For Posterity: Barney's Butt

So, my sister goes to Washington, D.C. and visits all of the typical tourist sites. Animal nut that she is, most of her pictures of the White House feature Barney the Dog, on a brief romp while he evades the staff member in charge of watching him.

Here, recorded for future Presidential historians, sort of with my sister's permission and definitely without the White House's permission, Barney's posterior:

A Tour of North Korea

I'm not sure who these Vice Guide guys are. Their style is too reckless for anyone to confuse them with mainstream journalists. I can say that they had some major balls to bribe their way into North Korea on a Chinese tourist package, risking repeated threats of criminal prosecution to re-emerge with lots of video. I don't think they ever fully explained how they got away with it: Bribes? Secret compartments? Tour guides full of empty threats?

The entire series is long, but here are a couple of episodes that convey how surreal their tour of North Korea was:

Episode Five -The Tea Girl
Episode Thirteen - Arirang

Here's the entire series:
The Vice Guide to North Korea

Cookie Monster Sets The Record Straight

Did Cookie Monster betray America's children? Stephen Colbert gives him a chance to set the record straight:

Cookie Monster

Stephen's Missing Peabody

(via Ender's Review of the Web)

If you know what's good for you, you'll blog and you'll blog often!

The software product I've been doggedly working on for the last year and a half is about to ship. This is the first evening of a long-awaited six-week vacation. I haven't had a summer vacation like this since ... high school?

No better time to kick off my new blog. As I explained in the last post on my neglected political blog, Issuefish, I've been meaning to make the switch to a general-topic blog.

Why unleash another blog on the world? Well, it's not about you guys, it's about me! Scientific American says blogging is good for you! Even so, I hope you'll all find my posts here to be interesting (and, no, this one doesn't count).