Friendly Floatees’ World Tour

From the website Strange Maps

. . . On January 10, [1992] a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.
The toys, or ‘Friendly Floatees’, as they became known, made their first landfall in mid November of 1992, when the counter-clockwise Subpolar Gyre started dumping the yellow rubber ducks (and blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs) on Alaskan shores. It took the ducks about three years to drift full circle on the Gyre – scientists calculate they drift 50% faster than the water in the current itself. They turned up all over the Pacific: Japan, Hawaii, North America and Australia.
As Ebbesmeyer predicted, some ducks escaped the Gyre to flow North through the Bering Strait into the Arctic. Between 1995 and 2000, they slowly drift eastward, frozen in the arctic ice, at a rate of 1 mile per day. In the new millennium, the ducks started reaching the North Atlantic, being sighted from the shores of Maine to Massachusetts. In 2001, the ducks reached the site where the Titanic sank. In 2003, the plastic toys reached the shores of the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. This article in the Daily Mail predicted their arrival on the shores of southwestern England in 2007.
If you spot one of these plastic toys on a beach, its colors probably faded by now, with the imprint ‘The Early Years’, then you’ve found one member of the plastic armada that set sail over 15 years ago.

Credit to Edstock at The Galloping Beaver for the link to this great site.

Great line of the day

From Alison:

Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard.

Go! Read! Laugh!

The wimp factor

Here's the truth about the McCain smear campaign against Obama and why Obama needs to hit back hard.
Regardless of how unfair and egregious and mean-spirited and inaccurate and racist and sexist the McCain attacks are, if Obama can't figure out how to defend himself, then American voters will think he can't defend America.
And voters anywhere won't vote for a wimp. Never have, never will.

The new accountability standard

And Bush wondered how historians would remember him!
Someday the Bush administration will only be a miserable memory, but I'm sure his version of accountability will linger on, particularly in these tried-and-true phrases:

"No one could have anticipated..."
"I'm an idiot, not a crook"
"I don't recall..."
"The previous administration did it too."

and these newer phrases which will prove their utility in the future:

"He's suffered enough."
"Let bygones be bygones."

These set a standard which politicians can achieve and journalists endorse.

One step closer to re-criminalizing birth control and abortion

The Bush Administration is pandering to the Religious Right wingnuts by proposing to redefine the most popular and accessible means of birth control, the Pill, as abortion.
They're pretending that the regulation is an innocuous human rights protection -- just a way to help all those poor beleaguered doctors and pharmacists who are now being forced by mean state governments to do their jobs against their moral code, you know.
But actually what will happen, of course, is that anti-abortion activists will now have a new focus for their activism -- they will launch intensive pressure campaigns against local doctors and pharmacists and hospitals to stop prescribing birth control pills and the morning after pill altogether, and to stop insurance companies from covering the costs.
Even the Wall Street Journal grasps the larger implications:

With its expansive definitions, the draft bolsters a key goal of the religious right: to give single-cell fertilized eggs full rights by defining them as legal people -- or, as some activists put it, "the tiniest boys and girls."
As long as Roe v. Wade remains in effect and abortion remains legal, that goal can't be fully realized. But in recent years, abortion opponents have scored notable successes. For instance: Several states now define a fertilized egg as a legal person -- an "unborn child" -- for purposes of fetal homicide laws, which allow criminal prosecution when a woman miscarries as a result of an assault . . .
Even if the draft is never implemented, activists on both sides consider it a potential momentum shift.
"You keep striking away and framing the issue the way you want to frame it," said David DeWolf, a law professor at Gonzaga University who has advised anti-abortion groups. "That's the political strategy."

Gee, sorta reminds me of the debate around our very own proposal for an Unborn Victims of Crime Act -- which, we are assured, has absolutely nothing to do with trying to re-criminalize abortion and birth control, no, of course not ...

What a dolt

Well, this just made trips to the bookstore a little easier.
I will never want to read anything by Orson Scott Card ever again.

These precious days

Lance Mannion has been blogging about his family vacation.
He's obviously been enjoying himself, and doing so consciously, too.
"Consciously"? Here's what I mean:
One perfect fall Sunday several years ago, when both my children were still living at home and my husband and I were getting Sunday dinner ready, I said to myself, remember this! Remember this day and how everyone you love is here and with you, and they are happy and you are happy too!
Because there will be days to come when one or more of the people you love will be away or gone or unhappy or ill. There will be a time when you will need a happy memory to look back on. So make this day that memory.
So I have consciously held that precious happy day in a bell jar in my memory ever since.

They made him

Chet at The Vanity Press provides some fine coverage of the Knoxville church shootings:

American conservatism is not merely, or even primarily, a set of principles; it's a culture, and at the grassroots one of its main rhetorical and motivating features is a carefully cultivated hatred -- a seething, white-hot hatred -- of the shadowy Other that it labels "liberals." It has cultivated this aspect of itself through talk radio, blogs, speeches, all sorts of communications media, and it has done so for decades . . . . The same loathing of "liberals" that has raised cash and gotten out the vote for Republicans, the same feelings of inchoate anger that have convinced millions to vote against their own interests in the name of screwing some nameless Other that they hate and blame, are what moved this man to walk into a liberal church and start gunning people down. His actions were a straightforward fulfillment of some of the conservative movement's most powerful words, and of the feelings of impotence and rage that those words continually evoke.
Until and unless American conservatism actually expunges the anti-"liberal" hatred from its rhetoric and motivations, I see no reason to let the movement disown this guy who shares and is clearly motivated by that same hatred. They made him, whether they like it or not.

Purple-shirted flatulence

I have been following the blog of Times religion reporter Ruth Gledhill and the StandFirm website for news about the Lambeth Conference -- where the bishops of the Anglican Church are trying to figure out how appease their homophobic and misogynistic right-wingers.
Of course, as they are discovering, it can't be done.
First they tried to float some kind of "compromise" on ordination of women so that churches could somehow avoid having to deal with a woman bishop. Of course, this was a silly idea that was rightfully voted down.
Now they have come up with another plan, called a Pastoral Forum, which they think will somehow force Canadian Anglican churches to stop blessing same-sex marriages, and will force US episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, to resign, while also tossing a bone to the librulls by stopping conservative African bishops from poaching US and Canadian congregations.
One commenter called this idea "purple-shirted flatulence".
And it ain't gonna work -- the conservative Anglican churches have already set up their own organization and they won't be stopped in their march backward.

Great line of the day

Dr. Dawg writes about that new poll showing 35 per cent of Canadians are mad about something but aren't doing anything about it:

... the realization that more than a third of my fellow citizens might be in the "quiet person who kept himself to himself before opening fire on a bus" category has me concerned, but only, I'll admit, to a certain extent. Thank goodness we're taught good manners in this country. The very thought of cleaning up afterwards is probably enough of a deterrent for most.

Word!

Laying the trap

The cynicism of this is beyond belief.
The Globe is reporting that the United States has made a "key offer" in World Trade Organization talks that to allow more foreign professionals to work in the States:

“When it comes to temporary entry of business professionals we signalled that we are ready to have that conversation in the context of the Doha round,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters.
“But obviously it has to be in conjunction with our consultations with Congress,” she said after a session on services at the World Trade Organization.
The issue of granting temporary business visas to skilled foreign workers is controversial as many politicians consider it an immigration issue that should not be included in trade pacts.

Yeah. So after seven years of fruitless talks, stymied because of disputes about agricultural subsidies, now -- in an election year -- the Bush administration says it wants to move ahead? And so it is going to ask Obama and the Democrats in Congress to approve allowing more foreign workers to come into the US? Yeah, that'll happen, I'm sure.
Pardon me for suspecting that Obama and the Democrats are being set up to be blamed when these WTO talks collapse.

AECL Employee of the Month

Power plant kept in the dark about missing reactor part

Waving American flags?

link
As my son pointed out, "They were waving American flags? In Germany?"
The average American may not realize -- or may not want to realize -- how amazing Obama 's trip has been, particularly in regard to rehabilitating America's reputation in the world.
Meanwhile, the best McCain can do is Ich Bin Ein Piggly-Wigglyer. The contrast is painfully pathetic.
The bloggers were saying last week what a bad week McCain had had. Now they're saying it again this week.

Love

I love this video -- four million people have watched it on YouTube. The full story is here: Christian, the lion who lived in my London living room

Roger DeBris lives!

Reading about the right wing reaction to Obama's speech -- Conservatives Project Their Fascist Fantasies Onto Obama in Berlin -- reminded me of one of my favorite lines:

Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it's just drenched with historical goodies like that... But we've got to do something about that third act - they're losing the war! Its too depressing!"

I couldn't find this clip on YouTube, but here's another great one: