RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) — Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was airlifted to a hospital after falling from stage during a concert at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in western South Dakota.
Hey Steve — maybe life is trying to tell you something. Let’s listen closely and see if we can hear what it is . . .
YOU’RE OLD!
Stop trying to suck every last dollar out of your former glory and retire, you geriatric bastard . . .
The two American journalists imprisoned for five months by North Korea came home to a tear-filled airport reunion with their families Wednesday morning following a dramatic rescue mission led by former President Bill Clinton.
In June, the North Korean government sentenced the journalists, who work for former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV cable channel, to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the country.
I don’t know . . . these gals look very emotional to me. Emotional women are hard to live with. Or so I’ve heard.
I’m sure the husbands are happy to have them back though . . .
From the White House Blog:
Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to “uncover” the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
Right. There’s no informed opposition to health insurance reform, only “scary chain emails” and “disinformation” traveling “just below the surface,” whatever that means.
It all sounds very sinister though, so as agents of the government, we are encouraging all good citizens to inform on their neighbors if they may be up to something.
My owner’s wife chased me around the island in the middle of the kitchen this morning. What a fun game!
It all started when she said “Come here, Lightning” and started walking toward me. When she says “Come here, Lightning,” it almost always means I’m going to have to do something I don’t want to do, like take a bath or go to bed — probably bath in this case, because it was morning — so that’s when I started going around the island.
A couple of times she tried turning around and going the other way, like I’m supposed to keep going the same way and run right into her. Let me tell you, pugs are a little too smart for that old trick!
Finally, when she saw she couldn’t win the game, she said to my owner, who was standing there watching,”Will you hold him for me?”
“Oh sorry,” he said. “I thought you were having fun chasing him.”
“You mean you were having fun watching me chase him,” she said.
— Lightning 
There is a permanently restricted area of airspace to the NW of the [Wilmington, Delaware] airport, around [VP Joe] Biden’s weekend house. The airport gets shut down every time Biden commutes home at taxpayer expense. What kind of plane does Biden, a tireless advocate of reduced carbon emissions (source), use for the 15-minute flight from D.C.? “Boeing 757,” was the report from the ramp. “You wonder how the government can criticize private companies for using light jets when they themselves ride solo in the back of a 757.”
[Note: the shortest version of the Boeing 757 can hold up to 234 passengers plus a crew of at least 7 (source).]
HER: You don’t sleep enough. You need to go to bed earlier. You know what’s the secret to my youthful appearance?
HIM: Telling people what to do every minute?
Don’t let the “science” and “pentatonic scale” stuff scare you off watching this. Think of it as “A Remarkable Demonstration of Music as a Universal Language.”
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.
There are some things that one just didn’t do. That’s the way I was brought up. It’s not gray; it was black and white.
Now the ethical standard seems to be if everybody else is doing it, I can do it too. Carry that over into the banking. Everybody else is doing these funny loans and having earnings grow faster, building up their margins, leveraging those margins.
The more leverage A gets, the more leverage B feels inclined to get. So the system fed on itself and drove bankers to making decisions that they, presumably, should have known better than to make.
I don’t blame government for this. I was at a meeting of CEOs, even though I haven’t been to one for quite a while, and someone asked me to sum up the morning. This was a bunch of bankers and other CEOs. They said, what do you think about all this?
I said, you know, what I’m hearing here is you’re blaming the government for allowing you to do what you should have had enough brains not to do in the first place.
Obama Drops Faster than Bush or Carter
[HT: Best of the Web Today]
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average.
Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate — which was below California’s average and largely tracked the national average last year — has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California’s 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California’s Employment Development Department.
Many of the jobless techies are targeting new gigs in the clean-energy or health-care industries . . . Some are shifting even further afield, looking for jobs in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and done that.”
IRS data shows that in 2007 — the most recent data available — the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.
Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.
As reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition yesterday, the British-commissioned survey, which took its findings from 55 studies made in the past 50 years, claims that eating organic food “will make no important difference to a persons overall health.”
This will come as a blow to the idiots standing in line at Whole Foods to pay 10 dollars for a slice of cheese . . .
I’m explaining to my wife how being an Amazon.com associate works . . .
“If I mention a book on my web site, I link it to the book’s page on Amazon. Then if someone clicks through on the link and buys something, I get a small commission.”
She loves money-making enterprises. “How much do you make?” she asks excitedly.
“It’s around four percent, which usually amounts to around 5 or 10 bucks a year.”
“Oh,” she says, rapidly losing interest.
“But look,” I say, showing her my online associate report. “Last month, someone clicked through on one of my links and while they were on Amazon, they bought a very expensive camera lens and I got the commission on it: 18 dollars and 48 cents! We could dine out on burritos and beer with that kind of money!”
“That’s wonderful!” she says. “Can you print that out so I can keep it?”
“Your sarcasm is killing my appetite.”
