Jon in Pasadena

Hmm, considering the state of English Dentistry, she'd probably have fit right in, across the pond. I'm fairly certain they never got beyond the Blacksmith & tongs phase over there...

I think the CARS program sucks and has nothing to do with trying to protect the environment at all. My 17-year old Saturn burns massive amounts of oil, spews heaven knows what horrors into the atmosphere, *barely* passed smog by a whisker and only because I disconnected the vacuum lines and stuck my fingers over the intake/outake ports for five minutes while the evap test ran, yet it's apparently not a clunker, because it got 28 mpg combined in 1993. But as a taxpayer, I get to subsidize the folks trading an 18mpg car in perfect operating condition for a new 22 mpg car. Yippee.

Yep. As recently as a few hundred years ago, people in Western societies went directly from kids to full-fledged farmers, kinghts, princes, or whatever, as teenagers. They certainly didn't "sulk around for a decade". Duh!. Also, gotta love the "proof by assertion" in #9....

Terrible mess of an article. Most of the items in that list have had solid evolutionary explanations for many years. (Example: W.D. Hamilton did an excellent job of explaining the evolutionary basis for altruistic behavior in terms of kin selection.) Many of the topics are addressed by Stephen Pinker in his books, c.f. "How the Mind Works."

I have been to Lake Titicaca and the answer is no, they don't. They do, however, have battery-powered satellite TV receivers, which I found hilarious.

No, I'm pretty sure those are Queens...

If Ahmadinejad nuked Israel and happened to end up vaporizing East Jerusalem including the Dome of the Rock Mosque (3rd holiest site in Islam) he'd for sure galvanize the Arabs. Galvanize them right up his Shiite ass.

The little 8-note riff at the very end gives it away.

I think he meant a "source" who lies a lot. You know, like Soprano.

Interestingly, that was the only one that gave me trouble. I got all the others instantly. But then again, I'm a) a weirdo who tends to hear & remember songs by their bass lines, not their melodies (drives the wife crazy), and b) an ex-bass player, so that helped. But I can't argue too much with your premise; I should listen to music from that era more often than I do.

You don't see how the fact that idle chit-chat distracted the pilots to the point where they didn't even notice they were stalling their aircraft, and then proceeded to crash and kill everyone is "that big a deal" ? Yes, pilot experience is paramount, and part of being an experienced pilot is knowing when it's OK to talk, and when to STFU and just fly the damned thing. Chatting in the middle of a trans-oceanic flight at 40,000 feet in clear weather is one thing. Chatting while trying to land a small aircraft in the middle of a !@#$ing blizzard in winter in Buffalo while the wings are icing is something entirely different.

Sounds surprisingly similar to my high school camping trip to Missouri. Now that was a torture-fest.

Stimulus money FTW

You kidding? We did some of the EFX on DM, as well as Speed, Speed2, Ya-ya Sisterhood, etc. I've seen parts of Sandra that you can only dream of!

Really? I'd heard that and was worried some, but I got my CA refund direct-deposited only 3 business days after the Federal one.

Yay! I officially out-rank a houseplant!

You only need to worry if you start noticing your complexion is clearing up and there's unexplained empty chloroform bottles under the bed.

At least 10x better. I'll vouch for this one as well. I watched it alone in my house at 3:00 a.m. while my family was, eerily enough, in Japan. Extra bonus: at one of the scariest parts, a geji-geji ran across my floor and I nearly shat a kidney.

Not that I brag about getting refunds (not that mine are that big either) but-- I've been scratching my head trying to figure a way to reduce my refund (increase my weekly take-home) without doing something to trigger an IRS audit. Any clever suggestions are welcome. (Don't bother suggesting claiming more allowances on my W-4; I'm already taking an uncomfortably large number). Until I have a better option I'll consider my 0% interest loan to the Gov (which massively outperformed the rest of my portfolio in 2008, btw) to be a necessary evil to avoid getting audited. Not that an audit would turn up anything -- it would just be a massive time & energy sink that I don't want to have to deal with.

That 3K is for ordinary income, over and above offsetting any capital gains (of course following the short-term/long-term rules yada yada) right, Chef?

Sure. A 95 year old Sandra Bullock.

Years ago, back when I was young and stupid, I was going through some turmoil in my life and ended up not filing my returns, and when it got to be like a year later and on the verge of being late with the next year's returns, I ended up packing up all the paperwork I could find for both years and dumped it all on some poor H&R Block guy's desk and begged him "please fix this". I was sure I was going to be sent to Leavenworth or something. The upshot? After all penalties, etc., the Gov (Fed + State combined; forget the breakdown) ended up owing me a few hundred bucks. Nowadays I use TurboTax/efile, and get my refunds direct deposited in 10 days max.

Maybe this is the spark our Defense desperately needs...

Have fun with that. (NSFW)