Merry Christmas

This might be frying too hard

Deep-fried everything.

I could swear I saw a link to this on Instapundit, but when I went back to look for it, it had disappeared.

Christmas is coming

Joe Felice has some thoughts on the Nativity: "Born In a Manger."



Thanks to Lynn at Violins and Starships, who says, "Please, listen all the way to the end." I'll echo that: please, listen all the way to the end.

Deterioration of news weeklies, and a vulgar new idiom

Noted by Ed Driscoll: In The Future, Everyone Will Be Emmanuel Goldstein For 15 Minutes. The idiom is in the video linked at the end. NSFW, though captured from TV.

Update: In the funnies.

Their fingers never leave their hands

Received in email from Dean, an amazing display of virtuosity.

That's Cecilia Siqueira and Fernando Lima, also known as Duo Siqueira Lima. If your first thought after seeing and hearing this is "What could they do with two guitars?" you might want to check out their website.

Dean sent a link to the video of this performance at wimp dot com, a video site I had not seen before. Fun videos, "suitable for all ages," it says.

Hockey sticks in the ice (cores)

Some sharp comments at this post by Neo-neocon, The WaPo goes rogue …, mentioning Sarah Palin's op-ed on Climategate. Commenter rickl suggests mailing this around: Hockey stick observed in NOAA ice core data. One of several striking graphs:

Those are years B.C. to A.D. across the bottom. Mann's hockey stick is visible on the far right. Or,

over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

Nice interglacial we have going here. Let's not mess it up.

Can we save ourselves?

Pull back from the brink? Not jump off the bridge?

Joel Kotkin discusses Copenhagen, what's happening, who benefits. Capping Emissions, Trading On The Future: The West's goals in Copenhagen are tantamount to suicide. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

It's been a long road since those days

Althouse posted an R.I.P. for Liam Clancy. I heard him a few years ago at the Mystic Sea Music Festival. Of course, he was very good indeed. Althouse linked to his obit at the Irish Times; here are obits from the Telegraph and the NY Times. His website is Liam Clancy dot com, naturally. Music begins right away when you enter the site, so be prepared.

For a while, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem personified Irish folk music in the States, and sold an enormous number of records in Ireland as well. I bought my first Clancy Brothers record back around 1962. It was this one:
(That's Tom on the left, Paddy in the middle, Liam on the right with the guitar, and Tommy Makem down in front with the whistle.)

I learned every song on it, and sing most of them still.

[Update: Amba posted an R.I.P. with two videos, one of them "The Parting Glass." Liam's spoken closing line in that holds a resonance now that it did not, then.]

Althouse's post includes a video of Liam Clancy singing "Those Were the Days." Commenter rcocean links to a video of Helmut Lotti singing "Dorogoy Dlinnoyu," the Russian song from which the music was taken. There is a discussion of the song at Languagehat, in which Languagehat links to this translation of the lyrics. Here is another translation, with some commentary, and here is a singable one. Languagehat quotes from a Russian page which says that, in October 1917, "'Endless road' became one of the biggest 'hits' in Russia." The singer whose performance made it famous was Alexander Vertinsky. And here it is (with subtitles in Polish).

Another Sunday afternoon concert.

Eric S. Raymond on Climategate

ESR has been looking at the emails and at the code, in a series of posts:

• Hiding the Decline: Prologue
• Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate
• Hiding the Decline: Part 1 – The Adventure Begins
• Facts to fit the theory
• AGW fraud unravels at an accelerating pace
• Facts to fit the theory? Actually, no facts at all!
• "The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room"
  

I dare say there will be more. And he points out that Ken Burnside has started a blog, Data Against Demagogues, which will deal with, among other things, an effort by himself and collaborators to get the datasets and run the models, to see if any of the AGW work can be replicated in an open source way. Along the way, Burnside links to the "complete list of things caused by global warming" at Number Watch. A small sample:

Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks,

Each item is a link. It goes on.

Conflict of interests for WaPo climate reporter

Recent stories about Climategate in the WaPo (and not-so-recent stories about global warming) written by Juliet Eilperin are written from the slant that AGW is incontrovertibly proven, and that "The e-mails don't say that: They don't provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle."

Oh, OK then. That statement begs the question in a couple of ways, by assuming that "climate change" is happening and that it is human-caused. Shoddy logic.

The conflict of interest appears when we note that Juliet Eilperin is married to Andrew Light. Andrew Light is, among other things, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, specializing in climate, energy, and science policy. A look around the CAP website shows that it is committed to all the worst ideas of the "progressive" left, including, of course, the notion that AGW is real and that therefore the world must be turned upside down to fight it. Oh, and overpopulation is a menace. They are right there with Holdren and Ehrlich.

Lynn has a few odd links

Right here. Don't miss the Three Redneck Tenors.

Cuttle, cuttle, little fishy

Perhaps Cthulhu should be depicted as looking more like a cuttlefish than like a squid. Thanks to Freeman Hunt, who linked this video in a comment at Althouse.

Climategate, still growing

Lots of Real Life^TM to deal with, lately, so I am just trying to follow developments, not doing much blogging. As you might have noticed.

Watts Up With That is staying on top of it, with a big accumulator page, and plenty of regular posting.

Such as: Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues: "The Whistle Blows for Truth." Most recently: Now it’s serious, Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocks Gore and Global Warming. As I said quite a while ago, more jokes, please!

The lung flute

Not exactly a musical instrument, but I want one.

Today, doctors in Japan use the $40 Lung Flute as a tool to collect sputum from patients suspected of carrying tuberculosis, and in Europe and Canada it’s used to help test phlegm for lung cancer. Clinical trials in the U.S. have shown that it is at least as effective as current COPD treatments. At press time, Hawkins expected the device to receive FDA approval any day, and says the reusable device could also provide home relief for patients with cystic fibrosis, influenza and asthma.

I suppose you'll need a prescription. Via Reynolds.

Update: keep up with current developments at Medical Acoustics.