Wow, was scrolling down the front page on BB, and just as the host of NPR's "All Things Considered" started to pronounce Rauschenberg's name, his name came up on my screen -- at exactly the same time. Is something trying to tell me someone?

Curios coincidence: a major organizer in my local biodiesel co-op has put out for gathering waste oil, be it for conversion into biodiesel or for other vehicular uses. He cited the rise of the cost of oil to $119/bbl, but perhaps he saw this through some other source. Or just knows what's coming.

The high-end new iMac ($2200) has the 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS video card. But, you can't "drop it in" to a lower-end machine. The two in the "middle" ($1500 and $1800) have a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO, while the lowest model has a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (lowest, $1200). How much slower or "worse" is the middle model versus the higher one? Or the lowest versus the middle?

Apple offers an unhelpful chart which says the high-end GeForce 8800 GS is 2.2 times "faster" than the Radeon HD 2600. But that leaves out the lowest ATI Radeon. And how useful is Quake 4 as the basis for graphics performance for someone who hasn't played a FPS in years and spends most of his or her time in TextEdit and Firefox? Just curious. :)

SCHMUCK: "They're heating the ionosphere -- clearly, this is responsible for global warming!"

ANNOUNCER: "This scientifically illiterate thought of the day was brought to you by the letter 23..."

KOMPRESSOR TAKE YOUR O-RING
KOMPRESSOR TAKE YOUR FUEL
KOMPRESSOR NEED NO OXYGEN BECAUSE
KOMPRESSOR IS IN SPACE!

(yaaaaH!)

That is really incredible... and the Red Army Chorous is about half the size their powerful voice suggests that they are! And.. they look... so... happy..... wow. That was great.

It seems the Leningrad Cowboys weren't terribly concerned with accurate transliteration. The Russian letter N looks quite like the English letter H; while that backwards in is more of an "ee" sound. Ah, Wikipedia makes it all make sense. Faux_Cyrillic! The Leningrad Cowboys appear on there too. 8-)

Yay for spelling "grey" the right way!

I'll have to read it now for sure.

Jeff sed:

Very cool way to show what's there. And just think how much of that fresh water is controlled by the Great Lakes states. We have gold, we just don't know it yet.

Here in Wisconsin, our state legislature has yet to approve the Great Lakes Compact that would control how the Great Lakes is used. I believe that if enough states pass it, it goes to Congress for final approval. Naturally, the Republicans are trying to block its passage. Its strongest opponents are from the rich suburbs that lay just on the other side of the subcontinental divide -- the line that determines whether water flows to the Mississippi or Lake Michigan. The governor will likely have to call a special session to try and get the majority Republican state assembly to pass it, as the state senate already has done.

Absolutetrust: My car runs 100% biodiesel in the summer, and it does not smell a bit like Burger King. What matters is the source of the fuel. Mine right now is made from soy oil, so it smells very faintly of vegetable oil. Now, the fuel a friend of mine makes from grease from a Chinese restaurant has a much stronger smell. Especially if he does not filter it at all, which he does not do, as he believes his old Mercedes-Benz diesel will burn nearly anything he puts in. There my be something to that, with an old diesel engine, but mine has a VERY powerful compressor (KOMPRESSOR MIGHT!) under the hood, and I will not run unfiltered or unprocessed fuel through it. It would be a very expensive repair.

I love what these guys are doing, using food waste to make fuel. There is a huge amount more "food waste" than anyone save perhaps freegans has any idea exists. It should be put to use in biodiesel production as a way to make cheap domestic fuel. It's brilliant. And I would hope their exhaust smells a touch better than the exhaust from my friend's unrefined biodiesel.

In wintertime (I'm in Milwaukee, Wisc.) I run 25-33% biodiesel, the remainder petroldiesel. It doesn't smell like much anything really, the newer (2006) diesel engine being much cleaner than the old 1980s diesel my friend drives.

have any of you seen the "Sgt. Pepper's" movie starring (among others) the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. I wouldn't seek it out unless you dearly love the Bee Gees and/or Peter Frampton. Apparently Steve Martin is in it too, but I couldn't stand it long enough to see him. Quality cinema it is not.

What I found terribly amusing in the brief time I watched it was the film's portrayal of music industry execs coming in and duping musicians into signing lengthy contracts that would likely make the record company millions but screw the musician, and moreover, the recording industry's scheme to corrupt the innocent town of Heartland. Ominous contemporary parallels when viewed with 20/20 hindsight!

just goes to show, life in the burbs ain't all it's cracked up to be.

welcome to the new police state, just like the old police state...

I speak a tiny bit of Russian, which is a Slavic tongue and uses about the same alphabet. They're not identical, though. You can tell by the trouble I had in translating the first word. I thought it was "dashe," which I thought meant "children," but then I realized "dashenka" is something like "young daughter. I now think think the first word is "paze," but I really don't know what that means, so I'll just stop commenting and making a fool of myself. 8-)

privet, menya zavoot haaz, e ya NE zanayo kak gaboreet pa-ruskee!