He’s smoking something really bitchin’.

Thanks to Mitchell for the tip-off.

Whatever stash Reid got into out there in Nevada, it’s something else.  Reid sounds like the political equivalent of Charlie Sheen in terms of weirdness, but without the porn queens, twitter madness, and machetes.  And Reid isn’t a rock-star from Mars with tiger blood in his veins.  But other than that, they’re friggin’ twins, brah.

“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

So let me get this straight… is he saying that this is a great venue for cowboys (and presumably cowgirls) to make more little cowboys and cowgirls to the tune of tens of thousands and if they scrap the NEA stuff there won’t be any more little cowboys and cowgirls because the big cowboys and cowgirls otherwise never meet and have rodeo sex?

if the scenario involves anything like the above pics and their unholy union, scrap it now, Now, NOW.

(Freaky cow gunman found here –  go check out the rest of the oddities… http://pictureisunrelated.memebase.com/2009/05/11/freak-of-the-week-caption-contest/ )

Disclaimer:  I can only tell you what I saw on the photo just prior to that one and the pic after that one – if the rest of the site is “sicker than octegenarian porn” (to use something I heard from Soylent Green) then I’m sorry, I did not know that.

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Seriously?  Take away 1/3 of those of us in this country and split the rest down the middle at random, and as a whole it’s like having to support some total stranger?  Yep!

Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages

(If I didn’t make a lick of sense, just ignore it and read the link)

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By the way, Sheen is creepily starting to remind me of my Uncle J.   Amazingly, Sheen is 30 years ahead of schedule.

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Update on Mercury’s Messenger…

Update:  Dream up a caption…

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From the JHU APL website…  The last sentence is the amazing one.  That is so close to the mark as to be awe-inspiring, at least it is to me.

Ten Days from Orbit Insertion

Ten days from now – on March 17 EDT – the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute maneuver that will place it into orbit about Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and initiating a one-year science campaign to understand the innermost planet.

Starting today, antennas from each of the three Deep Space Network (DSN) ground stations will begin a round-the-clock vigil, allowing flight control engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to monitor MESSENGER on its final approach to Mercury.

At 10:40 a.m. this morning, the spacecraft began executing the last cruise command sequence of the mission.  This command load will execute until next Monday, when the command sequence containing the orbit-insertion burn will start.

“This is a milestone event for our small, but highly experienced, operations team, marking the end of six and one half years of successfully shepherding the spacecraft through six planetary flybys, five major propulsive maneuvers, and sixteen trajectory-correction maneuvers, all while simultaneously preparing for orbit injection and primary mission operations,” says MESSENGER Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan. “Whatever the future holds, this team of highly dedicated engineers (http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/moc/index.html) has done a phenomenal job methodically generating, testing, and verifying commands to the spacecraft, getting MESSENGER where it is today.”

The mission operations team now turns its attention to the final preparations for the insertion burn next week and establishing nominal operations for the primary mission. As with the last three approaches to Mercury, the navigation team and the guidance and control team have been successfully using the solar radiation of the Sun to carefully adjust the trajectory of the spacecraft toward the optimum point in space and time to start the orbit-insertion maneuver.

As of the most recent navigation report on February 22, the spacecraft was less than 5 kilometers and less than three seconds from the target arrival point

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