Irony in the News

Amy Winehouse, the young lady with the surprisingly throaty soulful voice, is dead.  This is the same lady who brought us the song "Rehab," in which she says "they tried to make me go to rehab, I say no, no, no."

Shoulda gone, Amy.  Twenty-seven is far too young to burn yourself to the ground.

Elsewhere:
Tamagotchi toys are somehow still around.  A fad item if ever I saw one, the damned things are still on shelves, definitely in Japan and to a lesser degree here.  It's supposed to be a virtual "pet" kind of thing, it chirps and beeps and demands you pay attention to it from time to time.  How far away are we from having a Tamagotchi app for smart phones?

How much money could you have saved, just getting the Tamagotchi?  It's not like I see many people using their smart phones as phones.  You could skip the phone features and probably get by.

Elsewhere:
Anders Breivik is the guy who killed over 80 people in Norway last week, bombing a building and shooting dozens of young people at a camp outside of Oslo.  His idealogy: defeating the growing "Islamization of Western Europe."  His target: native Norwegians, because they were permitting the so-called Islamization to happen.

Way to win followers, Andy.  Good job.  Now all the pro-Islam groups have to do is point out how they haven't been killing any Norwegians, and they win points.

Elsewhere:
Even if the US Government does somehow pull its head out of its...you get the idea...as the deal deadline approaches, the final outcome of the debate becomes more and more moot as the loss of confidence in worldwide markets adds to the instability already present.  Which is to say, if you leave it too late, whatever you come up with may be too little.  It'll be as if everybody simply went to the beach and didn't bother with the debate.

That's not entirely accurate of course.  A positive solution is obviously better than a negative one, but this back-and-forth bickering is rattling the confidence of the entire world's bankers.  That's, you know, bad.


Elsewhere:
Now that NASA has retired its Shuttles and the United States doesn't have much in the way of heavy lifters for space launches (but we aren't entirely devoid of hardware that can get the job done), they trot out an ambitious new Martian rover mission.  Good timing, guys.

I think it's important to keep sending missions to space.  I think it's crucial to establish a permanent, self-sufficient base on the Moon.  This will take many decades to accomplish, which is why it's important to get it underway now.  Whatever form the new US space vehicle will take, whip it out.  Let's get that thing in the air.  How ignominious it is to have ceded the vast majority of manned spaceflight capacity to the Russians, when it was their manned missions that goaded us to such stunning heights in the first place.  What other country has ever landed a man on the Moon? Not one.

Let's get back to flying soon.