We watch a LOT of “Hannah Montana” around here. The current season is the final one for the show, and one thing that’s quite noticeable in the most recent episodes is how much all of the kids on the show have matured over the last year. Except for Jason Earles, the actor who plays Miley’s brother Jackson. And do you know why???? Because he’s 32 FREAKIN’ YEARS OLD, that’s why!! Or maybe not; Wikipedia says he might be only 24.
I was practically dumbstruck the other day when an old high school friend trotted out the “soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for your freedom” line on Facebook. Is it possible than even now, eight years into a pair of wars that show no sign of stopping ever, that there are still people who believe that there’s any other reason besides oil for our military presence in Central Asia?
Pretty much everybody knows that the United States is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the world, right? But did you know that the Department of Defense accounts for so much of that consumption that if it were an independent nation it would be #4 on that list all by itself? (in per capita consumption) Or, if you just use the absolute figures, the DoD would be #38 on the list, just behind the Philippines.
We’ve had a bit of a fly problem in our house recently. Due to the town’s trash collector coming by our house several hours earlier than usual a few weeks ago, I missed getting our garbage to the curb, and in the week that all of that rotting food had to sit in the mudroom waiting for its next turn to join the local landfill, some flies got in and got seriously busy with each other. At first it only seemed like a couple of flies here and there, but apparently there is no such thing as “a couple of flies”. Something had to be done, but we didn’t want to be spraying pesticides in the kitchen, which is where most of them had taken up residence, so Bridget bought some of those adhesive fly strips at the dollar store. In the space of a couple of days, the carnage was intense. You would think we were doing genetics experiments for the number of flies we found wriggling fruitlessly (HA!) on those sticky strips of doom. BWA-HAA-HAAAAAAA!
Ahem…sorry about the cackling. My point in telling you this story is to lead up to this link: the BBC reports that a new paper from a team of evolutionary biologists in Canada has concluded that most insects (and probably a fair percentage of other species) developed a “Stink of Death” mechanism so that the oleic acid given off by the decaying bodies of dead bugs would act as a repulsor mechanism to tell other bugs to stay away from a potential danger.
So, while the fly strips were successful in and of themselves in ridding our kitchen of the fly menace, leaving the strips hanging, covered with decaying fly corpses, is also probably convincing other flies to get the fuck out of Dodge. They’ll stay up for a couple more weeks, by which time the cold weather will have finished off whatever stragglers have escaped my lethal clutches! BWA-HAA-HAAAAAA!
The fourth annual “Most Corrupt Members Of Congress” report is now available for your perusal. This year, the report only lists 15 members of Congress, down from 24(!) last year. CREW, the organization behind the non-partisan effort, says the list is smaller because many of last year’s “honorees” were not re-elected in 2008, and some likely “honorees” have not been charged, censured, or indicted…yet. The list is pretty evenly divided between Democrats (8) and Republicans (7), though it is heavy with members of the House (12) compared to only three senators (McConnell, Ensign, and Burris). There are some pretty familiar names, too: Maxine Waters, John Murtha, Jerry Lewis (no, the other one), and Charlie Rangel. All people who pop up again and again as crooks. And, no, that moron Joe Wilson (the “YOU LIE!” guy) is not on the list — it’s not a crime to be stupid, especially if you’re a member of Congress.
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