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.

Skipping and poking head for a selfish question in English:

The word "commemoration" - to which ceremony exactly does it refer to? During the funeral? A certain time after the death of the person? Can it mean either one?

My brother needs it for something he's translating. He asked me if I could ask English speakers, since he checked in all the dictionaries he knows. Naturally, I thought of you guys. Thanks, in advance!

I don't think it refers to any particular ceremony. I would only use it to describe something that happened after the funeral, even many years after (for instance, you could commemorate John F. Kennedy's death now).

For a ceremony at the time of the funeral or near to it, I would use "memorial service."

I guess a funeral or memorial service connotes a personal ceremony, for the whole person, while a commemorative ceremony would be for the deceased person's public achievements or public persona.

Just my take, not an expert.

Freddo and simmit:

I love the idea of "OMGWTF" license plates.

Shortly before leaving Virginia I saw plates that read "PIZDETS." Which is the word for "cunt" in Russian.

Just read the Legal Urban Legends article. I had heard that the large punitive award from the jury was because, when the victim's injuries were described as "severe burns on the inside of both upper thighs and on the groin region," the McDonald's attorney said something to the effect of "What's the big deal? It's not like anyone's going to ever see them."

I was hoping to get that story confirmed or debunked, but the article just said "McDonald's had a callous attitude."

Hivemind: Chase Visa is evil and, more to the point, a big pain in my ass. (Latest payment gone missing, Chase refuses to remove late fee and finance charge despite the fact that we have always paid our bill in full for 10 years - in other words, we're not their ideal customer.) And due to corporate eviltude, they now own both our household's non-bank-debit-card credit cards. I want to escape their tyranny. Can anyone recommend a non-evil, non-likely-to-be-bought-by-Chase credit card company? We only need credit cards for cash flow management and purchase of things online with purchase protection, otherwise we'd just go with the bank debit cards. Is switching credit cards a credit report Bad Thing?

Unfortunately, in Albanian "car" means cunt. So when you speak to your Albanian colleagues in English about your motor vehicle, you call it the macchina.

Is switching credit cards a credit report Bad Thing?

Nope. We switch all the time, doing the dance of 0% introductory offers. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any credit card companies; near as I can tell they all suck.