I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something

You don't have to be a rocket scientist.

In fact, sometimes it's better if you're not.

Sometimes, like when it comes to predicting catastrophic asteroid impacts, it's better if you're -- oh, I don't know -- a 13-YEAR-OLD GERMAN KID!!!

That's right. The national brain trust at NASA just had their pocket protectors handed to them by a pimply faced German teenager, who discovered that there's actually a pretty damn good chance of a significant portion of North America and Europe being destroyed within the next 40 years.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth...

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

1 in 450?!?!!! That's better odds than Larry Moore saying something non-goobery within the next 40 years.

And we're not talking about some pea-sized piece of space granite, here.

Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

So nice going NASA. I don't suppose you have any ideas on what to do to avoid the mass calamity.

If you do, let's run them by the German grade school students for verification, mmmkay? You NASA guys can just keep looking for Klingons near Uranus.

tagged: NASA, asteroid, impact, Apophis, German, Klingons, Uranus, Michael Bolton, Nico Marquardt

Weekend review

While you were busy adding earthquake reinforcements to your house, I was having the best weekend ever.

Srsly, I got a lot accomplished and was left Sunday night with a pleasant healthy exhaustion. Felt good.

Here's a partial list of what I did (not in chronological order):

• Mowed the lawn -- added fertilizer and weed pre-emergent


• Attended a training seminar to qualify as a volunteer to work with children and disabled adults (more on this later)


• Dragged out and assembled our patio furniture


• Made awesome beef arm roast for Sunday dinner


• Assembled backyard badminton court


• Repaired two bicycles


• Cleaned garage


• Three loads of laundry


• Fixed broken garage door hinge


• Cleaned street gutter in front of house


• Refilled bird feeders and humming bird feeders

Yeah. I'd say it was a good weekend.

tagged: weekend, review, spring, mow

Friday Feast: The Meesha Special

Everyone is dedicating today's Friday Feast to Meesha, who just can't get enough. As a special treat, today's entrée features pickles.

Appetizer
Name a color you find soothing.
C2 M9 Y33 K0

Soup
Using 20 or less words, describe your first driving experience.
I swear officer, the light was green.

Salad
What material is your favorite item of clothing made out of?
Latex

Main Course
Who is a great singer or musician who, if they were to come to your town for a concert, you would spend the night outside waiting for tickets to see?
ScrantonicityDessert
What is the most frequent letter of the alphabet in your whole name (first, middle, maiden, last, etc.)?
X (three of them).


tagged: meme, Friday Feast, Scrantonicity, latex, pickle

Opracritical

I try to keep an open mind. I try to be aware and respectful of differences of opinion. And I try to be open to changing my opinion when justified.

It was with this in mind that I decided to sit through Oprah's show yesterday evening.

What I saw in the first two minutes confirmed that I wouldn't need to change my opinion re: Oprah being a big hypocritical phony.

In her increasingly desperate attempts to avoid being overtaken by Ellen Degenerate as the queen of the talk show (a dubious title indeed), she joined the green herd with an unoriginal guilt trip aimed at a wasteful America.

Here's what she had to say to start her show:

I hate waste.

It's a little known fact about me, but I save toast. I really do because I think it will be crisper tomorrow.

Really I can't stand it [waste]. I guess it's the way I was raised, and I wasn't even raised during the depression.

But I have this whole thing that I can't stand waste. I think we waste so much in this country.

So this show is to get you think about how much you waste and ways that you can be more conservative as a consumer.

So let me get this straight, Opes. You, one of the richest women people in the world, want us to stop wasting?

You, who recently bought a $50-million estate, want us to not be so wasteful?


The woman who has at least SEVEN palatial estates wants us to be less wasteful?

Winfrey currently lives on "The Promised Land", her 42 acre (170,000 m²) ocean and mountain view estate in Montecito, California, outside of Santa Barbara. Winfrey also owns a house in Lavallette, New Jersey, an apartment in Chicago, an estate on Fisher Island off the coast of Miami, a ski house in Telluride, Colorado, and property on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Winfrey's show is based in Chicago, so she spends time there, specifically in the neighborhood of Streeterville, but otherwise resides in California. Her Hawaii property was featured on the cover of O at Home and on her TV show. Winfrey also owns a home in the exclusive town of Avalon, New Jersey"

Oprah, who charges a minimum of $50,000 to advertise on her website let alone her television show/network/magazine, thinks we peons waste too much.

The woman who quite possibly could be the ROOT OF ALL EVIL! -- believes we are living it up too well.

Right.

Look, I understand that Americans waste a lot of food/oil/energy/time, but Miss Oprah is hardly in a position to tell anyone to cut back.

So why don't you just go ahead and piss off, Oprah.

tagged: Oprah, estate, evil, money, waste, hypocrite

Friday Blogthing: Orange

Maybe this means I can run for president of Ukraine, though I'm not too keen to be mentioned in the same company as David Blaine.

Your Aura is Orange

You're a bit of a loner, but you're never lonely. You know how to entertain yourself. Whether you're trying an extreme sport or a new weird food, you always live on the edge. The purpose of your life: testing limits - both physical and mental... and then telling people about it. Famous oranges include: Timothy Leary, David Blaine, Tony Hawk, Carey Hart Careers for you to try: Snowboarder, Circus Performer, Undercover Agent

What Color Is Your Aura?

tagged: Friday, blogthing, orange, aura, David Blaine, Ukraine, blog, meme

Coppers and robbers

Northlanders should take this as a hint.

Hell, AT&T should, too.

For the second time in the last few weeks, someone swiped a length of telephone line, presumably to sell the copper wire therein.

This is the second phone outage caused by copper thieves in recent weeks. On March 29, thieves stole several hundred feet of cable from 43rd Street and Pittman Road in Kansas City. ...

Meanwhile, the demand for copper is on the rise and the price could rise to $5 a pound in six months. Currently, copper costs $3.85 a pound.

This is a sign to AT&T -- and all of you Luddites for that matter -- who are still living in the 1960s (the decade in which the aforementioned telephone lines were installed).

The message is this: Get with the freakin' times, man!

This the 21st century! It's almost 2010, fer cryin' out loud. And we may not have flying cars (yet), but we've had wireless telephone technology for the last 20 years.

Buy a cell phone.

There are great deals out there. The networks are solid and with copper wire pushing $4 a pound (that's like five times more expensive than air) it just seems more efficient to go wireless.

I'm telling you, in this day and age, there's no reason to be connected by a wire to anything.

Just make sure you have an extra battery.

tagged: copper, wire, thieves, cell phone, ATT, telephone, outage

Posted On, Vol. 1

I just made up an old tradition at 3AM where I go through my comments on other blogs for the previous week and post them here.

Not only does it give me a chance to link to the blogs I read most, it allows me to be lazy and post something that I've already written.

Here's the round up for the past week:

• Posted on The Kansas Citian:
  James thinks the US is posturing for war with Iraq. I'm just excited about a new expletive:

  I think "Qud" is now my favorite invective: "Get the hell off my lawn, ya' damn Quds!!!" or "That slutty Qud goes home with a different guy every night." or "Ew! Somebody Quded all over my pizza!"

• Posted on The Random Ramblings of a Midtown Miscreant
  MM took some cheap shots at the town of Lone Jack, Mo. I had to defend it's virtues:

  Even though I'm married, I occasionally take a trip to Lone Jack. But thankfully, having a spouse drastically offsets the need of going to Lone Jack.
  
  Lone Jack can be fun every once in a while, but the alternative is much better.

• Posted on Frighteningly Uncommon Sense:
  Faith ranted against women who put on makeup while driving. I commented that my hands are already full without adding eyeliner into the mix:

  If I were a chick, I don't see how i could put on makeup while driving, what with my hands being full of coffee, bagel and cellphone already.
  
  Plus me being a chick and not a very good driver in the first place.

• Posted on I, Shane:
  Shane is campaigning for Barack Obama again. I'm still skeptical (natch):

  I’m almost there with you on this one, Shane. I certainly would vote for BO before Hillary. And I’m beginning to consider that he might be a better candidate that McCain.
  
  But I don’t have high hopes for his presidency. He says he’s the candidate of change, but I haven’t seen him propose any real reform.
  
  If I had to vote today, I’d probably still waste my vote on Ron Paul.

Well, that's it for this week. Go check out the posts I've linked to get the full force of my cleverness in its original context, and to experience some pretty damn good blogging from these local writers.

tagged: Iran, war, Quds, make up, driving, Barack Obama, Ron Paul

New Kids on the Blog

I wanted to take a break from being (as Keri Oki would say) Jerky McJerkelheimerSchmidt and highlight a few recent additions to the increasingly addition-laden blogroll at the left (which will make Emawkc's Third Annual Blog Anagram Game!!! really interesting later this year).

• Serenity's Escape
  Shame on me for not linking to Serenity sooner. She's coming up on her first year blogiversary, and I only discovered her about a month or two ago. I love her takes, and she has a great way with words. She coined the term "Wal-Martian" which I have put into regular use in day-to-day conversation. I just wish she would post more often. Maybe if you go read and comment there, she will.
  
  
• Moxie Mama
  I've been enjoying Moxie's opinions over the last few weeks. I even caught myself crunching numbers after a recent numerology post she did (I learned that according to my birthday, I'm in an extremely fickle and superficial phase of my life. Of course, that's been the case for the last 15 years).
  
  
• The Good Mother's Guide to Happiness
  Talk about a great sense of humor. Amanda (aka The Good Mother) has some great stories, a prime example of which is her brief history of her vacations...

  "It was dark and scary on that lonely highway. You know the kind of highway I'm talking about…where at any moment someone could step out of the cornfields with a machete in one hand and a bloody head in the other."

  Classic!
  
  
• The Aging Disco Diva
  I subscribed to ADD a few months ago and just recently added her to my blogroll (yeah, I know, more shame on me). She has a very entertaining way of popping the culture, including a recent, HI-laraious blistering of the world's most-hated woman:

  Heather Mills just brings out the ugliest thoughts and emotions from the Diva. Seriously... I have the irresistible urge to rip her leg off and beat her with it... no, not that leg---the one she was born with.

  Plus, the ADD is a K-State fan, so you know she's not just some crazy crackpot.

So go check these cool ladies out. Leave a comment and tell them emawkc sent you.

tagged: blog, blogger, blogroll, writing, humor

YouTube Tuesday: The beat goes on

Just trying to drum up a few comments with this one.




tagged: movie, YouTube, video, MetaCafe, music, drum, nonstop, Tim Jackson

Lost Tales of 3AM, Part III: Found

TO: Whom it may concern
FROM: emawkc
DATE: 04.11.08
RE: Your glasses

This note is to let you know that I found your Anne Klein prescription eyeglasses in the lobby yesterday.

They must have fallen out of your purse or computer bag, because they were sitting on the floor, right by the door. I nearly stepped on them, which would have sucked for you for obvious reasons.

I’m currently putting together a “FOUND” sign to tape up by the door. I’ll use an extra large block-type font (probably something like Arial Black at about 160 picas since I know (judging by the soda-bottle thickness of the lenses) that you’ll be nearly blind for the next few days. I hope you either a) have a backup pair of prescription glasses/contacts, or b) have someone who can drive your blind ass around for a couple of days because, DAYUM!!!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I found them and have them in my cube. You can stop by and pick them up anytime. Just make sure you bring a venti latte with an extra shot of espresso for my troubles.

tagged: lost, glasses, Anne Klein, venti, latte, espresso, Arial