I just watched Napoleon Dynamite . Color me bemused. Did I miss something, or is there really nothing to miss?

I liked it. My reaction was, "Hey, I know people like that!"

TOKYO - A powerful magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit northern Japan on Tuesday, triggering a tsunami warning for a stretch of the country’s Pacific coast and shaking buildings nearly 200 miles away in Tokyo, the nation’s Meteorological Agency said.

Many people were reported injured in the coastal city of Sendai, Kyodo News Agency said, but national broadcaster NHK reported, citing city officials, only objects falling from bookshelves and no major damage.

triggering a tsunami warning for a stretch of the country’s Pacific coast and shaking buildings nearly 200 miles away in Tokyo,

I read "shaking buildings" as "shaking bulldogs." It was a more interesting image in its selectivity.

How long does it take to fly to Japan from Chicago?

Are Rio & Saget already making the earth move?

I believe that's among the longer airline flights, so I'm gonna guess at least 16 hours.

Oh, and

Are Rio & Saget already making the earth move?

Hee!

This video is kinda interesting to watch:

[link]

A US Navy transport made an emergency landing when its landing gear could not be lowered. The plane was a carrier plane landing at a land base, but for the emergency landing they had an arrester cable just like a carrier does - the plane used its tailhook to hook the arrester cable to slow down very quickly as it was sliding along its belly.

La la la I should be in bed la la....

I saw this headline:

Tool-using chimps mostly lefties

and my first reaction was, "What, the Republican chimps are opposed to tools?"

"What, the Republican chimps are opposed to tools?"

There's a joke about the President here.

I watched a squirrel run up my DH's pant leg once. It tried the interior route first, got stymied around the knee, reversed, and used the external route to get to his shoulder, where it grabbed his ear and demanded something.

Given the divets the squirrel left in his leg, I was impressed at his ability to stand still.

According to the crash site investigators, and I don't know if this will be discussed in the media, decompression at >30,000 feet is so rapid that you could be flash-frozen, but you'd also suffocate at the same time. From the initial autopsies, it appears the flash-freezing didn't happen, but they haven't determined how much oxygen the people had (if they had enough to remain conscious). In all likelihood, they did not.

Again, not sure if they'll release this to the media, but there are some weird things about the crash: the cabin pressure is a completely different system from the cockpit pressure, so that in the event of a depressurization in the cabin, the pilots could still function. Also, the oxygen masks in the cockpit aren't like the cup/bags in the cabin; after that crash in Halifax, the cockpit has full-on firefighter-type masks. Interesting trivia.

In any case, it appears that several systems had to fail to cause this. The black box is a newer one, and records 300 different parameters, but no one here knows how many of those are related to the air-conditioning, so it's been sent off for analysis.

There's a joke about the President here.

There's a joke about the President pretty much the moment someone mentions tools.