~MEGABUGS~

Phil Mays, via the good folks of IFAS up at the venerable University of Florida, has been collecting big bugs for some time. Here's his Giganthus... If you look close that scale under the gigantus buggus looks like 256 grams to me. Holy Mary! Can you image what it must feel like to have one of those things fly into your face on a dark moonless night? Look at this.

Bob

~THE FLARES~

There are a handful of blogs that I wander through daily. You see them every time you come in here ------>. But this evening there are a bunch of them who seem to have trouble finding themselves. Now my friend Andy Taylor, who shares office space with me, says that an outburst of solar flares has caused the whole internet to become unstable... and he posits the theory that if things are this screwey because of some flares we can just imagine the havoc to come if anyone were to drop a big hammer... like explode a bunch of nukes. And, as I think about it, something like that would really screw things up, wouldn't it? The story about the flares has some legs... there may be something to it. Much as I hate to admit that Andy might know what he's talking about. Hmmm... the first time! Look here.

Bob

~THE FALL~

It was one of those photographs that frames something unforgettable... like the burned girl pic out of Viet Nam or the disintegrating Challenger. There's that falling man from the 9/11 debacle. Malkin pointed at a copy of a really good article about the picture in Esquire. Here it is.

Bob

~ACHES AND PAINS~

It seems as if all the other bloggers in this edge of the blogging universe have some kind of medical complaint so I figure that I should get my two cents in: every once in a while, my aging carcass seems to turn me from my usual aging hobble to a cripple. And there's not a damned thing to do about it but get out the trusty heating pad and get one of the industrial sized bottles of Tylenol.

The trouble is that my vaunted grandfather died at the golden age of 106... yeah, you heard me right. He fell off his own ladder while he was painting the roof of his own house. Third floor roof... there he was with an old fruit ladder... too cheap to hire the job of painting another coat of silver waterproofing paint on the old tin roof... then thumpthumpthump... broke his arm and him one hundren and six years old. Actually, the fall didn't kill him. When he got out of the hospital they had given him aspirin.. only it was some sort of super aspirin... and he OD'd on the stuff. Killed by a handful of aspirin.

So needless to say, I'm afraid of taking too much of the stuff. Sooooo... here I am hobbling around nursing a sciatic pinch with my heating pad. Hobbling around looking like I'm the one about to clamber up on a fruit ladder.

Heads up down there.

Bob

~LOST ~

Many people believe that the boy see here meditating in the niche of the tree truck to be the reincarnation of the Buddha. Now the kid has managed to go missing. How can you lose a god? Here's the link.

Bob

~17-0~

Well, yesterday the Canadians slipped past us, but this afternoons' flogging of the South Africans by Roger Clemens brought back the vulpine gleam to my eye. They finally involked the mercy rule after Clemens had pitched about 5 innings and Ken Griffey had run in seven (yikes) runs on the hapless guys from South Africa. It was a rout, but it got me thinking about the series. Lots of energy in the beginning of the season... sorta like the kind of tournaments that you see in international soccer. I didn't think too much of the idea when I first heard about it last year, but this tournament has been a lot of fun... even the loss yesterday to the Canadians was pretty good ball. OK... so I changed my mind. This is fun at the top of the season. If they had something like this at the end of the season lots of guys would be playing hurt and it would put the teams at risk. This way everybody is rested and fresh and ready to play some stick and ball games. Good stuff... and man o man... this satellite radio is the kind. Regular old times baseball on the real honest to god radio. Manomanoman. I decare it officially summer. Put the sweaters away for another year. It's baseball season!

Bob

~ 3.6 BILLION DEGREES KELVIN~

The gnomes at the Sandia lab managed to create temperatures of three and a half billion degrees kelvin in their lab. The most interesting thing is that there is a net increase of energy in the transformation than was entered into it. Hmmm. Superconductor? Here's the link.

Bob

~WHAT'S THAT SMELL?

Check this out!

Bob

~DUH~

If you missed it there in Drudge, Barbara Streisand, the woman who once said that President Bush was a C student dummie... while never attending college hereself (Bush has an MBA from Yale!) ... managed to make eleven spelling errors in an entry in her blog castigating the president during some sort of liberal rant. Excuse me while I throw up.

Bob

~ OUR PRESIDENT ~

And they say that Clinton was the only prez that had a good time with the wood. Check it out.

Bob

Nice hat, eh?

~ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT~

I hope you ready for this image. That's my idea of modern pedagogy.

Bob

~PARIS~

I came across a 360 degree photo of Paris done by Arnaud Frich that was taken from the Rose Window by the Seine. What was it Hannibal said? Memory is what you have when you don't have a window. I was in Paris a few years ago and the lady I was with (my daughter) took my picture standing in the Mozart portico of the National Museum of Music. I got a picture of the shadow before the doors... maybe that was a figure in the darkness... maybe it was me... but I do have the memory.

Bob