certain complex things (including, one must assume, bogus evidence of natural evolution like fossils and rock strata) happened at the wave of a hand (or fin, or claw, or whatever) of a very complicated God.
I’ll admit, I never did a lot of reading about the Intelligent Design argument except for some giggling at the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory. And really, I still haven’t. But even this bit of reading now has me convinced that whether right or wrong (and I have my opinion about that), this is quite possibly the most faith-based movement I’ve heard of in a long time. The faith portion is admirable — I don’t think I could do it. But it seems to say that God created everything, and anything that defies our understanding must be the indescribable complexity of God. Set, spike.
It’s pretty tidy. If I don’t understand something, clearly God does. And therefore EVERYTHING IS UNDERSTOOD by someone. Me and God, we have it covered. Crockett and Tubbs, Poirot and Hastings, Wallace and Grommit, God and I have this shit under control.
I guess I don’t understand the willingness to surrender the mystery. I don’t understand the need to explain everything. I love the idea that some creepy abhorrent occurrence that I don’t understand will be figured out by Nora or her contemporaries. That’s what makes all of this fun, right?
… as a whiny cynic, this is a great story from a softball game out in Washington State.
