MaxRedline

The Lost Generation

If you're under 40, chances are you've no idea how to fix stuff.

Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned.

Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to ‘just work’ and have no idea what to do when things go wrong.

She argues that they've grown up with factory electronics that they've come to expect will simply work all the time; inscrutable "black boxes", if you will. And when a component does fail, they simply toss it and go buy something new. You'd think that with their constant harping about Saving The Planet™ they'd be more interested in learning how things work and how to fix them when when they eventually stop working, but you'd be wrong.

Most of the hipsters don't even know how to open a computer to clean out accumulated dust. When it stops working, it never occurs to them that the circuits might be overheating due to the insulating qualities of that dust. So they just dump it and go buy a new one. It's probably why they like to store their data "in the cloud" rather than in, say, a backup hard drive.

Learning stuff takes time that they could be using to update their social media pages.

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The Helpless Generation?

Barry To Wedding Party: You'll Need To Hold The Wedding Someplace Else

Natalie Heimel and her fiancé, Edward Mallue Jr., a pair of captains in the Army, were walking from their wedding rehearsal on Saturday at the 16th tee box at Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course in Hawaii when they were informed they'd have to move their wedding, scheduled for the next day.

President Barack Obama wanted to play through.

Not sure why anybody'd want to get married on a golf course in the first place, although they are often built in spectacular settings, probably as a means of distracting the duffers as they chase a little white ball around, whacking at it with a steel stick. Nonetheless, that's where Ed and Nat were set to be married, until Barry's golf game took precedence. Barry Boots Bride.

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Obama Plays Through; Soldiers' Wedding Out of Luck

Not Over Yet

But the Year in Review is out, nonetheless. There's still time for Barry to get off the golf course long enough to label Li'l Kim a pig, and Lurch might issue a strongly-worded memo. Holder might launch an investigation. You just never know.

Mann-Made Global Warming Sets Its Sights On Portland

We'll be getting snow up here, as well. Fine and dandy - I have a lot of aged alder stashed in the rack. Heats the house up just fine.

The weather service says "the coldest cold snap of the season" will strike all of Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington early this week.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Oregon's DEQ hates my fireplace.

Lefties

Ants, it appears, almost always turn left when exploring novel environments, and so they exhibit what is known as behavioral lateralization. In this respect, they're the opposite of humans, who also display behavioral lateralization in that, with the exception of Democrats, they tend to orient toward the right in similar circumstances.

The observation is interesting, and several hypotheses have been proferred regarding tha behavior of ants: 

Consistently turning one direction over the other is a surer way of finding an exit if you’re lost or stuck somewhere. Or it could be that ants are all programmed to make left turns just to keep workers together. Or, the team added in a statement, “The ants may be using their left eye to detect predators and their right to navigate.”

At present, no hypotheses have been forthcoming regarding Democrats, although it appears that they are, for some unkown reason, innately directionless.

Jivin' With June (Cleaver)

Yep, from Leave it to Beaver fame, Who knew?

How she, the epitome of whiteness, learned to talk jive:

NorK Raaacism!

Oh good heavens! Their Dear Leader insulted our Dear Leader by calling him a "reckless monkey"! The sordid tale, reported in The Oregonian, has propelled the usual cadre of Leftist commenters to spend much of their day calling other users racist bigots if they dare to disagree with their point of view. It seems to be the latest thing, among them.

It was perfectly okay to spend years referring to "Chimpy McBush", because that was "funny". But when the NorKs call Barry a monkey, that's raaacist! Odd how that works.

On the other hand, to these folks, any sentence that includes "Obama" and ends in a question mark is automatically racist, as well; the sole exception being the rhetorical question: Is there any way Obama could be more perfect?

CNN Salvation

The disappearance of another Malaysian airliner, this one an AirAsia flight, can give the network some additional legs as they fill their airwaves with 24/7 speculation. Things haven't looked this good for them since last March, when:

…the news is dominated by the baffling disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has millions of viewers tuning in to CNN to follow its round-the-clock exclusive video coverage of random unidentified objects floating in the ocean that might be airplane pieces — although they never actually turn out to BE airplane pieces, but they MIGHT have been — accompanied by countless hours of analysis by a wide array of experts who have no more actual knowledge of what happened to Flight 370 than the people selling jewelry on the Home Shopping Network.

Difficulty: this is a short-hop plane, meaning that it doesn't have the amount of jetfuel that M370 carried. So it can't have gone nearly as far, which could prove problematic for CNN.

Let's See: Endangered Species, Or A Theme Park?

Miami-Dade would like to declare their pine rocklands, home to a number of endangered species, as "blighted" so that developers can put in a theme park, hotel, and shopping mall.

To wildlife managers, the pine rockland surrounding Zoo Miami represents what could be a last stand for the embattled forest, the biggest swath found outside the protected confines of Everglades National Park and a rare tract that has withstood the decades-long onslaught of development in South Florida.

But to a Miami-Dade County consultant, the land is a slum.

The finding, part of an updated look at the area, is the first step in establishing a special taxing district the county needs to help generate $130 million requested by a team of developers, including 20th Century Fox and Sony Music, who want to build a $930 million amusement park in the area. The consultant’s report is also fueling growing criticism from environmentalists and some neighbors, who oppose the park and plans for a neighboring shopping center.

Good grief; it's not as though Orlando's all that far away. They have theme parks galore, there. Florida really ought to consider concentrating on eco-tourism, rather than more concrete.

County Commissioner Dennis Moss, who has long pushed for the Miami Wilds theme park to be built in his district, argued that environmental concerns need to be balanced with other needs.

Subsequently, he was eaten by an anaconda.

The feds don't much care for the cunning Miami plan, warning that it would harm protected species and would require a "lengthy" review from USFWS.

 

Citizen's Arrest

Where else but Texas: a guy driving along spotted another guy in a car, beating on a woman. So he pulled over and forced said beater out of his car at gunpoint, holding him there until the police arrived.

Southlake officers were dispatched to Farm Road 1709 and Tower Road at 1:35 p.m. Friday after a caller reported an assault in progress. The officers found two men outside their vehicles in the middle of the roadway, according to a news release from Southlake Police Chief Steve Mylett.

One was pointing a gun at the other, the release said.

The man with the gun told police that he had seen the other man assaulting a female passenger. When both vehicles stopped, the man with the gun got out and pointed it at the other man and held him there for police, the release said.

Even in Texas, this caused quite a stir; halting traffic in both directions. The gun owner had a concealed-carry permit and was allowed to continue on his way, while the 28 year-old beater was arrested and booked into jail.

While the gun owner committed no infraction, police strongly recommend calling 911 rather than engaging in this sort of activity.

As the saying goes, an armed society is a polite society.