Getting in touch with my inner dork...

1. Spiffy new laptop running Vista
2. Palm Tungsten e
3. Palm wireless keyboard
4. Palm Treo - leaning up against a Rubik's cube, for added Dork points...

Not pictured: nifty presentation wireless powerpoint advancer/laser pointer.

I am the King of Dorks!

(and with all this wireless radiation going on I plan on developing a nasty brain tumor any day now...)

KaraMia doesn't care about this post...

(and neither do most of you, but I don't care!)

I've been giggling since February. I finally got over it last week, and then the draft happened and it started all over again.

First, here's what got me giggling back in February...

Meet Adalius Thomas.





Adalius Thomas is one big mother-truckin' linebacker who can drop into coverage, stuff the run, and has speed off the edge. He does it all. He's played something like eight different positions at one time or another.

He was the cream of the free agent class this off-season, and my New England Patriots did something completely out of character. They opened up the checkbook and put a push on for the big stud.

So that had me giggling.

And then they went nuts.

Donte Stallworth, erstwhile Saint and Eagle, and certified burner (4.2 40 time in college). Sure, probably a bit of a head case. And some involvement in the League's substance abuse program, which is never a good sign... But... 4.2 in the 40!

They added his former college teammate Kelley Washington (6'3 with speed... 6'3 with speed... 6'3 with speed), and then brought in the next Troy Brown (speedy, smart, undersized with a huge heart), in Wes Welker. (Plus the guy absolutely killed the Patriots in a game at Miami this year... Getting him off the Dolphins was a two-fer).

That's three pretty good new wide receivers for a team that was one first down away from the Super Bowl. By now, I'm giggling every time I drive by The Razor (Gillette Stadium's wicked cool unofficial nickname).

And the draft was still coming, and the Pats were holding two first rounders (they absolutely robbed at gunpoint the Seahawks, getting a first for Deion Branch...).


They came into the draft with some real needs on defense. Their Linebackers are getting old, and got abused by the Colts last year, and they need a defensive back, where Safety Rodney Harrison is still a force, but is getting limited by injuries.



So they go and draft Harrison's replacement, right down to nasty temperament, Brandon Meriweather. Meriweather's the guy who stomped on another player during the Miami-Florida International game. He's a little smaller than Rodney (Rodney's 6'1 and 220, Meriweather's 5'10 and 190), but he hits bigger than his size.



The Pats traded their second '07 first rounder for the 49'ers '08 first rounder which looks to be a decent deal if they didn't have anyone else of 1st round caliber on their draft board. They also gave away their 3rd rounder to Oakland, for Oakland's '08 3rd, and some other flotsam pick.



The announcement of the Oakland trade was interesting, because there had been rumors all day about Oakland trading Randy Moss, their disgruntled superstar. Since it didn't happen with the 3rd round swap, I figured the deal was off the table, as there was no way you can get Randy Moss... That's Randy Moss, he of the 6'4 frame and blazing speed and fierce temperament, for some low second-day draft picks...



But oh my God. Coming back from dropping the boy off at CCD, word hit the radio that Moss was in Foxboro, undergoing a physical. He had apparently agreed to contract concessions, and was coming to New England for a 4th round pick. A fourth round pick. Four.



Oh



My



God.







Rumors about Moss had been floating around the Patriots for months, back to the middle of last season. Everybody pooh-poohed them, saying Belichick would never bring in someone like Moss. An obvious malcontent, a locker room problem.

But remember Corey Dillion? He was an absolute @sshole his final season at Cincinnati, a real cancer in the locker room, and he came to the Patriots and got the message.

Doug Gabriel, Moss' erstwhile Raider teammate? He came to New England, didn't get with the program, and was shown the door. I don't think Belichick's all that sentimental. I think he's a football coach, looking to win football games, and is going to do it with the best players he can get who buy into his system. And Randy Moss, for all you can say about him, wants to win football games.

I almost feel bad for the Colts. Almost.

Maybe I'll stop giggling by July. But I don't think so...

Dumb Enviro of the Week: Sheryl Crow

If there's anything that makes it difficult to be an environmentalist (other than Gino’s continued Troglodytism), it's when a celerity says something very, very silly, proving once more there is absolutely no connection between the ability to make good public policy and the ability to play chords while standing up.

Today's example: Sheryl Crow. Ms. Crow, the erstwhile Armstrong marriage-wrecker, has shared her environmental vision of the world. Apparently, Sheryl's very concerned about de-forestation and paper production. So on April 19th she blogged about a couple of possible ways to cut down on wasteful paper usage.

No, no, not reining in CD packaging so there are no more 13-page foldout posters inside CDs, it's about our wasteful toilet paper usage:

I propose a limitation be put on how many sqares (SIC) of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.

Sheryl, Sheryl, Sheryl.

Look, I don't know what you're eating, but when normal people eat food and poop, well, sometimes it gets a little messy. And one square of TP ain't going to cut it. Sometimes, after a particularly hot chili, why, I bring an extra roll in there.

How about this - why don't you cut down the size of your entourage when you're on tour? Take a look at her typical tour contract. It specifies parking space for three tractor trailers, four buses, and six cars. Now, compare that to the mighty Jethro Tull, who require only one 45 foot bus with a trailer. (Ian and the boys also have a contract rider specifying that all unused catering food go to a local soup kitchen. And he doesn't feel the need to pat himself on the back about it...)

But really, what do you expect, she's a rock star, not a Mensa member. Here's what she wrote after a visit to New Orlean's 9th Ward:

"-the irony is that many of those who left, were happy to leave- they were living in conditions so unbearable anyway, life away from New Orleans is preferable...so maybe our concern for a displaced community is...misplaced?"

Which makes her sound a lot like Rush Limbaugh. We shouldn't be too concerned about folks who lost their homes and possessions, because, well, their homes and possessions kind of sucked anyway? Actually, it's not Limbaugh, it's more like Marie Antoinette, who responded that the peasants who were out of bread and hungry should eat cake instead.

Actually, Sheryl's now saying the whole toilet paper thing, as well as her other suggestion that we not use paper napkins and wipe our mouths on disposable sleeves, were jokes. I can see that. And lord knows, I wouldn't want the Drudgereport to be running excerpts from my blog everyday. People may take things out of context. (or what’s worse, may not!)

But this is a teachable moment: actually, Sheryl's got a point there, buried within her nanny-like tut-tutting about our apparent wasteful hygiene habits. Trees are wonderful "eaters" of carbon, sucking it out of the atmosphere and using it to grow. So we like trees. The rainforests and forested areas are what we call “carbon sinks” because they “sink” carbon back into the ground. You remove too many trees and you upset the Earth’s natural carbon cycle even more.

But, actually, trees are best at sucking up carbon when they're growing. So paper companies which cut down a lot of trees, but also plant more to replace the trees than they cut down, aren’t as bad as you may think, Sheryl. They produce a lot of fast-growing, young trees to suck up carbon. And unless you're incinerating the waste, the paper ends up, at worst, sitting in a landfill, becoming part of the earth again.

So we shouldn't go around talking about people using less toilet paper and risking serious cases of monkey-butt. We should talk about rules for responsible forestry and requirements that companies practice sustainable wood harvesting techniques. There’s a cost to those linen napkins too, you know, in terms of water used to wash them and the electricity needed to dry them.

And really, trust me on this. You want me to use as much TP as possible. Really.

David Halberstram, RIP

Author David Halberstram was killed in a car accident in California yesterday.

I've only read two of his books, "The Fifties" and "The Education of a Coach" (about Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick), but two's enough to know we've lost a giant of letters, and a wonderful example of a person with a view not clouded by political affiliation or partisan zeal, but instead by a realistic assessment of who we are as a people and the breadth of our potential as a nation.

Look at the commencement address he gave at the University of Michigan in the spring of 2000.

You are fortunate enough to live in an affluent, blessed society, not merely the strongest but the freest society in the world. In this country as in no other that I know of ordinary people have the right to reinvent themselves to become the person of their dreams, and not to live as prisoners of a more stratified, more hierarchical past. We have the right to choose: to choose if we so want, any profession, a venue to live and work in, any name. As much as any thing else this is what separates us from the old world, the old world across the Atlantic and the old world across the Pacific, where people often seemed to be doomed to a fate and a status determined even before their birth. We have the words of the great physicist I. I. Rabi to remind us of that special freedom, of the privilege which comes with choice. When he received the Nobel Prize, Rabi was asked by a journalist what he thought: I think he said, that if I had lived in the old country I would have been a tailor.

I do not think the stunning success of this society took place by happenstance. Both by chance—and by choice—I have become something of a historian of the second half of the twentieth century. I graduated from high school in 1951, and from college in 1955, and my professional career, throughout the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam took me through the stormiest years of much of the last 50 years. And if there is one great truth which categorizes that period in America it is that this nation has systematically become more and more inclusionary in race, gender and ethnicity—that we have made a constant and increasingly successful effort to make the playing field as level as possible, and to open doors once firmly closed.

When the question of inclusion or exclusion, one of the most basic to the concept of a state, has arisen over the years—when the status quote has been challenged—not every one has been in accord with the premise of a more inclusionary society, whether in sports, in the military or in the economy. There have always been doubters and they were always convinced, that the old ways were the best, that this impulse to open America up, much of it court-driven would somehow weaken us, that newer Americans were not as worthy as old and that the different groups hungering for a fairer share of the good life were not as worthy as those who had held power before them.

I am old enough to remember when a great many influential Americans were absolutely convinced that Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays would fail in the great arena of sports, and that our military would be significantly weakened by the integration of the armed force. You might like to wonder that when you think of Michael Jordan or Colin Powell, and their respective brilliant careers. These doubters, those who favored the status quo (in many cases it should be noted, because it favored them) also believed that the descendants of slavery who had worked so hard for so little for so long and who had been voiceless in our society for so long would somehow weaken our economy, if given a fair place in it.

The truth is, not surprisingly, that this effort to be inclusionary has made us in all ways a better, fairer and stronger society. And as for the economy being weakened by being more inclusionary I should mention to you that the year that I graduated from high school, 1951, the Dow stood at 250. Yes, that's right, 250.

I believe that this great American ideal, to be more just, to be more inclusionary, to offer to the children of others the educational possibility we would want for our own children, has given us not just strength but much of our common purpose. We still believe that we can improve ourselves and make this a better and more complete nation: we may argue with each other about the rules in the social contract, we can dispute each other's arguments, we are often cantankerous. But slowly steadily we are on our way to becoming the world's first universal culture. No wonder then that our popular culture has such power throughout the world—it is something that people all over the world can understand.

Looking at the commencement address he gave at Tulane in 2003, it's essentially the same, but with a nod toward the contemporary issues of the War on Terror and the occupation of Iraq:

But I would ask you today not to be fearful--we are not a fearful nation, we have never been one, and the members of our own families who settled in this country often after the most difficult and arduous of journeys were most assuredly not fearful people. Instead I want you to look forward to the essentially rich future which lies ahead of you, the blessed future which goes with the great good fortune of being a college educated citizen of this bountiful and most dynamic country.

This is something missed by those whose modus operandi is to complain first about America and ask questions later. We have problems, sure. But give me a country that doesn't have problems? Don't give me some two-bit European country with a social class system out of the 1600's. There is no place on this planet that matches the opportunity we provide, and the results we achieve.

It's something John Winger hit square on the head. We're the Mutts. We're the wretched refuse kicked out of every decent country in the world. But mutts are stronger than purebreds, because mutts mix the best traits and leave out the bad teeth and hemophilia you see in the British Royal family.

And that's what Halberstram was talking about.

And somehow, I think he would've been please to see the connection between Bill Murray's character in Stripes and his own Pulitzer Prize winning career...

PS - Yeltsin, Halberstram, who's next?

Lilac Sunrise

The lilac bushes have started budding.

Morning coffee on the porch is not far away. We've started grilling again, and baseball season's just kicked off.

Welcome back, spring.

A belated Happy Belligerent Americans Day

I forgot to post this yesterday, but it's a tradition I have to recognize April 19th, Belligerent Americans Day.

1689: Massachusetts Governor Edmond Andros is booted for being an autocratic @sshole.

1775: Mob of ruffian farmers on Lexington Green start shooting on Redcoats (who are the army of the country of which the ruffian farmers are citizens, by the way) as the Redcoats are in transit to Concord to arrest some fellows who were plotting against the Government.

1861: Mobs of ruffian city folks riot in Baltimore, attack Union troops on their way to Washington DC. Four union soldiers and nine civilians are killed.

1898: Congress grants President McKinley's request for War with Spain.

1917: The S.S. Magnolia encountered a German U-Boat and fired what is believed to be the first American shots fired in WWI.

1993: The government storms the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Seventy-four religious extremists die in resulting conflagration / mass suicide / murder.

1995: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols explode a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, including 19 children.

Now, if I were Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I wouldn't get out of bed today...

I am just so damn proud of the USA...

I just read a story from the London Daily Mail that made me so gosh darn proud of my country that I knew I had to share it with you.

And to provide you with the appropriate soundtrack for your reading, here's a little patriotic music to read by:

(the good part starts at 0:33)



Okay, now on with the story.

Well, it seems that folks in old blighty have started to take after their corpulent younger cousins and obesity is quickly becoming common over there as well.

This has all the usual side effects; poor health, fat out of shape kids, and the breakdown of the family as people eat too much fast food, cats and dogs living together, fire and brimstone being rained from heaven, all that end of the world crap.

Now, for whatever reason they cremate a large proportion of dead people in England (I would assume land constraints, but I don't know so I'm not going to guess), like 2/3rds.

And this pandemic obesity is causing a problem with their crematoria. You see, the average English coffin is 16 to 20 inches across. Well, that's before Burger King. So their crematoria are built to handle that sized coffin. Problem is, there's a growing segment (the segment is growing, as well as each of the people in that segment, don't you know) of their population which is requiring coffins up to 40 inches wide.

Wide load, indeed.

So, what's this got to do with America? Well, in retrofitting their crematorium "fleet", English companies are having to turn to American companies:

"Among them Lewisham in South London has ordered a 44 inch cremator from the United States, where the world's highest rates of obesity means the funeral trade is geared up to meet the problem."

Alright! We're the world's leading exporter of fatass-fryers!

Let's hear it for the good-ole, corpulent, USA!

A World Without Bee Stings?

A World Without Honey?

Actually, it's worse than that. There's growing evidence that something very odd is going on with bee populations across the United States and Europe. In the past month or so Drudge has picked up a couple of stories about recent the growing phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) where bee colonies pull a Roanoke and disappear. Some possible culprits of CCD are parasites and immune deficiencies caused by pesticides. Another possible vector, according to studies done in England, are cell phones. The numbers are pretty scary, with massive losses in bee populations in 22 states.

Either way, it's fairly clear something is going on, and there's a decent chance that we're more responsible than not. Now before you go all troglodyte [Gino: ;)] bees are crucial parts of agriculture. While we've been busy creating artificial pesticides and toxic-runoff producing fertilizers, we haven't figured out how to effectively replace the simple bee's role in pollinating crops. If bees go, well, we go.

Here's Einstein's take on it:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Look. I'm a Republican. I'm a conservative, in the classical sense. I don't get all weepy about calling out evil and facing it (Nazi Germany, Iraq, the Soviet Union) and I don't think that it's particularly productive or sustainable for the Government to be relied on for sustenance, education, and direction.

I believe in God and I think he's as real as a rock, but even if I didn't I believe that the idea some overarching and eternally true moral sense is required for human beings to live together and not kill each other. I voted for GW Bush twice and I cried when Reagan died. I'm red state, baby.

But my party has got itself all fricked up over the environment, and the love of money, and the debasement of quality living, and I can't stand it anymore.

You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, and something is not right here.

It's time to slow down. It's time to stop thinking that newer is automatically better. It's time to stop paving the green places, start reinvesting in our cities, recreate our neighborhoods and... and... and this is the toughie: turn off the goddamn TV and have dinner as a family.

For my conservative friends: you claim membership in a creed that cites personal responsilbility and minimalist government intervention. The flip side of that is a requirement that we be stewards of our own lives -- we don't believe in the nanny state so we work, we take care of our own family, we, in short, take care of our own business.

Well, this big world of ours, this is our business too. This is all part of stewardship. We have a responsibility to ourselves, and our kids, and our kids' kids, to understand what we're doing to the world and, as best we can, minimize our footprints. And we don't do that when in the name of efficiency or economy we buy cheap crap made oversees by slave labor for companies that piss and moan every time you try to make them clean up their messes.

We don't practice stewardship when we say "oh, the Earth is so big and nothing I do can have much impact." Multiply that statement times 6 billion and you see the problem.

We don't practice stewardship when we, in the name of convenience, surrender the moral and ethical programming of our children's minds to the folks who put "Two and a Half Men" on TV.

Too many in the Republican party have come to associate "conservatism" with bowing and scraping to big business. Efficiency is exalted as the end. Big is good. Cheap is good. Stock market's up? GREAT! Does it matter that it's up because the five biggest companies on the Dow have undertaken "downsizing" initiatives to inflate profits at the expense of thousands and thousands of jobs? Ah, the hell with those folks who got canned, I'm gonna get an extra $0.04 on that quarterly dividend...

Times are changing. Are you ready?

What do you think you get for frequent flier miles?

Have you guys heard about the Rocketplane XP? Being built by a private company in Oklahoma, made up of a shadowy bunch of ex-aerospace industry guys (one had experience on the SR-71 blackbird program and has done contracts for DARPA, the secret hi-tech defense guys) and political hacks (a bunch of ex-NASA guys, and the chairman of the board is a two-time Republican Convention Delegate), the Rocketplane should be lifting off sometime in late 2007 or early 2008 carrying four suckers who pay $250,000 to go 100 kilometers into space and experience weightlessness for 3-4 minutes.

The technology looks neat, if somewhat limited in its application. It's pushed by two conventional turbofan jet engines, and one kerosene-fueled rocket engine related to the Atlas Rocket engines. Only 43 feet long (smaller than a 8 person private jet) this puppy will get to Mach 3.5, reach a minimum apogee of 34 miles, upside down so you can look out the roof and see Mama Earth, and then land at a normal airfield in unpowered flight mode (ie, you're gliding... Yeah, that sounds fun.).

Anyway, they've got a fairly developed website where they solicit your requests to be separated from a quarter million of your hard earned money. They've got some interesting schematics of some of the technological features of the craft, some which raise more questions than provide answers.

For example: The ventilation system is designed to provide clean, dry air to the cabin, contains a chemical scrubber to remove CO2, and is specially designed to filter out "any foreign items such as dirt, hair, or vomit that may be released in the cabin".

Umm...

Okay.

I can see some concern about vomit. That makes sense; you're going to be pulling 3-4 G's, and that may trigger a re-run of lunch. And dirt, well, sure, whatever. I mean, I would assume they're not doing the whole clean room thing that made John Kerry look like such an ass when he visited NASA, but I would be concerned if they're expecting too much dirt. Maybe they should vacuum more often. And, you know, "dirt" is sometimes a euphemism for something else, something a little more squishy than what we usually think of as dirt, but instead of counting on a filter to take that stuff out of the air, maybe they should just take a tip from this person, and issue each passenger their own Depends.

It's that middle thing on the list that's giving me a little problem. Hair? They're expecting hair to be released in the vehicle? Maybe they are expecting to have Lisa Nowak (from link in that last paragraph) and want to protect against the stray public hairs that come loose during groovy zero-G lovemaking. And you new know when Clarence Thomas may make a reservation and you'd hate to have a repeat of that whole "who put a public hair on my diet coke" thing.

Of course, this isn't the only way you can get into space. Over at Space Travellers you can book a flight on a Mig-25 Foxbat. That baby'll get you 15-20 miles up, about the right height to see the curve of the earth and high enough that you're wicked screwed when your assembled - by - disgruntled - commies - after - vodka - break aircraft falls apart.

By the way, "travellers" isn't a typo. The folks who run the website can't spell, but they can send you into space. Go figure.

Anywho, there are a number of adventures to be had from the old Soviet space program, but not that flight to the International Space Station Lance Bass was supposed to take a bunch of years ago. You can though, for the price of either $5.50 US$ or $5,500 (again, these guys should hire an editor, it would give me a little more confidence in their abilities) book a trip to Kazakhstan this October to watch the liftoff of a Soyuz rocket bound for the ISS.

For that dough you get accommodations at a 3 star hotel (I'm guessing it's no worse than the Day's Inn in Durham, NC), and all "transportations" in Moscow and Star City (the old Soviet kosmodrome in Bakinour, Kazakhstan (including "economy class" airfare from Moscow to Baiknour... Economy class Russian airlines? Boy, that sounds fun...)

You also get to watch preparations and training, and have a special seat in the VIP section of the stands watching the liftoff. Again, this is Russian space technology we're talking about here, so remember to bring your umbrella to deflect flaming chunks of rocket should the thing blow up on the pad.

Oh, by the way, handicapped folks need not apply, as the homebase for the pinnacle of commie technology doesn't have any elevators.

Me, I'll stick with driving fast and watching Borat again today, thank you very much.

Hello, been a while!

Sometimes when you're up to your ass in alligators it's hard to remember you started wanting to drain the swamp.

It's hearing season up here in Boss-town, so I'm very busy scuttling from oak-paneled room to oak-paneled room, kicking @ss and taking names. Oh yes, the forces of sin and inequity (that is, nasty polluters and perpetrators of sprawl and bad development) quake when they see the mighty Kal and his cohorts coming.

Well, maybe not so much. I am at an inherent disadvantage with the malefactors of great wealth: I can't golf, and I don't like to drink in public...

(My drinking is all done at night, in the dark, while caressing the lovely, cold blue-steeled barrel of my .38.)

So, some personal news: I've become an uncle for the first time, as Brother-in-Law #2 has finally spawned. See, the wife and I are the oldest in our families, and up to now none of our combined five brothers and sisters had seen it fit to settle down and fulfil their biological imperatives.

Wifeypooh has a bundle of brothers and sisters, but the one closest to her age is, at 34, a confirmed bachelor. I think he spent way too much time with Wifeypooh growing up and has seen what a miserable bastard I am -OUCH!- (boy, she moves quietly when she wants to)...

Anyway, he's not going to get us nieces or nephews anytime soon. And Brotherdear is a Stage 4 commitment phobe with a nice dose of LookingForMsPerfect-itis, so while he's been in a couple of fairly long term relationships, I have my doubts (although I like his current paramour... She seems to call him on his shit, which he severely needs...) But I'm not holding my breath with respect to him.

The other siblings are all fairly young (Sister-in-Law#2 was 5 when I started dating Wifeypooh about 100 years ago), so we've had to wait a while, but it finally happened today, with a little girl coming this afternoon.

And I'm so glad it was B-I-L #2 who had the kid, as he was the giver of several loud and obnoxious baby toys for which I now get to return the favor, bwa ha ha...

Well, off to do some work. Thanks for checking in!

And another thing...

I am proud to announce that if you google "Layfette House Foxboro", my "review" of 2/14/07 comes up number one.

For those of you who don't remember it, my opinion of this particularly restaurant (and to reinforce it for any google-bots that happen by):

Layfette House sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks Layfette House sucks....

Thank you for your support.

The Soundtrack of my life...

The best decade of music ever...



(Argh! Frustration! Supposed to be playing 14 videos from my YouTube "80's Radio" playlist! Why is it only playing the first one?!? Gagghg!!!

Well, anyway here's the link to the playlist, if you're interested. Ciao!)

Help!

Staying home with sick kid...

Watching Spy Kids 3-D...

Brain shirnking....

Help!

Google Paper, what a deal!

You guys been on gmail yet? They've got a new feature, where they'll mail your email to you.

What a deal! If you don't really like electronic mail, they'll send you your emails through the US Postal system, printed out on paper!

For free!

How can they afford this, you ask?

Well, they'll include ads on the back of the emails, in large, red type.

Still, sounds like a wicked deal, doesn't it? I had a few ex-bosses who would have loved this option, as they seemed to just print out and read all their emails anyway.

And over on Googlesightseeing.com they've got a story about the great new feature on from Google, live satellite imagery on GoogleEarth!

But the more I thought about this, the more worried I became. I mean, wouldn't this be a perfect tool for terrorists or something? What the heck are the folks at Google thinking?

So I called the State Department and told them what the folks over at Google were up to. I mean, not the mail thing. That's cool. But the whole real-time satellite imagery open to anyone. That's no good. Jeez, those guys could launch cruise missiles or something!

Oh, yeah. Happy April 1st.