So what do you think of this puzzle of the day thing? It should be centered in the column, at least. What was I thinking?

The first manned, privately funded, sub-orbital space launch was a success this morning. Outstanding. The first I’d heard of Scaled Composites was from Bill Whittle just under a year ago, when he went to the desert to see one of their rocket engines test fired. And today they made it to space. Glorious days.

Finally, this weekend is the big camping trip. So keep an eye on this page, campers. There’s something wrong with either blogger or my ‘puter at home, because I couldn’t post anything over the weekend. Apparently it is working now from my office box.

Isn’t that interesting? One percent of my traffic comes from Saudi Arabia. Hmmmmm… Also of note, Three percent comes from Chris N. while he’s at work. Thanks bud!

Sure, it’s a lame post, but it’s all I got. I’m a little hungover and have already seen pictures of an innocent man’s head cut off by Saudi terrorists (the leader of whom has been sent to hell), a man’s hand surgically cut off, another man’s fingers cut off with a sword, a man beaten with a stick, and another man having his arm broken by means of smashing with pole. (The evil fucks who did all that likely greeted al-Moqrin in hell as a part of OIF.) Or maybe were sent there today by way of 1000 lbs of high-quality American ordnance.

Your Brain Usage Profile:

Auditory : 53%

Visual : 46%

Left : 62%

Right : 37%

L-Train, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.

You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.

By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions

When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.

Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.

To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.

Now you take the test

Nick O. found the yeti-sports webpage a long time ago, back when he was a-blogging. Today, they’ve upgraded big time, with five games in total. I highly recommend the darts game, (Orca Slap.) Check it out!

Illinigirl has a friend who’s doing a master’s thesis on what sorts of factors compel gamers to play a video game more than once. (As for me, it’s one thing: beating Metroid in as short a time as possible. Nostalgia from my horndog days of junior high.) So if any readers play console games, go here and answer a few questions. Help out a struggling academic, eh?

I finished reading my first Robert Heinlein novel last night, a story called The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls. I enjoyed the book a greatly for about 360 of the 382 pages. The dialogue was fairly lifelike, and the TANSTAASFL politics were appreciated. But the ending was, IMHO, a god-awful cop-out of the worst order possible. The second reviewer at Amazon there said that you have to really be into Heinlein to read this one, and definitely not to read it first. I didn’t think it was a bad story, it was a good story with a tragically weak ending that diminished the rest of the story considerably. I’m not giving up on Heinlein though, I divined from reading the Cat that he’s a very good writer. Still have three of his books on my bedroom floor that don’t need to go back to the library until August. Should have gone and found that “Have Spacesuit–Will Travel” story or “Starship Troopers.” The sequel to which I rented and stopped watching about ten minutes in. Bad, bad movie. And this is from someone who watched Star Crystal two times in as many days.

I fiddled around with the blogrolls. Rotated in blogging soldiers who are currently deployed and out ones that have completed their duties.

I’m having a good time working on this particularly nasty audio. I’m digitizing some old 7″ reel-to-reel tapes that a client’s dad recorded when he was 24. He kept changing speeds, so I have to go through and digitally change the pitch of different sections, but he must have had at least four settings, since the ratios aren’t working out as foretold in the language of reality, Mathematics. Getting good results though, and the customer is already very pleased. Also completed a bunch of other jobs. Too bad I didn’t look for any work to do last month, for now I find myself in a particularly bad financial pickle. At least I’ve got an old car to sell and a strong back to make quick cash landscaping.

I’m fine with this:

You’re Richard Vernon… “DICK” You
definetly raid Barry Manilow’s wardrobe. You’re
a heartless bastard who only cares about
himself. when you’re not out spying on the
students, you’re snooping through their
personal files. Shame on you!

Which Breakfast Club Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The Cards are on a tear of late, beating the tar out of Texas yesterday afternoon by a score of 13-2. I watched most of the game on the local WB affiliate in the Cardinals network and saw something super cool. In the third inning, a foul ball went up into the seats over the Cardinals dugout and landed right next to a little kid. The KPLR camera crews do a good job and followed the ball and kept a camera on the spot where it landed to get a shot of whoever caught the ball. What the camera caught was a big bald dude diving over the seats from the row behind and knocking the little kid over, then coming up with the foul ball. The kid’s mom slapped him on the shoulder with her program and he got up menacingly (or so it appeared on the tv screen) knocking the kid around again with his fat ass. Then he got back in his seat and slipped the ball into his shirt pocket.

The kid’s mom starting laying into the dude and he appeared to “gloat,” according to the WB broadcaster’s description. The aghast crowd turned a bit hostile and started taunting the dude. In between and during ABs (with Woody Williams on a roll on the mound, nothing to see at the plate), the cameras stayed on the action up in the stands and the WB announcers made fun of the bald dude mercilessly. Another kid and his dad walked over to the little boy who’d been knocked around and gave him a baseball, and probably called the bald dude a cocksucker. A local tv reporter was interviewing the bald dude, who still refused to give up the ball in spite of the crowd chanting “Give him the ball!”

The broadcast started off the next inning after commercials with an usher bringing the kid and his parents down to the Cardinals dugout where Reggie Sanders gave them one of his bats and a baseball, to which the crowd gave up a “Reggie, Reggie” cheer. Beautiful. Reggie Sanders is a hell of a guy, and belongs on a classy team like the Cardinals. Hopefully Roger Cedeno can learn something and start fitting in. Undoubtedly, that kid is going to have a great summer, and will be a Sanders fan for life. I didn’t hear about it on the broadcast, but this article about the incident describes Steve Kline’s reaction to the bald dude/little kid incident:

Cards reliever Steve Kline also witnessed the incident on television and sent the man over a gift, a Cardinals shirt, which he signed, “tough guy and ball stealer.”

The shirt, however, was never delivered. The unidentified man left the premises soon after Sanders’ good-will gesture and could not be found.

What a loser! Whenever I go to a ballgame, the first thing I do (after picking up an icy cold budweiser and a hot dog loaded up with onions) is to pick out a kid nearby to give any balls that come my way. It’s never come up, but when it does happen, I want to be prepared. My girlfriend went to an Astros game once when she was a kid, and something very similar happened, where an asswipe dove over a kid to get a ball. But the kid came with plenty of uncles who ensured that no self-centered joker was going to rob their nephew of a show-and-tell prize.

One more addition to the baseball ettiquette rant. I also really hate the newfangled “tradition” (started by the Wrigleyville fans) of throwing visiting home run balls back onto the field. The only time you should ever throw a ball back is if it was that player’s first home run, or some other milestone event where the player would really like to have it for themselves. Catch a ball, give it to a nearby kid. (But let the ass munchers nearby taunt you to throw it back to the field until they give up first, don’t want them to taunt a kid!) Or make sure you’re sitting just in foul territory and you won’t have to worry about that.

Update: How about that, Fark found the video. There’s also a link in the comments to the Post-Dispatch story about the ugly incident.

I’ll link to the Olsen Twins countdown page, because it won’t be funny for much longer.

Move aside, International A.O.W.C.U.T.G.D. — F.P., the Corner has found an even longer registered domain name. Check it out.

Arthur Chrenkoff has posted part three of his Good News roundup. It’s a great feature that he’s been putting together. Also read his post on Reagan’s passing. His was one of the first I read, since he grew up in Poland and was living there during the Solidarity movement.

I rented Medal of Honor: Frontline for the GameCube tonight. Wow. The .45 in that game is an incredibly effective weapon. The first level is on the normandy beaches and the rumble effect in the controller doesn’t ever stop. It took me a few tries to get through that level. The first time I ran off the transport, I headed straight for the wire, hiding behind obstacles or in artillery craters when available. Apparently you have to get orders from your captain first, he wants you to go provide cover fire for a bunch of dudes pinned down behind barricades before he’ll call in engineers to blow up the razor wire. I think I took 96 bullets in that level. And that’s the time I didn’t get killed by the Germans.

I must say that unloading a fixed machine gun on a trench full of Nazis is a pretty good time.

Hey Jeff, have you heard of Garage Band? Sounds cool, I like it a lot. If I were a young (not quite) serious (I’m not) musician (definitely not) that’s the sort of thing that would have my interest.

I met my homeboy Chris tonight to watch the Cardinals/Cubs game over a few tasty brews and chicken tenders. (Budweisers, Guiness, and I had a Weihenstephan Hefe-Weissbier later on) Alas, we lost. But it wasn’t a total loss, as late in the game water started dripping from the ceiling of the Esquire, the fine, satellite TV equipped establishment I frequent for the purpose of watching Cardinals baseball and drinking said tasty beers. Water dripped, then poured from the ceiling tiles. The owner was called over and proclaimed “Holy Shit!” He rented out an apartment upstairs to a gal who partially installed a clothes washer up there. Partially in that she didn’t properly aim the drain tube. Hilarity ensued as she did a load and split for the evening, resulting in the water pouring into the drop ceiling of the esquire, which picked up on the joke and dropped to the floor in a fine smackety-smack of wet, mushy, foil-backed formed fiberglass. So I had to watch the Cards lose to the Cubs, but at least I got to see ceiling tiles drip, soak, crack, and fall.

Fortunately, we have a slick early-day matchup tomorrow of Matt Morris v. Mark Prior. Most St. Louis fans have a keen hatred for Mark Prior for some comments he made last year leading up to the playoffs. I respect his skill, he’s an absolutely fantastic pitcher. I just wish he was on our side… or that of some AL team. Preferably Oakland. Or Boston.

I don’t know what to say about Woody Williams. But I hope he regains his form of the past two years. I want him to retire with honor as a Cardinal.

And here’s some good news you probably didn’t get in your local paper. (Via Vodkapundit) The three Italians who were kidnapped along with Fabrizio Quattrocchi two months ago were rescued by special forces, along with a Polish contractor who was kidnapped more recently.

My vacation comes to an end this week. Thank God. It appears likely that I’ll be in St. Louis during the day on Thursday, possibly returning on Friday or so. I figured I’d go outside and take some pictures of my gardens today to share with you, my loyal reader, since I didn’t write much of anything during this vacation. Here goes:

You might recall that I planted a little flowerbed not long ago. Since then, it’s done very well, although the irises didn’t last long and are now but very nice looking grass. The reddish grass that’s in the back corner is really taking root, and has grown quite a bit. Those little orange daisy looking things are really popping like mothers.

And here’s the jasmine plant I’d mentioned, it usually has little white flowers on it, but it got a bit sunburnt today and they closed up.

My crib also has a whole bunch of day lillies all around, my girl’s horticulturist sister tried to talk me into getting rid of all of them, but my defiance payed off, since they look real nice:

And here’s two shots of the vegetable garden in the back. I’ve got two cherry tomato plants on the left, my herbs in front of them, and about five different kinds of pepper plants throughout, two yellow squash plants, some tomatillos that probably won’t come up, and some kentucky beans that have yet to come up. One of the neighbors is growing potatoes and tomatillos on the other side of the fence, and he gave me a spearmint plant too. Nice guy. I’ll have to learn some more Spanish so I can talk gardening with him over the summer.

So those are my gardens, so far. I should take some pictures of my girl’s… she’s got some kick ass radishes and beefsteak tomatoes, and her garden is about three or four times the size of mine.

Read this story about Atlantis and get a good look at the bottom picture with the caption, “The rectangles: What interpretation can be put on the satellite images?” Crazy Brits.

Loosely related is this EBay item, uncovered by Venemous Kate (with the help of a distracted motorist).

Another fine weekend past. I went up to Chicago on Wednesday of last week to meet Nick O who was up there on business to see Nick V do his improv olympic show. Got to see some really funny people. Nick’s almost done with his stint at Second City, in Level 5 of the conservatory program. Saturday night I felt like checking out some new watering holes around town, having soured more or less on all the other ones. Took my girl to a place called Bentley’s that opened up over the winter. I was surprised by how nice it was inside. It’s got a real handsome bar with good woodwork and a built-in clock. I had a few Young’s Oatmeal stout, an English export beer. It was OK, but next time I go I’ll have to get some bitters. I’ve been looking for some samples of English beers for a while now. Folks have been telling me since college that the English have the best beers, but I’ve never had one a decent one. I put my garden in the ground on Friday, a bit late in the season, but better that than never, eh? In two months, I should have some peppers ready to harvest. I’ve got at least five different kinds of peppers, including the much feared Habanero and the world-famous tobasco varieties. Also cherry tomatoes, Kentucky beans, tomatillos, and yellow squash. And the herbs are in the ground too, after suffering far too long in their little pots. Finishing up some Swedish audio and then my phonetics data at work today.

Rest in peace, Ronald Reagan.