FlaSoxxJim

Always Something There to Remind Me and Jenny Jenny were both good calls. I'll add: Ah! Leah! - Donnie Iris the Beat Goes On/Awitchin' To Glide - The Kings My Sharon-a - the Knack (even though it was released in 1979, it's an 80s song at heart) Along with Jenny Jenny, these are pretty much the New Wave anthems that I still get a kick out of. Honerable mentions: No One is to Blame - Howard Jones In a Big Country - Big Country Land Down Under - Men At Work (a buddy and I used to do a kicking acoustic version of this back when I played out more) And my embarassing 80s guilty pleasures... Prince and most anything off of the first couple Huey Lewis and the News albums Hey, admitting I have a problem is half the battle, right?

But this empiricist/experiential acceptance that baseball exists should hold for the existence of dinosaurs in the geologic past as well. We can see, feel, and study fossilized bones that are perfectly comperable in form and function to those of living vertebrates. we can date those based on known and almost-certainly constant physical laws (isotope decay rates) to tens-hundreds of millions of years of age. We can see gradual change in the body plans of these animals as we examine progressively younger geological strata. This all qualifies as observational evidence indicating the existence of dinosaurs and other animals in the far geologic past, and a gradual change in those lineages over time. Without invoking the God-as-Trickster scenario this is as readily observable as a baseball game to anyone who takes it upon him/herself to observe. None of which is intended as knock against Carl who I genuinely like as a ballplayer for the intensity he brings. I just wouldn't let my kids take a natural history class taught by him (get beat by him?).

No worries, behemoth is a pretty apt description even if non-specific.

Buffalo?!? How is A North American species in the Bible? Can you provide the chapter and verse, please. I'm not necessarily doubting your authority on the subject, it has to surpass mine at any rate. But how is a buffalo in the bible? I can see travelers telling stories about wildabeasts from Africa, and the Romans certainly brought lots of exotic animals back from Africa and Asia, but a statement as matter-of-fact as the Bible "does mention buffalos" struck me as interesting. Of course if the reference is to a generic 'behemoth' ala' the generic 'leviathan' I will be somewhat less impressed.

Eight States, NYC sue utilities over global warming About a year ago in a back and forth over global climate change, our attempts to gut Kyoto, and the administration's general myopic backing of industry at the expense of environmental public health I suggested litigation was likely the next avenue for trying to get US utilities companies to cut emissions. The Attorneys General from eight states and New York City are bringing the suit, so it is not going to be as readily dismissed as an earth-hugger excercise as it would if it were Greenpeace, Sierra, etc. It will be an uphill battle to win the precident-setting suit, and as the industry folks say in the article it is tough to successfully single out a handful of big industries and hold them accountable for global warming. The same lkinds of lawyers who successfully used statistics for years to protect Big Tobacco by stressing that you can't prove any single case of lung disease was caused by smoking will be called on to defend the utilities here I'm sure. In the end, though, Big Tobacco wasn't bulletproof as we all know. Win or lose, I'm sure more suits will follow. Hopefully this triggers global suits as well. And hopefully that starts the WTO looking at the global economic losses due to the industrialized world's ignoring the problem and taking appropriate action. Kyoto Version 1 represented the merest baby steps we should have taken as the world's leader in greenhouse emissions; KV2 is almost laughable in how short it falls of where the industrialized world really needs to get, and we wouldn't even sign on to that draft. It will get interesting for sure.

Local brand you grow up with in Chicago. Gotta go with Jays.

Well said. Still, I assume there is a large contingent that figures dark matter, Higgs particles, and anti-matter are just more tests of faith thrown our way via Prankster God, as is the appearance of a 14 billion year old universe when the Bible clearly indicates it's just a few thousand years old. There is a difference between not having everything figured out down to the last detail (which is why scientists have not yet discovered/invented themselves out of their jobs and being just plain ignorant.

Wow, first Zambrano blows up and now LaTroy loses it. Being a member of The Coob really can take its toll. A couple more incidents like this and maybe the stupid "Lovable" moniker will finally get tossed out and the country will see these guys as just plain old LOSERS.

GIVE!?! Tell me who's giving them away and I'll go there for school next time around. Screw working for the damn degree.

That's weird as hell if it's on the level. My somewhat educated guess without knowing the source was Maryland would have been that the the images are absolutely of a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta). The round ears are a good way to distinguish this one from the other three hyenas (striped, brown, aardwolf) which all have more pointed ears. -- Spotted hyena -- This image of the purported Maryland animal in particular looks like it's a spotted hyena: So what's it doing in Maryland?? IF(!) the story is on the level, a zoo escape or escape from an exotic animal collector is most likely. It is NOT a hybrid of a hyena with a domestic dog since they're not even canids (hyenas are actually more closely related to cats than dogs - strange but true). It could also be a really really ungly, mangy dog I guess. If the story is on the level and if the animal is such a frequent visitor, it would certainlybe easy enough to get a sample for DNA testing. It would be leaving hair near the bowls of cat food it is supposedly eating, and if there are intact follicles you could use that and not even need blood or saliva.

nerd.

Len hit this in his monologue last night, buthe only thought it was twins. He said it was good because that way the babies would be able to keep each other company through the LIFETIME OF MENTAL COUNSELLING they were bound to be headed for. he also noted that this pregnancyis again an artificial insemination and said, "Boy that Michael just can't keep the turkey baster in his pants can he?"

Bill Hicks was most excellent. Lengthy tangent (sorry, and don’t read if you think Creationist bashing is not fair sport)… I have had numerous encounters in my life similar to the debate between Hicks and the Texan, but two of them have always stuck with me. A few years ago I was back visiting in Chicago with my wife and then toddler daughter. We were in line for the coal mine at the Sci and I Museum and right in front of us was a biblical literalist matriarch with a couple of new inductees to the cult. They were going back and forth about Bible stuff and whatnot and one of the newbies mentioned he had seen the "Sue" T-rex exhibit at Field and that he thought it was cool seeing old fossils like that. The queen fundamentalist quickly interceded and told him how the bones were actually just a few thousand years old and that dinos and humans had coexisted and the dinos were probably killed in the Great Flood etc. etc. The look of utter hopelessness on the guy’s face was priceless. He hadn’t yet considered that by drinking the fundamentalist purple kool-aide he had essentially agreed to a virtual lobotomy and had to toss out everything he thought he knew about the natural world if he was going to fit in with his new friends. I can only hope religion didn’t take and he got away while the getting was good. Also a couple years ago at a favorite restaurant there was another veteran Biblical literalist holding court with some new inductees. He was talking about how no living things died in the time from creation up until the Original Sin of Adam and his madame and that the phenomenon of physical death was only introduced with Original Sin. He also noted that all living things were created once and in total perfection (and we evolutionists be damned). It was an open forum so I asked him how he explained the existence of detritivores. "Huh?," he said. I again said what about detritivores – organisms specifically equipped to live off of dead organic matter – worms, scavenging insects, fungus, frigging bacteria. If in the beginning nothing died AND if there was no second round of creation of biota or evolution of non-detritivorous organisms into detritivores, then how did they survive the pre-death Genesis period and how could they reasonable be considered to be "perfectly designed" if they were created to subsist on a NON-EXISTENT food source?!? Undaunted, Mr. Literal hemmed and hawed for a few seconds and then deftly chalked it up to the caring hand of the Creator, who OBVIOUSLY must have provided some ready-made dead organic material for these creatures until man started a-sinnin’ and life started a-dyin’. I didn’t have the strength to go further, suggesting that this deck-stacking God apparently knew and expected that Man was bound to sin and set the organic death cycle in motion or he would not have bothered with the decay organisms. I just ate my lunch and listened to the rest of the discourse, amazed at the version of the world the guy was selling.

Ugly 9th, but a good Sox WINNER!

Nope, there's another one. Servin' up taters tonight.

Beat me to it.

Well Hello Carl!! Welcome Back!

Tough at-bat by Barajas - good job Scho

Damn. Go Tiggers!

This is a good way to put the A's series behind them - they just nead to beat up on a team like this tonight.

Well, it's no Dirty Sanchez, but I'll pass on the Hot Carl nonetheless... :puke

It is 0.99 per song from the i-Tunes music store. But you can use an i-Pod without ever buying anything from the i-Tunes store and vice versa. And you can also use the i-Tunes mp3 manager software without buying songs. i-Tunes and i-Pod work so unbelievably well together (Windows ad Mac platforms) that if you try it out you'll love it.

I JUST bought a 40G 3rd generation model three weeks ago. I love it but I could have saved $100 if I waited. I'm not sure that the all-in-1 wheel will prove radically better than the wheel with the 4 buttons across the top like the last generation, but Apple usually gets ergonomic changes right so they may be on to something.

I enjoyed Unbreakable well enough because I like that stupid comic book logic. But when I saw that some of the best scenes from the DVD outtake stuff was what was deleted for the theatrical release I really began to doubt the guy's storytelling ability. There was this scene with the Samuel Jackson character as a kid getting all busted up on a carnival ride that was so intense and really would heve propelled the film, and it ended up on the cutting room floor. I really tried to like Signs but there were too many things about it to let it be so. Basing the film on the now-debunked crop circles myth was a bad beginning, and the stupid "tell your brother to swing away" cryptic crap from Mel's dying wife sucked because I don't think M. Night very successfully mixed the sci-fi genre he was trying to dabble in with the supernatural genre he normally works with. The beauty of sci-fi for sci-fi folks is that once you accept the story's physical universe rules, then everything should work. In signs, accepting the attacking crop-cutting aliens isn't enough to make the film work - you also have to accept a supernatural order where a dying person is granted a vision of how to stop the aliens (to top it off, the big from-the-dead secret is 'hit them with a $%*%# baseball bat,' something they should have tried anyway I figure). The crowning (under)achievement in signs was that we are never told what the ancient weapon was that the world used to repel the invasion while we focused on the local events around Mel's farm. I get what Night was trying to do – personalize events that were supposedly happening on a global scale – but IMO he fell way short of pulling it off. Sounds like The Village is going to be more M. Night shock-ending formula from your assessment. It's like the old EC horror comics from the 50s, where they had 8 pages to tell the story and after you read a few dozen of them you knew exactly when they would have to pull the old shock-a-roo ending to fit it in. I love those old rags but they're not great literature. And thus far, M. Night's post-Sixth Sense offerings haven't been great cinema either.

I thought the "buried secret" was going to be that M. Night is a one trick pony who caught fire with Six Sense, stretched even the logic of comic books in Unbreakable, and pretty much stunk up the joint with Signs. Here's hoping The Village is better, but I'm not too optimistic about it.