contain yourselves

You probably know this already, since it hasn't been featured on this blog's "you heard it here first" feature, but there are two huge experimental breakthroughs which managed to escape world governments without their budgets thoroughly mangled.

CERN is currently test-firing proton beams in sections of the 17 mile Large Hadron Collider, now that all of its 50,000 tons of magnets have been cooled to the appropriate temperatures (~456.3 deg. F). Scientists are confident that they will find the elusive Higgs Boson, a force-field-ish thingy supposedly responsible for the inexplicable phenomenon of mass, which you may have noticed around you throughout your daily life. There is also speculation that they could find evidence for unseen dimensions or supersymmetric particles that might bolster the case for string theory.

But hold on, the GLAST satellite is also chugging along as of early this summer. It's supposed to observe gamma rays (the highest frequency EM waves) at energies never before studied. Who gives a shit, right? Wrong. Proponents of opponents of string theory (most notably Loop Quantum Gravity) think that the fine-tuned measurements of the satellite might show minor discrepancies in the speed of light due to the motion of light particles across quantized spacetime. Basically, they want to prove that space and time are made of discrete units.

Oh snap! Two major quantum gravity theories are about to throw down all up in this bitch! It's exciting, we swear! Don't cut our funding!

Two good things

Here are two funny quotes from today.
From John McCain:

“World history is often made in remote, obscure countries. It is being made
in Georgia today."

As Yglesias notes, this is not correct. But what I like is the idea that an entire nation could be "remote" and "obscure". Like most countries, Georgia is actually located next to several other nations (for example: Russia). It is only remote in the sense that it would be very far away from you if you were standing very far away from it. This is also true of all things.

But is it obscure? No. In addition to the millions of people who live in or near this country, approximately several million more people knew about Georgia from such sources as school, maps, and noticing things. Obviously McCain wasn't doesn't waste his time with any of those.

The other quote stands alone. It's from Michael Mukasey, America's worst Attorney General, in reference to the frequent criminal behavior at the Justice Department during this administration:

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

six degrees of shut up, clinton

Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director from back when she mattered, claims that if they had known that J0hn Edwards had cheated on his terminally cancerous wife sooner, they might have had a better shot at the nomination. The Clinton aides had actually gotten together sooner to decide how to make this situation seem unfair to Hillary as opposed to, say, everyone who's actually involved in it. Terry McAuliffe insisted that they travel back in time and release the information before the Iowa caucus, and then looked around wandering why everyone had stopped listening to him.

In other news, Bush is condemning the Russian army for invading Georgia because he doesn't yet know that it's not, like, our Georgia, with the peaches an stuff. He would have spoken out sooner, but there are a lot of black people in Georgia. HA HA! That was an out-dated Kanye West reference. No word yet on how the invasion fucked Clinton out of the democratic nomination.

Obama is still pissed off about the ad that compares him to a white, non-political, licentious, moronic, female celebretard who was expelled from high school and whose father wrote a large check to McCain. Rick Davis brilliantly defended the ad by noting that all of the human beings mentioned in it could technically be considered celebrities, and therefore am I right or am I right? This seems ridiculous to thinking people, but what they don't realize is that McCain actually does think that everyone on TV is the same person, since how else could they all fit in that box with the buttons on it? Still waiting on McCain to apologize to Senator Clinton for the tasteless ad.

McCain

Apparently Jimmy Carter is significantly more tech-savvy than McCain, even though he is one of the few humans older than him. According to Hendrik Hertzberg:

McCain doesn’t even use a computer. Carter does, and how. He writes, he e-mails,
he surfs. He doesn’t have a blog of his own, as far as I know, but he reads
other people’s, and I’m guessing he spends more time at the keyboard than your
average Facebook member one-fourth his age. In Jonathan Demme’s
movie, Carter can be seen speed-typing on his Mac and grousing that his
inbox pileup is driving him nuts, or words to that effect.

This compares favorably with McCain’s statement that he depends on “Brooke and Mark” to show him his favorite blogs, which are Drudge, Politico and RealPolitics. We’ve noted this before, but it continues to be true that the first two aren’t blogs and the third doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists. (Could he mean this?)
To many people, McCain gets a pass because you don’t expect the oldest candidate in America to be particularly sharp with the post-1990 technology. McCain is older than at least 92% of the world, and he has already outlived the global life expectancy (to be fair, he wouldn’t hit the U.S. male life expectancy until the third year of his term). He’s older than the first modern computer. Of course, Jimmy Carter is older than the Turing machine, or, indeed, talkies. But he’s also a pretty smart guy. For instance, he has figured out how to divert Hannity-style attention from Obama and onto his own meaningless world travels instead. Is it really fair to compare McCain to a smart guy? His class rank at Annapolis says no.
But according to these guys, 70% of elderly computer owners get online at least sometimes. So we should be able to find a more apt comparison. Here’s one: My grandpa (a smart guy, but also just a regular guy). Let’s compare them in this handy chart:

Based on their familiarity with the dominant technology of the modern era, it looks like Grandpa Jack would be a better candidate for President than John McCain. Ha, but get this, one time a Democrat said he invented the Internet.

T-minus Thirteen weeks

The numbers, as of this Monday (Obama's 47th birthday!)

SFW (ha! JK you are FIRED)

Unfortunately for our blog, I just found some terrifying, nonsensical and generally offensive cartoons from the era when I was figuring out how to use my art tablet. The learning curve was steep, let's just say.

Installment One.

Inch-High John McCain!

I have an idea for a cartoon, either as a kids’ show or a comic strip. It would be called Inch-High John McCain, and it would star Inch-High John McCain. This inch-high version of John McCain lives in a pile of M&M’s and travels around in the shirt pocket of his intern, Mark. Mark is a clumsy but good-hearted young guy who runs the entire McCain campaign because he feels bad for Tiny McCain. Together they have a series of adventures en route to trying to get elected. For example, in one episode Mark could meet with major donor Tex Sinister to schedule a fundraising dinner. Through the secret eye-hole in Mark’s pocket, McCain notices that Tex is wearing a FARC lapel pin. When Tex leaves, the following exchange takes place:

IHJM (screaming): Hey Mark!
Mark: What’s up, Inch-High?
IHJM: What’s FARC?
Mark: FARC is a group of Colombian drug bad guys. Banana companies like Mr. Sinister’s sometimes pay them secret money not to murder their workers.
IHJM: MAMIE! That’s not the Inch-High way! We’ve got to do something Mark!

They hatch a plan, and later IHJM uses his tiny size to sneak into Tex Sinister’s headquarters, where he destroys all records of the Sinister Banana Corporation’s dealings with FARC, and leaves a strongly-worded memo urging Tex to wear an Inch-High Straight Talk Express pin when in public.
The show won’t spend too much time on IHJM’s back story, since the main focus will be the series of challenges he must face to defeat his opponent, the Dark Menace, in a general election. Of course, since IHJM frequently refers to his desire not to dwell on his war medals, which he uses for a table when guests visit the M&M’s pile, we will have to have a flashback episode. In that one IHJM is on a mission for the super-secret D.O.M.I.N.O. forces. He flies his tiny plane (Fig. 1) into the Viet Cong embassy to spy on them, and suddenly a bug hits the windshield and he crashes. For the next five years he is trapped under the sofa, until finally he escapes by leaving.
Obviously the show would be a great way to teach kids current events. But it could also be an action-packed fun zone with a lot of product-placement potential. What do you say, TV guys?