[Major Geek Alert...] Some of you may have read the news items about Microsoft’s Zune player freezing up on its users last December 31st. The problem it turned out, was in a bit of software that calculates how many days since January 1st the current date is.  I’ve no idea why the Zune’s software needed to [...] ...

Very cool photos of frozen soap bubbles… It’s very cold tonight, so we played with bubbles. If you blow them upwards enough they have time to freeze on the way down. And this… Chasing bubbles round a very icy garden (we’d made an ice-slide right down the path), in the dark while looking through a viewfinder is surprisingly [...] ...

Via Pam’s House Blend.  Don’t read this if stories about Mormons physically and sexually abusing children might make you want to go out and throttle the first Mormon you see afterward.  Probably some of them don’t even know how depraved their church is.  They just see the Donny and Marie side of it and [...] ...

From the Letters To The Editor page of the Asheville North Carolina Citizen-Times, January 4, 2009.  Welcome to the New Year my fellow gay Americans… Regarding the story, “Gay wedding ban protested,” (AC-T, Dec. 21): I feel morally obligated to express my opinion. I am a transplant from Jackson, Miss., who is astounded by how many [...] ...

Every week I end up with about a dozen or so links I wanted to write a post around but I never got to it.  And I don’t know how widely most of the folks who stop by here travel the web, since most of you don’t write or comment.  I’m not complaining or trolling [...] ...

Apparently science has discovered something we romantics have known for ages… Scientists: True love can last a lifetime Using brain scans, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have discovered a small number of couples respond with as much passion after 20 years together as most people only do during the early throes of romance, Britain’s [...] ...

German culture, or so I’m told from all the books I’ve been reading about it lately, teaches its own that life is mostly a zero sum game.  This, so I’m told, follows from the fact of Germany being a small nation that is very tightly packed with people.  The attitude is that if you have [...] ...

Via KOS…A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers?   Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior… Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That’s how the species survives. [...] ...

Step 1:  Start with a pair of circles for the glasses… Step 2: Decide what kind of frames you want them to be.  For this lesson we will use a basic aviator frame example.  Just keep it simple to start out with…     Step 3:  Now add the rest of him.       NEXT: Drawing a paycheck in today’s economy.     ...

Okay…you all remember our last lesson…right?  Fine.  Today we’re going to build on that a little… Step 1:   Create a basic stick-man frame.  Try not to make it too detailed. Step 2: Add the major body segments as oblong bean shapes…head, neck, chest, arms, legs…and so on…  Again…try to keep it simple. Step 3:  Now add the [...] ...

I honesty figured he’d just round file it, but no, Steve Fidel has to write me back… You just proved my point. Cheers, Steve See…if you’d been raised a Baptist like me, you’d have smiled sweetly and said "I’ll pray for you" in that tone of voice where the other person hears "burn in hell". Are Mormons Christians? No…really. ...

I keep getting hits on This Post, via search strings like "sexy guys" "sexy guys underwear" and so forth.  And from the most interesting places too…like Ogden, Utah and Dubai, Dubayy and Islamabad, Pakistan, where they’re only a little more sexually repressed then in Utah.  No, I am not kidding about the hits from the middle [...] ...

…via ScienceBlogs - Dispatches From The Culture Wars, which you should read: A reader sends along this link, which he says is not a parody but is actually a serious statement by a guy named Matthew Stucky. He says that Santa Claus (which he spells Clause, for some reason) is satanic and is "corrupting people all [...] ...

Steve Fidel over at the Mormon Times complains, Thusly …. For those who have (correctly) assumed the editor of a Web site called MormonTimes.com is a Mormon, I’ve been called on to be an insider in this discussion by those looking for support for their views against same-sex marriage. As a Mormon, I’ve also been the [...] ...

If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments.  This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them. I’m angry.  At you.  At [...] ...

Via Atrios…  I’m reading this story about how the republican governor of South Carolina finally decided it was better to let people collect unemployment then…well…starve or something I guess… COLUMBIA, S.C. — Just hours before the unemployment benefits fund was to run out in South Carolina, the state with the nation’s third-highest jobless rate, Gov. Mark [...] ...

Next time a Microsoft spokesdroid complains about software piracy, laugh in their face… Microsoft to hide Irish Tax Haven data of subsidiaries that have saved it billions of dollars in US taxes US software giant Microsoft has taken steps to shield from the public, the value of Tax Haven transactions of two Irish-registered subsidiaries that have enabled [...] ...

Character is what you are, not what other people think you are. The news this morning tells me that the marriage (second try) of the guy who dressed up as Santa and killed nine people at a party recently started to break apart after his (second) wife found out about the brain damaged son he’d abandoned… Marriage [...] ...

Figured it’s going to take me another couple weeks to get used to writing 2009 instead of 2008 so I thought I’d get a start on it now.  2009.  2009.  2009.  It’s bright and sun-shiny here in Baltimore.  Also cold.  20 degrees at BWI and 23 in my back yard according to my does-it-all digital furnace/ac [...] ...

…like my first try at egg nog for instance.  It wasn’t…wonderful.  Oh it isn’t horrible either…but the recipe I used called for Way too much booze in retrospect, and for some reason the ingredients mixed up a tad flavorless.  You could tell it was rich…I used the best milk and eggs and cream I could [...] ...