brainrow

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow mines a rich vein of pure American Crazy to bring us 2010: The Year in Crazy.

There’s too much for just one cartoon, so there’s a part two, also.

(You can click the images to see the complete cartoons.)

With so much Crazy these days, he’s done a whole book titled Too Much Crazy, a collection of his weekly cartoons. I like Tom Tomorrow. If you don’t, reading this book may make you crazy.

Experience your minimum daily bagpipe requirement:

I don’t know why, but this motto on the wall of the Bailey Building and Loan in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life seems appropriate to the season:

All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.

This appears in the movie right before George Bailey gives away his entire life savings to keep the Building and Loan from falling under the control of greedy Henry Potter.

Via Slashdot: NASA does a huge amount of photography on every Space Shuttle launch in order to assist in detecting problems and analyzing system behavior. Here’s a 45-minute video narrated by a couple of NASA engineers.

You may want to click the little four-arrow icon in the lower right corner of the video to view this full-frame.

And if that’s not enough for you, here’s another ten minutes worth:

Republicans don’t believe in coddling 9/11 rescue workers:

Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and others who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke at the site of the World Trade Center attack in 2001.

So where did the notion come from that Republicans are somehow the stronger party when the nation is attacked?

Via TidBITS: Music video about cleaning a laptop fan.

Sadly, I don’t think modern Mac laptop fans are any easier.

Sixty-nine years ago today, Japanese carrier-based planes attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Americans remember the date as the start of World War II, but the war in Europe had started more than two years earlier, when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Even before that, the signs of impending war were impossible to miss. In the Pacific, Japan had been fighting in China since 1937.

But to Americans, December 7, 1941 remains the “date which will live in infamy.”

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the attack, supposedly said, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

He got that right.

For good or ill, the world we live in today was born the day Japan awakened the American giant.

The Denver Post has a collection of little-seen photos from the Pacific war.

A couple weeks ago I attended a NASA panel with Mercury astronaut John Glenn, Apollo 17 moon-walker Harrison Schmitt, and Space Shuttle astronaut John Grunsfeld. After the panel discussion, I got to actually step up and meet Schmitt and Grunsfeld.

Grunsfeld is probably not as famous as the other two, but he’s flown on five Shuttle missions. He’s been to the Russian Mir space station, and to the International Space Station (ISS). He’s visited the Hubble Space Telescope three times, doing eight separate space walks to perform maintenance and repairs on the telescope.

I asked something I’ve been curious about for years: did he think of the Hubble Telescope more as a thing, or as a place? Grunsfeld said that, strange as it sounded, he thought of it almost as a person. He had spent years studying the telescope, and felt it almost had a personality — perhaps the way some of us earthbound types think of our cars or our computers. He said the Mir and the ISS both felt like places.

While Schmitt took one of NASA’s most requested photographs, Blue Marble, I told Grunsfeld he deserved credit as a co-author of many of the amazing Hubble images which wouldn’t have been possible without the work he did to repair and upgrade the telescope.

Which brings us to the Boston Globe’s 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar: 25 photos, with one new photo revealed each day until Christmas. (They include links to the advent calendars from past years.)

It’s a big universe out there.

Christmas cuteness:

Somebody’s a pretty skillful video editor.