“Oh shit, they let the Old Man into the lab again!”

 

Well, both Sloopy and Banjos pulled up lame this morning, so despite me being stuck in a hotel room in Atlanta-the-Damned (where it has not stopped pouring rain since I got here on Monday morning), I feel a sense of responsibility that you good folks have a place to commiserate, snark, and post links to pix of silicone and Photoshopped electronic creatures. So please forgive me for being terse and the links lacking my usual commentary- I’m supposed to be working, and my boss will be here shortly to pick me up to take me to the plant. And because this has been a work-travel week, I haven’t been around much, so if any of this has been discussed to death, I plead ignorance. Likewise, I won’t be able to drop in and comment, but I’ll be back at full strength this weekend.

At least there’s a lot of news.

Pictured here with corpse

Starting with the obvious one, from the Department of Hoist By One’s Petard. And really, read the comments- the spin by the erstwhile “believe all women” crowd is predictably hilarious.

I can’t say that I mourn when Facebook gets kicked in the nuts, but it’s particularly amusing when they handed their critics the steel-toed boots. And I notice how weird it is that when someone criticizes Sheldon Adelson for his financial support for questionable Team Red causes, the media position it as good citizenship, but when George Soros is criticized for his equally questionable Team Blue antics, OMG IT’S ANTISEMITISM! Not that I’m cynical or anything.

Speaking of Semites, the recent abortive kerfuffle between Israel and the Adjacent Jew-Haters seems to have scored a direct hit on Jerusalem. All I can say is, thank Yahweh that the US appears to be doing far less meddling there than it has in the past. Now if we can only stop our meddling in the other 7 or 8 Middle Eastern conflicts that Bush and Obama got us into…

they demand asylum from the oppressive forces of good taste

Remember all those people saying, “If Trump gets elected, I’m running to Canada!”? Apparently, that’s happening. Woops, not the same people. And predictably, not only are the actual numbers minuscule, Canada is tossing out the majority of “asylum” seekers, despite the social-signal tweets from Prime Minister Zoolander extending Canada’s welcome.

Heh, we just barely got over the massive PR campaign of a few weeks ago touting the HORRIBLE NEWS FROM SCIENTISTS that the Global Warming heat in the oceans was hugely more that anyone had thought. Front page on every newspaper and news website. For some reason, though, this latest story seems to be barely covered. I can’t imagine why not. On the one hand, it’s good that the paper’s authors acknowledged their simple and fundamental error. On the other hand, the fact that the paper’s referees didn’t catch this is a sad example of how the socio-political narrative has t-boned any actual scientific integrity in this field.

Despite the brevity of links today, you’re still getting stuck with Old Guy Music. My boss, who is also a music geek (albeit a much younger music geek) had wanted to go to Eddie’s Attic, a pretty famous music venue here in the Atlanta suburbs. He looked up who was playing there last night and despite it being someone neither of us knew, we figured, meh, it will still be fun to go there and have a few drinks after several rather grueling 12 hour workdays. Well surprise, surprise, the show was terrific. And here’s one of the songs he did. Intelligent pop-style, audience participation, high energy, a delightful transition from guitar to piano, it had it all. Standing O, and Gabe has a couple of new fans,