You know, it’s just not a party until someone shows up with a lamp shade on her head.

No, really, we were having a hard time hearing her bark, so we set her up with a surgically-attached megaphone.

No, really, she’s going to a costume party as Queen Elizabeth.

OK, fine. On Sunday, not long after I got back from Michigan, she tore her foot open a little bit near her upper pad on her left leg. The dog next door started barking, Canis Minor^* chased after her (there’s a fence between the yards and the dogs love mixing it up with the fence between them), and turned a minor injury into a pretty big and gruesome gash, 10 cm long and quite deep. A trip to the animal hospital later (of course this had to happen on the one day our regular vet was closed, so we get charged extra for the emergency) and she had the dressing and the collar on. She also came home stoned out of her mind from the procedure, which was actually pretty funny. She came down after a few hours and is now more like her normal self.

That’s why the live video chat was late, and I appreciate the well-wishes from all the listeners. CM is feeling a lot better, but the dressing stays on for several more days. She’ll be hopping around quite a bit for a while, but she doesn’t seem to mind the collar. She’s a weird dog.

Evidently — and I do mean evidently — there is no "too much". And for this, we have a threefer:

1) The Bush White House has politicized the EPA so much that it is making it very difficult for the agency to protect citizens from toxic polluters.

2) What does this Administration do when they find someone in the government who supports the people over industry? Oh, we know the answer to this all too well: they fire them. After all, it’s better to have a company dumping toxic chemicals into rivers and lakes for a half century than it is to protect humans.

3) This one may be the most incredible: The Bush Administration doesn’t want meat packers to voluntarily test cattle for Mad Cow disease. They’re afraid of "false positives" upsetting consumers. Hey, here’s a thought: regulate the testing so it’s done correctly. Of course, given the mutilation of science done by this White House, I wouldn’t trust them to regulate anything fairly, but wouldn’t that make at least a bit more sense than trying to gag the packers? The trumping of corporations over consumers is so blatantly obvious by the Bush Administration that this is positively Orwellian.

I assume that our chocolate rations will be increased from 30 to 20 grammes any time now.

The past seven years have been one of seemingly unending downward spirals into recession, far-right control of the government, loss of liberty, and nothing but non-stop lies from the Bush Administration. I can only hope the damage they can do to America over the next 7 months is minimal, but even if Bush sat that time out in the Oval Office playing tiddlywinks, the damage is done, and will continue to grow (at $20 million per hour).

January 20, 2009 cannot come fast enough.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars for the purging article and the Mad Cow article.

Microsoft has finally released their long-awaited World Wide Telescope software today. It uses vast amounts of data from telescopes across and above the world, allowing you to pan and zoom across the cosmos much like Google Earth lets you view our own planet.

I’d love to post a review of it, tell you about it’s flaws and successes, but I have a Mac, and I don’t have Bootcamp. So for now I’ll go the safe route and assume it simply has huge software security issues, and running it will triple your spam, crash your computer, and give away your social security number to hackers.

If I have time later today I’ll download it on Mrs. BA’s PC and see how it goes. Stay Tuned.

The web is abuzz about a NASA announcement of "the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years".

There’s speculation running rampant, that they’ve found aliens, or an asteroid that will wipe out the Earth, or whatever.

Folks, think. If NASA had that news, would they make a pre-announcement stating they found something they’ve been looking for for five decades? No, they wouldn’t. They would gather professionals, work on how to release the news, then talk to members of the press, probably just a few, and keep extremely tight wraps on it.

They wouldn’t bellow, "We found something, and it’s really cool, and we’re not talking until next week lalalalalala!"

Without doubt this is some very interesting astronomical discovery, but not something that will wipe out life, or change our view of humanity in the Universe forever. It just wouldn’t be released this way. Bear in mind that the press pre-release mentions the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which is essentially blind to incoming asteroids, and wouldn’t be the right instrument to use to see them. Obviously, whatever this discovery is it involves X-rays, and those only come from a handful of sources. But they’re very interesting objects astronomically, so whatever this thing is I’m sure it will still be really cool. Just not aliens-invading cool.

So stay tuned. I’m signed up for the telecon, and I’ll report on this as soon as I have any real information.

Comedy Central has an interesting table up: which Presidential candidate would make the best companion for Doctor Who^*? Turns out, in their opinion, it depends on the Doctor.

McCain gets three nods, while Obama gets four, including being on board with David Tennant. I dunno. I’d like to see Nader complaining about the unsafe features of the TARDIS (no safety belts?), or John Edwards survive a typical crash landing without one hair out of place. Of course, Clinton would ignore all of the Doctor’s advice (the Time Lord is an expert after all).

But McCain? Part of the charm of the show is that the Doctor is older than everyone else.

Tip o’ the Sontaran spacesuit helmet to BABloggee dj empirical.

BABloggee Bret Hall sent me a note linking to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article following up on my earlier diatribe against antivaxers. The article talks about a new outbreaks of measles, and people could potentially die:

The disease - which is completely preventable through vaccination - can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis and death. It is most dangerous to the very young, the very old and people with compromised immune systems, such as chemotherapy patients.

While no one has died in this latest outbreak, 20% were hospitalized. An outbreak in Milwaukee in 1989-’90 killed five children.

Since 2000, one in every 250 Americans who got the disease died.

I’m very glad no one has died, but there is a very ominous implied use of the word "yet" in that article. Five kids died earlier? One in 250 overall die?

And why would someone not immunize their child?

In this latest outbreak, two-thirds of children between 16 months and 19 years old had not been immunized because of religious or personal beliefs.

Perfect. This is what Jenny McCarthy is advocating. This is what our Presidential candidates may cause (especially if they purposely ignore the advice of experts, who are of course too "elite").

Do I sound angry? Duh. Bad science kills, and some people are all-too-willingly embracing it.

The X-files movie trailer is up on YouTube, c/o Gia:

W00t! It looks great! Gia, who posted it, has a couple of screencaps, too. Gillian Anderson is still teh hawt, even maybe more so now. I loved that she was called "the thinking man’s sex symbol" back when the show was on. Even though the actress herself has a touch of the woo, Dana Scully was all science and a scorcher because of it. [Swooning sigh]. Obviously, Gia agrees.