The SpongeBob Agenda

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SpongeBob’s gay agenda:

On Wednesday however, Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family, said the group stood by its accusation.

“We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids,” he said. “It is a classic bait and switch.”

(from Secretly Ironic)

Drought and Climate Change

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Over in the comments at RealClimate, Dave of ClimateWarning.org pointed to some new research by Aiguo Dai and colleagues at NCAR on the detection of increased drought on a warming earth.

In the December issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology, Dai et al. report“observational evidence for the increasing risk of droughts as anthropogenic warming progresses and produces both increased temperatures and increased drying.” Then in a subsequent paper presented last week, Dai and his colleagues took the results further:

Dai et al. drought map

“This depiction of linear trends in the Palmer Drought Severity Index from 1948 to 2002 shows drying (reds and pinks) across much of Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa and moistening (green) across parts of the United States, Argentina, Scandinavia, and western Australia. (Illustration courtesy Aiguo Dai and the American Meteorological Society.)”

The Palmer index is not the best measure of drought, but it’s a good crude index, and the results in the Dai map shown above are striking: significant areas of the globe – especially areas, like Africa, with significantly vulnerable populations – are drying.

The Broccoli Refrigerator Magnet

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My long quest for a broccoli refrigerator magnet is over:

Broccoli Refrigerator Magnet

I found one today at Rainbow Man, in among the old Navajo rugs and jewelry and Santa Fe Railway memorabilia. It’s the railway memorabilia I go in for – old placemats, and occasionally the lovelyMary Colter faux Mimbres dinnerware they used in the dining car on the Super Chief. I almost missed the metal tray of refrigerator magnets tucked in a corner, they just caught my eye on the way out the door. 50 cents each.

Score.

It was the tail end of a nice few days wandering Northern New Mexico with my beloved. L and I are a good team when it comes to wandering aimlessly. We shopped some, saw some art (if you’re in New Mexico or headed this way, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has a terrific show of Charles Sheeler, the modernist photographer) and added some new lines to the big map on the wall of my office on which we mark all of our New Mexico travels.

And I found a broccoli refrigerator magnet.

The Coming Ice Age

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This whole “scientists used to think we were headed into an ice age” thing is one of those delicious examples of things I thought to be true that turn out to be wrong.

Over at RealClimate, William Connolley does a great job today of laying out a case he’s been building for a long time. The bottom line is that, while there was some discussion in the scientific community in the 1970s of the possibility of a future ice age, the notion that scientists generally believed one was imminent, and now have changed their tune to say we should expect warming instead, is flat wrong.

Beating Elijah

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I finally beat Elijah.

I noticed recently, looking at Bugzilla emails in my inbox, the remarkable speed with which Elijah Newren has been triaging incoming bugs, and I made a little game out of trying to get to one before he did. A couple of times I came close, only to hit the “submit” button some small bit of time after Elijah, because we’d been literally looking at the same bug at the same time.

This morning I finally did it. The trick seems to be to be up early in the morning while Elijah, I assume, is still sleeping.