Nominated for Funniest NHL goal of the year

This one was just plain ridiculous.

Follow the bouncing puck:



More on the Capitals' strange fortunes and observations about sports teams in the Baltimore - DC area coming up soon.

Will this marriage be doomed?

Researchers, somewhat tongue-in-cheekedly, have "refined" their formula for predicting the length and eventual demise of marriages between celebrities.

Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom

The formula uses as one variable the number of appearances of the female partner in the marriage in a Google Image search wearing next-to-nothing, or even better, nothing at all.

Kinda like this (yes, she's married, to ex-star soccer player Gary Lineker).  Now, their difference in ages might weight in their favor;  plus he's rich as all get-out.  And I still gotta do that thing about happiness in marriage.  I will, I will.

 Unfortunately, I have to mention this right about the time that the marriage of Jenny Garth (Beverly Hills 90210, Dancing with the Stars) to Peter Faccinelli (Can't Hardly Wait, Twilight series) is breaking up, kids and all.  But face it, marriages between mortal humans and immortal vampires rarely work out for the best. 

New study of impact of overfishing on the Med

A National Geographic - sponsored study of the Mediterranean Sea, led by lead research Enric Sala, has described that there are many places in the sea with lots of fish, still (amazingly), but there are other places where they are virtually all gone.

Overfishing Leaves Much of Mediterranean a Dead Sea, Study Finds

 “We found a huge gradient, an enormous contrast. In reserves off Spain and Italy, we found the largest fish biomass in the Mediterranean,” said National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala, the paper’s lead author. “Unfortunately, around Turkey and Greece, the waters were bare.”

 A series of marine reserves that shelter slivers of the sea allows certain ecosystems to recover and their all-important predators to eventually reappear. “The protection of the marine ecosystems is a necessity as well as a ‘business’ in which everyone wins,” Sala said. “The reserves act as savings accounts, with capital that is not yet spent and an interest yield we can live off. In Spain’s Medes Islands Marine Reserve, for example, a reserve of barely one square kilometer can generate jobs and a tourism revenue of 10 million euros, a sum 20 times larger than earnings from fishing.”

So the answer to helping ecosystems recover from overfishing is -- NO FISHING.

In the interests of balance

Even though I don't agree with it, this editorial discusses how Germany is phasing out, and how some politicians in France are saying they are going to phase out, nuclear power.  The author argues that Britain should do the same.  Well, there's really only one way that's going to work, a way that the author states clearly. 

Nuclear energy - a fading dream

One can refer to my earlier post about the fact that countries with money are investing in the building of new nuclear power plants, because they supply carbon-free energy in abundance.  It's nice if some Western countries think their populace is going to do without and do with less, but I think that's trusting a lot to human nature.  In developing countries where the populace has gone without for a long time, the leaders expect that their people are going to want more -- cars, TVs, computers, cellphones, lights, the basic things that we take for granted.

So here's what he said:

"And as European politicians have turned increasingly against nuclear, they have started taking energy efficiency seriously. In Germany politicians plan to reduce electricity demand by 25% by 2050 through energy efficiency."

Yes, they plan.  But is that realistic?

"But the coalition government here in Britain is planning for electricity demand to double over the same period, even though Ministers accept that energy saving is cheaper and greener than building new power stations."

Well, if they don't want more nuclear power stations, then they'd better get the people believing in, and practicing, lots and lots and lots of energy saving.  Hope that works out.

Next new national HS record in the 100-yard butterfly

Well, it's less than a month old, so this still counts as relatively recent - Maclin Davis of Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville set a new national high school record in the 100-yard butterfly with a 46.64, breaking the 47.04 record set by Virginia swimmer Sean Fletcher in 2009.  And I think Fletcher was wearing a suit that no one can wear anymore when he did that, which makes the record even more impressive.

What seems really remarkable is that Davis did the record in the preliminaries of the Tennessee state championships, and hardly anyone (except at least the guy making the video) seemed to notice.  Ho-hum.

Joe Romm debates nuclear power

Joe Romm, whom I admire MIGHTILY, has a new article about how he claims nuclear power is too expensive to contribute greatly to a low-carbon energy future.

The question I'd like to pose directly to Joe is:  given the cost projections for the potential consequences of climate change, isn't it more expensive to not generate every possible Watt from non-carbon
sources?  And nuclear is the only proven high-yield energy source available right now.  Lots more solar would be great, even in the Sahara piped to Europe, but IS THAT GOING TO WORK?

In the comments, I noted that the oil countries are investing heavily in nuclear.  They've got the money to do it, and they can see the future when cheap fossil fuel energy won't be cheap for anybody, including them.  Developing countries are not going to back off their commitment to economic growth, and to do that rapidly (like the Western countries did during the Industrial Revolution) requires cheap energy. So with pressure on them from the developed nations to reduce the investment in carbon-based energy plants, and the fact that carbon is no longer as cheap as it used to be and is just going to get more expensive, both monetarily and climatically, the only real alternative that can keep economic growth going is nuclear.  And that's why another big growth place for nuclear is China. 

As I also noted, to really fight both the energy crunch and the climate catastrophes, developed Western nations should get on a war footing to implement the drastic energy conservation measures that are required now.  And I certainly don't see the collective will in Western economies to do that.  So the "low pain" alternative is nuclear.  Sad but true, unless energy efficiency gets on the fast track.

After the fact, a public service announcement

Well, if anyone isn't paying attention, Jennifer Love Hewitt is going to be playing the role she was born to play in Lifetime's The Client List series.   She combines her girl-next-door appeal and her wonderland of a body in an episodic tale about a housewife who earns extra income to keep her family fed not with Texas tea (oil, that is), but with the endowments God gave her and a moneymaker worth shaking.

I.e., she's going to be earning a little on the side by being on her back.  Or taken from behind.  Or maybe a little reverse cowgirl.

And I likes the sounds of this:

"Thank you. I’ve never played a character who is this overtly sexual. It’s definitely going to be a departure from the normal stuff I do. Plus, we have a lot of really fun things in the series eye-candy-wise for our audience. ...  It’s a lingerie-heavy show every episode, for my character in particular. It’s not going to be your mother’s Lifetime."

No, thank you.  As I noted, April will be good (and busy) with the lustiness of the sinful Borgias, the power plays and sexual manipulations in Game of Thrones, and this surfeit of scandalousness, it's goin to be hard to keep track of who's doing what to who. 

So without further to-do, here's the link to the Maxim cover story, with six picks and a short video.

April 2012 Cover Girl Jennifer Love Hewitt

And may I say, though she's had a few fitness highs and lows, she's certainly looking tangy and tawny here.