So the inimitable Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit just happened to have a post today about tramp stamps.

Tramp stamps are a favorite subject of mine to ponder. There’s something about the debate between those who have them and think they are “cute”, and those who look at them and snicker about advertising a certain product, that makes me chuckle.

And that’s more or less what Glenn linked to, a blog post by someone listing the “20 worst tramp stamps”. But in reading that site I happened onto a link to a site which attempts to decipher “kanji” or other oriental tattoos that Americans or other westerners get without knowing what they actually mean.

I’m not really much for schaudenfrade, but I have to say I laughed out loud at some of the examples of tattoos permanently engraved on the skin of gullible fools who have no idea what the tattoo actually says. I warn you, if you are like me, you may lose half an hour or more of your life reading through some of these stories. They’re like potato chips, you can’t stop with just one.

As far as tramp stamps go, I’m afraid that I am of the opinion that “tramp stamp” is a perfectly good description of the lower back tattoo. Whether the girls who get these like it or not, the immediate reaction of any guy who sees a girl lean over and expose a barbed wire pattern coiling out of her whale tail is gonna think “yeah, she’s easy.”

That’s just the way it is.

A longtime professor at UCLA, told that he would not be rehired because his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department, says he’s being fired after 36 years at the prestigious school because his scientific beliefs are “politically incorrect.” via FOXNews.com – Scientist’s Firing After 36 Years Fuels ‘PC’ Debate at UCLA.

So while performing some sort of archeological dig in our closet yesterday, the Cosmic Wife uncovered our long-lost high school yearbooks. (Yes, the Cosmic Wife and I attended the same high school, although she was a lowly freshwoman when I was a high and mighty senior. As a result we have six years of consecutive yearbooks.)

So there were a couple of things I wanted to check out, mostly looking up some photos of folks I had some recent interest in, but as these things happen, I happened to come across some schoolmates’ comments and ended up reading every comment in my senior yearbook. I don’t remember having done that since a few years after graduation.

Let’s just say that reading those comments was an education in itself. Here are some fictionalized reproductions of some of the comments. These aren’t actual comments but they are reasonably accurate compilations/reproductions of actual comments.

From a male classmate, not in my social group, but who was in several classes over the years:

Well, I waited all year for [teacher name here] to smack you or expel you, and I guess it will never happen now. You are one strange dude. Even if you hated the football team, I guess you’re OK.

From a female classmate, not in my social group, but who was in several classes over the years:

I can honestly say I’ll never forget you. You sure made [random class name] fun. I’ve never met anyone like you before (and I’m not sure I ever want to meet another one in the future – just kidding!).

From a male classmate, in my social group:

What can I say about you that hasn’t already been scrawled in here? Yeah, you’re strange, you’re weird and you’re going to get yourself in a lot of trouble one day with your mouth, but it has been mostly fun knowing you.

From a female classmate, in my social group:

I’ve never met a more unique person. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it’s been interesting for sure! I really enjoyed the long conversations and how you listened to my problems. You sure have some interesting ideas about the world. You’ve got to quit being so hard on yourself. Don’t forget me when you go to college, be sure to write!

And finally, from one of the many females I was totally smitten by, but with whom I at most shared nothing more than a single date or kiss.

Wow, what do I say? I can’t really figure out our relationship. You sure are strange, but in a weirdly almost good sort of way. You’ve got so many talents I hope that you do something good with them. Learn to accept yourself as you are and just be yourself. Don’t forget me. I sure won’t forget you.

In a few cases that last category included a “call me” or “let’s get together this summer” comment.

I dunno what sort of comments other people get in their yearbooks. Are these fairly typical?

Maybe there’s a web page out there somewhere which compiles yearbook comments…

Yeah, so I’m now leveling up a paladin on the same server my rogue is on. He’s level 77 now. He was level 55 about two weeks ago, so I’ve been power-leveling him pretty good.

The funny thing is that the only reason I started leveling him was to have him mine titanium and saronite for my rogue to prospect or sell for cash. But that goal was achieved at roughly level 68 or so, and I’ve kept going… By this weekend he’ll be level 80. Then he’ll be competition for raiding with my rogue…

Dunno what I think about that yet… One thing I do know is that paladins are insanely easy to level up and run dungeons with compared to a rogue. My rogue gets hit one time and she’s down. My pally gets hit three or four times and says “hmm… perhaps I should heal myself” and continues fighting…

Hmm… according to my site meter, this post generated roughly 20 times my normal daily traffic when it was posted.

I can’t find any incoming links which would explain it, which implies that the traffic was all organic, from search engines.

Weird.

A man known for protesting the Discovery Channel stormed the network’s Maryland headquarters carrying a handgun on Wednesday, taking a “small number” of hostages while appearing to have a bomb strapped to his chest, police said. via FOXNews.com – Armed Man Believed to Be Environmental Protester Takes Hostages in Discovery Channel Building.

/sarcasm

The man appears to be a nutcase who believes human babies are “parasites” and we need to stop having babies to save the planet.

I wonder where he got those ideas from?

Palin’s plan to headline the Iowa Republican Party’s annual fall fundraiser on Sept. 17 is solely to help raise money for the state party’s candidates, the former Alaska governor’s aides said. And one trip to Iowa is a long way from a successful campaign for the state’s 2012 presidential caucuses, still 18 months away, Iowa party insiders said. But Palin’s recent overtures to Iowa reveal a change in posture that puts her in a position — like other 2012 presidential prospects already laying campaign groundwork in Iowa — to build goodwill and relationships with influential activists, state Republican officials said. via Sarah Palin’s plans mark change in posture toward Iowa | Des Moines Register Staff Blogs.

My aesthetic challenges are notorious here on CC, but I nonetheless still have opinions about aesthetics, even if they are those of an artistic philistine…

First I’ll address the timing of this. It’s yet another political unforced error by the Bumbler-in-Chief. It really doesn’t matter that the expense of this is not picked up directly by the taxpayers, nor that the office should be comfortable for the sitting President to facilitate better decision making. The reality is that not only was this done when a huge fraction of America is out of work and facing mortgage foreclosures, Obama had the additional tone-deafness to have this done while he was on yet another of his seemingly endless vacations. The message that sends is very much reinforcing the “Marie Antionette” image that he and Michelle seem determined to force down the throats of the American people. But the bottom line is that from a purely rational perspective, Obama has every right to do this, most other Presidents have done the same thing, and it’s really a tiny, tiny thing in the overall scheme of events and issues that we face today.

Now the room itself.

What’s with the stealth doors? I’ve never seen doors to an office blended into the background before. I find the outlines and doorknob sticking out of the wallpaper to be far more distracting and annoying than an actual door frame would be.

I don’t like the predominance of browns and beiges… Working in that office would just make me tired. I’d want to lay down and go to sleep. Those couches look too fluffy and comfortable too, just adding to the image of relaxation. They look more like dozing couches than working couches. I’m guessing the scene in the photo above is somewhat distorted by a fisheye camera lens. But the sense of staring down a gauntlet is pronounced in this view. I would prefer a more casual alignment of the couches and table to suggest that when engaged with the President, it’s more of a meeting of equals than a group of supplicants seeking approval.

The wallpaper sends me mixed messages. The muted brown and beige pattern suggests a casual and warm atmosphere, but the rigid striations marching around the room send the opposite message, especially with the harsh white paneling along the bottom third of the room.

And what’s with the single blue cushion? It feels like someone carried that in from the Lincoln bedroom and accidentally left it behind. I’m not a big fan of bunches of sofa cushions anyway, they just get in the way when you’re trying to actually use the sofas, unless you are taking a nap, in which case they are quite useful. I can’t help but look at the cushions and visualize a servant removing them from the room for every important meeting so they don’t end up tossed on the floor, and then bringing them back in for photo ops….

All in all I find the design to be sort of outdated. Some have called it a 1970s remake, but it’s not so much 1970s as it is the sort of color scheme and layout I’d expect in a starting attorney trying to create a particular atmosphere. Attorneys seem to love those browns and beiges based on the lawyers’ offices I’ve been in. I’m not sure that’s the message the leader of the free world wants to send out.

On the other hand, if this layout does make Obama tend to go to sleep, I’m all for that.

Forget “Fore!” “Fire!” was the cry of the day for a golfer whose off-target swing sparked a 12-acre blaze in Southern California. The golfer at the Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine landed a shot in the rough Saturday. On his next swing, his club snagged a rock, causing a spark that lit the rough ablaze and eventually attracted 150 firefighters to the scene. via Golfer’s swing snags rock, sparks fire in S. Calif – Yahoo! News.

At least 18 mushroom-lovers have been killed in accidents while hunting for their favorite fungi in the mountains and forests of northern Italy. via Mushroom hunter “massacre” claims 18 lives in Italy – Yahoo! News.

So, Obama has clearly been irked lately by a large part of the American population. According to polls almost 1/3 of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, and a similar number believe he has something to hide about his birth.

Obama’s flippant response was “I can’t walk around with my birth certificate plastered to my forehead all the time.”

Surprisingly, even on the news sites where I’ve seen this covered, the most common response to this quotation is something like “No, Barry, you don’t. Ten minutes would cover it if you allowed hi-res photos of your actual long-form, doctor-signed, witnesses in attendance birth certificate instead of the short-form copy which is not actual proof of anything.”

And that pretty much sums up my opinion on the whole “birther” thing. Obama’s camp continues to say that Birthers are “liars” but the real lie is coming from Obama’s camp, and that lie is that the form they have provided is actual proof of anything. This seems like such a clear-cut and obvious thing to me that it astonishes me how many people seem incapable of grasping the concept.

As I have always said, the whole “born in Kenya” thing doesn’t really matter to me, but the continued effort to paint people with a legitimate question as nutcases does bother me tremendously. I am really sick and tired of Leftists lying by calling people they disagree with liars. But they continue to get away with it, so I suppose they’ll keep doing it.

Plans for sending humans to visit an asteroid are heating up, with at least one company already scoping out the technological essentials for a deep space expedition within a decade, given the go-ahead. The asteroid space trek is seen as both scientifically valuable and as a dress rehearsal for a Mars mission, NASA officials have said. It could also hone ideas for planetary defense to guard Earth from a messy head-on clash with a space rock. via SPACE.com — ‘Plymouth Rock’ Deep Space Asteroid Mission Idea Gains Ground.

I’ve been saying for 30+ years that exploiting the asteroid belt is the key to the human race becoming a space-based civilization.

Essentially asteroids are resources on a silver platter. Why we haven’t already set up asteroid mining colonies by now is a complete mystery to me.

A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming. It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof. The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed by research. via Express.co.uk – Home of the Daily and Sunday Express | UK News :: Climate change lies are exposed.

In essence what they are saying here is that the IPCC made up stuff out of whole cloth and passed it off as critical science that required policy changes amounting into the trillions of dollars and beggaring entire nations.

It is hard to conceive of a more egregious scientific fraud in the entire history of the world. That’s no exaggeration. The scope of the impact of this chicanery is incalculable, and could well have led to economic ruin for the entire world.

I’ve been warning about this for years.

I’ve called this the “dirty little secret” of electric vehicles. In the extreme this will drive desperate owners to dump their cars in an attempt to defraud insurance companies. As electric cars become commonplace, the degradation of their hyper-expensive battery packs will cause huge drops in value after certain mileage values. It is quite likely that even with crazy government subsidies, owners will see their auto loans go underwater overnight.

Reality has a harsh habit of intruding into fantasies, whether they are about rainbow-colored unicorns, or about “saving the world” with hyped up technology claims.

So I worked my butt off last week on this presentation I have to do for our senior leadership today. I was up ’til well after midnight twice, and had to defer a scheduled personal day off to get it done.

It’s only four slides and I’ve only got ten minutes to do it.

Wish me luck!

Now I know that virtually everyone has had a moment like this where your brain takes a couple of seconds to engage and you look like a fool.

But just imagine, imagine if George W. Bush had been stuck in a gate for a few moments while trying to get an umbrella through the gate.

Oh. My. God.

I know this is a bit outdated, but I hadn’t seen this particular toon until today. Made me chuckle…

It was so chilly this morning that I put on a sweater to work in my home office since I didn’t want to turn on the heat in August.

When the sun finally broke through the trees, I went and lay down on the deck to allow the warmth of the sun to drive away the chill. It’s almost 3:00 and I just now took off my long-sleeve shirt.

Winter is coming.