Wednesday evening this and that.

--Steampunk Lego sets? Why had this not happened before. Unless they are fools, this will be made of win.

--Nancy Grace has always irritated me, even before I happened to be stuck in a doctor's office or something, and saw her try to corner Elizabeth Smart in a bullying manner. (Note Smart's semi-eye roll at 1:21, to a rather stupid question put up by Grace.)
But she's especially irritating as a commentator, when she does a split-screen interview with a woman who is in the same parking lot as herself. On-scene stand-ups are over-used in the news. There is NO POINT in sending a reporter out to stand in front of City Hall at 07:00, to tell you about the agenda that they're going to talk about, later that day. So now CNN is using three tools that irritate me at the same time: unnecessary stand-up remote broadcasts, unnecessary split-screen interviews to attempt to show that they're ALL OVER on the coverage of this salacious story, and of course, Nancy Grace.

--On a side note, that Jodi Arias chick is so bat-feces crazy guilty (she took the stand, for 18 days!!!), she'll be extremely lucky if she doesn't get the needle.

--I like that now-defunct Nickel Creek band.

--From F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry in Wikipedia:

"Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured 'the poor son-of-a-bitch,' a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby."

I would have expected more out of Dorothy Parker. But I'm planning on collecting crude statements by Marko Kloos, Cranky Professor, PhlegmFatale, and Larry Correia, so that I'll look literary when I cuss. Larry says that he can write me up a good funeral scene. I look forward to reading that. I'm thinking along the lines of a Valhalla send-off, delivered in the style of John Cleese at Graham Chapman's funeral.

--Phillip, a fine historian of firearms was giving a presentation of a Teddy Roosevelt double rifle at the end of the NRA Convention in Houston this weekend. This is something that they will do for accredited news media, to educate about some of the noteworthy pieces in the amazing NRA firearms collection. I went to the one last year in St. Louis. This time, just like last time, a security flunky came up to these officers of the National Rifle Association (the group that just spent million$ to lease the space), and tried to give them and the media the bum's rush. Phil politely let her have it with, uh, both barrels. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)  He took a breath, and continued with the demonstration. Well done, sir. One of my colleague web correspondents caught the action on video, here. Hopefully next year in Indy, we'll have this issue worked out.

--I didn't get to go to the NRA Convention. I'm still kinda pouty about that. But Dad got to go, and I'm glad about that.

--Lots of graduation notices, this May. Pricey.

Monday Wikipedia Safari.

I've got a Statistics final on Wednesday. So of course it makes sense that I would use this morning off to, uh, put off studying that wearisome subject.

Tamara mentioned the 1914 Battle of the Falkland Islands between German warships and British warships, which naturally led me to re-read the entry on the 1982 Falklands War, in which Maggie Thatcher reminded the Argentinians that Great Britain still had teeth. For a while, at least. (Sadly, hers may last longer than her nation's.) The British made long-range bombing raids against the Argentinians in Operation Black Buck, during which they flew early 1950's vintage Avro Vulcan bombers 8000 miles from Acension Island. Ascension Island was designated the stone frigate "HMS Acension".

Backing up to look at the delta wing Vulcans a little closer, I noticed that an incident was mentioned in which a Vulcan landed hard at an airshow in New Zealand in 1959. The cheeky New Zealand Air Force fixed it up, but applied their own kiwi roundels to the plane. No word if they kept it. Looking at the various roundels of the world, it would seem that there is often a disconnect between how cool a country is and how cool its roundel is. Somalia's roundel is pretty cool, but one wonders if there are any flying aircraft in their air force. (Also the color looks faded, like a bumper sticker on the back of a 1982 Buick Regal Ltd.) Kyrgyzstan's is striking. On the other hand, Malta's is pretty neat. I would definitely suggest to Latvia, Turkey, and Peru to get visibly different ones, for their ships of war. Or at least demand that Target Corp. sponser them.

And then I needed to make a new pot of coffee.

Why? Because it's frickin' cool. That's why.

I know that I've referenced here some folks (cough, INLAWS, cough) who have voiced their opinions that "The only thing the space program ever brought me was Tang, and I don't even like Tang!"

You know, I'm not even going to get into the fact that they watch satellite TV, use cell phones, expect the weather forecast to be perfect, and are jingoistic in their foreign policy take. Not to mention their reliance on modern medicines.

All I'm going to say is: without a space progam, you don't get incredible images like this one:

View of a total solar eclipse (occlusion) from the International Space Station, 29 MAR 2006. (click to enlarge)

And, for what it's worth: I liked Tang. I think I'm gonna go buy some right now.

More Evidence Of Why We Need To Vote In The Democratic Primary

...to pick the lesser of two evils.

(Click To Enlarge)

There's a LOT of backlash out there, people.