Monthly Archives: February 2007

Still sucking his fingers

Posted on February 19, 2007 | Comments Off on Still sucking his fingers

I noticed, this morning before he awakened to get ready for school, Mr. Boy was sucking his fingers in his sleep. Three months after we started painting his fingernails with essence of cactus–at the request of the dentist who said his permanent teeth would come in crooked–Mr. B.’s apparently become accustomed to the rancid taste of the stuff. He doesn’t suck his fingers during the day, that I’ve noticed, but I’m going to start watching for it again. The taste of the stuff on his fingernails used to disgust him, but that’s apparently over. Unfortunately, the finger-sucking isn’t. Longterm habits are hard to break.

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Posted in Mr. Boy

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Fur children

Posted on February 19, 2007 | Comments Off on Fur children

I know more than a few people who have forsaken having children. Instead, they lavish their money, time and affection on dogs or cats. The ones who refer to their animals as children seem the weirdest. Little did I know how common it was becoming, according to MSNBC and Dr. Helen:

"…maybe one can let the Baby Boomers off the hook if they have already had children and now because of an empty nest are looking to their fur children to lavish their attention on, although I have to ask, what happened to spending time with the real, live human grandkids? And if people are having fur children instead of real children, what will happen to the human race?"

According to Dr. H.’s husband, the Instapundit, it’s apparently not uncommon to see people in Washington, D.C., pushing their fur children in strollers. I haven’t seen that in Austin, but I’m going to start looking for it. The people I know who do this aren’t Boomers. They’re mostly career women in their early thirties. But I don’t think it will impact the human race. More likely just the decadent Western portion of it. No wonder Mark Steyn thinks Third World Muslim breeding will bury the West.

More on the fur babies via Instapundit, who says "I welcome our new feline overlords."

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Posted in Scribbles, Texana

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Today’s pretty picture

Posted on February 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Today’s pretty picture

m42_cfht.jpg

Orion again. It is winter, after all. This is part of the nebula’s cloud complex, imaged by a telescope in Hawaii. It’s not visible without a big telescope but it’s to the left and just below the belt of three stars in the constellation. So when you look at the strider and his belt, think of this/ Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

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Posted in Space

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Messing with the “A” key

Posted on February 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Messing with the “A” key

I.e., don’t, as in do not. Alan Sullivan, the Seablogger, did, trying to retrieve a sesame seed and:

"When I tried to pry off the key cap, the whole delicate underpinning scattered in a shower of miniscule parts…There were three tiny interlocking bits of plastic under the cap. Four nubbets on the underside of the cap were supposed to fit into microscopic openings at the ends of a rectangular pad that was held in place by two harness-arms. These in turn slotted into almost invisible mounting fixtures on the laptop chassis."

A true-life horror story at Fresh Bilge. 

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Posted in Blogosphere

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Shooting the wounded

Posted on February 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Shooting the wounded

Despicable Europeans still angry that cowboy Bush toppled Saddam find nasty ways of getting even:

"American transports flying badly wounded U.S. troops back to the United States, often ask European air controllers for a more direct flight path through European air space. This is in order to get the wounded soldier or marine to the American hospital more quickly. This is particularly useful when the aircraft have been turned into a flying ECU (Emergency Care Unit), and doctors are actually treating the seriously wounded in flight. The European air controllers rarely allow the direct flight."

Many of these flights are direct from Iraq to the Army hospitals in San Antonio.

Via Op-For 

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Catastrophe 2036

Posted on February 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Catastrophe 2036

NEOs, or Near-Earth Objects, are well known to astronomers who generally believe there is very little chance of them hitting the planet. Earth simply is too small and the solar system is too vast. Places like Meteor Crater in Arizona are notable for being so rare. But now scientists who study NEOs have a candidate for worry: Apophis, a 250-meter (750 feet) wide asteroid weighing an estimated twenty million tons might strike in 2036. Former moon astronaut Rusty Schweickart wants the hapless, corrupt and dictator-dominated UN to mount an effort to do something about it. Fat chance. At least there’s plenty of time to talk about it, a form of "action" for which the UN is famous. Some sort of talk might be a good thing. Even if Apophis isn’t the size of the object that is believed to have killed the dinosaurs, and even if the odds are it would fall in one of the oceans that form most of the planet, it could still do a lot of damage to coastal areas.

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space

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Quieter in Baghdad

Posted on February 17, 2007 | Comments Off on Quieter in Baghdad

The surge and its crackdown are taking hold:

"We are hearing fewer explosions and less gunfire now than two weeks ago and that, in Baghdad, qualifies as quiet. I agree with what some experts say about this lull in violence being the result of militants keeping their heads down for a while. It is also possibly the result of the flight of the commanders of militant groups. Grunts left without planners, money or leaders wouldn’t want to do much on their own."

If the IA and the police can get a handle on it, it could make it harder to resume the attacks later.

Via Mohammed at Iraq the Model 

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Posted in Iraq, The War

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