aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
How hot?
The explainer wonders, Does it really get up to 130 degrees in Iraq?
Yesterday, John McCain told supporters in Iowa that U.S. soldiers are “carrying 40 pounds of body armor in 130-degree temperatures.” Run a quick Google News search, and you’ll find numerous references to Iraq’s sweltering “130-degree” weather. It’s in the Philadelphia Daily News, the Providence Journal, the Tucson Citizen, Wired, and even on military blogs. But according to this government Web site, the highest temperature ever recorded in Asia is 124 degrees-in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. So, how hot does it really get in Iraq?
The temperature never breaks 130 degrees, according to official climate records.
McCain isn’t alone. Remember Tony Snow in July:
Q Is the Iraqi government and the Iraqi parliament taking the month of August off?
MR. SNOW: Probably, yes. Just not --
Q They’re taking the entire month of August off, before the September deadline?
MR. SNOW: It looks like they may, yes. Just like the U.S. Congress is.
Q Have you tried to talk them out of that?
MR. SNOW: You know, it’s 130 degrees in Baghdad in August, I’ll pass on your recommendation.
Q Well, Tony, Tony, I’m sorry, that’s—you know—I mean, there are a lot of things that happen by September and it’s 130 degrees for the U.S. military also on the ground --
MR. SNOW: You know, that’s a good point. And it’s 130 degrees for the Iraqi military. The Iraqis, you know, I’ll let them—my understanding is that at this juncture they’re going to take August off, but, you know, they may change their minds.
Exploding frogs
These days, who needs science-fiction? BBC:
Toads in an area of northern Germany are being killed off by a mysterious disease - they are exploding.
Thousands of the amphibians have died in recent days in a pond in Hamburg’s Altona district, with their bodies swelling to bursting point.
The toads’ entrails are propelled for up to a metre (3.2ft), in scenes that have been likened to science fiction.
Scientists are baffled. Possible explanations include a unknown virus or a fungus in the pond.
What’s in that pond?
LATER: In comments Harry points out this is 2 years old! If I were a better blogger I’d have looked more closely. Given that it has passed, I wondered what had caused it.
Among the explanations listed in Wikipedia were crows (apparently frog liver is a crow delicacy) and that “the eye witness accounts were flawed, confused, or mistaken.”
Video find-it: SideReel
Check out SideReel.com, a wiki-style video search site.
Founded in January of this year by two former Guba execs, SideReel wants to be the conduit to your favorite TV shows and other content.
SideReel just lists links to find content, so it is distributor neutral. Heroes disappears off iTunes and goes to Amazon? SideReel just changes the link.
To find what you want, SideReel believes that people are more powerful than the algorithm. With that in mind, what separates it from video search sites like Truveo and blinkx is that it uses its community to deliver relevant results, as rabid fans keep the site’s info and links up-to-date. To be sure, the site’s traffic does not yet impress; daily visitors currently number in the “tens of thousands. [...]
SideReel isn’t alone in this space, with competitors coming up like LocateTV (now in private beta). But SideReel’s still a good option for the average joe who simply wants to watch TV online.
Other posts in the “Where to Find Good Video” series: StumbleUpon, Digg, Megite and Tailrank, Divvio, Mesmo.tv, Vadver.
