Alex Clare

Thank you NPR interns.

Cheesey

Blue Du Bocage Pascal Beillavaire - I might have a new favorite cheese. This blue goat's milk cheese from France is insanely good. Goaty and creamy with a mild to medium blue kick. It was all I could do to save some for tomorrow.

Comte Grand Affinage - This cooked raw cow's milk cheese from France underwhelmed me at first. Then I took my second bite. Once my taste buds stopped exploding, I realized I had stumbled upon a gem. The buttery nuttiness is great on its own or eaten with fruit. I'm glad I took that second bite.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

"My point is that consumption of spicy food isn’t just a experience of the palette, it is deeply social. It is a signal of awesomeness, like having big antlers."

Loud and Squished

Hopefully, the judge will force AA to get rid of its awful MD-80s.

Efficiency

This is the crew that stood around doing a lot of nothing while we sat on the tarmac in Lima on our way home. For 3 hours. The plane ended up needing a new part. The closest available part of this type was in Chicago. Needless to say, we left 15 hours later. I'm happy to report that the food at the Lima airport is actually pretty good, particularly, the lomo saltado (i.e., salty beef). I didn't want to stoop down to airport ceviche, especially after having it at Pescados Capitales the night before. Mmmmm.

"Mary and Max"

I watched Mary and Max last night with the boys. Great movie on friendship, loneliness, and mental illness. I highly recommend it for adults and children.

"Working"

From xkcd:

"Five of the Most Expensive Cheeses in the Universe"

From Chow Bella.

"Twenty-Five Pieces of Basic Sartorial Knowledge So You Don’t Look Dumb"

From putthison.com, A Web Series About Dressing Like a Grown Up.

Numbers 20 and 21 are my personal favorites.

Dick Cheney

Getting shot with a 12 gauge from 30 yards away in the neck and shoulder hurts. I've been peppered before, but this mishap left a 2 inch bruise on my neck. Always wear eye protection kids!

Flying Squirrel

"Ponzi Scheme"

From Mother Jones.

"I'm Sorry"

From xkcd.

The Formation of the Milky Way

Rupert

The ongoing News Corp scandal has been fascinating. One of the most powerful men in the world has been taking a shellacking for over a month. The downfall of such men isn't something you see frequently.

Yves Smith takes a look at the difference in coverage between the U.S. and the U.K..

"Yaweh or No Way"

The Colbert Report
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Blame-itis

A great post by Megan McCardle on the debt, deficits, and the associated blame game.

Cheese - y

La Rustichella Sheep Tartufo Molitero - an aged raw sheep's milk cheese from Italy. With black truffles. Crumbly. Sheepy (i.e., mild). With delicious, delicious black truffles. Overall, an amazing cheese. It went very well with panchetta, as well as with the pickled habaneros.

Fromage

Igor Gorgonzola Dolce - Creamy, creamy gorgonzola. With prosciutto and red pepper stuffed olives, it is very, very good. Almost as good as St. Agur. Almost.

Cheese

Midnight Moon - An aged (1 year) goat cheese from Holland made using a gouda recipe. I must say that I liked the smell, but wasn't a huge fan of this cheese. It might have been that I was looking for something other than goat flavored gouda to go with my prosciutto and garlic stuffed olives, but I'm still not sure I would have liked it. The gouda overpowered the goat and the gouda wasn't that great. I like my gouda at least 3 years old (preferably 5) and crumbly, not creamy.

QE2

QE2 in in pictures at the WSJ.

I really wish was could run experiments in parallel universes where we could control the flow of time. That'd be convenient.

BTW, I'll soon be issuing bonds to myself and then printing cash to pay for them to myself, which I'll then use to buy lots of cool stuff. Any investors?

Guns, Fiddle, or Knives

Please ask me about my experience in the security line on 6/12. I'm begging you.

"Obi-Wan Is Dead"

From The Galactic Times.

Space

From xkcd.



"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

Awesome

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Milkshakes

Vanilla, apple, and bacon milkshakes are amazing. Seriously.

At B Spot in Beachwood, OH.

Bucheron

It's been a while, but I finally made it back to the cheese aisle at Whole Foods.

Bucheron: A mild and tasty goat cheese from France. A slight aftertaste that is chased nicely with a Diet Coke. I've seen this cheese before, but due to its similar appearance to other goat cheeses I've had (creamy chevre-like center and a soft outside), I haven't indulged. I'm glad I did today. It made a great afternoon snack.

Sadness

No elk hunt this year. 120,000 people put in for tags and I wasn't one of the fortunate 12,000. At least I have a bonus point for next year. I might need to buy a new gun to make myself feel better (I've been eying that synthetic .223 Tikka T3).

Libya

This foolishness in Libya is killing me. No plan. No long-term thinking. Intervention when no vital U.S. interests are at stake. The disconnect between what we are doing in Libya versus what we are doing in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.

Here's Stratfor's take on how Gaddafi will potentially respond.

Hisashiburi

"No Correlation"

From Indexed.

Two Gorillas

From The Economist.



I hope that not addressing entitlements and the defense budget is simply politics by the President and that he is willing to work with Congress to look at both entitlements and defense. We're going to ignore 76% of the overall budget?

Egypt's Regime

Stratfor argues that what we are witnessing in Egypt is not a revolution, but a continuation of the existing military regime.

Scale

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

13.2 Billion

A galaxy 13.2 billion light years away? That's a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang. And ~8 billion years before the earth was created. The speed of light and looking into the distant past always twists my mind into a Gordian Knot. Mind blowing stuff.

Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan's famous thoughts on this picture, which was taken as Voyager 1 passed Pluto:

"Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

LBJ Orders Pants

From The Atlantic

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.

Arabic

"Uh,

your picks are on backwards."

From XKCD (847)

Speaking of which (clicking on the image will enlarge it, making reading a little easier):

Astronomy

The full version is even better.





Please enable JAVA^TM to use the Mini-AstroViewer night sky map.

Crazy Rules The World

Arizona Shootings Reaction

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Still Running and Eating Cheese

I'll be making a cheese run later today. I had an absolutely horrible stinky cow's milk cheese a couple of weeks back (Morbier = not good to this man).

Also running. You'll be happy to note that I am finally back to my race weight after putting on 20 pounds last January.

One Day

Liz surprised me with one of these beauties for Christmas.



She asked me last summer (LAST SUMMER!!!) what instrument I would choose to learn how to play. I told her the banjo because I love bluegrass and the clarinet because the the jazz clarinet is something special.

I already have my forward roll down. I'll report back in 5 years.

Bogus, Fraudulent, Debunked

The British Journal of Medicine reports on the fraud committed by Dr. Wakefield and his sensational and untrue claim that there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

I wonder how many children were sickened and/or died due to the fear this man's claims put into parents.