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Google is now suggesting results.

Hmm... i can think of some good things about this and I can think of some bad things about this...

The app itself, though, is pretty cool.

Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be athletes...

Check this out - more and more kids coming in for treatment with serious sports-related injuries.

Makes sense, given how competitive youth and school sports are getting. I'm one of three in my family who have had their knee reconstructed due to injury (mine from pole-vaulting, my sisters' joints claimed by field hockey), so I know how this goes. If you think about how easy it is to get hurt playing sports in general, and then tack how serious it's getting, and add a few jerks here and there, this makes the formula that we're getting now.

Pop always used to say, "Protect yourself". Clint Eastwood's new movie about boxing has the same concept. And if you look at it from a long-term perspective, Michael Jordan was one of the greatest athletes ever, in any sport. The one thing about MJ that always struck me - he was never the victim of a serious injury. Just some wear and tear, here and there, but never the devastating, season-ending knee blow out that seems to be more and more common.

Still - once people are finished playing competitive sports, due to that injury, they discover something amazing - that going to the park on Sunday and playing pick-up games with strangers is more fun than they would have thought. And easier on the knees.

Social Security, the income cap, and taxes

So there are problems with raising the income cap (currently at $90k/year) for the prez - his own party is giving it the "10 foot pole" treatment. Basically, they lump it into the new tax category, and reject it out of hand.

How about this for a compromise:

Remove the cap completely, taxing all income for everyone, but lower the tax rate slightly. The amount of money coming in will increase due to the sheer amount of new money being taxed, but for anyone making less than $90k / year (actually slightly more), it will amount to a tax cut. This would be a tax cut for the large majority of working Americans.

I'm the last one to suggest solutions to get the big guy out of hot water, but isn't that the job of the Congress - to work together and find compromised solutions to the problems of the country. Seems like they're forgotten something...

Bloggered

And blog will eat itself.

Big guy at CNN quits because his remarks are amplified around the blogosphere. Rather's memos get outed as fakes. Gannon/Guckert guy is outed as a fake news source by the blogosphere. Michael Jackson verdict discovered before the jury makes the decision and circles the blogosphere. Brooklyn Bridge put up for sale and auctioned off in the blogosphere.

OK, so the last two are bull. But it seems our little blog medium is becoming the new way to muckrake. Or has been and the NY Times is finally catching on. Either way, are we entering an era of acountability, or the time of false accusations? "Reality-journalism" I've heard it referred to...actually I myself referred to it that way over Christmas dinner, but failed to realize that one of the other people at the table blogs in a very different way - ie for humor (and is quite good, actually). Which, I guess, in some ways is more valid, since there's no asumption of truth, only the attempt to entertain.

Personally, I'm not really interested in digging up truths about people,as anyone who reads this space can tell. I'm all about finding stuff that you might not have seen, and turning you on to links, stories, pages, music, and whatever else I find interesting that I think people should see, if they're free and surfing for no reason at all. So, enjoy!

Nice Budget, sir.

Ah... Paul Krugman on the budget. Wonderful.

"Where are we heading?
Are we e'er gonna get there?
Do we see the clear and dirty?
Is it all beyond repair?"

This budget, in 4 words: *Cough* *Cough* *bullshit* *Cough*

Laugh this video

Dave Chappelle does the run up to war...pretty classic.

9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings

Yet another thing for the file that probably would have been helpful to know before that election in November.

In lighter news, there will probably be no hockey season this year. That wailing that you don't hear - that's the fans, who decided that there are better things to do than watch overpaid hockey players.

Like watching college hockey, which is way more interesting anyway, if you ask me. My alma mater is not doing so well this year, but hey...

Now this is not so good...

...when there is fear of teaching a theory. A few months back I posted about how if schools wanted to teach alternatives to evolution (in that case, 'intelligent design'), that should be fine. I got some guff for it, and I understand completely why. God forbid that our most time-honored and dependable theories be subjected to (gulp!) alternatives.

This, however is a different matter. When teachers fear to teach something because of their current administration or school board, then we have a problem. We're one step from book-burning. Some people want to put disclaimers on the theory of evolution. Probably because no one explained to them that the word 'theory 'doesn't mean 'just some idea' in all contexts.

How much of this did science bring on itself? The other day I was listening to global warming scientist / advocate speaking in an interview, and the journalist asked him about the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". Personally, I loved that movie. I had its problems, sure, but the science, while fictitious, was stretching the truth very thin, not merely making stuff up. So what does the scientist do? He tears it apart as complete nonsense, with claims like, "that could never happen", "that's impossible", and any other number of out-of-hand remarks about the movie's ideas. Sounding, for all the world, like our current president on Global Warming. "A fairy tale" is what they call global warming, and yet here's this guy, asking the world to believe that small particles in the upper atmosphere will melt the polar ice caps, by trapping heat. To say nothing of the now-emerging theory (there's that word again) of 'global dimming', which may counteract the former.

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with the ideas behind global warming, and in 50 years, I expect to be an old man, visiting my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, via gondola. Figure Lower Manhattan will look more like Amsterdam, which, since New York City was originally called New Amsterdam, will make perfect sense, 350 years after the fact.