JMA-PSOS

Odds and ends:
1. I love This American Life (today's story about the Hemant Lakhani case was quite engrossing).
2. Today I learned that Volkswagen's board is divided equally between workers' representatives and executives. What an alien concept to US boards!
3. According to Wired, Jorn Barger, the guy that is considered the first blogger as the author of the Robot Wisdom Weblog since 1997, used to be homeless not long ago. He recovered his weblog recently and he's at it again. I like his haiku style blogging.
4. I rediscovered a treasure-trove of anti-Bush ads and pseudo-ads at bushin30seconds.org. One of my many favorites is no. 112 in the Top 150 entitled What would Jesus do?, though I remember seeing no. 1 on TV and thinking that they hit the spot with it: Child's Play. In a similar, manipulative way, no. 4 What are we teaching our children? wasn't too shabby either. Funny in a Blue-Collar TV sort of way is Bush Cheney Auto World. I could go on and on...
5. Today, I realized that there is no one-word in Romanian that translates as thumb. It's simply the generic "degetul mare" (meaning "the big digit"). It's interesting because the sister Romance languages do have equivalents: pouce (fr.), pollice (it.), pulgar (sp.), polegar (pt.). Since Latin did have a word for thumb (i.e. pollex), I wonder if that implies that the word has Neo-Latin roots or that somehow Romanian lost it (the word not the thumb, although the oddity does create some cynical images in my head in a very Cioran-esque self-hating Romanian vein)?
6. Rehashed my pro-evolution, anti-ID position in an exchange with mshonle here.
7. Today, Marina and I enjoyed the nice weather on our sun deck for a brief few hours. After noticing that two dragonflies were simply roasting in the sun on our deck with us, I managed to get some good close-ups of both. Here (1600x1200 768k jpg) is one of them. While uploading the pic on my website, I rediscovered some pics we took a year ago of some local sunsets, some goslings, and others. While browsing today, I found a very interesting picture of a boat on a river in India, which, IMO, it exemplifies perfectly the Indian culture: very ornate and somewhat delicately balanced.