Bookworm Room

Every morning, partly out of habit, partly out of martyrdom, and partly out of the same fascination that drives us to rubber-neck roadway accidents, I check out the San Francisco Chronicle on line.  It is certainly a nicely laid out home page.  It has clear links to its own columns and articles, and a nice [...]

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Hat tip:  Power Line

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Hat tip:  Soccer Dad

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For my book club, I’m reading The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850.  The title is self-explanatory and the book’s premise simple: Following a fairly halcyon early medieval period that saw global warming, and with it a rare stability in an intensely agrarian world, the world cooled down, with devastating effects on the [...]

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I found the report about the White House solar panels interesting.  In theory, I think solar panels are a fine idea.  In practice, here in the land of PG&E, I do not.  You see, we have solar panels.  It cost us roughly $15,000 to install them.  Before we even purchased them, it was obvious that [...]

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Unless you’ve been on a camping trip in a remote wilderness for the past few days, you’ve heard about the video that a British climate change advocacy group prepared.  The short video takes you through a variety of settings (classrooms, workplaces, sports fields), in which people are encouraged to diminish their carbon footprint and, importantly, [...]

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Alaska is the land of many, many glaciers.  During my trip, I had the great pleasure of seeing Glacier Bay, the Hubbard Glacier and the Mendenhall glacier.  They are magnificent.  What I found amusing, in an icky kind of way, was the approach the museums, the Park Rangers, and the information sites all took to [...]

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It’s the first day of summer for my kids, so I’ve been in mommy mode all day (expect when I was in martial arts mode, which was, frankly, more fun).  Things cross my radar, though, and there are three things that came my way that I wanted to put onto your radar.  In no particular [...]

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It tells you how quickly the world is moving that José María Aznar was prime minister in Spain as recently as 2004.  It’s impossible today to imagine any current world leader, including our own President, writing this about Israel. I’ve posted Aznar’s message on both of my facebook sites, emailed it to all my friends, [...]

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I spoke with a fellow parishioner today about our children. This well-meaning, socially aware good fellow (an attorney) was extolling how well his son was progressing in his Ivy League undergraduate education. And, I asked, what was he studying? Environmental sciences. Ah, I said…that’s an interesting and certainly timely field of study: had he been [...]

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I have to say that this video actually made me giggle, because having all of Al Gore’s doom-and-gloom compressed to less than 2 minutes, and then playing Pomp & Circumstance in the background, is more like a cartoon than anything else. Then again I didn’t have to listen to the whole blather, and I wasn’t [...]

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I’ve been following Al Gore’s global warming hysteria with all the attention it deserves.  I’ve understood about the boiling frogs; the way he gets to fly around, live in mansions, and drive SUVS, while the rest of us don’t; and our responsibility to use only a single square of toilet paper regardless of circumstances.  I [...]

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I truly intended to fisk algore’s op-ed at the New York Times, in which he explains why global warming is still so important that the world should continue its task of turning him into the first green-based billionaire.  I was foiled, however, by the fact that I couldn’t step giggling as I read his hysterical [...]

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I’ve been reading Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh.  Normally, I’d shy away from a book like this — after all, it’s about math! — but it was required reading for my book club, and it’s proven to be delightful.  To the extent there is math [...]

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I don’t know how people get these to market as fast as they do, but this is one of the funniest Hitler in the Bunker parodies (language alert):

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I’d like to think that Climategate, this extraordinary winter, and myriad other evidence about the fraud that is Anthropogenic Global Warming will finally de-Gore-ize a scarred world.  In a logical place, change should come about given information distributed in posts such as this one, at American Thinker, attacking IPCC methodology and myriad climate frauds; or [...]

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Rod Serling was certainly a creative genius, but who knew he was a clairvoyant, with the ability to predict the future?  Or, more specifically, who knew that, back in November 1961, he had the ability to predict the Winter of 2010, a record-breaking American winter playing out against the hysteria about Global Warming and imminent [...]

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I think it’s pretty clear that Audi meant to show that its car is so environmentally pure, it can withstand any scrutiny.  (Michelle Malkin shows just how committed to environmental “purity” Audi purports to be.)  However, its Superbowl commercial very effectively (and probably inadvertently) managed to show precisely what life will be like in a [...]

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This is one of Steyn’s best, and that’s saying a lot.  Here are my two favorite parts from his column on Copenhagen: [T]he Prince of Wales is simultaneously heir to the thrones of Britain, Australian, Tuvalu, and a bunch of other countries. His Royal Highness was also in Copenhagen last week, telling delegates that there [...]

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Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit.  The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win [...]

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Some things go out with a whimper.  Global warming may well be going out with a bang.  The latest news from Russia is the claim that the global warming scientists didn’t just have faulty code and highly massaged numbers.  It turns out that they also messed with the underlying data, falsifying it or ignoring data [...]

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The law of unintended consequences is a fascinating one.  I blogged the other day about the tax on restaurant food that’s eaten “here” as opposed to “to go.”  In cafes, smart people order food “to go,” and then consumer it here.  The result is garbage cans filled with food containers.  Oy, the pollution! Here’s another, [...]

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Every year, there’s that one December weekend when every event converges.  This past weekend, which really ended only yesterday, was that weekend.  Friday we went to the Cirque du Soliel.  I’ve seen every show since the Cirque burst onto the national scene in the mid-1980s.  This show was exquisitely beautiful, with some of the most [...]

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My daughter is a very reluctant Girl Scout, only because her best friend, an equally reluctant Girl Scout, is in there due to parental pressure.  In Spring, we sell cookies, and I buy the minty kind.  Might have to stop selling and buying, though, because it turns out that, not only have the Girl Scouts [...]

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I can’t do better than to quote from the Wall Street Journal on the EPA ruling, which constitutes nothing more than an undemocratic takeover of all business activity and most government activity in this country: EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday that her ruling that greenhouses gases are dangerous pollutants would “cement 2009′s place in [...]

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