Presto Agitato

Dream On

From Scottsdale, a winter fantasy:

Tommy Leclere, manager of Carlsbad Tavern restaurant near Hayden and Osborn roads [in southeast Scottsdale], said pea-sized snow flakes began falling from the sky around 12:30 p.m.  It came down intermittently for about 15 minutes, with the flakes hitting the ground and melting.

Bzzz!  No cigar for you, sir.  But that is an excellent description of graupel, sometimes called 'snow pellets' but really just hail with a snowflake (rather than the usual ice or dirt) at its core.  You did notice the dark and nasty clouds and maybe some gusty wind, no?

Diagramming the TSA

(h/t: Reason)

Quote of the Day: Public Reputation

I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual.  He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual. — Richard Epstein

Obama isn't the first politician to successfully affect such a demeanor: Adlai Stevenson, who was marketed and fawned-over as an intellectual, never evidenced any such talent; wit and depth of thought aren't the same thing.  But Obama doesn't even have the wit, but only a talented speech-writer and a very tingly press.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

I love the Louis Armstrong/Velma Middleton version (I'm a sucker for Satchmo), but this is a very, very cool arrangement.  (You can stop it at 1m 58s.):

Men Who Can't Pee Right

A Very Führer Christmas

The London Daily Mail has published several previously-lost photographs of a Nazi Christmas celebration in 1941 (or, perhaps, a few years earlier).  But their analysis requires some correction:

But the Nazi Christmas was far from traditional.

Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice,’ rather than Christmas.

Out of sight at the top of the tree behind Hitler was a swastika instead of an angel, and many of the baubles carried runic symbols and iron cross motifs.

Wait a minute: Hitler substituted a god for Santa Claus because religion had no place in his Reich?  How's that again?

But confusing Christianity with religion per se is far from the worst mistake I've read on the subject:  A reviewer of Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great went so far as to mistake Hitler's dislike for Catholicism with atheism.  In truth: Nazism was rife with occult and pagan (particularly Norse, but Hitler borrowed, um, liberally) symbolism and rituals.  Nazi Germany was a cult.

Merry Christmas, bitches.  And Happy Kwanzaa.  (cough)

Pronouncification

From Physics for Future Presidents, by Richard Muller:

What about 'nukular'?  That's the way the word nuclear has been pronounced by many people, including President Dwight Eisenhower, Edward Teller, President Jimmy Carter (who served on a nuclear submarine), and, more recently, President George W. Bush.  Is this pronunciation wrong?  Many scholars assume that it is.  Academics mock people who speak that way.  Yet 'nukular' is included as a colloquial variant in both the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries.  Edward Teller was one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb; he is often called the 'father' of the hydrogen bomb.  Doesn't he have the right to say it any way he wants?

Yeah, yeah, but he was Hungarian.  I don't take pronunciation cues from Zsa Zsa, either.

It turns out that pronouncing the word as 'nukular' has been a tradition at some of our weapons laboratories since World War II. ....

Most of those guys were immigrants, too, right?  But all right, all right: I'll yield. But I'll still grind my teeth and mutter under my breath....

The Security of a Free State

I hadn't thought of it this way:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

 

Tribal Update

A Note from the Help

Wait till he sees Christmas dinner!