The Prof’s AWOL on a Sunday again, so it’s my duty to notify the blogosphere that Will Vehr’s done his usual thing.

Now the Indians are getting into the act. They plan to have manned launches by 2015.

Well, now we know who’s going to run the lunar motels.

It was announced at an Indian science conference in which:

They were also discussing topics including genome research, nanotechnology, climate change and information technology.

Interesting.

I don’t know if this is something they’ve been doing for a while, but ESPN is now putting links in the text of its stories (at least in this morning’s front pager about the Fiesta Bowl). On-line Big Media is finally starting to catch on to how to write for the web.

First they compared the Israelis to Nazis. Now they’re comparing them to Stalinists. Arafat is accusing Israel of building a “Berlin Wall” around Jerusalem.

Since the BBC can’t be bothered to do it, I will.

Hint, Yasser. The Berlin wall kept enslaved people in Berlin. The Jerusalem wall is to keep human bombs out of Jerusalem.

You, and the inevitable idiots who will no doubt parrot you in the coming days should practice. Say “in, out…in, out…in, out,” until you understand the concepts and the difference between them.

I guess we have to add another pair to the old Orwell litany. War is Peace, Up is Down, In is Out…

Mindles H. Dreck reminds us of the cornucopia of capitalism, and the idiocy of those who (truly) mindlessly rail against it. It’s a perennial topic, but there are always newcomers who are unfamiliar with the facts of the matter.

No, not the garden kind. Warning, geeky stuff ahead.

I just made the mistake of upgrading from Redhat 7.3 to 8.0. I don’t know why I never learn. I’ve never done a major-number RH upgrade without fubaring my machine.

It crashes on install because it’s got some kind of disagreement with XFree86 4.2. My version isn’t a Redhat package. I installed it from tarball on a previous upgrade (to 7.2), otherwise I wouldn’t have had X at all.

Despite the crash, it rebooted into what appeared to be 8.0, with the Bluecurve desktop theme.

But my menus are all bolloxed up. Turns out RH has standardized the Gnome 2.0 menus in Bluecurve, and they neglected to include a menu editor, so I’m stuck with them as is, unless I manually edit it. Finding out how to do this has been painful. There are a few comments on the boards, but they’re mostly cryptic, and unhelpful.

However, for anyone who’s been having the same problem, I finally found a How-To here.

I don’t know if it works, but at least it’s somewhat clearly written. I’ll update on whether it’s useful or not a little later.

J.R.R Tolkien was born a hundred and eleven years ago today.

How cool is that?

At least according to Lileks. I don’t know whether the movie rox or not, but Lileks’ movie reviews sure do.

Or maybe just the garden variety.

I was driving through Santa Barbara (and Yes, Barbara, the proposal is done (I can’t say “Yes, Virginia” because it makes Virginia Postrel upset, and that’s the last thing that I like to do)), and the traffic was kind of…horrid. There’s a two-lane bottleneck at the south end of town that I don’t know what they’re going to do about, because you’d have to tear up a lot of valuable real estate to expand it. I suppose I should be glad that at least the freeway goes through all the way, as it didn’t in the eighties, when I used to have several traffic lights through that stretch.

But I digress, as is my wont.

Anyway, I got stuck behind a vehicle. With bumper stickers. It had a Wisconsin plate. From a dealer in Madison.

Can you guess what the car-ass adornments said?

I knew you could.

Here they are, to the best of my recollection.

On the upper right window, there was one that said “Iraq War, NO!” Below it was another, even dumber, that said, “End Iraq Sanctions.” To its left was one that said, “I’d rather be smashing imperialism.” (Is there a market for a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be smashing bumper-sticker idiotarianism”?). And of course, in the upper left, the eye scanned the obligatory “Free Mumia.”

Did you guess correctly? Good.

Now here’s the tough part. Guess the make and model of the auto.

Oh, what the heck, I’ll give points for just the make.

[Cue, quiz show theme song]

Dum dee dum dum dum dee dum.

Dum dee dum dum DUM…de da da da da

Dum dee dum dum dum dee dum.

DUM de dum dee dum dum dum.

[/end game song]

Anyone guess?

I know, Volvo, right?

Nope.

Then, it must have been an older Japanese econobug. Right?

Nope.

It was an Infiniti.

And not just any Infiniti. It was an Infinity QX4.

That’s right. It wasn’t just the brand of the Evil White Imperialist Patriarchal Capitalist (TM). It was [gasp] an SUV!

Never before have I seen such a politically-incorrect vehicle fraught with such politically-correct bumper stickerage. I almost felt sorry for it. I wanted to pull the owner over and lecture them, but who knows, they might have been totally deranged and pulled a gun on me…

Jay Manifold calls this blatant sucking up.

I’d like to think of it as perspicacious prescience, myself. Anyway, it beats trolling for links.