Ananova: EU rejects call to change flag. Whew, and yet – Is anyone somehow a bit disappointed?

Am I the only one who remembers a cartoon carnivore saying “And then it’s lunchtime!” as he plotted to catch the innocent rodent or boid? Does anyone remember him less hazily than I do?

(from a spam for growth hormone): “As seen on NBC, CBS, CNN, and even Oprah!”

Speaking of spam, I almost wonder whether shiny new “Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience” might be more useful than my BS (1981) in a field in which I haven’t worked in fifteen years.

I haven’t read Spider-Man much in the last twenty years, so I forgive myself for needing to have it pointed out to me (in a review whose link I have lost) that the nonentity recently played by Ms Dunst is not the real Mary Jane Watson by any reach. She would have disabled one of the creeps before Peter arrived. (And she’d have better sense than to flee into an alley at night.)

Apart from that, Spider-Man the movie treats the canon honorably.

I have a strong feeling that I’ve met someone who looks and talks like this J Jonah Jameson, but where?

Charlie Stross describes the FBI Carnivore email-snooper as “an indiscriminate Hoover”. That’s twice this month he’s made a pun such that I can’t tell whether he was aware of it. (The other was “Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta”.)

Got a spam (three or four times now) from a Christian kook. In the middle of the prophecies about nuclear war and the biochip of the beast is a paragraph about Creation, including:

THE LATEST RESEARCH IN MOLECULAR PHYSICS HAS COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (APPROXIMATLY 10 TO THE 34th POWER) JEWLS (POWER UNIT) NEEDS TO BE INPUTED INTO THE WHOLE UNVERSE EVERY SECOND TO KEEP IT FROM FALLING COMPLETELY APART. THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THIS ENERGY COME S FROM BUT (— THIS IS ENOUGH ENERGY TO LIGHT NEW YORK CITY FOR 200 YEARS –) THIS IS PART OF THE WILL OF GOD- PLAIN AND SIMPLE-.

Whee! Where do they find this stuff? Of what is it a distortion?

If my figures are right 10^33 watts is about 3 million suns; negligible in the Galaxy, beneath measure in the Universe. But 10^33 joules is indeed enough to power New York City for two hundred years – assuming 8 million people each using twenty terawatts.

. . . in the slow moments of my temp job.
Lileks watches 9/11 documentary:

It says something about America that you can’t blow up an average skyscraper without killing people of every race and creed on the planet.

It says something about America’s critics that fighting Arab Islamists is automatically racist — and the murder of diverse peoples by an ethnically homogenous group is explained as a response to . . . racist American policies.

Lileks explains practical socialism:

(It’s always okay to kill lower-case people on behalf of upper-case People. Class warfare always involves a lot of case warfare.)

Lileks on presidential language:

in the entirelty of Bill Clinton’s career he issued an endless stream of soggy bloviation, and the only three lines for which he will be remembered — “The era of big government is over,” “It depends what the meaning of the word is is,” and “I did not have sex with that woman” — were, in turn, insincere, evasive, and dishonest.

Aw come on. What about “We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans”?