Like father, like daughter.

It always makes me a little sad to discover an otherwise likable person is an American conservative, like learning that they have lupus erythematosus.

I note that her wikipedia entry says "Mainly raised by her sitter Zonker." There's an alarming prospect.

I note that it describes Kim as "Kim Rosenthal - Jewish-raised Vietnamese orphan". Is there any way to ask why they use "Jewish-raised" rather than "Jewish" that can't lead to a heated discussion?

Almost no carry-on baggage is allowed on flights from Canada to the U.S., Transport Canada announced this afternoon as holiday travellers continue to cope with long delays at Pearson International Airport.

Patrick Charette, a Transport Canada spokesman, said the change is effective immediately.

nicked from jonquil

In the future ... high schools will eliminate science labs and the science department in order to free up resources to help struggling students.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students.  He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

This should bring everyone up short: parents and other people charged with making their school the best it could be, unanimously said that eliminating science education was the most optimal use of taxpayer funds.

The Governance Council then voted (unanimously) that the strong shall wait for weary, the hale shall halt for the weak, and to use the remaining stock of seed corn to make tasty before, during, and after school meals for the struggling students at Berkeley High.

When asked about this the students peasants-in-training said "Huh?"

It's a Red Queen's Race to the bottom.

Who was the most unlikable supposedly sympathetic protagonist in a book you read for the first time in 2009?

[Actually, let's start off by admitting, yes, someone will have read Donaldson for the first time in 2009 and if eligible Thomas Covenant wins this sort of thing hands down so he gets his own special lifetime achievement award and is removed from consideration]

My money is on Todd Hewitt from The Ask and the Answer. He was merely annoying and ineffectual in The Knife of Never Letting Go but in the sequel he is the most technically virgin technical virgin I've seen in the field of non-violence in a long time. He's quite vocal about not being willing to hurt people but he manages to actively facilitate a considerable amount of suffering despite this. His personal body count may be low but he has an impressive number of assists.

It's not a book that has a lot of human characters one can like, actually. I am cheering for the Spackles to clear their world of its off-world visitors.

I have not double-checked this.

How much of the undersea portion is exposed during ice ages?

My wife owns a cockatoo.  We bought a cage advertised as 'escape proof' and 'your cockatoo will not get out of this cage - ever'.

Within a few hours of installing him in the new cage he'd chewed a bar off.  Months later the cage is looking very ghetto, what with a bars missing here, and missing there.  And he's opened two spaces in the cage large enough to squeeze out.

What we need is an actually good cage for a 'too, one that he can't tear apart.  Suggestions?

Story so far: Guy straps a bomb to his leg, detonates it.  Passenger jumps him, beats the snot out of him.  At some point the bomb malfed, because of inept engineering, or the efforts of the citizen or both.


This is the bit that I have not seen anyone else talking about:

A Predator did not blow him up.  Delta Force did not kick down his door.  A US Marshal did not put the cuffs on him.

The government could not stop this guy.

A citizen did, or did his best to do so.

 

To wait for the government to be your savior is to be a bystander in your own life.

Update: What do you say about a 'system' that allowed a known-terrorist to fly with a bomb in his crotch?

What we are focused on is making sure that the air environment remains safe, that people are confident when they travel. And one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.

Secretary Napolitano, this was not a system 'working'.  This is what people out here in the real world call 'failed'.

Are the banks open tomorrow? I know FedEx isn't delivering.

This would be the perfect moment for a brilliant and somewhat evil businessman to stage a train renaissance in the US. The somewhat evil comes in because part of the obvious strategy for building support would be to use his influence to make the TSA even more intrusive, ineffectual and annoying.