Events

Above Siberia, 9:34 JST I actually can see Russia from my window:

Over Great Bear Lake, N.W.T., 16:20 MDT Note the first: A westbound 13-hour flight seems a lot shorter than a 9-hour flight the other direction. We left Chicago a little more than four hours ago, which equals the flying time from Chicago to San Francisco, the farthest place you can go within the Lower 48. It doesn’t feel that far. The sun confounds perceptions of time: we took off at 1pm and we land at 3:30, chasing the sun across the Canadian permafrost most of the way. I get to Shanghai at 7pm. My...

First, a housekeeping note. This is the one of three entries posted after the fact. Almost always, a post time you see on The Daily Parker accurately records when I first posted the blog entry. At this writing I’m on an airplane over Canada’s Northwest Territories, so the post time shows when I took notes about the entry that follows. This all may seem, as my dearest friend might say, “a bit Asperger’s-y.” Perhaps. Another very close friend blogs retrospectively, because she wants her entries to...

As reported earlier, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not like the Pope's actions in dealing with child abuse. Dawkins has clarified his remarks: Needless to say, I did NOT say "I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI" or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me...

I discovered this joke from the head of Duke's CCMBA IT department: An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor. "Doctor, I just can't get to sleep at night." "Have you tried counting sheep?" "That's the problem - I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it." And 24 hours from now, I'll be somewhere over Minnesota on my way to Shanghai...

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose work I have followed for years, want to arrest the Pope when he visits the U.K. in September: Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998. Dawkins and...

Darwin's Tears is now available in printed form. (It's been available for Kindle for a couple of weeks.)

Before continuing yesterday's list of Star Wars lines that only a 14-year-old could love, I need to tip my hat to reader AS who found this sparkling diamond of a list. Change one word in a Star Wars quote to "pants" and you get, for example, "I find your lack of pants disturbing," or, "In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering." Fascinating that the list includes lines from all six movies, and yet only lines from the first three made it into the top 20. Here's a clue. Here are...

Did you ever wonder about these lines from the original Star Wars? "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid." "Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!" "Look at the size of that thing!" "Sorry about the mess..." "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought." "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" "You've got something jammed in here real good." "Put that thing away before you get us all killed!" "Luke, at that speed, do you think you'll be able to pull out...

Truly stunning news from Russia this morning, with devastating repercussions for Poland: A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard. ... Among those on board, according to the Web site of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, were [President Lech] Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of...