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I thought you all might enjoy the picture I took last weekend. It’s a squid christmas light display. Click the picture for the full-sized picture. Ocean City, MD has this huge display of different sea-themed Christmas decorations in a parking lot at the south end of the island. The squid – okay, well, it’s probably an octopus – is taller than I am, maybe 8 or 10 ft tall. There are about 30 of these things around the parking lot. Which is really odd because the parking lot is closed for the season. The whole town is closed for the season. There’s just dark motels and these things. Squid.us has Cephalopodmas images. Check it out.

NORAD tracks Santa 2007 The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a joint U.S.-Canada military organization based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. With help from our neighbor to the North, NORAD systems scan the skies for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) flying over the poles with deadly gifts from our friends in the USSR (Ob Russky: CCCP). The goal of NORAD is to warn us in time for us to take cover. We might get 15 minutes warning. “ With enough shovels …” To accomplish the aerospace warning mission, the commander of NORAD provides an integrated tactical warning and attack assessment to the governments of Canada and the United States. To accomplish the aerospace control mission, NORAD uses a network of satellites, ground-based radar, airborne radar and fighters to detect, intercept and, if necessary, engage any air-breathing threat to North America. As a part of its aerospace control mission, NORAD assists in the detection and monitor...

The Zucchini Patch » A Slave to Cigarettes Jessica of The Zucchini Patch wants to quit smoking. This is my comment. It deals mostly with the money aspect of smoking. They don’t talk about that much in the anti-smoking ads. They talk about cancer only in very vague terms. They show little pictures of the particulate matter that coats the lungs. They don’t talk so much about the reality of drowning in your own putrefying lungs. Oddly enough, they also don’t talk about the 20% of women with lung cancer who never smoked at all. The politics of the anti-tobacco movement is another story for another day. Wow. I remember in 1979 saying I’d quit when cigarettes reached 75¢ a pack. Let’s see… $3.50/pack × 2 packs/day × 365days/year? Thats over $2500 a year! So your first year’s savings are the down payment on a new subcompact car. Each monthly savings after that is the car payment. Not sure how much daycare costs. Save your sa...

The long awaited Manic-Depressive Illness : Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, Second Edition , by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison is finally in stores. Hopefully you have the first edition. It is *the* reference book for bipolar disorder. Over the years many of the hypotheses set forth in the first edition have been proven out. It’s all there. Phototherapy, circadian rhythms, bipolar creativity. The effects of lithium on the suicide rate. Why we must avoid unopposed antidepressants. And that’s what I saw just riffling the pages! I can’t wait to sit down and read the medical roadmap that Drs. Goodwin and Jamison set out for the next 15 years. A sample chapter is available for download from the Oxford University Press . If you apply for the Amazon.com Visa when you make the purchase you can get a hefty rebate. Yippee!

Police expect no charges in youth group diaper skit According to the article above, the Christian youth organization Young Life promotes paraphilias as an “icebreaker” at teen gatherings. A skit at a local Christian youth group meeting had teenage boys taking off some of their clothes, wearing adult diapers, bibs and bonnets and being spoon-fed by girls as they sat in their laps. I can’t imagine what was going through the boys’ minds during the skit, but I have a pretty good idea what was going on in the diapers. The adult group leader can’t possibly see the Young Life diaper skits as doing anything but corrupting the morals of the good Christian children in their charge. Acccording to this article on the FBI web page , many pedophiles are “persons in positions of trust or which provide them ready access to children such as youth ministers , camp counselors, public servants and employees of law enforcement agencies.” One can only hope that the...

It would, of course, would have been far easier to reformat my hard drive. The problem seems to be a bagel variant and has something to do with files named C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\hidr.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\srosa.sys and possibly an infected NETWAITING.EXE file. I have tried multiple rootkit detection and removal programs with varying degrees of success. McAfee Security Center says that no parts of my McAfee software are enabled. It says that parts of the software are missing and I have to reinstall. McAfee Rootkit Detective 1.1 flagged hidr.sys and said it would remove it, but it didn’t. F-Secure Online Virus Scanner is unable to download all its files – I suspect the bug is blocking them. Their Blacklight program has been integrated into the new scanner. Oh well. AVG Free won’t install – it can’t find one of its installation files – I assume the malware is deleting it. AVG is my number one favorite free antivirus program. Panda ...