Some news and goings on in a minute, but first a bit of a link-fest before I lose track of these.

DNA may be able to be extracted from a 20 million-year-old spider trapped in resin. Wow. Too bad my high school Biology class was such a complete dud. Maybe I would be working on cool stuff like this instead of writing COBOL code to reformat text files.

Why does sand stick together better when it is wet? Every kid that has ever been on a beach knows that wet sand will hold a shape, but dry sand will not. That may not sound like a very interesting question, but the answer turns out to be just that. Too bad creativity, questioning, and wonder are held in such poor esteem these days.

Why must tragedy always be turned into a farce? And why is it always a lawyer at the heart of it? This is nothing more than using a mother's real pain and grief in the pursuit of money and status.

And from the Yet-Another-Thing-to-Worry-About department, we now have to be on the lookout for six-year-old terrorists wielding butter knives. Really. You may not realize you need to worry about this, but you do. I love the passive-aggressive attitude; that they were letting the kid off with just an in-school suspension when they could have expelled him permanently. It sounds like this boy was blessed with parents that don't take that sort of crap. Good for them. How can any child subjected to this sort of stupidity grow up with anything other than utter contempt for authority? Remember this story the next time you see a teenager disrespecting a teacher, parent, cop, or other authority figure. Our school system has taught them well.

Speaking of terrorism, we also need to be on the lookout for college students writing parodies of other college students. I completely agree with this student when he says, "Some people are not college material. They do not know how to think critically nor are they willing to learn. They are everywhere." It used to be you had to be smart to get into college. Now our government and courts have invented from thin air the Right to College. Smart kids would have gotten the joke and that would have been the end of it. Of course, smart kids wouldn't have gotten their panties in a knot over a completely self-evident statement:

Holding up the Bible: This is not a science book.
Holding up the Origin of Species: This is.
Holding up the Bible again: This is a book about relationships with God.
Holding up the Origin of Species again: This isn't.

I was taught as much in my YEC Christian high school.

Vox Day's latest column give a lot to think about. Any of the quotes in isolation are bad enough. When you consider they are nearly identical, spoken over a period of less than a month, and spoken by the "leaders" of the "free" world, it makes me want to stock up on ammunition. YMMV.

Vox has also published the first chapter of his book, Media Whores, on his blog. The reason this book was never published will be obvious from the opening paragraphs. I'm looking forward to seeing more of it.

In local news, my girls were allowed to play on the main field on Saturday. The out-of-town teams from the GVSA were pushed to the Under-14 (smaller) field. They didn't look very happy. I had some dweeb try to get in my face about where the "other big field" was. I told him there was only one, it was in use, and I had no idea where they were supposed to play. He went off in a huff, and shortly afterwards, I saw them trudging off to the smaller field on the other side of the complex. I guess the lesson here for the GVSA is to deal with people with some sort of personal integrity, which excludes anyone related to the Kaliseum. It will be interesting to see what happens on the 22nd when we have our last home games.

As far as the soccer went, we lost both games. The score was close and the girls played very well, but we just can't get the ball into the net. That will come with experience and some drills we will be doing in practice on Thursday. Tonight we were supposed to have practice, but there is a varsity soccer game at the time we normally have it, so we would have to move it up to right after school. That knocks out about half the team due to other obligations, jobs, and transportation issues. We also have most of the team hurting in some way or another, so I just pulled the plug on practice for tonight.

More proof that Verizon is run by idiots: I mentioned that the day after I canceled our phone service and signed up for cell phones, there were several Verizon vehicles on our road. Sure enough, they reran the phone lines down our road. Except they ran them to the cabin instead of the house. None of which matters, because we are not Verizon customers. Next time you wonder why it costs $35 a month for a Verizon phone, it may be that they spend a lot of money running phones lines to unoccupied structures owned by non-customers. (shrug) They can have me back as a customer any time they want as long as they agree to 1) refund the cost of our second, non-functioning phone line back to when I reported the problem in the beginning of July, 2) run buried cable down the county road at the proper depth, 3) install the proper hardware at the transition to buried service on our property, 4) reimburse me the $28 for the stop-payment order I had to issue to stop them from continuing to hit our bank account, 5) buy out the 2-year service contract on our cell phones. Debbie talked to some Customer Service Specialist (we used to just call them secretaries) that promised 1), but I'll believe it when the money is in my hand. The rest will never happen, which I can gladly live with.

That's about it.