Benjamin Moore has a nifty website that allows you to paint a room digitally.
Via Just West Of The Nile.

This is sad. And what a situation for police to be faced with – a man soaked in gasoline inside a van (curiously, it was rented), threatening to set himself alight – and then following through. No word yet on his condition. Pulse24 TV has the video available. For the life of me, I don’t know why.

Looks like Helen is a touch steamed at the moment…

The brittle shell.
Via MUSC Tiger

Jeff Jarvis continues a Terry Teachout post on “Vanishing America” – everyday things that are disappearing from our lives. Among them;

Fax machines. I have one, but I rarely use it more than twice a month, both ways.

Typewriters. I disposed of my last one ten years ago.

Newspapers and magazines on paper.

Local hardware stores.

Christmas cards

I really noticed a drop off in Christmas cards this year. Though, I shouldn’t admit this, most of the things they list I do still use. Going to the post office to mail packages, corded phones, knobs on public washroom sinks, bar soap, aerosol cans, bank tellers, cassette tapes, ice cube trays, modems..
That’s probably not surprising, considering my rural lifestyle. I will add one thing I no longer use, that I didn’t see on any lists;

Well, the dog show turned out to be a waste of time and effort. I don’t get shut out very often, but it happens. I should be more reasonable in my expectations – I do more than my fair share of winning, certainly more than most owner-handlers. However, it does suck to lose. I hate losing, I really hate losing to entries I know are inferior, and I utterly despise driving halfway across a continent to discover the judge has a few “favorites” and favours to hand out.
Yeah, I’m a bad loser. A really, really bad loser. I don’t make scenes or get in people’s faces, but I bitch and complain with the best of them. I don’t apologize for it, either. An aversion to losing is a fundamental ingredient to competitive success.
“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser”.
It’s true.
Back to regular blogging shortly. I’ve been out of the loop and have some catching up to do myself.
In the meantime, if you haven’t read the updated link on my brief Hunter S. Thompson memorial post below, here it is again. Song of the Sausage Creature is a classic.

I’m sitting here after dinner, a glass of wine at my side, in a home with automatic gates, servants, and wonderful hospitality, somewhere in Englewood, Colorado. There’s a chocolate dish with Tahitian vanilla ice cream on the dessert menu shortly.
It’s shirtsleeve weather (at least for a Saskatchewanian). You can be jealous.
Listened to Hugh Hewitt on radio for the first time and it reminded me of how far behind the curve Canadian conservative talk radio is in this aspect. I’ve been reading him pretty regularly for a year or so, and it reminded me of one of the frustrations of being a Canadian “amateur” blogger. Why isn’t Canadian talk radio moving into the world of blogging? Ignorance? Station policy? Laziness?
On his Monday show Rawlco radio’s John Gormley mentioned – I believe for the first time – the Eason Jordan affair. That’s all well and good – he certainly beat the news department on the “scoop” – but when a medium as immediate as talk radio is two weeks behind the curve, it’s pretty stale stuff.
On the other side of the fence, bloggers here dig, work to get reader tips due exposure, and swarm as best we can on stories we believe deserve attention. But there’s little chance for momentum to build in a country where television and print media is a virtual house organ of the Liberal party and talk radio has not yet produced a Rush Limbaugh. If they continue to plod along in their insular little regional am wave world, they’re pretty damned unlikely to, either.
The blogosphere in Canada will continue to lag behind the US in our ability to coalesce around a story and move it forward, so long as Canadian talk radio plods along in a 90’s mindset about the internet as little more than a convenient, but largely unreliable source for out-of-the mainstream show fodder.
C’mon you guys. Get on board. Get your blogs up – and by blogs, I mean the real deal, with trackbacks and a blogroll. See Hugh Hewitt. Hell. he has an email address – ask Hugh Hewitt.
Here’s another suggestion – local talk radio has weekly features with regular guests – contests, movie reviews, dvd release shows, “mornings with the mayor” etc. Why not try this – a weekly round-up of the stories perculating in the Canadian political blogosphere?
Stop playing catch up. Get in front of a story for a change.

The bike I painted last week is finally finished, but the client didn’t want to put it back together as there was other work planned. When it is, it’ll look vaguely like this original (computer drawn) draft, though some of the actual design details were altered along the way.
It was originally a bright green, with taped flames, etc. There was a considerable amount of refinishing involved – a couple of parts in progress:

The finished fuel tank.

I’ll post a pic of the completed bike when I get one.

Still spending much of my time at the shop, on the bike-that-never-ends…. the first five pieces are now basecoated, though, so there’s light at the end of the tunnel. (When painters tell you that automotive painting is 90% prepwork, it is not exaggeration.)
QOTD from a radio dj this morning, in a discussion about the latest round of NHL talks, and the impending season cancellation;

“Gary Bettman is the Jack Kavorkian of the NHL”

Better yet, he managed to segue into that from a report on the health of the pope.
This guy should get into blogging.
Carry on in the comments sections, kiddies. I’m too busy to watch what’s going on at the moment, but if I come down there and finding someone’s being writing on the walls in crayon, theres going to be hell to pay.
(I really ought to start a category on “solvent blogging”. Heh.)
Back to the booth.

Well, if you’d just left a flaming bag of cow shit like normal kids, none of this would’ve happened.

Via Instapundit, (who like me, would like to think this story is true.)

“Eastern Ukraine is heavily ethnic Russian. The main industry is coal. The miners are rough, tough, and hate Yushchenko for wanting to take Ukraine away from Russia and toward the West,” writes Wheeler. “It was arranged for more than a thousand of them to be taken from Donetsk, the capital of the coal-mining region, by bus and train to Kiev, where, armed with clubs and blunt tools, they would physically beat up the Orange Revolutionaries. Such mass violence was not only to disperse the demonstrators but serve as an excuse for the government to declare martial law, suspending the Ukrainian Parliament (the Rada) and elections indefinitely.”
Now comes the secret weapon: vodka.
“When the miners got on their buses and trains, they found to their joy case after case of vodka � just for them. When they arrived in Kiev, trucks awaited them filled with more cases of vodka � all free provided by ‘friends’ of the Donetsk coal miners. Completely soused, they never made it to Independence Square. Too hammered blind to cause any violence at all, they had a merry time, passed out and were shipped back to Donetsk.”
Available only to subscribers of To the Point, Wheeler’s column goes on to explain who provided the liquor: teams of Porter Goss’ CIA working with their counterparts in British MI6 intelligence.

Well, it certainly sounds plausable… the rest is here.

Outside the Beltway is having a “Fun with Fiction Contest“

Rules:

It?s time to find out just how literate and witty OTB readers are. The goal is to change one letter of a book title so as to give the story an entirely new meaning. After the altered title, offer a one or two sentence explanation of the new story.

There are some pretty good entries there already.

Anheuser-Busch is pulling an advertisement planned for this year’s Super Bowl that would have poked fun at last year’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” that exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show, according to a published report.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the ad would have shown…

Why bother with the description, when Wizbang has the video?

The mystery of a coincidental beheading victim found 30 miles from the murdered New Jersey family has been solved.

According to Nuss, Persieck decapitated himself by using three separate ropes, tying one end of each around a light post in the back parking lot of the theater located on the northbound side of Route 35, and the other around his neck.
Once the ropes were secure, Persieck got into his 2004 Ford Explorer and started to drive. His head was found approximately 100 feet from his body, Nuss said.
“There were no skid marks, so we don�t believe that he was going at a high rate of speed. He had about a 40-foot run-up so we figure at best he was doing 30 mph at the moment of decapitation,” Nuss said.
The vehicle coasted to a stop about 200 feet later, after it hopped a curb and hit a small tree. Nuss said that it was evident after talking to family members and discovering other supporting materials, that it was a suicide.
“Apparently, he [Persieck] had been having problems recently in his life. He left six pages of notes in the vehicle, which we found afterward,” Nuss said. “The kids who found the victim were definitely shaken up.”

You don’t say.

Just what the flying public has been clamouring for – a 308 ton excuse for losing your luggage.

Though – no one has yet tried to actually fly the thing. There’s a remote chance that Airbus has invested $10.7 billion developing the worlds largest taxi.

Adam Walter blogs a Mark Helprin book tour stop. While the purpose was to promote The Pacific and Other Stories., with Helprin, politics invariably comes up.

[T]he first question asked was political. A man said he had read A Soldier of the Great War and taken it to be very humanitarian & anti-war in tone, but in reading about Helprin recently he was shocked to learn of his “hawkish” leanings. The man referenced New York Times reviews of Helprin’s books.
In beginning his response Helprin said, “Well, let me tell you a story about the New York Times” – This drew an appreciative laugh from those of us who could understand the sort of trouble that that ultra-liberal paper would cause for a conservative author. His trouble with the paper began when they ran a spurious report that Helprin was someone who “read no living authors.” There was no truth to this comment; he had never said anything like it. Later, they “outed” him as a conservative, beginning a piece on him by listing the political party he belonged to; something that’s just not done in book reviews, and something they hadn’t done with other authors. The paper also ran a piece representing him as a terrible liar, accusing him even of lying about his service in the Israeli infantry. Since then the paper has routinely misrepresented him and his work, and he has had to work very hard on book tours to counter the unprofessional animosity the paper has directed at him. The New York Times has refused to print his refutations of their lies, and they’ve refused to retract them. All of which is doubly frustrating for Helprin, considering that his father was once an editor at the paper.

Lots of other interesting observations, and a brief foray into an unfortunate stereotype, but not a bad read.
Know nothing about Helprin? Start with this excellent e-review

A couple of people have sent me this link to before and after satellite photos of tsunami ravaged coastlines. It takes a bit of time to download over dial-up.

Spectacular photos of the tsunami at NBC

I had originally written something complaining about the snow I had to shovel when I got home this afternoon. Changed my mind.
update – my sitemeter shows this page is recieving a lot of hits. This link to bloggers who are located closer to the scene may be of interest to visitors surfing in. Wizbang has a list of video links.
(If you aren’t familiar with the blogosphere, this is an individual entry – the “main” link at the top of the page will take you to the home page and links to many more.)