RelentlesslyOptimistic

United Breaks Guitars: revenge is sweet (and a pretty good tune, too)

Halifax based band Sons of Maxwell flew United Airlines to Nebraska in March of 2008. While on the ground at O'Hare, they heard another passenger exclaim, "My God, they're throwing guitars out there," and could only watch as baggage handlers mistreated their instruments.

After a year of trying to get the airline to pay the $1,200 repair cost, the band released their new song, "United Breaks Guitars" on YouTube. The video was popular even before the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago NBC affiliate covered the story. After the NYTimes did a story this morning, the video's been played nearly 2 million times. Enjoy!

Revisiting Vince Lombardi

From Mike Luckovich  via For Your Entertainment.

COPE

Via Woosk

Burnt Poop Google Map

Especially for Elizabeth and Jer: San Francisco is suffering a crime wave; someone is setting fire to porta-potties! Fortunately an enterprising soul at Dream Not of Today has created a Google porta-potty pyre map to chart the locations of each of the 25 crispy crappers burnt so far.

Via jwz. Photo from Seven Morris.

Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

I said I wasn't going to post, but this was quick and I couldn't resist.

I support Barak Obama a lot!

I'm thrilled to say that I have put most of my life on hold or handed it off in order to join the staff of Obama's Campaign for Change. I'll have no time to blog for a few months, though I'm sure I'll have plenty to say later.

Please volunteer for the campaign!

MoveOn.org is giving away Obama Buttons

Living under the house, part two

Happily, Michael & Kathleen's skunks left voluntarily. In the meantime, though, something has moved in under our house. The stairs that lead from the basement up to the room addition and then outside are lined with the same limestone as the foundation. Recently, after I spread some boric acid, tracks appeared near holes between the limestone blocks on either side of the steps.

To find out what was living there, I first consulted these ingenious little plastic tags. Each tag has sized examples of front and back foot tracks, none of which matched the tracks on the steps. 

So then I turned to the only book of tracks we own. Even though this one's for the Rocky Mountain region, I figured it'd probably have something close. I started by looking at the tracks of rodents, of course. All the examples included drag marks from tails, which ours didn't. I then looked at the tracks of critters without tails, like chipmunks, but still found nothing similar.

I finally just started thumbing through the book, and found an exact match! I know they don't usually live under basement stairs, but stranger things have happened.

We're very excited.

We have otters.

A thrill a minute!

From For Your Entertainment

Hope!

From Frostfirezoo.com

Are we dreaming?

From Tom Toles in the Washington Post