Medary.com

Not a sports story:

NEW YORK - Pale Male, the famed red-tailed hawk of Central Park, was perched on the 22nd floor of the swank Beresford apartment building on Wednesday when the national emblem of the United States soared past, carrying a large fish in its talons.

"Pale Male usually sits there sort of relaxed, but he sat up straight when he saw the bald eagle," said Lincoln Karim, the man who made Pale Male and his mate Lola famous with his extensive photographic record of the romantic raptors raising fledglings in their high-rise aerie on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue.

Say it isn't so!  (This is only a test.)

Flatulence blamed for starting jail fight

Sheriff Jerome Kramer said the incident was a result of overcrowding. The jail was built in 1933 and has a capacity of 23 inmates, according to 2006 standards, Kramer said. As many as 65 inmates have been lodged at the jail in recent days, he said.

"You just can't get a reprieve from one another," Kramer said. "When you've got a guy causing problems passing gas, there's no way to get away from the smell."

The report doesn't say whether the offending action was "silent but deadly" or "loud and proud."

More Facts on Farts here. I know you want to read it. Go on. Do it.

Didn't Benjamin Franklin once write a pamphlet titled "Fart Proudly?" Why yes, he did.

I haven't been posting much lately--ever since the November election in fact.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, I really didn't have much to say.  Second, college basketball season was starting and that always provides me with a huge distraction (and, much entertainment) during the late fall and winter months.

But, with Christmas now behind, I'm beginning to re-engage with the world, and so to post my thoughts here.

The biggest thing I notice is how little changed with the U.S. election results.  The Jihadist threat remains, although Ethiopia is in the process of demonstrating in Somalia that the Jihadists have a very, very vulnerable glass jaw, should they be opposed determined resistance.  Of course, we know this, but our problem has always been that our resistance to Jihadist fascism is anything but determined.  The laughable Iraq Study Group report is a classic example of feckless appeasement.  We shall see if it is remembered in the same breath as Chamberlain's "peace in our time" prelude to a world war.

Elsewhere, Iran and Syria continue to make trouble.  Iranian agents have been detained in Iraq, and bombs and weapons of undisputed Iranian origin are routinely found in Iraq.  Yet, no one in power is willing to call Iran to account for these acts of war.  Syria and Hezbollah continue to work to destabilize Lebanon.  So far, the world is letting them do it.

Israel continues to send stronger and stronger signals that it will not tolerate a nuclear Iran.  Nobody is listening.

Meanwhile, the scandal-ridden Democrats are set to take power in Congress.  Too bad that nobody wanted to focus on Murtha, Jefferson, Hastings, and the rest of the corrupt Democrats, being so focused as they were on sending the corrupt Republicans home.

So, maybe it's time to get back to those Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD's, House, Dr. Who, and Battlestar Galactica on TV, and those rascally Jackrabbits and oh so orange Lady Vols basketballers.  There's only so much "realism" you can take in one dose.

McClatchy Newspapers, which bought the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis/St. Paul in 1998 for $1.2 billion, is sellng it off for $530 million.  That's 44 cents on the dollar.

That's what we normal people call a "loss."  I'd fire a financial advisor who got me into an investment that lost 66% of its value in eight years.  Wouldn't you?

Fortunately (note the irony), McClatchy still owns my home town Kansas City Star.  Oh, joy.

I'm not sure what to think of this story:

Researchers: Baking impacts Puget Sound

SEATTLE - Researchers at the University of Washington say all that holiday baking and eating has an environmental impact -- Puget Sound is being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla. "Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness."

Keil and UW researcher Jacquelyn Neibauer's weekly tests of treated sewage sent into the sound from the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia showed cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla levels rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike right after Thanksgiving.

Natural vanilla showed the largest increase, "perhaps indicative of more home baking using natural vanilla," Keil and Neibauer wrote.

Maybe it was all those vanilla and cinnamon lattes being churned out by Seattle-area Starbucks?

Beyond all the wrapping paper and football games, beyond the food and drink, what's it about?

How about:

Humility?

Charity?

Doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you?

Hope?

Mercy?

Forgiveness?

Buy your kid some decongestant, go to jail.

"(I was) made to feel like a criminal -- Made to feel low, dirty. Just totally degraded," recalled Tim Naveau, who says he'll never forget the hours he spent in Rock Island County Jail -- he says all because of his allergies.

"They searched me, made me take my shirt off, my shoes off," he recounted.

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.
. . .
The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

Do I even have to comment on how utterly ridiculous this is?

Via Reason Hit & Run.

Thereby explaining why Gregory House, M.D. is always in such a bad mood.

Article at ScienceDaily, if you're really interested.

Time Magazine has chosen as its ""Man" of the Year" . . .

YOU.

Only, not really you, you. Not folks who get up, shower, grab a bite of breakfast, hurry along to work, put in a good day, then come home to a beer and whatever's on ABC or Fox that night. Them. Like, you know, those wacky Facebookers. OpinionJournal approaches Time Magazine's selection thus:

And yet, there is something uniquely demented about this year's choice. It claims to celebrate You, the reader, the YouTuber, the amateur, the activist. Editor Stengel goes so far as to compare You to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. So then what does Time choose to highlight as examples of greatness in action?

Leila is a 20-year-old single Muslim woman who lives in Maryland and posts diary videos on YouTube: "She says um and ah a lot. She has been known to drink and blog. Sometimes she doesn't speak at all, just runs words across the screen while melancholy singer-songwriter stuff plays in the background."

Megan Gill is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Portland who just broke up with her boyfriend and changed her status from "dating" to "single" on her Facebook page. She has 708 registered "friends" who check back for regular updates on her site, such as "Megan is so over first semester," "Megan is bummed about the election results," "Megan is tired of letting people down."

I have seen the present, and it is vapid.