The news from here, 6-14-06

• Stephen Hawking says we desperately need colonies in space. Pharyngula is not so sure.
  
• From NewScientist: A theory about why planetary moons seem to have an upper size limit. Several announcements of new extrasolar planets have noted that they lie in their parent stars' "habitable zones". The hope being that one of these planets just might have a big Earth-sized habitable moon or two. That may be impossible under the new theory.
  
• One of the great things about the blog world is that one gets a window into the lives of people in circumstances utterly different than one's own. Here are two blogs by women from the Philippines who work in the Persian Gulf region.
  
• This blog recounts the ongoing story of a large number of cats rescued from homeless camps in the Corvallis/Albany OR area.
  
• Worldwide Pablo has the first post about Portland's shiny new tram tower. I would've thought Jack Bog would've had something unkind to say about it by now. Maybe he's waiting until they've got the whole thing installed, I dunno. I took some pics of it myself this morning, and I'll try to post them later on, if I get around to it.
  
• A fun little bit of Python bashing. The language, not the snake. Bashing snakes would be cruel. Unless by "bash" you mean the shell, not the violent act. And if you do mean bash=shell and python=snake, you end up with a sentence that just makes no sense at all.
  
• A good post at pdxleft about our Glorious Leader's recent heroic photo op in Baghdad.
  
• The food fascists are now suing KFC. Gee, and all this time I thought KFC served healthy non-fattening fare, because if there are 3 words in the English language that I most strongly associate with healthiness, they'd have to be "chicken", "fried" and "Kentucky". (Note for the irony-impaired... oh, forget it, never mind...) Crap like this makes me want to run out and buy one of those "cheesy chicken bowls" they've been advertising lately. You know, the one with a big bowl of mashed potatoes, fried chicken strips, gravy, corn, and a layer of cheese on top. Who the hell are these people, anyway? Here's a great article about the clowns at CSPI, from the libertarian mag Reason. I'm generally not a libertarian on the economic side of things, but eating whatever you want without Beltway control freaks lecturing you about it is an issue of basic personal freedom. Especially since the food police also moonlight as the beer police. Grrrr!!!!!
  
• FOX News manages to be "Fair and Balanced" for once. Seems the Fred Phelps cultists are so nutty even Rupert Murdoch won't touch 'em.
  
• In sad news, Roseburg's Hawks Brewing is ceasing operations, at least for the time being. You can't really understand what an unfortunate turn of events this is unless you've tried their beer. The ESB can't be improved upon. Look for the beer with the boring-est logo.
  
• At least the historic Yerkes Observatory isn't going to fall into the clutches of greedy developers.
  
• Referrer pages of the two folks Blogger sent my way when I first posted this thing: Transglobal Permutations, an interesting blog from Spain with lots of pictures, and Really Nothing To Say, which is just a bunch of empty posts. It bills itself as the silliest blog on the planet, which I think is a bit debatable.
  
• And then, three more visitors from when I added the previous item, arriving here from: Why Aren't I Famous, a blog mostly about hip hop music and culture; Disneyland2006, photos of someone's trip to Disneyland; and orgias69.blogspot.com, which I haven't visited but the URL suggests it's probably not safe for work. So there you have it. Let's see if anyone new shows up here this time when I repost this baby...