Maybe it's the long, dark nights

Sometimes when Sitemeter shows an unusual number of hits from an exotic locale, such as Norway, I look a little deeper. This time I found a half-dozen guys (I presume) hitting on May recently.

Of course it could be that some Norwegian social studies teacher assigned a class to look into racial relations in the United States.

Naah, probably  not. Most likely some randy little devil caught the old post by mistake and spread the word. Can't say I blame him. :)

Score one for The Associated Press

A friend and I were debating the flap over the AP photo showing the girl seeming to ogle Romney's butt. That led to a little research on AP caption corrections in general. I stumbled across this one. It is a dated (2010) but neat story of a cut line change on a captured enemy photo once thought to be of the Bataan Death March.

It shows GIs carrying bodies of their comrades, and for years everyone just accepted it was the march.  Decades later, a Bataan survivor said the Japs allowed nothing to slow the gory parade. The bodies were left where they lay. He believed the image was of a burial detail at POW Camp O'Donnell where the brutalized victims were taken.

AP did some checking, decided the veteran had a point, and,  some 65 years after the fact, rewrote the caption.

Hey, let's fleece Tourist!

News flash: Iowa bureaucrat says tourists spent more than $7 billion in Iowa last year.

About  two-thirds of it was the cost of driving around, trying to find a way out. Wait. I made that up, although it is not a totally implausible thought.

But I find the news item important as an illustration of the genius displayed by our official shreikspersons. For instance:

Economic Development Authority Director Debi Durham says travelers are perfect taxpayers because "they come to our communities for a short time and leave billions of dollars behind."

Well said, Debi. Now if we only had a law preventing our own wild and crazy guys from traveling around and spending money in other hip scenes...  (I'm thinking of places like Nebraska.)

Something else I didn't build

The Wood Faerie not only brought it one day, that night he cut it, split it, and stacked it.  For that I certainly want to thank the Wood Faerie and his advisor, His Ineptness, the president.

The president deserves yet another paean in this regard. By reminding me I don't actually own this little project he saves me from the notion that I have some right to resist any looter who swings buy with a pickup to transfer any or all of the sustainable, renewable biomass from my residence to his.

(Unfortunately, "paean" is always a noun, never a verb, which prevents a  fellow from writing that we should have a great national meeting and paean the president. Proper grammar imposes regrettable limits on expression.)

For energy geeks, you're looking at a little more tha two cords, mostly oak, containing roughly 40 million btus of energy, comparable to the heat available from more than six  barrels of crude from the Arabs who, oddly, seem to own their oil. At least His Ineptness, has never lectured them on the universal nature of collectivism.