On My Reading List

I sorta, kinda want to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I'm concerned that I might not understand some of it since I've never read anything by Jane Austen before. I really, really, really want to read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Killer.

It even has its own trailer...

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Weekend Assignment: Summer Reading

The Weekend Assignment has a new home, a blog of its very own. This week's assignment has to do with our summer reading plans...

Okay, yes, I know, it's still spring, but this is when I begin thinking about what kind of summer reading I might like to have on hand for those too-hot-to-clean days of summer. So, for this week's assignment, I want you to share with us the kind of summer reading you look forward to the most. Sci-fi? Horror? Political Thrillers? Romance? It's all good. Now, tell me more!

I've written before about my strange reading habits. I used to be a voracious reader until the Internet came along and gobbled up all of my free time. Now, it takes me much longer to get through a book, but I'll read from almost genre except romance.

My only hard and fast rule is that my next book is always completely different from what I'm reading now. To illustrate: I've been slowly (very slowly) working my way through the bibliography of Charles Dickens, and at this moment I'm about 120 pages into Great Expectations. Before that, there was (working backwards) a quick read about the history of NASCAR; The Black Ice by Michael Connelly, a police procedural thriller/mystery; Mila 18 by Leon Uris, a great piece of historical fiction; The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, an atypical King work -- more unsolved mystery than horror; and The Barrens and Others by F. Paul Wilson, a book of mostly horror short stories.

I've never really noticed any perceptible changes in my reading habits from one season to the next.  Summer, winter, spring or fall, my reading doesn't fit any sort of pattern or genre.  In the coming months, possibly during the summer, I'll try to find another Dickens book, another King book (I'm waiting for the local library to cough up a copy of Under the Dome), and anything else that strikes my fancy.  The point is that I don't know what I'm going to be reading this summer, but the weather outside probably won't play much of a factor.

Quotable

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on President Obama...

"It's very interesting to be with him. The most important thing that distinguishes him from many other people -- I won't name anyone by name -- he's a thinker. He thinks when he speaks."

Hmm. Wonder who he might be thinking of?

Ed Stein, Rocky Mountain News

Redesigning

There's a new look around here.  I used the new Blogger Template Designer to change the digs around.  How do you like it?

A Typical Day at Work

Geech by Jerry Bittle

Quotable

"I am not happy about the way things are.  I pray for President Obama every single day.  But tell you what.  Homey made this bed, now he has got to lay in it."

-- "Actor" Stephen Baldwin at the CPAC convention today

NASCAR Basics: Window Strips & Roof Flaps

An article at NASCAR.com explains how the new window strips are supposed to keep the Cup cars from going airborne at Daytona and Talladega...

"If you ride down the highway and you put your hand out the window and you hold your hand in the direction the car is traveling, there's not a lot of resistance," Darby said. "But turn your hand sidewise and it'll come back and slap you in the forehead. It's a very similar effect."

"If you picture the strip on the car, and you're going down the straightaway, it really doesn't have that much effect. But as the car starts to spin and the strip now sees the air pressure, it does two things. It slows the rotation of the car down, and as the air comes across it, it packs air on top of the trunk lid to help push the car back to the ground before it lifts."

And the reason why the trunk fin is on the left side of the window is also inherently logical.

"It's actually lined up with the left edge of the left roof flap," Darby said. "Because as the air hits that fin, part of what happens is that the airflow travels up to the flap. There's a misconception about the flap. A lot of people think that air pressure blows them open. It's quite the contrary.

"The flaps are contoured on the top and it works much like an airplane wing to where the airspeed that travels over the flap actually pulls it open. If we can put more air to the flap and accelerate where it goes across it, then it's going to open faster and stay up stronger. So part of the air helps deploy the flap and the rest of the air -- because the trunk lid is wide and you have more surface area to come across -- helps hold the car back down on the ground."

Even though the trunk fin seems to be the best solution for Daytona and Talladega at this point, Darby said the process is always evolving -- and more improvements may come from additional wind tunnel testing.

Authority

Film student Ronnie Bruce created this video for a class project on typography. He chose a poem with a great message...

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Sarah Palin Is a F**king Retard

Just some subtle satire...

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Quotable

"Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money."

-- RNC Chairman Michael Steele

I'll just have to take his word for that.

Quotable

"Speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.  No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."

-- Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee

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Weekend Assignment: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Karen has a weekly assignment at Outpost Mâvarin. This week's assignment is pretty straightforward...

Weekend Assignment #302: Do you Tweet? Why or why not?

Yes, I am a Tweeter...or a Twitterer...or a Twit, whatever the people who use Twitter are calling themselves, and you can find me here. 

I was avoiding social networking sites like the plague; they just didn't seem like my cup of tea.  Several people told me I needed to get on Twitter, but I kept putting them off.  One evening, my wife basically just put me on Facebook, and within a day or two, I finally decided to take the Twitter plunge.  Both have worked out pretty well for me.  On Facebook, I've managed to reconnect with several friends I lost track of over the years.  Twitter has turned out to be a pretty useful tool to quickly get an overview of the day's news events, keep up with the few friends I've found on the site, and occasionally promote my blog.  And although I'm not sure that I could repeat the process, I somehow managed to link my Twitter account to my Facebook account so that anything I tweet shows up on Facebook as a status update.

Extra Credit: If you do use Twitter, how many people follow you? How many do you follow?

It's not my goal to get on Twitter and interact for hours at a time, so I only follow 20 people.  Some are not "people" at all.  I follow MSNBC's and National Public Radio's News and Politics tweets, as well as tweets from AlterNet, ThinkProgress and the Huffington Post.  There are also a few liberal individuals I follow, like Rachel Maddow, Bill Mahre and Thom Hartmann.  Andy Borowitz has funny tweets about the day's events.  I follow a couple of sites that cover NASCAR news, one that was tweeting pretty regularly about the health care debate, and John Scalzi.  The remaining handful are personal online friends.

I'm trying to keep it from getting out of hand.  I like being able to log on to the site and work my way through the tweets that have accumulated since the last time I was on in about half an hour, including time to check out interesting links.  But I'm looking for more people to follow.  I'm interested in useful information, not necessarily what you're having for lunch (unless you're a friend -- then I might be interested).  I like people that tweet often, but not obsessively.  I like people who retweet useful information from the people they follow.

I have 14 followers so far.

A Spending Freeze?

I'm trying hard not to buy into all this voter anger directed at Obama.  I'm trying to be optimistic that he is going to learn from his first year mistakes and the economy is going to improve and the next three years are going to be better, but a spending freeze?  That's what you're going with?  A spending freeze?

To get the proper level of disdain I feel about this proposal, watch this short clip of Jim Mora.  Every time he says "playoffs" replace it with the words "a spending freeze."




Rachel Maddow lays out how Obama and the Democrats have driven all the way down the field to the one-yard line and are now ready to punt..

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And by all means, yes, if you're going to have a spending freeze, don't dare mess with the bloated Pentagon budget. Jeez!

For Your Consideration

I filed the link to this NY Times story away in my bookmarks and forgot about it until just recently -- about twenty minutes ago. The article talks about Danny MacAskill and how he "can divide his life in two: before his YouTube video and after." I can understand that. I've been able to ride a bicycle for most of my life and can still ride one now when the need arises. I've seen a lot of people ride bikes, but I've never seen anything like this, the video the Times was talking about...