(NUNAL) (EYEBALL)

Lark seems to have become a little girl overnight. She suddenly looks the part of a kid rather than a baby. Her unsurpassed cuteness is still unsurpassed. Here she reads to her Penguin, named Qua. And she is talking in sentences. Well, kind of sentences. She uses articles all of the time now, as in "a book", "a dog". I think you will agree with me that there is a lot of meaning in the addition of "a". Taken in conjunction with pointing I take to be her speaking the full sentence "This is a book which I find interesting, though with not as well developed a story as we found in Tickly Octopus " and "Look, that is a dog pursuing a squirrel, a thing it does out of instinct."

I know this is semi-old hat for the computer literate, but it utterly blows my mind that google maps has the street level feature of looking 360 degrees in front of almost any address. How in the hell does this work? I can't figure it out unless satellites can provide that sort of lateral view. It has been a while since I wasted time on google earth and the level of detail really has hopped up. It used to be that you could just see a satellite image with some detail (I could tell it was my old Ranger parked in the driveway, for example). But the street view is amazing. This is not me being easily impressed, it is really hard to fathom. Here is the street scene in front of Lerma's Nite Club , the classic conjunto club in San Antonio. If you don't know what I am talking about try plugging your address in. Here is the street view of my house . It was taken sometime last summer since my renter's car is in the driveway. You can also see my both of my neighbor'...

Virginia Beach has taken the radical step of allowing the almost-free practice of religion. "The City Council voted unanimously to let a group of Buddhist monks hold religious services at their home in Pungo. The monks can hold mediation services on Sundays with no more than 20 people, and festivals must be held elsewhere. The monks cannot put more statues in their yard, and the landscaping must be maintained. The conditions of the use permit approved by the council were outlined in a tentative settlement filed in federal court in March. The monks and some followers had filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the city had violated their religious freedoms by denying them a permit last year. Some of the monks’ neighbors said they were concerned about traffic and a religious institution springing up in a residential area." I am sure you can sympathize how shocking it can be when religious institutions spring up in residential areas. From my house a careless rock thrower would ha...

Sometimes I like to think virtue gets rewarded. This weekend brought in some unbelievably perfect weather, the kind of crystalline days that make the spring in Virginia about perfect. My first thought upon stepping outside was that, after several miserable days, it was a perfect day for swarms. But through sheer force of will (and because I have so much to get accomplished at the moment) I went to the library and read microfilm of nineteenth century correspondence. Clearly this produced some good Karma. After a couple of hours my cellphone rang informing me of a swarm only a couple of miles away. I went and grabbed it and hived it and was back in the library within a couple of hours. The swarm was pretty good size and easy to grab on a low branch. I just shook it into a bucket and off I went. This was a fortunate swarm, I need some more bees to get the strawberry honey at my yard in Pungo. More interesting than the swarm was the place it chose to sojourn. The house was in a rou...

The Navy Seals are not the only government officials out shooting people. Tidewater police are doing their best to take no prisoners: No weapons in car of men killed by Chesapeake police "City police recovered more suspected drugs and bullets, but no weapons, from the car of two men shot and killed by Portsmouth police last week." ...Records filed Wednesday with a search warrant in Circuit Court showed that Chesapeake police, who are investigating the April 9 incident in the Holly Cove neighborhood, seized several items including four bullets, a bullet fragment from the seat behind the driver, suspected marijuana, a bag containing a white substance, a digital scale, $27.98 in cash and two cell phones." Four (4) bullets, $27.98 in cash and two cell phones. Some bigtime drug kinpin killers, no? here is a possible source of the four bullets--they went through these guys' bodies: "The men killed were Demetrius D. Edens, 28, of Chesapeake, who police said was the ...

Following up on my class' discussion today of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the expert government assassination of the teenage pirates, and the question of what to do with the captured pirate, this discussion from Eugene Kontorovich is interesting: "Just an Honest Fisherman A professor of piracy often deals with eye-patch and hook jokes. Many people who find this academic specialty intriguing loose interests when they learn that modern pirates wear jeans, tee-shirts and flip-flops, or when they’re feeling natty, fatigues. They certainly don’t fly a black flag. They have very bad personal hygiene: forget Johnny Depp and Cary Elwes. Yet the ordinary appearance of pirates leads to a potentially serious problem in prosecuting them. Universal jurisdiction only applies to pirates. Captured Somalis are likely to insist in court that they are not pirates but rather simple fishermen, erroneously seized by a foreign navy. What makes the claim compelling is that most pirates are in fact...

If we are supposed to be mortified about the casual-U.S.-marijuana-user-fueled violence in Mexico should we really be celebrating the extraterritorial triple killing of the Somali pirates by Navy Seals? Even if the killing was cinematically cool? My students were all excited about it today until I pointed out that the pirates were teenagers. (Of course, here in Norfolk we leave the killing of teenagers to other teenagers). Writer Lindsay Beyerstein said it plainly enough : "Enough dead teen pirate porn already" The banner headline in the Virginian-Pilot this morning said, boastfully and with more than its fair share of posturing: "THREE SHOTS. THREE KILLS" . The Washington Post featured the same phrase, in fact. Obama, deftly avoiding early, administration staining debacles like Desert One or Black Hawk Down incident had at least the good sense to parade a dog around today instead of landing on an aircraft carrier and declaring the mission accomplished. One thin...