I've never studied French. So I, like many others before me, pronounce "coup d'grace" as "koo de grah" -- an apparently Americanized pronunciation that would really mean "blow of fat" rather than "blow of mercy."

I must laugh at myself sometimes.

I recently complained that the number of popcorn-worthy movies this winter was paltry, but I just found this movie guide that suggests I was merely sucked into a black hole and thus was uninformed of several potentially fun movies.

Mmmmm...popcorn....

Most of the largest known prime numbers are called "Mersenne Primes" -- they are primes that can be expressed as (2^p)-1, where p itself is also a prime number. A new "largest prime" was found in August this year, and if written out would have almost 13 million digits!

It is (2^43112609)-1

A really big number! And did any of you make a big deal about it? Throw a party? Memorize the digits of it? I guarantee that it would be much easier to memorize the 13 million digits of the larges prime than to memorize all the digits of pi!

Still, nothing from any of you. I'm shocked. Bamboozled. Flabbergasted! I'm even flabberboozled! You people need to get out more. Geez.

For those of you who want a new excuse to visit the mall in DC, the Smithsonian Museum of American History has reopened.

Details available at WTOPnews.com

In particular, they will have costumed historical characters every weekend, and weekedays too during the summer.

When I was taking drivers education classes, one of the "rules" was to lock your car before you put it in drive. But why?


In favor of locking:
Maybe in an area where you stop a lot, a carjacker or other villain might open the door when you stop.

Against locking:
If you are in an accident, and unconcious, rescue workers won't be able to get in.


But is there a real, honest to goodness, not based on hyped up fear, safety reason for locking the doors?

Wheel of Time movies/games news

Not sure that I think they can really do this well. If at all. Time will tell.

Today's Questionable Content (online comic strip) asks the important question, "where does a pirate's parrot poo?"

OK, let me get this straight...

Take a deep breath and read this sentence out loud:

Much of the current economic problem is due to a burst housing bubble nightmare in which housing prices dropped while balloon mortgages jumped and millions of people ended up in foreclosure which resulted not only in terrible financial stress for the people involved but for the mortgage institutions as well which ceased having sufficient capital to make loans and the economy skidded to a halt. <--- look! a period! Breath now!

Congress agreed to allocate $700B as a bailout fund for the curent banking problem. Congress agreed to make this allocation (despite having less than no money itself) for the purpose of buying the bad loans from the banks. Now, however, it appears that instead of buying the bad loans, the government is instead going to buy shares of the banks (directly from the banks, not the public stock market), which will infuse money into the banking system that the banks can then use for loans. At least that's the idea. However, the banks are not required to use the money for loans, so instead banks are using the money to buy other troubled banks. Thus the American public is paying for these mergers while the economy is still standing still watching its own toenails grow.

To make matters even more interesting, apparently the IRS or the Treasury or some such institution of wisdom decided to make changes to existing tax regulations. It used to be legal for businesses to buy failing companies as tax shelters -- using the failed company's losses to offset the parent company's profits for tax purposes. About twenty years ago, Congress put limits to this kind of tax shelter. The Treasury has now negated that law, and this makes bank mergers very attractive. So not only will taxpayers foot the $700B which might be used to help banks merge, but those same banks will avoid paying more than $100B in taxes themselves because of those same mergers.

And guess what! Now there is also talk of using some of the $700B to help bailout non-banking industries (like the failing US auto industry).

Most of this is readily Googleable, if you want more info. Below is one link that is tough to find, on the Treasury action.

Washington Post article about the Treasury ruling.

blueeowyn pondered the question, if "RenFest moves, will the new village keep the name Revel Grove"? I said, "Of course not, it will be Tiddington!"

Maybe if they move, they should have a naming contest.

According to this WTOP news article the National Zoo is getting a very expensive, much needed face-lift. The plans include increasing total exhibit space by about 30%, replacing surface parking with a garage, and adding an aerial tram with three stations (like a ski-lift tram).