Turns out Ralphie’s mom was right after all. Not about shooting his eye out with his Red Ryder 200 shot carbine action BB gun, but about falling icicles being known to kill people.

According to this Reuters report

Six people have been killed in three days by icicles falling from buildings in a central Russian region, ITAR-TASS news agency reported Tuesday.

San Diego County and Palm Springs - you know, southern California San Diego County and out-in-the-desert Palm Springs - have been  hit by a snowstorm accompanied by rain, sleet, hail and ice.

A couple of days ago Palm Springs was 85 degrees.

Clearly, more proof of man-made global warming.

You hear people complaining all the time:  it always rains on the weekend.

Science says otherwise. A recent study concluded more rain comes down mid-week than on weekends:

The study was carried out by atmospheric scientist Thomas Bell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues. They looked at data collected by NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2005. This method has advantages over rain data collected with ground-based gauges that can vary from one gauge site to the next.

They found it rains on average more between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. The clearest day of the week was Saturday, with nearly twice the rainfall on the wettest day, Tuesday afternoon.

Just when the 9-11 twoofers have me convinced that the US has cornered the market on complete and utter ignorance and stupidity, I come across this survey involving 3,000 residents of England, raising the hope that maybe other countries have as many drooling imbeciles per capita as we do:

23% of those British surveyed believe Winston Churchill is a myth, a fictional character who never really lived.

I am not making this up.

47% think King Richard the Lionheart is a mythical character. 23% think nurse Florence Nightingale is made up, and 3% believe Charles Dickens, one of England’s most celebrated writers of fiction, is himself a fictional character. Also on the list of people believed to be myths are the Duke of Wellington and Mahatma Gandhi.

On the other hand, 58% know that Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, was a real person. Which would come as a surprise to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer who created Holmes.

From a NEWSMAX insider report: 

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has announced the formation of a new non-profit organization aimed at “discovering, rewarding and fostering excellence in education.”

The Tallahassee-based Foundation for Excellence in Education’s programs will include honoring top teachers and their classrooms with awards of at least $2,500. Selection will be based on how their students improve on standardized reading and math tests.

The group is backed by some of Florida’s largest companies, including Disney and Gulf Power, and is staffed by several of Bush’s closest political advisers, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

During his two terms as governor, Bush brought significant changes to Florida schools, using the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to measure student progress, grade schools, and award teacher bonuses.

“Reform is never finished and success is never final,” Bush said. “A perpetual cycle of reform will lead to sustained improvement for the long term.”

 Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has mended fences with the Jewish community and is now favored by American Jews ahead of her Democratic rivals.Clinton’s embrace of the wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1999 was featured on the cover of the New York Post and upset many pro-Israel supporters. But since taking office in the Senate, Clinton has taken a hawkish stance on Israeli security, helped win world recognition of the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, and arued against anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks.

In a survey late last year by the American Jewish Committee, 58 percent of Jews said they view Clinton favorably, compared to 38 percent for both Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Her strength among Jewish voters could be important in the Feb. 5 primaries in New York, New Jersey, and California.

Obama,  has been criticised for taking on Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, as his national security adviser. Brzezinski has clashed with pro-Israel groups since the 1970s. And Obama had to issue a statement strongly condemning the “anti-Semitic statements” made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan after it was reported that Obama’s Chicago pastor had praised Farrakhan.

From a NEWSMAX insider report: 

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has done an about-face and expressed support for a proposition changing his state’s term-limits law.

The Feb. 5 ballot measure would allow many sitting lawmakers to run for re-election this year instead of being forced out of the legislature.

As a candidate in 2003, Schwarzenegger backed California’s term-limits law as protection against “special interests” getting too much power.  But in an essay published in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, Schwarzenegger said the law “went too far.”

“Under the current system, our elected officials are not given the time they need to reach their full potential as public servants,” Schwarzenegger wrote.

“Imagine what would happen if we told a big-city police chief or a sheriff he could stay in the job just long enough to start mastering it and then had to move on.”

Proposition 93 would reduce the total number of years a legislator can serve from 14 to 12. But it also would permit lawmakers to serve all of their time in either the Assembly or the state Senate. The existing law limits them to six years in the lower house and eight in the upper house.

The existing law has created a “relentless campaign cycle,” Schwarzenegger wrote in explaining his change of position, saying the cycle makes lawmakers more dependent on lobbyists and campaign contributors.

Newspapers in Venezuela are reporting that Hugo Chavez and British-born supermodel Naomi Campbell began dating two months ago after Campbell interviewed Chavez in Caracas for the magazine GQ.

Chavez reportedly flirted with the 37-year-old model and invited her to “touch my muscles” during the interview.

Chavez is 53 and  has four children from two marriages. Campbell has never been married, but she has been arrested for physically and verbally abusing employees and associates. Last year she pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless assault against her maid and was sentenced to five days community service and ordered to attend an anger management course.

What, no Tribbles?

Enjoy, closet Trekkies (or is it Trekkers?).  You know who you are.

Here, there be monsters

Did You Know . . .

A swimming pool is a good play area for children. But installing one means worrying about pool filters, disinfection etc. It is better to consult a pro for any swimming pool questions regarding to cleaning. They usually recommend professional pool cleaners. They even come up with healthy swimming ideas, that should be followed at any cost.

Exporting Democracy to the Middle East

While heavy on the statistics and regression analysis, the Middle East Forum seems to reach a pretty solid conclusion after weighing the evidence:  The more Islamic the country, the fewer the political rights.   This conclusion would seem obvious to most who follow world events, but I think that it bears thinking about in terms of our current and future entanglements in the Islamic world and “nation building” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.  Of course there have been free and fair elections in Iraq.  But there have also been elections in Gaza and one can hardly conclude that because the people cast a vote, that they have expressed a will to be “free” as any in the West would understand the term.  So absent some method of extracting Islam from the body politic, much like Ataturk managed in the early part of the 20th century, can true democracies ever develop in the Islamic world?  We may have to wait a long, long, long time to find out if our experiment in Iraq bears fruit.

Well-known and well-liked in the neighborhood, he is nevertheless literally all alone for the Yom Kippur holiday in Kabul:

Zebulon Simentov, the last Jew in Afghanistan, is once again marking the Jewish holy day of fasting in solitude, in a deserted synagogue in the capital of a devoutly Islamic nation.

“I have everything I need for the 24 hours of praying and fasting,” Simentov tells AFP before the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at sunset on Friday.

Around two decades ago, there were still about 20 Afghan Jewish families living in Kabul, although all were from Herat — the largest city in northwestern Afghanistan near the border with Iran.

Through the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the subsequent civil war and the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, all went to Israel or moved to neighbouring former Soviet republics — undoing a Jewish presence built up from the seventh century.

Only Simentov has been left behind, becoming by default the guardian of Kabul’s empty synagogue.

The synagogue’s former keeper died of illness two years ago, Simentov’s wife and children are in Israel, he has special permission to slaughter his own kosher meat - normally done by a specially trained rabbi - and the Taliban stole the synagogue’s Torah, thinking it was valuable and could be sold.

But Simentov stays on, praying alone, the last Jew in Afghanistan.

I’m not sure how you get sanctioned as a World Burrito Eating Championship event, but for what it’s worth:

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine - A day trader and aspiring pizza chef known as “Eater X” munched through 10 3/4 burritos in a dozen minutes Saturday to win what was billed as the world burrito-eating championship.

10 3/4 burritos in 12 minutes? These are “professionals”? They’ve obviously never seen my teenage son eat burritos. The $3,000 prize money wouldn’t cover his Taco Bell tab for the month.