Economic Times;

Buffett described BYD as a ‘young and energetic’ company, and said he was ‘amazed’ by the performance of its E6 electric car.

It’s a perfect segue to our next story…
*Alternate Title: “Driving Off A Cliff: Not Metaphoric Enough!”

From the comments – “Looks like the forest fire situation has improved. But I’m surprised that Putin drives himself to work, aren’t you?”
h/t Scott

Too soon old, too late smart. Honey, you could have benefited more from a welding class.
h/t.

Parents of teenage boys now have evidence to back up the claim they could be eaten out of house and home with a U.S. study finding 14-17 year-old boys will eat a lunch of 2,000 calories given the chance.

Find a lazy anti-Semite.

The Tea Party raised the spectre of big government so effectively that America moved and that frightens incumbents.
There’s a solution for that problem this year, stop listening.
h/t Drudge

I know what you’re thinking. A city zoo that keeps guinea pigs?

If only they’d sewn Al-Qaeda flags to their backpacks.

How many bus tickets can you buy for $1.9 million?

Internet trolls primed to ‘ignore social rules’: Expert
First comment – “Still like to see her chug the Lysol…….”

Online dating sites that are used around the world need to take into account cultural differences, researchers at the University of Bath have found.

They’ve been lying at our feet for thousands of years, yet the average dog has a better understanding of English than the average Englishman has of Dog.
They hear “sit, stay, down, stand, come, fetch, outside, car ride, walk, cookie, toy, cat, sic em. Good dog!”
We hear “bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. Bark? “
Our track record in communicating with other species isn’t exactly stellar.
Nonetheless, world leaders who can’t pronounce “Ahmadinejad” (much less solve him), insist on blasting “come git me!” cards into space.
I suppose there’s comfort in the notion that an alien intelligence with the technology to zoom across the vast distances between star systems would be equally progressive in their approach to foreign ecosystems and their cultures. We can hope so, anyway. It’s not like we can do much about it now – the invitations have been sent.
Still, when I look at this and then rotate it counter-clockwise by 90 degrees….

I was working on a Harley tank yesterday when this came over the radio…

Councillors voted almost unanimously in favour of a 32-page staff report detailing everything from coop sizes to the creation of a $20,000 shelter for abandoned chickens.

I thought it was the solvents talking.

“And on this house I shall build my Spaceship Jesus”*

I admit to being surprised by this;

The Hagars built their 2,700-square-foot house by stacking tire bales—five-foot-wide blocks of compressed tires—to form the exterior walls. They plugged gaps between the bales with cans, bottles, plastic plates, and other junk and moved in toward the end of 2008.
“We lovingly call it the trash house,” Ms. Hagar says. The Hagars covered up all that trash with concrete, clay and stucco and installed south-facing windows to capture light, heat and views of the snowy slopes.
To pay for it, the Hagars in 2007 took out a $240,000 line of credit from Red Rocks Credit Union in suburban Denver. In the old days of easier credit, appraiser Lori Slota couldn’t find another tire-bale home that had recently sold but said the house would be valued at $500,000 when complete, citing the listing of a straw-bale home as well as other houses in the area.
Last year, with the home finally finished and interest rates at record lows, the Hagars started trying to refinance into a long-term, fixed-rate mortgage. But in February 2009, they got the bad news from loan officer Bill Schimel, who wrote in an email, “I think we have really hit a brick wall here.”

I’d always assumed such projects were self-financed.

Your tax dollars at work;

Before penalizing the city $12,500 this week, inspectors with the Canadian Transportation Agency counted five instances when bus drivers didn’t call out stops.
Marc Comeau, senior communications advisor for the transportation agency, said there were three times that inspectors, posing as regular riders, asked OC Transpo bus drivers to say when a certain destination was reached, but the drivers didn’t call the stops.
“It was actually cases where the stops were requested,” Comeau said.

Oh, the humanity.
h/t Jamie

“The first published national study of injuries related to table saws reports that these devices account for about 31,500 injuries per year, 97% percent of the victims are male and most injuries are due to ‘contact with the blade of the saw’…”