We took a great walk through the botanic garden today. Spring flowers were in bloom – so many flowers and so many colors. The rose garden was magnificent and the lilies were doing their spring thing.
This yellow bearded iris was one of the prettiest flowers in the garden. It was hard to pick out which one to post, but this seemed unique. Bearded iris only flower for a few days at most and the timing was fortunate to see it at it’s peak.
Click on the image for the full-sized version.
I took this out of the truck window last week on the way home from the shooting range.
Click for the 800×600 image.
This is a map of the country from the 2004 presidential election where states carried by Bush are colored red and blue if carried by Kerry. The map of “red states” seems to dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, this is a little misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations and most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election where the majority wins.
However, the Federalists designed the Electoral College to mitigate domination by states with great population over those without. Constitutional scholars know that this is an important concept the Founders handed down.
Now, if we were to re-map the country using a cartography technique to distort state boundaries to account for the population of that state, we get a much different picture. Each state now has a hypothetical area in proportion to its population. Regardless of this distorted view, however, the Electoral college selected President Bush for his second term. The actual nationwide popular vote also went to Bush by a plurality of over six million votes.
An interesting observation of the distorted map is that many of the blue states appear bloated and overweight. In real life, it seems, the governments of the ‘bloated’ states are as bloated and overweight as the hypothetical boundaries.
Sadly, California, the most bloated of the re-mapped states, is one where government overtaxes, over-regulates and repeatedly invests public funds in failed government programs, the educational system being the most paramount among them.
Maps prepared by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan.
As a veteran, I am outraged by Time Magazine’s desecration of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the U.S. Marines raising the American Flag on Iwo Jima.
We never cease to be amazed by the inability of the left to feel shame and its lack of reverence for America and those who defend its freedoms, including the right to be stupid. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time, taking the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree, qualifies for obscenity of the year.
It echoes the greenie theme first advanced by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat in the history of mankind. Gore and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism… This trivializing of the sacrifice of American blood and treasure to defend freedom ignores the fact that in World War II we faced a real enemy with a terrible agenda. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor were quite real, not the output of some badly fed computer model.
‘Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,’ Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, [said]: ‘The Japanese Empire on February 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history’.”
—Investor’s Business Daily
I call on veterans and others outraged by this to boycott Time-Warner Corporation! If you subscribe to Road Runner, get another high-speed carrier. If you get cable from Time-Warner, it’s time to look into DirecTV, which, by the way, is owned by the parent company of the Fox News Channel. Most of all, never, ever buy another copy of Time.
Hat tip to The Patriot Post.
I wrote a post last May about cosmos flowers that included a little background; I’ll repeat it here:
Sometimes called Mexican Asters, cosmos were grown by Spanish priests in their mission gardens in Mexico. The evenly placed petals led them to christen the flower “Cosmos,” the Greek word for harmony or ordered universe. Cosmos, like many of our warm weather annuals such as marigolds, originated in Mexico and South America.
These are currently flourishing on the patio. Click the image to enlarge.
Damsel takes photos of our arsenal before, during and after the weekly cleaning and maintenance session. She took a photo of the Remington 870 trigger plate assembly; when I looked at the photo, it reminded me of something completely unrelated.
Is it just me, or does the assembly resemble the profile of an airborne Canadian honker?
I stated on our not-very-political personal blog that I was a daily reader of the on-line Dilbert cartoon. Recently, the folks at www.dilbert.com upgraded their site to a nice new interactive format. One of the many new features is an animated cartoon strip. Another feature challenges the reader to produce a better punch line than Scott Adams, the artist that produces Dilbert.
Which brings me to this little animation, “The Knack,” that pokes a little fun at some of us who are a bit on the nerdy side. I’m not sure where this originated, since I got it in an email from an associate. At any rate, I think it’s worth the one-minute run time to learn about little Dilbert’s “Knack.”