The once great city of Havana...

The once great city of Havana...  Michael J. Totten is in Cuba, and has posted his second report.  Like all his work reporting from the nether regions of the world, it is outstanding.

U.S. High School students slip in global ratings...

U.S. High School students slip in global ratings...  Wall Street Journal...

Food City advertisement...

Food City advertisement...  Kudos to them...

That One's approval numbers continue plunging...

That One's approval numbers continue plunging...  The Real Clear Politics poll average shows yet another drop, now to below 40% approval.  The further he drops in the polls, the more trouble he's going to have getting fellow Democrats to toe the Party line on things like ObamaCare and Iran...

The I-400 has been found!

The I-400 has been found!  This is the first giant bomber-carrying submarine built the Japanese in World War II with the objective of attacking the U.S. mainland.  It was captured at the end of the war by the U.S. Navy, studied, and then sunk in 1946 to prevent the Soviets from getting access to it.  Now researchers from the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory have located its wreckage.  The video at right shows the first sighting of it...

World's largest stone Buddha...

World's largest stone Buddha...  He's a big fellow, all right: 233 feet tall!

About that consensus...

About that consensus...  When the American Meteorological Society (comprised of weather scientists) surveyed its members to see how many thought global warming was primarily caused by human activity, they got an answer they didn't like: just 52%.  Oh, my...

Don't wash that coffee mug!

Don't wash that coffee mug!  Funny article about an unlikely U.S. Navy tradition: never, ever washing out one's coffee mug.  I can attest to this tradition being alive and well at least through the '70s, when I was in the Navy.  Some of the saltier chiefs had coffee cups whose capacity was significantly reduced by the thickness of the tarry scum lining the inside of their cups.  And those old salts were very attached to those cups – if someone were to wash it out for them, I wouldn't give good odds for their survival...

Abolish the TSA!

Abolish the TSA!  So says Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit...

Rock music...

Rock music...  Some experts think that Stonehenge may actually have been built to make music!  I've seen one of those “ringing stones” in Wales.  I wasn't very impressed with it, though...

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because, debacle!

Oregon's exchange director on leave of absence.  You may remember that the Oregon exchange had such an astonishingly bad rollout that they actually made the Federal healthcare.gov rollout look good.  That is an achievement one can only marvel at...

Liberals' love-hate relationship with the law.  ObamaCare figures prominently in the discussion.

Pathetic.  What a progressive writer looks like when he's scrambling for positive ObamaCare news...

New goals for ObamaCare.  Megan McArdle looks at the evidence, and concludes that the new goal is a simple one: to keep the Democrats from dismantling it before 2015.  Not to make it, like, work – just to keep it (and the progressive dream it embodies) alive for a while...

No security ever built into ObamaCare web site.  So says David Kennedy, a well-known “white hat” (good guy) hacker.  He's got a dog in this hunt (he makes his living securing web sites), so one should be cautious about accepting what he has to say.  With that caveat, what he asserts is pretty damning...

ObamaCare and the “Amazon experience”.  Bret Stephens is underwhelmed.  Way underwhelmed...

ObamaCare and the totalitarian mindset.  James Taranto continues his merciless lampooning...

ObamaCare is back in court today.  There's at least a possibility that one of these suits could bring the whole thing tumbling down – or at the very least, give wavering Democrats a reason to start gutting it...

“Please Wait”.  Pro Publica, normally a reliably progressive site, continues their critical series on ObamaCare.  This time they took the “fixed” web site for a test spin – and found the results quite discouraging...

Never give up...

Never give up...  The cook on a Nigerian tugboat was below decks when the tugboat suddenly sank last May.  Eleven of his shipmates died that day, but the cook survived the sinking – by finding a pocket of air in the ship as it hit the bottom.  Three days later, divers went out to the wreck to retrieve the bodies of the crew – nobody expected any survivors.  The startled divers found the cook alive, and then scrambled to rescue him.  The rescue was a success, and the cook is now back with his family.  No word on whether he's changing occupations.  The video was taken by the divers on the day they found the cook...

Pater: Curiosity...

Pater: Curiosity...  I've run out of decent electronic images of my dad, so for the rest of these posts I'll add different images, but from things we did together.  The image at right is of a blue columbine taken high on the slopes of Picayune Gulch in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, in July 2005.  They were one of his favorite flowers there...

Curiosity...

On one of my family's epic camping trips “out west”, circa 1965, we visited Yellowstone National Park, entering via the Beartooth Highway (the northeast entrance).  My parents and all four of their kids were jammed into an incredibly underpowered Volkswagen Microbus along with a few hundred pounds of camping gear and supplies.  My dad had that poor vehicle in second gear, engine roaring, for most of the climb to Beartooth Pass, at nearly 11,000 feet.  It's an awesomely beautiful drive.  If you've never been on it, your life is needlessly impoverished.

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Near the highest point the road travels through green hills (the area in the center of the map at right), almost like the rolling hill country of Pennsylvania – except these “hills” are really just knobs on 10,000 or 11,000 foot high mountains.  At one point my dad glanced outside and noticed that the green meadow we were passing was full of flowers, which meant (of course!) we needed to stop and take a look.

This sort of flower-worship was completely normal and expected in my family, and we all participated except my baby brother Mark, who was too young (and, perhaps not coincidentally, is the only family member not crazy about flowers).  I still have this habit, as anyone who has ever traveled with me can attest.  I love wildflowers, will drive thousands of miles to see them, and for damned sure I'm going to stop and enjoy them when I see them.

I've forgotten what kind of flowers these particular ones were, but there were two kinds – both with tiny blossoms (perhaps a quarter inch across), one blue, one yellow, and they were both growing densely, all mixed together with each other, grass, and other greenery.  I remember that the blue ones had a delicate scent, a bit like fresh-mown grass, but sweet.

My dad was puzzled by something that most people would never even notice: he wondered why he was surprised by these flowers.  Ordinarily he'd have spotted any wildflowers at a considerable distance – his eyesight was keen, and he was very good at picking them out of any scene (a skill that I seem to have inherited).  But these he didn't see until we were almost upon them.

He looked over toward a little knoll perhaps a couple hundred feet away.  It appeared to be completely covered with greenery, but no flowers.  He walked over there, some of us with him, and discovered that the knoll was covered with these little flowers, too – but we couldn't make them out until we were much closer.  After some thought, he came up with a theory: that when we were far enough away that we couldn't make out (resolve) the individual blooms, our eyes mixed the blue and yellow together, much like a painter mixing colors on a palette – and blue and yellow together make green, which would effectively disappear against the greenery.

Once he had a theory, he enlisted our help in proving it.  We gathered up enough blue and yellow blossoms to make a small bouquet without any greenery in it.  One of us kids held it, and he walked away – and sure enough, when he was a couple hundred feet away, he said it appeared to be a light green, not blue and yellow.  Then he came back and held the bouquet while we all walked away until we could see the same effect – which we did.  My mom, waiting back in the car for us, got the bouquet when we were done.  I don't think she knew why we had picked it :)

My dad was very curious about the world we lived in, and he had a sharp eye for the unexpected.  If he saw something that piqued his interest, he was perfectly willing to invest time and effort into investigating it.  I grew up thinking that was normal; it wasn't until many years had gone by that I realized that most people never even noticed such things, let alone take the trouble to ponder them and figure them out.

I seem to have inherited my dad's curiosity about the world, or perhaps his example instilled it in me.  There have been many occasions when others looked at me askance as I pursued it, or even called me weird.  I wear that as a badge of honor – I'd really be quite ashamed to be called “normal”.  I suspect my dad had the same experience, though he never mentioned it to me.  He'd have paid no attention, and would have considered his own interest to be more than sufficient justification.  It makes me smile to know that's something we shared...