One of my favorite things to do in beautiful Monterey where I am blessed to live is to visit the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium (consistently one of the top five tourist destinations in all of California), less than 15 minutes from my house.

The aquarium just announced it has added a white shark to its offerings. This is the fourth white shark the aquarium has displayed in one of the most successful attempts to study this oft-misunderstood animal. MBA is the only aquarium in the world to successfully house a young white shark for longer than 16 days. Previous specimens have been kept alive for several weeks.

You can bet I'll be heading over there soon to check it out.

One of the sharpest wits in American history, George Carlin, has died at 71 of heart trouble. He and Shelly Berman were my two favorite comics and I'm a big fan of comedians and comedy.

"Coincidentally" this morning's email brought me a reminder of one of his best lines. Commenting on Martha Stewart's legal problems:

'Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she's behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her off to jail.'

One of the things about getting older is you watch a lot of your friends -- and people like Carlin who only *seemed* like a friend -- move on to what's next. I'm not sad for them, but I *am* sad for me.

Give 'em Hell, George.

"Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile way and you have their
shoes."

Anonymous

I've heard it before but for some reason it struck me as particularly funny today.

Wow. This is a very interesting set of large-scale images depicting huge statistics that otherwise have no meaning to most of us. Very cleverly and artistically done by Chris Jordan.

This has to be one of the niftiest pranks I've ever seen or heard of. The video is really fun to watch and the idea is so good I can imagine seeing it reproduced all over the country in coming weeks.

A nice, empty, comedic moment in the midst of the chaos.

Check it out.

Thanks to my friend Vicky for the pointage.

My buddy Sandi Golden sent me this link to a Dutch shopping site. You can't order anything and the site's all in Dutch, but after the page loads, wait a few moments and then watch what happens.

If American advertising had this kind of creativity to it, I might even watch some of it and perhaps even buys something just to reward their ingenuity.

Just a quick reminder for some of my readers and friends who live or work in one of the several parts of the country experiencing stormy weather today, including my home base of Monterey to save often. I mean really often. Particularly when it's been a while since the last storm, power outages are fairly common. This morning, we have had three very brief outages, usually a harbinger of a day of unreliable power.

This is one of the main reasons I'm reluctant to part with my PowerBook; it keeps running for quite a while during such outages. My desktop machine goes down immediately. I'm going to buy a small UPS for it today.

I'm thankful for the rain, not so much for the damaging winds!

It turns out I'm not the only person on the planet who's had it up to here with the crappy, maddening, dangerous and environmentally disgusting "clamshell" packaging that manufacturers are using so much of these days. There's even a name for the behavior people often engage in as they wrestle with this garbage: "Wrap Rage".

Manufacturers claim they have to use this stuff that you need jackhammers and blowtorches to open so that they can reduce theft of merchandise from inside the package. Poppycock. They're too lazy and cheap to solve the problem in some way that doesn't horribly inconvenience their customers.

Hey, numbskulls! You put a bar code on the outside of the package. You often have retailers who can determine when a package is being removed from the store without the formality of checkout. How about this idea? Put that anti-theft stuff inside the stupid package. Why do you want to let the bad buys win again by turning their propensity for thievery become a reason that thousands of Americans slice their fingers, lose patience, embarrass themselves in front of children and grandchildren, and generally hate you?

Makes no damn sense to me.

This came across my desk today courtesy of Mark Hurst's GoodExperience newsletter. A bunch of professors at Penn have recorded lectures summarizing the key teachings in their areas of specialty. The goal was to create a lecture of 60 seconds' length. Most go a bit over but none egregiously so and they are often quite fascinating.

(Unfortunately, the lectures are in Real format, which may not be easy for you to locate and install, but it's probably worth it despite that bad decision.)

The annual TED conference in Monterey each year offers some of the best and brightest thinkers and ideas available anywhere. They recently started making videos of their talks available for free on the Net, a veritable bonanza of insight, humor, thought-provoking ideas and startling truth.

This guy brings only a little of that but is the most entertaining of the videos I've seen so far. Check out Arthur Benjamin, Mathemagician. Stay to the end. He does a problem out loud that will blow your socks off.