Panda Puppy Pictures!

Stupid Cat, or Panda Guards the Kittens

If you were a cat, living in a barn, where would you have your kittens? In a nice corner of the hay mow, nestled in some warm hay? Not Jamie. She had hers in the trash can. She's a particularly stupid cat. She gets very excited when I feed grain and comes running around the corner and crashes into the feed cart. Crashing into things is one of her favorite things. Panda is guarding the kittens, but he's really thinking what nice little morsels they'd be.

Panda guards the flowers

April showers bring May flowers, only now they bring them in March. And we all know why.

Buffalo Hunters Revisited

Buffalo are ruminants, right? Ruminants give off lots of methane, right? Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, right? The white man nearly wiped out the buffalo on the great plains, right? If they hadn't, we'd be sweating much more under global warming, right? The buffalo hunters were, therefore, heroic environmentalists, right?

Chris Sligheds out of the Competition

He got worse from week to week Too bad. He was a funny and likable fellow.

Claire had him nailed for 10th place. No points for her. Like golf, Claire.



The standings:

Arnold 8
Claire/Scott 10
Cassie 11
Tom 12
Laura/Luke 15
Claeb 16

A Few More From the Naval Ball

Havin' a good time

Yes believe it or not I actually did attempt some dancing.

Naval Ball!

Okay I finally got around to posting some Naval Ball pictures, here they are.

Michelle on TPM

Remembering Grampa
December 06
Who would have thought the colors arching over the hill would become such a strong remembrance of you.

TPM you were known by some, Dad or Tom by others, Grampa to me.

What memories I hold of the warm home in Conway where us grandkids were always welcome. We were free to explore wherever we pleased- the creek at the bottom of the hill, the nooks and crannies of every room, the sinking red shed, and the infamous sliding hill of the Boyden’s farm.
And who can forget the slide shows in the basement, swimming at Conway pool, and Gramma’s cookie jar?

And I can still picture you, Grampa, sitting in your brown recliner by the TV yelling at the ball players who can’t play the game right, or calling the President a thing or two. And your laugh. Oh, your laugh still rings blissfully through my ears.

Sometimes I lie in bed at night and relive these memories as if they happened just yesterday. I swear I remember every detail- the green shag rug, your turtle pill holder, the walking canes hanging in the garage, the lounge chair with wheels on it, Gramma’s tossed salad and your perfectly sliced roast beef with gravy.

And, of course, your many photographs you so lovingly arranged in albums including those of the rainbows behind your home in Conway.

The day you passed on, I was blessed to see the colors of a rainbow spread in front of me. Before I received the inevitable phone call, I knew from the colored arc your time had come for you pass on to heaven.

Many years have passed since you have been looking down on us from above. I now have a child of my own, a husband and a home. I think of you often and wonder what you would have said about this situation or that situation, what you would think of our current president, and what your reaction would have been to the Red Sox finally winning the World Series.

But what I hold most dear are the memories I hold tightly to my heart of the days we spent together here on Earth. Not everyone can say they were blessed to have such a wonderful and wise Grampa as you, but joyfully I can.

I love you.
Michelle

A post for Dad

This is Violet. She is not actually the property of the U.S. Postal Service, but of my Lexis friend Elizabeth. Panda is agog.

Feel free to Help me out

I know everybody's tired of my GW/environmental rants. (Have I told you how much I hate, just hate, the environment?) But, ya know, it takes posts to make a blog come to life and there are a couple of people who come here daily, looking for something new, and I hate to disappoint them. So anytime you feel inspired to post, about any little thing, please don't hesitate. I'm having trouble being fresh and exciting.

So, it's raining and thundering wildly here, and Panda and Mouse are camped outside Laura's door. ("Maybe she'll come home and save us!")

And I'm going to feed the cows.

Post something.

Please.

If you doubt the effects of alcohol,

try playing websudoku after a couple of stiff ones. "Nine minutes? Gee, I thought I was doing really well."

If you're not part of the solution...

you're part of the precipitate.

Whom Does He Remind You Of?

Or better yet: Of whom does he remind you? Jeremy? Tom Brady? HELP ME!

What do environmentalists want?

They want you dead. You are killing the planet.

Stephanie falters, pays

After several excellent performances, Stefanie sang "You Don't have to Say You Love Me" horribly. I've thought from the beginning that she had a likability problem. She seems perfect in every way, except in some way that I can't define. She reminds me of...someone.

Anyway, she is voted off the island, and the standings now look like this:

Arnold 2
Mom 4
Scott/Tom 5
Laura/Luke7
Caleb 8
Claire 10

Whaddaya think of that, Arnie?

Support the Troops!

At least these people are honest about how they feel about "the troops".

Who's your favorite Beatle?

Yoko?

Keep walking, guys! It's working!

What Aunt Liz is up to

Here's an article about a new course she's teaching.

AI-week one

Brandon of the cherubic face is the first to go. Diana Ross's hits were featured and it made for a number of lame (pronounced lah-meh, french for undistinguished) performances. People who have had face-lifts, btw, look really weird. (Remember that, Arnie. Not that you could afford one.) Sanjemima and Philip joined Brandon in the bottom three. It bodes not well for the men.

The standings after one week:

Scott/Arnold 1
Laura/Caleb 2
Cassie 3
Tom 4
Claire/Luke 5

Please keep tabs on my scoring. It would be very easy to make a mistake.

More

Last bits. Promise.

New Yorkers are selling their Homes over Global Warming fears. Can you say "moonbats"?

And the antidote Global Warming movie is here. It is filled with scientists of the highest credentials. Scientific consensus, my ass.

The Backlash Begins

Ya gotta figure if the NYT mentions it it must be pretty bad.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Heh.

"Christ, it's cold out here."
"Why don't we use some of that global warming?"

Bitter cold turns back a global warming expedition. But they explain it with, ""They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming...But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

No matter how cold it gets, it will always be global warming.

Lileks...

has a way of putting things:

"The fist in the kisser and the gentle caress, that’s March: official Psycho-Bitch Month. The weathermen are predicting we’ll be in the mid-fifties today. The snow retreats; the sun twinkles in the streams in the gutter; coats are opened, chins lifted an inch or two, and everyone realizes that it will all be over soon enough. it's not spring yet, but winter just made its first mistake."

AI Contest

The moment you've all been waiting for. I'm sorry I haven't been able to return all the phone calls and email. There are just too many. Here are the rules:

Rank the contestants in the order you think they will finish. You'll receive a point (points are bad) for each position away from your prediction that the contestant finishes. For example if you pick Haley to finish third and she finishes fourth, you get one point. The entrant with the fewest points wins. You will owe the winner 1 dollar for every point by which you exceed his points. For example, if you have 12 points and they have 9, you owe them 3 dollars. Maximum loss is 12 dollars. No second place. No last place. One winner only. If you can't afford the entry fee, a major pharmaceutical company may be able to pay for you. Deadline for entries is the start of the next show on Tuesday. Place your entries in comments to this post. The names of the Idol contestants are Chris Sligh, Chris Richardson, Sanjaya, Blake, Phil, Brandon, Stephanie, Haley, Gina, Lakisha, Melinda, and Jordin. Tell your friends. You might be able to win 12 dollars from them and the more the merrier.

Tiebreakers: Starting with the #1 position, the winner would be the one who picks that one correctly. If there is a tie, we'll go down the list from 1 to 12 until we come to an incorrect pick. for instance if I tie with Mom/Cassie, and we both pick the winner correctly, but she picks the runner-up correctly and I don't, she wins.

Make and enter your picks right here in the comment section. Picks may be revised up until the show on Tuesday night.

An S-E OotM Team at Regionals

This is one of the teams that Lucy, Judi, and I judged at Regionals. It's S-E's Div III Classics team, coached, I believe, by Mr. Radley. That's Bekah in the mustache and Bronwen (I am pretty sure?) in the short green dress. I should probably know the names of the green-blue person and the one with her back to the camera, too, but I don't. That backdrop is all made of fabric and is in the format of a giant diary with pages that turn to show the different scenes. The picture came from the Evening Sun, here, in an article that, even in the dead-tree full-length version, is mostly about TAG rather than Odyssey of the Mind.

Hey!

Guess whose son pitches for the UPENN Quakers.

Click here, but you have to guess first.

The Worm Turns

A leading French scientist and early proponent of the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) theories recants.

He says:

Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers," Dr. Allegre especially despairs at "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters."

It's just the beginning of both what's out there and what's to come.

Off to England

so I can see this movie!

I told him.

He got it so stuck they left it there over the weekend. Nice that the "environmental conservationists" are so eager to destroy my ski trails.

American Idol

So everybody's too busy this year for American Idol. Except me and Mom! "What are we gonna watch tonight?" Which is too bad because the talent level is up dramatically this year. There are two women who are mind-blowingly good, and several others who would have been contenders last year.

So, there will be an AI contest anyway. It will start after this week's elimination of four more contestants to bring it down to 12. The point system will be the same as last year's unless someone makes a better suggestion.

All are welcome to enter. Except maybe Arnold.

24

Well, I no longer stand by my statement that Jack's brother's son is Jack's son. Jack's relationship with jack's brother's wife appears to have been years before the birth of Jack's brother's son.

We finished season 1, which was intense. Disturbing, almost. It was a bit of a spoiler to know that Jack's wife didn't survive, even if we didn't know when. We were waiting for her demise. Mom commented that jack's wife was lovely and I said, "Enh." She asked who I thought was lovelier, Jack's wife or Nina. I voted for Nina.

So we drove all over central New York yesterday looking for season 2 to rent. Found it.

You shoulda gone to Harvard

Then you could have gotten this e-mail from the dean of freshman.

Searches that find the blog

As you know, we use "SiteMeter" to count the visits to our blog. (The count is now at 15,759 and counting -- who'd have guessed that, two years ago? The counts vary wildly, but typically we get 20 to 30 visits a day and, on busy days, as many as 250 page views.)

But SiteMeter doesn't just count. It also keeps track of all kinds of other information. The info is visible, apparently, only to me, since I set up the account. Our version -- the free one -- tracks information about the most recent 100 visits, such as date, time, number of page views, the visitor's domain name, and entry and exit pages. We could buy a paid subscription that would track the last 4000 visits, instead of just 100, and would provide much more detail about each visit. Someday, I just might. But meanwhile, one fun item is a world map that shows the domain name location for the most recent 100 visitors. Here's a map from this morning:


This one isn't the most thrilling since, as you can see, our most recent visitors have all been from North America, but it's not unusual at all to see visits from Australia or New Zealand, Africa, Europe -- all over the place. Amazing!

In some cases, though not always, SiteMeter also reports a visitor's referring URL -- that is, the page that sent the visitor to the blog. When a visitor gets to the blog through a search engine, SiteMeter also shows the search that the visitor used to find us. And THAT'S really interesting. For a while now I've been keeping track of these searches. Sometimes, the search itself will give you pretty good clues as to who the searcher must have been. People who've been mentioned on the blog for one reason or another get here sometimes by Googling themselves, for instance -- or perhaps being Googled by a friend or relation. Once in a while the searcher's identity is unmistakable. For instance, a few weeks ago, a searcher in Kenya found us by running a Google search for a string of words something like this: "Luke Laura Earlville Murphy blog." Hi, Jessie!

Other times the link is much more mysterious. Why, for instance, did somebody in Ohio run a Google search for "prine ali ababwa" ? And even more mysterious at first glance, why on earth would such a search have led to this blog? We'll never know the searcher's reason for running the search, but here's the reason that the search turned up this blog, along with two other sites: the infamous song lyrics comment string.

Here are some of the other searches that have led to this blog in the past month or two:

Blogsearch: Klaus climate

Blogsearch: Vaclau Klaus

Search.naver.com (Korea) : When the frost is on the punkin

Blogsearch: Minnesota vet school interview

Google: "Sir Mort Clark" January 23

Google (Tanzania) : swahil merchant of venice plot

Here's my all-time favorite, from some hopeful dreamer whose location I didn't note:

Search.com : "the one" love at first sight..descriptions..does it exist

And far and away the most common are searches along the lines of these:

Google (New Zealand) : Albie the Racist Dragon

Google (Arizona) : Lyrics Albie the Racist Dragon

Blogsearch (Columbus, Ohio) : Albanian boy and racist dragon

Google (London) : The Albanian Racist Dragon

(Do you begin to detect a pattern??)

Fun, huh? I'll post more of these as they appear.