Miscellanea

-- At what height can you drop a steak into the Earth's atmosphere so that it will be cooked by the time it hits the ground? Technically, it can't be done, although you can get the outside of it pretty well charred before the charred layer is stripped off by turbulence. You can achieve the same results by bugging your dad when he's grilling.

-- Remember those great days when the White House responded to the online petition to explore creating a Death Star with humor, sending back a memo with lots of Star Wars laughs and acting like cool folks who got the joke? Yeah, not any more. The new limit probably won't stop the goofy petitions but I imagine will at least keep some of the other embarrassing ones -- like this one asking the White House to tell Harry Reid's Senate to do its job -- out of the news. I can't disagree; if there were 100,000 people who cared that much about whether or not Senators did their job we'd have a lot of different Senators.

-- Hey Lance, don't go away mad. Just go away.

-- At the bookstore the other day, I saw a book called The Essential Chomsky, collecting some writings of linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Curiously, Mr. Whipple was nowhere in sight.