Google Demographics: "Male (51%), female (49%)"

Photographer arrested for taking pictures of Vice President's hotel: "An amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis was arrested on Tuesday in his home city of Denver - for simply taking pictures of buildings in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing."

46 percent of Earth is still wilderness, researchers report: "Despite population growth, logging and other environmental threats, nearly half the land on Earth remains wilderness -- undeveloped and nearly unpopulated, according to a study released today. The study by 200 international scientists, the most comprehensive analysis ever done on Earth's wild places and population trends, was seen by some experts as a surprising cause for optimism. Biologists also viewed it as a warning, since only 7 percent of the wilderness is protected."

Last Friday was the three year anniversary of this weblog, and I forgot to have a party! Ouch!

Happy Holidays!

Review of Adaptation: "Unlike most top-shelf Hollywood screenwriters, Kaufman doesn't seem terribly, er, adaptable. Anything he writes is likely to turn into a Charlie Kaufman script. That's apparently what happened with Adaptation, a version of Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief that Kaufman took on after Malkovich. When he finally delivered a draft after months of helpless toil, The Orchid Thief had mysteriously turned into a comedy titled Adaptation, about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) trying to juggle his pathetic, loveless existence and an assignment to adapt an unadaptable book called The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean (appealingly played by Meryl Streep, in her tenderhearted-professional-woman mode)."

The knotty problem of choosing the optimum way of lacing up shoes has been solved by a new mathematical proof. Mathematics unravels optimum way of shoe lacing: "There are many millions of different possibilities but, reassuringly, the proof shows that centuries of human trial and error has already selected out the strongest lacing patterns. However, the pattern using the least amount of lace possible, the decorative "bowtie" lacing, is usually only seen in shoe shop displays."

Posting will be relatively sporadic over the next couple of weeks. Angie is due on December 22, and I think I'd better spend more time with her and less time blogging! Watch this space.

The Intellectual Origins Of America-Bashing: "America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity."

It's All About the Brand: "It's no coincidence that during the late 1980s and early 1990s it was a marketing executive from Pepsi, John Sculley, who grew Apple into the biggest single computer company in the world, with $11 billion in annual sales. Sculley marketed Apple like crazy, boosting the advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million. 'People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company,' Sculley told the Guardian newspaper in 1997. 'It was the marketing company of the decade.'"