I can't link to it directly (stupid Javascript link) but if you go to MSNBC [link] and look a screen or two down, on the left at "Week in Video" they have a clip of that Norweigan penguin that just got promoted. The penguin inspects some troops - cute.

(Penguin footage is the last thing on the clip, which is about 2 minutes long.)

Of course, now I have a baby, but not a PhD, which just goes to show, um, I hope nothing.

My parents never bothered me about grandkids. His? Err, yeah.

My MiL started an IM conversation with me while I was at work to mention that if we had any problems, it might have been similar to my FiL's "issues". Talk about a conversation I was never meant to have. EVER. Poking my eyes out at work wasn't an option.

Advil Cod & Sinus

Something's fishy about that product.

One reason I like having young parents is my mom doesn't want to be a grandmother any time soon. (I'm sure she'd love having grandKIDS, she just doesn't want to be called Grandma. So no pressure.)

Ooh! Awesome knife holder finally for sale in US

Remember a week ago, when Rush Limbaugh said, “Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents, there's nothing about it that's real…”

Now he's denying ever having said that. [link]

there's no slaughter rule in soccer?

Nope, at least not when I was coaching. Plus, no sport would have one at that level. Those are for rec and youth leagues so no one's feelings get hurt.

"I don't need to pull from my experience for a character, and I've never understood why actors would, except for lack of ability, imagination or research," he says. "I had all three things, so this is a little frustrating to me, because it denies my work and the research that I did."

Joaquin Phoenix reacting to the assumption he was drawing on his experience of mourning a brother while filming the Johnny Cash story. Article.

Uh, why wouldn't you? I'm not saying he has to, just that it's odd to not understand why not using the feelings you've experienced to bring a character to life is a valid choice.

The cold, hard facts on cryonics

Antifreeze much better than anything in your car is now pumped into a client's corpse. State-of-the-art cooling techniques are used to chill the body parts down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit before they are stored inside tall stainless steel tanks that look like they might have come from a microbrewery. The battered bicycle helmet that used to be strapped onto the deceased's head during the cooling phase is soon to be replaced with something more clinical-looking.

But the experts here, who have been struggling to perfect their techniques since 1972, still haven't quite conquered the ultimate bane of cryonics practitioners everywhere: the unfortunate phenomena known in the trade as "acoustic fracturing events."

In layman's terms, those would be the audible cracking noises made by the brain and other internal organs as they shatter from the effects of the extreme cold.

"It's exactly that kind of noise when you drop an ice cube into a glass of Coke," explained Tanya Jones, Alcor's director of technical operations. "In the best-case scenario we've ever had, it was only five fracture events. We are working on the engineering to see how to eliminate this problem."

"acoustic fracturing events" - um, eww?