Top 10 ‘bad boy’ baby names

A new study shows that if parents play it safe when choosing baby names, they may be doing their offspring a favor: Giving a newborn males odd, girly or strange first names may just help land them in jail.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31960846/ns/parenting_and_family/from/ET

Clearly they forgot about “Reeve.” Wait—I hear somebody calling me on a bullhorn. I’ll be back in 2-to-5.

McCain’s Airbus ties-not pretty

At least seven top McCain advisers and fundraisers – Thomas Loeffler, Susan Nelson, John Green, Kirsten Chadwick, Kirk Blalock, Aleix Jarvis and William Ball III – have all lobbied for EADS, the parent company of European airplane manufacturer Airbus.

The Air Force and Boeing have dirty hands too-remember Darlene Druyun and Michael Sears?  Of course the White House and Donald Rumsfeld were involved in the original deal.

I’m pretty unhappy with the lack of professionalism shown by many current military “leaders”.  Between this deal, the Pat Tillman story, and the mess at Guantanamo, we’ve seen political-grade leadership from our senior military.  We all should expect better from them. 

I say outsource the tanker deal to the Japanese and be done with it.

Three mountaintops

I call these “mountaintops”: they’re overriding principles of my life.

We

Get smarter

Total World Domination

“We” means “honor and respect my teammates and the team.”

“Get smarter” means my quest for knowledge, hard skills, and soft skills will never end.

“Total World Domination” means winning is a mindset and not a score.

Favorite TV

My favorite shows include:

• “The Simpsons” (trust me-this show is the least offensive one listed herein)
• “Family Guy” (you’ll like this show if you appreciate tastelessness and oblique humor)
• “Squidbillies” (15 minutes of utter tastelessness)
• “McLaughlin Group” (high-volume political commentary)
• “60 Minutes” (a classic American “get-the-bad guy” show: I can imagine Mike Wallace waving bank receipts in front of Eliott Spitzer)

A British import, “MI-5″, gets a special mention.  It’s a dark, contemporary spy show, where much of the intrigue is psychological and political.  Somerset Maugham’s short stories set in the Far East and Len Deighton’s “Bernard Sampson” arc are precursors of MI-5.

Honorable mention goes to:

• “Futurama”
• “King Of The Hill”

And R.I.P. for:

• “The Prisoner”
• “Chappelle Show”
• “Bizarre”
• “The Two Ronnies”

-rf

Hāna: the thingie over the “ā” is a…

macron.

Killing a dead satellite

Why is there so much fuss about shooting down L-21, the dead spy satellite?

We’ve been putting men on the moon for almost 40 years (until we stopped, anyway).  We’re landing all kinds of smart gadgets on Mars.  We can hit an asteroid from 80,000,000 miles away.  So what’s the BFD with hitting a school bus-sized derelict hunk of space trash from 150 miles away?  Give Dick Cheney a .410, point him at a dove, and wait for the hydrazine shower.

I mean, it’s not like we don’t understand orbital mechanics.  It’s not that we don’t understand missle targeting-after all, we’ve been targeting the Russians, and specific missle silos, with great accuracy for half a century, and that’s going through the atmosphere twice (up and down), whereas here we’re just going up.  What about all the money we’ve spent on SDI, otherwise known as “Star Wars”?  Didn’t we get anything back from that investment?  And I really find it hard to believe that the U.S. military hasn’t been running simulations for this exact exercise for decades.

No, this isn’t a trivial exercise.  Among other things, the closing speed of 20,000 MPH requires dead-on aim: a fraction of a degree off target means the SM-3 missle “warhead” will miss the L-21 by miles.   But a dual-core Itanium processor has 2,000,000,000 (yes, billion) transistors.  If we can manufacture with that level of precision, we can certainly guide a warhead into a narrow target window.

A long time ago, I had an alter ego known as ”Mr. Evil” (there’s a small story that I’m not going to share).  I sympathize with my homie Austin Powers-inspired character Dr. Evil, who groused, “You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!”

If the sharks with laser beams can’t shoot the damn thing down, we’ll send the fembots after it.

Recent purchases

I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon.com.  You know, the destination web site.  I’m doing my self-directed Christmas spending now; I go into a funk if I don’t have a box on my front porch at least once a week.

Recent purchase #1: Motorola Global Q PDA.  I’m not a sophisticated user but so far everything works: phone, contacts, e-mail, ActiveSync.  It’s Windows Mobile 6 running Opera instead of IE…go figure?  When I have the time and an Internet connection…

Recent purchase #2: Nikon D80 digital camera.  This is my aloha present and it’s sweeeet.  I had an N90 and the associated lenses (all of which are worth essentially zero on the resale market), so there was an “economic” incentive to spend the dinero.  I looked at other comparable units but I prefer to spend a little more and get the best; quality is the best economy.  2,700 images on one battery charge-dang!  I like it.  There’s nothing not to love except the sticker.  The only open item is case providing some degree of rigidity so I can put the unit in my backpack.