"Our Town" Performed By Iris Dement And Emmylou Harris

One of the all-time great songs...

What Looks Like Wolverine And Cooks With Foam

Top Google search results for Chef Wolverine Foam

Western Goes Main Campus

From The Enquirer - Western College to change in 2008

NPR Listeners' Top 10 CDs Of 2006

NPR Listeners Pick the Best CDs of 2006

Neko Case should be number one and Jenny Lewis and The Watson Twins number two.

Midwest Cougars Migrating From The Dakotas

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press - State cougar sightings seem to be increasing

Immigrants Help Create Jobs

Via USA Today - Immigrants behind 25% of start-ups

Angelina Jolie As Dagny Taggart?

Via IHT - The challenge of distilling Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

Randall Wallace, who wrote "Braveheart" and "We Were Soldiers," is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of "Ray," are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.

NOAA Finally Links Greenhouse Gases To Warming

Via NYT - Agency Affirms Human Influence on Climate

The Housing Bubble Is Global

Via IHT - Real estate bubbles: How worried should we be?

And a global housing slowdown could be traumatic. Indeed, the world is flat (like the housing market).

Edun Live To Launch At Miami

Via Dayton Daily News - Miami to launch new student-run business Tuesday

What caught my eye was this:

Edun LIVE is a sub-brand of Edun Apparel Ltd, the label founded in 2005 by U2 singer Bono, his wife, Ali Hewson, and clothing designer Rogan Gregory, a 1995 Miami graduate.

What? Bono better keep that on lock-down. Rogan and I were good friends for a couple years in college. But I don't remember him being a snazzy dresser - he was into the hot ladies however so that may explain this career path.

Links To Homemade BBQ Contraptions

Via The BBQ Blog - Flower Pot BBQ Smoker

More Drilling Proposed For The Pinedale Area

Via the Billings Gazette - BLM study examines Pinedale Anticline

The energy industry has proposed to quadruple the number of natural gas wells and triple the surface area impacted. But how do they get from that to "innovative"?:

Industry officials have said their proposal is an innovative approach to balancing energy development with preservation of the area's natural resources.

Christian Fundies Rudely Get Their Opinions Interrupted By Facts

Via NPR - Ellison to Take Oath on Thomas Jefferson's Quran

Using Thomas Jefferson's personal copy of the Quran is a brilliant move by Rep. Keith Ellison.

Stupid Cows

The western blizzards are making the going tough for cattle ranchers whose livestock is starving to death.

But not to fear, there's a massive publicly financed rescue operation underway.

Via MSNBC - Military helps cattle stranded by snow

And if cattle do die insurance and government will compensate ranchers for their losses.

However, the bison are fine:

The 20,000 bison on ranches in southeastern Colorado, western Kansas and Oklahoma were unaffected by the storm, partly because bison use their head and hump “like a big snowplow to get down to where the forage is"...

Bison also provide a healthier meat than cattle.

Better eating, better for you, and easier to manage. So why are we still eating cows?

Google Tries A New Way To Weed Out Applicants

Via The New York Times - Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm

Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.

Placebo Security

Via The Inquirer - TSA 'security' measures are internally inconsistent

...the TSA put in place placebos to make us quake in fear, cheese us off, and generally do nothing for our security. If you look at what they do, it flat out does not work, much less do what they say.