• More post-oil research, courtesy of Network World:
  

  

  Football field-sized kite powers latest heavy freight ship

  A kite the size of a football field will provide most of the power for a German heavy freight ship set to launch in December.

  The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%.

• Vernor Vinge has posted his 2006 novel Rainbow’s End online for free. It’s only available in HTML format, but you can’t have everything.
• BuyNLarge.com is a very funny, very thorough, very fake web site for the world-dominating corporation from Pixar’s next film, Wall-E. The pharmaceutical ads for Xanadou, a pill for euphoric shopping experiences, are a nice touch. Good little consumer that I am, I’m sorely tempted by this user-agreement t-shirt.

President Bush states that 2 + 2 = 6.

Liberals immediately run to the blogs and yell, “Are you stupid? Crazy? 2 and 2 still equal 4!”

Democratic leadership, sensing an opportunity to appeal to centrist moderates, compromises on the position that 2 + 2 = 5.

The traditional media reports that Republicans say 2 + 2 is 6, while Democrats maintain the answer is 5. In an effort to stay “objective,” they do no research and nor any math to figure the answer for themselves.

Joe Lieberman scolds Democrats for not being reasonable and open to the idea that 2 + 2 might actually be 6.

Rudy Guiliani says the answer may have been 4 or 5 once, but 9/11 changed the rules of mathematics.

Romney, McCain, and Huckabee insist that not only does 2 + 2 equal 6, but when they’re President it will equal 7.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama offer no immediate comment because they are unfamiliar with the math at this juncture. Clinton announces her position after the first poll on the issue is released.

Dennis Kucinich says 2 + 2 is 4, and that his animal spirit guide gave him that answer during deep meditation.

Harry Reid offers legislation defining the answer to 2 + 2 as 5. The bill fails under the threat of a Republican filibuster and Bush veto. Instead, Reid allows a vote on a bill in which the answer is 6 but contains a “sunset clause.” It passes.

Nevertheless, during the next election, conservative groups run campaign ads that morph Democratic opponents into Bin Laden while a voice intones “Tell Washington to keep liberal San Francisco values out of our math.”

Cable news pundits wonder whether the Two Plus Two Debate has destroyed Democratic chances in the next election.

And the public, to the small extent that they’re paying any attention at all, believes 2 + 2 might be 4, 5, 6, or perhaps 38.

Meanwhile, I try not to pop another blood vessel and resist the urge to flee the country.

NOTE: If you think I’m being overly cynical, visit this site to find out what waterboarding is and how to do it, then realize that we have a “debate” over whether it’s torture AND whether torture is illegal. In fact, our new Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to come down on one side or the other, meaning in our current political climate, you can be on the wrong side of a “torture debate” and still become the new leader of the Justice Dept.

The Broncos may seem unpredictable this season, but today’s loss against the Bears continued a strong trend: they are 5-1 when I watch them on TV and 0-5 when I don’t. And that one loss was a close one to the Packers, on Brett Favre’s long touchdown pass on the first play of overtime. That night, I skipped a portion of the second half to watch the previous night’s Dexter and returned for the end.

Sorry about that. The Broncos-Bears game wasn’t on local TV, so there’s not much I could do about that, short of finding a sports bar.

Now that I know the fate of Denver’s season is in my hands, maybe next time I will.

Shaenon Garrity launched her web site today, the appropriately-named Shaenon.com. I’m a little jealous of people whose first or last names alone are uncommon enough to still be available on domain registries. But I suppose that bit of luck is balanced by a lifetime of having to correct everyone else’s spelling and pronunciation.

Coincidentally (or not), Shaenon’s Narbonic semi-spinoff, Li’l Mell returns after a long hiatus.

Meanwhile, Narbonic vol. 5 is still at the printers. I faxed my proof approval to them on Monday, so the only remaining step is to await the books’ arrival. Will they be available in time for Christmas for the low price of $13.95 plus shipping? Wait and see. (Because frankly, I don’t know, either.)

Here it is, the day before Thanksgiving, and the weather in Tucson is the same as it’s been for the entire month of November: sunny, high in the 80s. Which will strike you as a silly thing to complain about, especially if you’re reading this from a northerly clime, but summer in Arizona starts around April. I’m long past ready for a different season, thanks.

Kristie flies home to Tennessee this afternoon for a holiday with her family and her mom’s wedding this weekend. She returns late Sunday. With everyone else around here busy with retail work, family, and/or travel, it looks like I’ll have four days to myself, with nothing but a couple of cats, books, and video games for company.

On the upside, I have some fantastic video games at the moment.

I’m up to the third case in Phoenix Wright: Trials & Tribulations, the final entry in the lawyer-adventure series on the DS. I’m still fairly early on in Bioshock, an absorbing 360 action game set in a 1950s-era undersea Libertarian paradise gone awry.

On top of those, yesterday I picked up my reserved copy of Mass Effect, the latest Bioware RPG. My initial impressions after playing for half an hour or so aren’t great — I can already tell I’m going to miss the pure-RPG combat of KOTOR or Baldur’s Gate. Still, it’s a Bioware game, so I can’t imagine I won’t get drawn into it soon enough.

And if I don’t, it’s not like I don’t have anything else to play…

That’s what GQ says about Josh Marshall as part of its Men of the Year issue, and I agree. The article gives a nice rundown of TPM’s accomplishments over the last few years.

I’m happy to say I was on board during the early days, before the Iraq War, when Josh and a handful of appalled bloggers were pretty much the only people questioning whether Saddam was trying to get uranium from Nigeria — or had WMDs at all. I dropped $10 over Paypal when Josh needed funds to cover the 2004 New Hampshire primary, and again when he wanted to hire muckrakers for his staff.

TPM is not perfect — sometimes its obsessions get too wonkish even for me, and its forays into TPM-TV have been mostly underwhelming — but compared to the joke that the news media has become, Marshall’s work is all-important.

This is the closest we’re gonna get for a while:

Oops. Another week without a post.

I’m still (STILL!) meaning to write about primary politics, waterboarding, and other fun, angry topics. Maybe by this weekend. In the meantime, have some links.

• The Predatory Lending Assocation is a Colbert-esque spoof site about the payday loan industry. The Poor Finder functionality is especially brilliant. Wow, look at all the gun stores and pawn shops in my neighborhood…
• The same people who did that site also put together Walk Score, which rates your neighborhood’s walkability. My current address rates 51 out of 100 — could be better, could be worse. My apartment in Ballard scored an 85, while the townhome I used to own here registered a 26. Neither score surprises me.
• The Post-MST3K Internet Zeitgeist continues, as Joel Hodgson is interviewed on starwars.com and Frank Conniff stars in a spoof viral vid about the WGA strike.
• Is Heavy Ink the future of single-issue comic distribution? Having a weekly box of comics delivered to your door — with a 20% discount and free shipping, no less — certainly makes it easier to keep track of which issues you’ve already bought and read.
• Happy 30th, Jim! Don’t worry about feeling older, because just saying that makes me feel even more ancient than you…

In case you’ve been living in a cave, the WGA went on strike a couple of days ago. Certain series like The Daily Show were shut down immediately and went into reruns. Since I consider the guild’s demands to be fairly reasonable (as explained in the video above), I began the week figuring the stoppage would be pretty short, and I would be without my Stewart fix for maybe a week or so.

Then the radio news reminded me that the last strike in 1988 lasted six months.

Urk.

Well, at least the last season of The Wire is already in the can.

Oddly, the news media coverage is pretty negative, such as in this NY Times article. Joss Whedon mocks it in this post, then goes on a little more about the strike in this other post.

Actually, a bunch of people I read are blogging the strike, such as Jane Espenson and John Rogers and all the writers they link to. And the writers of The Office even put together an online video, somewhat ironically.

• Via my girlfriend Kristie: the current king of my iPod is Ashkon’s R&B spoof “Hot Tubbin’”. The main page is here if you want to sample his other stuff. (I haven’t yet.)
• Via Warren Ellis, who is decidedly not my girlfriend: based on this prelude chapter, Dash Shaw’s Bodyworld could be one great webcomic. The comic proper doesn’t begin until January, however.