Teen Mom – I Wanna Go Out from Merlin on Vimeo.
Here’s some video from my New Year’s Eve party. I’m the tall guy with the glasses and pie.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 29 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Teen Mom – I Wanna Go Out from Merlin on Vimeo.
Here’s some video from my New Year’s Eve party. I’m the tall guy with the glasses and pie.
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology
NASA’s Picture of the Day for January 1, 2013:
Here’s the image caption:
The Hubble Space Telescope captured a spectacular image of the bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097. In this image, the larger-scale structure of the galaxy is barely visible: its comparatively dim spiral arms, which surround its heart in a loose embrace, reach out beyond the edges of this frame.
This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers. NGC 1097 is a Seyfert galaxy. Lurking at the very center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun is gradually sucking in the matter around it. The area immediately around the black hole shines powerfully with radiation coming from the material falling in.
The distinctive ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation due to an inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy. These star-forming regions are glowing brightly thanks to emission from clouds of ionized hydrogen. The ring is around 5000 light-years across, although the spiral arms of the galaxy extend tens of thousands of light-years beyond it.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
Just think: if the Teahadists have their way, none of the engineering or aspiration that made the Hubble possible would see the light of day (or night) in the future. Just sayin.
And with that, an intergalactic open thread is yours.
by DougJ| 80 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I spend more time than I should wondering what future historians from some other civilization or species or planet will make of contemporary American society.
It’s hard to imagine this they’ll be impressed by this (via).
More Qs. W/Krauthammer against, where are Rush, Sean, Gigot, Palin, Santo, Huckabee, Jeb, Christie on this? Will Rs put forth spending cuts?
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) January 2, 2013
by John Cole| 97 Comments
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Open Threads, Sports, Teabagger Stupidity
Eating some pork and sauerkraut and watching the Rose Bowl. Kind of curious about the Orange Bowl and how Northern Illinois will hold up against FSU.
Latest news on the fiscal cliff, according to C-Span, is that there are not 218 votes for an amended bill, and they are currently in recess and may bring the Senate bill to the floor for an up or down vote. On a side note, I died a little on the inside when the C-Span announcer quoted a Luke Russert tweet.
This post is in: Beer Blogging, Open Threads
This really happened. One year, right after Christmas, my mom decided to drive herself, my little sister and me up to North Carolina to see snow. As native Floridians, my sister and I had never seen snow before. We complained bitterly about this fact, especially during the holidays when all the TV specials featured snowmen, sleigh rides, etc.
This was a very long time ago, back when people drove ugly green station wagons with fake wood paneling. Anyhoo, we had a little dog—a poodle mix of some sort. He was a kind of goldish color, so we named him Butterscotch. But we all called him Scotch.
We couldn’t take Scotch with us since we were staying with dog-phobic relatives in North Carolina. So my mom asked her younger sister to housesit and watch after Scotch. Auntie agreed to do this for us and promised to take good care of our beloved pet:
Poor Auntie had to spend New Year’s Eve all by herself. However, my mom had generously given Auntie permission to raid the liquor cabinet. She polished off a few cocktails and then rang in the New Year watching Dick Clark on TV as she lounged in our recliner and finished an entire bottle of champagne:
As the next morning dawned, Auntie blearily awoke and immediately noticed something was missing:
She looked all over the house, but she couldn’t find him. Then she remembered that we had a doggie door in the back of the house. She thought maybe Scotch had let himself out. She looked out the window into the empty back yard. Then she noticed the hole in the fence:
Now Auntie was in a full-fledged panic. She knew how much we loved our little dog. Horrifying scenes played through her mind—finding Scotch run over in the street and having to break the news to us. She ran out into the front yard and called Scotch repeatedly at the top of her voice:
But he didn’t come. She ran into the house and grabbed his doggie dish, thinking maybe if he saw it, he would come to her. She walked up and down the streets in our neighborhood, holding out a silver dish and screaming SCOTCH!!! The neighbors were not impressed:
After an hour or so of this, with cranky, hung-over neighbors jeering at her from every window, Auntie walked back home, dejected. She wondered how on earth she was going to tell her beloved little nieces that she’d become intoxicated and misplaced their pet.
But when she got to our yard, Scotch was waiting:
THE END
[Originally posted at Rumproast on 1/1/2011]This post is in: Garden Chats, Music, Open Threads
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Happy Twenty-Thirteen, everybody!
In my tin-eared opinion, this is somewhat less nihilistic than last year’s World Go Boom, but still not as much fun as 2009’s Blame It on the Pop.
My creaky desktop is gradually collapsing in fits & (non)starts, and the replacement is stuck in “I know I put that copy of Win7 somewhere… “ limbo, so if I disappear from the blog without warning, don’t get your hopes up too soon.
On a more positive note, my favorite mailorder tomato sites are accepting orders for 2013, already.
What’s on the agenda for New Year’s Day, and going forward into 2013?
Early Morning Open Thread: Shine BrighterPost + Comments (33)
This post is in: Open Threads
Just poured a nice scotch and am settling in to take in the night’s festivities as I watch the waning minutes of the LSU/Clemson game, and I thought I would just thank you all again for another wonderful year. New Years Eve, as I have aged, has gone from a drunken bacchanal to a night of quiet reflection, and as I sit here typing on the laptop, in a fully heated house, a couple pets on my lap, a drink in hand, I realize I have it pretty good.
My family is all healthy despite my dad’s best efforts to kill himself in a wood chipper, my dogs and my cat are in good health, I’m safe, secure, fully (OVERLY) fed, and comfortable. All in all, the end of the year inventory is good. I forget how good I have it, but I really do have the best life ever. I seriously hope the Buddhists are wrong, because there is no way that any rebirth will be as good as this.
As always, thanks again to you all. We have some amazing people writing here, most of whom are a helluva lot smarter than me, and we have an active and vibrant comments section filled with people who care about each other, even if this isn’t meatspace. Over the last year, we raised over 15k for animal rescue, goodness knows how much for the Kenyan Socialist Muslim and other Democrats, and that doesn’t include all the money we raised for other charities. Find me another website filled with generous, decent, caring people who selflessly help others the way you all do. I’ll spare you the time. You can’t.
So I will sit here in the last few minutes of 2012 and hope that 2013 is just as good and better. I realized earlier that Tunch and I have been together going on 11 years tonight, and I have Lily and Rosie on my lap. This is the good life.
I hope you all have a great night and a great 2013, and despite my attempts to put up an act about being an uncaring jerk, I really do love you all and wish you the best.
Happy New Year!
And yes, I take shitty pictures, as evidenced above. Eat a bag of dicks.