ninme

Well, that didn’t take long. It’s not even 9 am.

I hear that Punxsutawney Phil has been officially cited by the IPCC as evidence of a worsening climate.

-Iain Murray

Categories: Science and Nature

Not that it’s actually the end of the decade (that’s next year but why be pedantic hey?), but oh what a decade it’s been. I started it out in college, moved to the East Coast, moved in with Peter, graduated college, moved to Seattle, had the bottom fall out of my life’s goals, started a [...]

Categories: Wildcard

The Telegraph – The Christmas donkey starts on the way home<br/> Truth, light, love – these are things that anyone, Christian or not, rejoices to find at home.

[F]or everyone finds sooner or later that we are none of us quite at home. Christmas is homely with the children, but the children grow up and [...]

Categories: History

Times Online – Pope Benedict XVI knocked to floor during Christmas Eve Mass

Reverend Benedettini said the woman who pushed the Pope appeared to be mentally unstable and had been arrested by Vatican police.

The pope’s spokesman is called Benedettini? Pope Benedict and Reverend Benedettini? That’s adorable!

Categories: People and Current Events

Just look at that blue sky. 70°. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Categories: Science and Nature

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of this blog. Usually, uncannily, I remember after not thinking about it for weeks, like a bolt from the heavens, “What’s the date today?!” This year I kept remembering and, thinking I was totally on top of it, totally forgot yesterday. I was really busy, that’s why.

Anyway, It hasn’t been [...]

Categories: Wildcard

Today we Americans celebrate Veteran’s Day by thanking the living (because of a quirk having to do with us getting to our Civil War before the Europeans got to WWI) while the rest of the world remembers the dead. We’ve done a lot of remembering the dead even in this country lately, so I thought [...]

Categories: War and Peace

20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall<br/>

So the US delegation to commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of European Communism is Hillary Clinton and David Hasselhoff.

Telegraph Blogs – Nile Gardiner: Barack Obama’s shameful absence from Berlin: Four Key Reasons why the President stayed away

Barack Obama was quick [...]

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

National Post – Conrad Black: Centuries in the making

In the only place where heavily armed Soviet and American soldiers had faced each other in the Cold War, at the world-famous Berlin checkpoints, there was now an immense flow of traffic, and thousands of people tearing down the wall, as U.S. leaders from John [...]

Categories: History

Headline, Times Online: Uproar as city of Berlin blocks U2 fans from ‘1989 freedom’ gig with a… wall

Categories: Entertainment

At least somebody’s celebrating.

BBC – U2 to play Brandenburg Gate gig

U2 are to perform a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate to mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 5 November gig will form part of the MTV Europe Music Awards in the German capital and [...]

Categories: Entertainment

*Update:**

RC2 has a real post on possible festive celebrations for this august day:

Wheat & Weeds – How Shall We Celebrate?

Categories: Geography and Foreign Affairs

Categories: Wildcard

Every year around this time of August I think wistfully back to the day in 1998 when, over at my cousins’ house in Palo Alto one summer’s afternoon, they announced they were going to walk over to the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple for the Obon Festival. I had no idea there was a Buddhist Temple [...]

Categories: War and Peace

Telegraph – Hunting, shooting and fishing with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s man of action << Click here to view the full album!

I think the news room was in hysterics when they wrote these captions.

Categories: Politics