{filmstills.org}

President Obama has great self-awareness, so when he compares his game to the Special Olympics he probably is not lying. Some logic produces the true meaning of such a statement. Obama’s score of 129 is, in fact, better than most people bowl. I’ve seen plenty of completely healthy people score in the 60-100 range (myself included). Odds are that a Special Olympian has bowled over Obama’s score, and most probably score in the sub-100 range along with everyone else. Essentially, we can conclude that Obama took a roundabout way of saying that he bowls like an average person. (Yes, the President should have rephrased his critique).

From ABC News:

Toward the end of his approximately 40-minute taping on the “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” Obama talked about how he’d gotten better at bowling and had been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

“I bowled a 129,” he told Leno.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

But then came the foot-in-mouth moment: “It’s like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said.

Special Olympic Board Chairman Tim Shriver gave a lengthy response, including these wise words:

“This kind of language needs to be a teachable moment for our country, I think. I would hope every parent that’s at home this morning watching this show could turn to their children and say, ‘This is a chance for us to recognize that when we talk about Special Olympics, when we talk about people with special needs, let’s make sure we talk about it in an affirming way,” he said.

Finally, let us not forget that Special Olympians can be excellent bowlers. Loretta Claiborne, named the Special Olympics Female Athlete of the Year by the United States Olympic Committee in 1988 and the Special Olympics Athlete of the Quarter Century by Runner’s World magazine in 1991, is also a skilled bowler.

{bangitout.com}

From EurekAlert:

While U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching fruitlessly for Osama bin Laden, UCLA geographers say they have a good idea of where the terrorist leader was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since.

In a new study published online today by the MIT International Review, the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.

“If he’s still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now,” said Thomas W. Gillespie, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “It is still the safest tribal area and city in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northwest Pakistan and one of the only tribal areas that the U.S. has not bombed with its unmanned Predators.”

1. A large number of stations already have tower crews contracted for antenna work tied into the 2/17 shutdown date. Tower crews are already in very short supply, and can’t just be rescheduled at will.

2. Analog transmitters use lots of electricity. Station budgets are already tight, and were figured on the assumption that, as federal law required, the analog transmitters would be shut off on 2/17. Who’ll pay the bills for the analog transmitters after that?

3. Broadcasters have made huge promotional efforts centering on the 2/17 deadline. Now they’re supposed to just say “oh, never mind” to all those people whose attention we fought so hard to win?

4. Many of the frequencies being vacated by analog TV stations already have new occupants. Think they’ll be thrilled about having to wait another few months to a year to get the remaining stations on those channels cleared away?

5. Many analog signals have already cleared out. Many of those stations made the judgment call to go dark on analog somewhat early on the premise that it was only “somewhat” early…and that the rest of the analogs would be following suit in a matter of just a few weeks.

6. The FCC’s already-limited staff is being swamped beyond belief by the sudden need to authorize potentially hundreds of STAs for nightlight operation.  The FCC won’t be happy to find out that all that haste was for naught – and neither will broadcasters who are spending money on consulting engineers to file rush applications for nightlight authorizations.

Like many New Yorkers, I remember a time when nearly everyone smoked. In 1950, Collier’s reported that more than three-quarters of adult men smoked. This epidemic had a devastating and long-lasting impact on public health.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a new public health epidemic: childhood obesity.

What smoking was to my parents’ generation, obesity is to my children’s generation. Nearly one out of every four New Yorkers under the age of 18 is obese. In many high-poverty areas, the rate is closer to one out of three.

That is why, in the state budget I presented last Tuesday, I proposed a tax on sugared beverages like soda. Research has demonstrated that soft-drink consumption is one of the main drivers of childhood obesity.

For example, a study by Harvard researchers found that each additional 12-ounce soft drink consumed per day increases the risk of a child becoming obese by 60 percent. For adults, the association is similar.

If we are to succeed in reducing childhood obesity, we must reduce consumption of sugared beverages. That is the purpose of our proposed tax. We estimate that an 18 percent tax will reduce consumption by five percent.

Our tax would apply only to sugared drinks — including fruit drinks that are less than 70 percent juice — that are nondiet. The $404 million this tax would raise next year will go toward funding public health programs, including obesity prevention programs, across New York state.

The surgeon general estimates that obesity was associated with 112,000 deaths in the United States every year. Here in New York state, we spend almost $6.1 billion on health care related to adult obesity — the second-highest level of spending in the nation.

Last year, legitimate concerns about links between consumption of fast food and the prevalence of heart disease prompted New York City to ban the use of trans fats in restaurant food.

No one can deny the urgency of reducing the rate of obesity, including childhood obesity. Obesity causes serious health problems like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It puts children at much greater risk for life-threatening conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

We must never stigmatize children who are overweight or obese. Yet, for the sake of our children’s health, we have an obligation to address this crisis. I believe we can ultimately curb the obesity epidemic the same way we curbed smoking: through smart public policy.

In recent decades, anti-smoking campaigns have raised awareness. Smoking bans have been enacted and enforced. And, perhaps most importantly, we have raised the price of cigarettes.

In June, New York state raised the state cigarette tax an additional $1.25. According to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, this increase alone will prevent more than 243,000 kids from smoking, save more than 37,000 lives and produce more than $5 billion in health care savings.

These taxes may be unpopular, but their benefits are undeniable. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, for the first time in generations, fewer than 20 percent of Americans smoked. Lung cancer rates have finally begun to decline. As a result, we are all healthier.

Just as the cigarette tax has helped reduce the number of smokers and smoking-related deaths, a tax on highly caloric, non-nutritional beverages can help reduce the prevalence of obesity.

To address the obesity crisis, we need more than just a surcharge on soda. We need to take junk food out of our schools. We need to encourage our children to exercise more. And we need to increase the availability of healthy food in underserved communities.

But to make serious progress in this effort, we need to reduce the consumption of high-calorie drinks like nondiet soda among children and adults.

I understand that New Yorkers may not like paying a surcharge for their favorite drinks. But surely it’s a small price to pay for our children’s health.

Reminds me of Odd Job’s hat. The bowler hat, made famous by actor Harold Sakata in Goldfinger, contained a razor in the rim which Odd Job used to try and kill 007.

Odd Job's hat

WASHINGTON (AP) — Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for energy secretary, has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.

Chu, a Chinese-American who currently is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, has in recent years campaigned to bring together a cross-section of scientific disciplines to find ways to counter climate change.

If action is not taken now to stop global warming, it may be too late, he argues.

Since 2004, Chu has been director of the Berkeley lab, the oldest of the Energy Department’s national laboratories, with its 4,000 employees and a budget of $650 million. The laboratory does only unclassified work and under Chu has been a center of research into biofuels and solar energy technologies. He is a former head of the physics department at Stanford University.

Chu, 60, brings additional diversity to the Obama cabinet.

Born to Chinese parents in St. Louis, he grew up in the Queens borough of New York City. His father, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and professor of chemical engineering, and mother came to the United States in 1943 and two years later decided to stay because of the political turmoil in China.

One of the country’s most renowned scientists, Chu in 1997 shared the Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists for his research into ways to cool and trap atoms using laser light. By cooling atoms to minus-273 degrees Celsius, they found the movement of atoms can be slowed to a point where they could be trapped and manipulated.

More recently, Chu’s scientific interests have centered on energy and finding ways to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels from plants and converting energy from the sun into a fuel. He has spoken frequently about the need to link the physical and biological sciences with engineering to rally independent-thinking scientists in the fight against climate change.

Steven Chu {lbl.gov}

Putin: “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls.”

Sarkozy: “Hang him?”

Putin: “Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Sarkozy, using the familiar tu: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?”

Putin, briefly lost for words: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

London’s Times Online has more.

{National Enquirer}

From the best of sources, the National Enquirer:

The wealthy blonde heiress and her secret pal have been spotted together around her hometown of Phoenix, Arizona over the past several years, say sources.

The amazing spy photos were snapped April 1, 2006 when Cindy and her companion attended the Tempe Music Festival says the person who took them. The photos are somewhat grainy, but the insider says they depict Senator John McCain’s wife, who was greeted by pals at the event as “Cindy.”

“To my amazement, Cindy had her hand on his shoulder and was kissing him passionately on his lips,” the photog told THE ENQUIRER.

A second witness spotted Cindy and her “mystery man” at a Moody Blues concert “passionately kissing and hugging.”

“I couldn’t believe it. I remember thinking, ‘Go get a room!’