Oh Wow …

As this is the plane I’ll fly on when I finally head for Japan, I’m very pleased:

This is the carbon-fiber Boeing 787 Dreamliner at 150% service load during the ultimate wing load test required for FAA certification. During the test, the wingtips underwent 25 feet of vertical deflection without failing. Engineering is awesome. [Boeing via Wired]

Boeing 787 Dreamliner : Ultimate Wing Load Test [Jalopnik]

Rollen Sie Heraus Das Faß

The fine village of Fucking, Austria, now has a fine beverage named for it!

“In German the word for a lager beer is a Helles beer, so we have also patented the name Fucking Hell, which means lager from Fucking, of course. I don’t understand why the patents office think of something else. They must have dirty minds.”

We think kids would be a lot more interested in geography if they knew about this.

Brewer Names Beer for Austrian Town [Newser, via Blogenfreude]

Update: Silent Creative Partner asks where Fucking, Austria, is exactly, so we’ve enlisted Google Maps to help:

Read more »

Mitre Market…

Catholic League President Bill Donohue buys an NYT ad: “The Times continues to editorialize about the ‘pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent.” [Towleroad]

A Teabagger Fable

Bill Hemrick loaned Tea Party Nation fifty large to bring Sarah Palin to their Nashville convention. Nice Mr. Hemrick.

Read more »

Drill, Barry, Drill…

Fulfilling his pledge to implement the 2008 Republican platform, Obama opens 167 million acres of ocean to offshore oil drilling. [NYT]

My First Guest Tonight is George Gobel

Sarah Palin hosts her first Fox News show Thursday night. Much to the surprise of the people on it.

LL Cool J upset with Palin, Fox [CNN]

Update: Fox obliges…

Read more »

A Brief Guide to the Nature of Our Pathology

Helen Smith, “a psychologist specializing in forensic issues” in Knoxville, Tennessee, poses today’s question:

Why are liberals unable to sympathize with conservatives? I offer three possibilities.

1. Lies about Iraq, lies about torture, lies about “Death Panels,” lies about climate change, lies about the Census, lies about upper-class tax cuts, lies about the Senate Parliamentarian, lies about the “Death Tax,” lies about the job performance of emergency-management administrators, lies about commonly used parliamentary procedures, lies about the birthplace and political views of democratically elected Presidents, lies about the Congressional Budget Office, lies about “defending” legally recognized cohabitation, lies about arbitrarily incarcerated foreign nationals, lies about decorated war veterans, lies about the nature of human sexual desire, lies about the political ambitions of evening cable-news hosts, lies about the agency of former Presidents in the dissolution of Communist nation-states, lies about the journalistic integrity of politically driven cable channels, lies about the size of racist protest crowds, lies about the efficiency of government programs that have been starved of revenue, lies about scientific theories of species development, lies about Leviticus being elective, lies about the racism of tanning-bed taxes, lies about plans to move to Costa Rica, lies about the lies they told yesterday, and lies about the nutritional value of ketchup.

Read more »