Can you spell "STOP"?



Wow! Very good, sweetie. Can you do it again?



Nice! How about "MAP"?



Daddy is as proud as she is.

Weather in Nashville continues to impress. Today, a hail storm




The bad news is our cars have numerous little dimple-dents in them. The good news is that our mileage will no doubt go up. Golfball effect from golfball-sized hail. With the price of gas and all, it might be a blessing!

Headline today on the British Daily Telegraph:

The UN has left us to die, say fleeing [__________]

Fill in the blank:

A) Bosnians
B) Sudanese
C) Syrians
D) Rwandans
E) All of the above....and then some.

Just swatted a bug that was on my kitchen wall, and was surprised by the resulting bright green flash of light.

A firefly! There are a lot of them around our house.

The cicadas are pretty much gone now though.

Lower Saxony's agriculture minister says initial tests have confirmed that locally grown beansprouts are the likely cause for Germany's E. coli outbreak that has killed 22 people and sickened hundreds.

Time to irradiate! Seems like a no-brainer to me, but it has that scary "rad" word in it.

And General Francisco Franco is still dead.

Nothing exciting. We seem to be holding onto the 1 million jobs created since the start of the year, but no new ones are showing up.

I posted this comment over at National Review:

Here is my crude take on this. The income tax system is responsible for covering public debt _plus_ intragovernmental debt. This is why these two obligations are combined. The Social Security and Medicare program tax systems are responsible for their unfunded entitlement obligations _minus_ intragovernmental debt. This is because the intragovernmental debt for the most part represents the money that the income tax system owes to the Social Security and Medicare tax systems. The government as a whole is responsible for public debt plus unfunded entitlement obligations. This is the sum of the obligations of all the tax systems, and is clearly independent of intragovernmental debt. So whether or not you think intragovernmental debt is important depends on what you are looking at.

Symbolically:

IncomeTaxDebt =PubDebt + IntraGovDebt
EntitleDebt =UnfundEnt - IntraGovDebt
TotalDebt =IncomeTaxDebt + EntitleDebt
=(PubDebt + IntraGovDebt) + (UnfundEnt - IntraGovDebt)
=PubDebt + UnfundEnt

By the way, I liked the Captcha I got:



but there are two "a"s in Klaatu. Everyone knows that.

I am seeing more and more single handle shower controls which allow for temperature regulation, but which have no facility at all to adjust the flow rate! They are either on full-force or off. Sleek! Modern! Idiotic!

h/t John Cook.