https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRIlxQGni8

No time to work up a formal introduction, so we’re going to dump you straight into our Open Thread/Door-Slamming Concerto for Sarah Palin’s final speech as governor, live from Fairbanks. If you’re near a TV, CNN’s got the show. Otherwise you’re on your own.

Some of his best work – 7/10 cardboard boxes.

Title: “Fahrenheit 451”

Author: Ray Bradbury

Rank: 93

Blurb: None. And by this point, none needed.

Review: “If you are a thinker, Faherenheit 451 is book for you. You will also want to read Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe.”

Customers Also Bought: “Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller

Footnote: Given how the Collected Doorstops of Ayn Rand have been showing up in the Amazon Top 100 lately, we wondered whether there was some bizarre wingnut angle to Bradbury’s classic moving some inventory. False alarm: Bradbury himself — who turns 89 in August — has been making the rounds, with interviews, a new graphic novel of 451, and an appearance at San Diego’s Comic-Con on Saturday.

So we’ll take this moment to give props to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDnet, who came up with the best line about the recent fracas over Amazon deleting books from its reading devices: “If it had been Fahrenheit 451 instead of 1984 or Animal Farm, the Kindles would have probably burst into flames.”

Fahrenheit 451 [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

John Cornyn (R-TX)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP9By-fHG4s

Apparently he’s not aware that India is our ally.

All this to save a plane we don’t use, especially in the rain.

Poor WorldNetDaily. They’ve been flogging the issue for months, raising money for billboards, even producing a new DVD — and when their moment of glory finally arrives, they’re left out in the cold:

On a story that no news organization has followed more closely than WND – questions surrounding Barack Obama’s birth certificate – one of the Internet’s top news portals, Google News, is now placing dozens of sources and even left-leaning blogs higher in the search rankings than WND.

Shocking! that Google would give Glengarry placement to news sites with Glengarry audiences. Less Shocking! is that WND is treating it as a conspiracy even more threatening than President Mombassa himself:

“In more than 12 years of Internet experience, I have never seen anything like this,” said [WND Editor Joseph] Farah. “As of today, all the major search engines systematically began scrubbing our content. This happened at the very moment this story broke into the mainstream.”

From a geek perspective, the thought of Microsoft and Google cooperating on anything is even more hilarious than WND styling itself as a “news organization”. Game over, folks: the shark has jumped.

And the long-gestating Birther Meme is about to die.

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They thought Clouded Leopards were extinct in Bangladesh.  Eh – not so much: