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Fox News headline: “Alien life clues in Antarctic Ice?” The story says, in part:

[Scientists] don’t expect water samples from Lake Vostok will hold alien life, though any life it contains may have taken a slightly different evolutionary path than what appears on the planet today.

As the rest of the article goes on to say, it wouldn’t be “alien” life at all–just other forms of Earth life. So the headline is perhaps slightly misleading, although it does sound like it could hold some interesting stuff. But the scientists’ hopes that it will tell us something about alien life are all so heavily based on conjecture–they’re hoping to find life that might resemble life that might exist in some similar places that are “suspected” to be on the moons of Jupiter. It’s hard for me to get too excited about that.

I just wish they wouldn’t “hint at strange survival in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism.” And it’s the Antarctic, which automatically demands a Mountains of Madness reference.

(Just so you know, I’ve always treated these real-life similarities with Lovecraftian tales as mere humorous coincidences.*)

*But sometimes, “I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.”

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I bet somewhere today there’s some slacker student with a paper due that he hasn’t worked on, and he’s just now going to go cribbing from Wikipedia like he always does, when he gets an unpleasant surprise.

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You know, it’s rarely my intention when reading the news, to find things that sound like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. But these things just seem to happen. As National Geographic reports:

“Birds of a feather usually flock together—but not in the case of a rare “white” mutant penguin, spotted Monday in a chinstrap penguin colony in Antarctica.”

I’d never heard of anything other than normal black-and-white penguins–except, of course, in the pages of At the Mountains of Madness, where the giant albino penguins serve as fodder for the Shoggoths. Coming on the heels of news about a hidden mountain range in the Antarctic makes this even more disturbing.

Okay, so I’m kidding around. These kinds of stories don’t actually worry me.* But I do think they’re both pretty cool.

*Yet. 

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[To be sung to the tune of “The Minstrel Boy“/”The Son of God Goes Forth to War“]
The Chosen One from the tourney’s gone,
With his wild throws wound up behind him.
His throwing form he must work upon;
A decent trainer they must find him.
“Son of Swamp” said the media throng,
“Since all the World exalts thee,
Your team was felled by a Branch so long,
No one among us faults thee.”
The Great One fell! And the Hooded One
Could not keep his dark side under.
For to make his opponents wonder.
And said “No luck today for ye
Who win with tricks and gimmickry!
Your plays work when the safety’s free;
They shall never work on our DB!”

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So, right now, it seems like Mitt Romney is probably going to be the Republican nominee. As I see it, the person who seems to have the best chance at challenging him is Ron Paul.

And, as has happened before, I find that only Claude Rains as Mr. Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia can assess the situation properly: “One of them’s half-mad – and the other, wholly unscrupulous.”

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Conservative writer Cal Thomas, lamenting the evil Liberal media’s vicious interrogation of innocent Republicans, proposes a solution:

“Instead of complaining, which changes nothing, Republicans should run the equivalent of a Tebow option play. They should refuse to participate in any more dog-and-pony shows designed to trip them up. Instead, they should create their own panels with an ideological mix of interrogators.

Invite a couple of ‘wild card’ conservative partisans like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to add to the journalistic mix. If the ‘Miss America’ contest could invite Limbaugh as a judge in 2010, why can’t the Republican presidential candidates invite him, or Hannity, to judge and question them?”

Absolutely! Because if you are qualified to judge the Miss America pageant, you are totally qualified to ask questions of the Republican candidates for President. I couldn’t agree more.

The funniest thing about politics isn’t when people lie; it’s when they say things that are more true than they know.

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Sometimes I feel that I am not as mature as I should be. For example, when I was reading this article by David Brooks entitled “Where Are the Liberals?”, I couldn’t help thinking of a modification to the song Hugh Laurie sings in this sketch, replacing his words with “Where are the Libs?”

Yes, I know I have issues. Anyway, though, I think I know the answer to Brooks’s question “why aren’t there more liberals in America?” It is because what we call “Conservatism” today is a (sometimes tenuous) alliance between two different philosophies, Nationalism and Materialism, whereas “Liberalism” basically reduces down to one philosophy: Cosmopolitanism.  

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This New Year has begun with a host of technical difficulties that have made blogging difficult.
I have suspected for some time that my internet router is out to destroy me. It would hunt me down and kill me if it didn’t have to stay plugged into the wall outlet. But it is clearly attempting to cut off my lines of communication in order to leave me isolated and vulnerable.
It reboots itself at seemingly random intervals, and each time it seems to hit upon some new way of wrecking my internet connection; either by disconnecting me entirely or else by making the internet run painfully slow.
Now, because of many painful experiences, I have learned to anticipate this sort of thing and so I’ve thus far been able to thwart most of its plans by carefully timing my internet use for when it least expects it. I have read Sun-Tzu, and so I recall the lesson “appear at places to which [the enemy] must hasten; move swiftly where he does not expect you.”
However, my router has enacted a counter-strategy, where it wipes out all of my settings when it reboots, thus forcing me to have to fix them before I can do anything else. This, I am convinced, is a clever trick it has concocted so it knows when I am about to use the internet.
People tell me that I’m paranoid, but they haven’t seen the way the router’s green “everything is okay” light flashes mockingly at me when everything is obviously not okay because I am not connected to the internet.
Someday, I have to figure out why these things happen to me. But, more seriously, I though I’d post while I still had the chance to let you know that I’m battling technical difficulties, and so I don’t know when I’ll post next.

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According to this Financial Times article, China has announced that they intend to send a manned mission to the moon in the next decade or so.

But what scares me about this news is that it is an eerie harbinger that John McLaughlin, host of the political talk show The McLaughlin Group, made an accurate prediction several years ago when he said “the next man or woman to walk on the moon will be Chinese.” If you watch the show, you know why the idea of him making an accurate prediction is disturbing.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not note that Mr. McLaughlin’s prediction has formed the theme of a good but bizarre (how could it be otherwise?) song by Andrew WK:

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As it seems that we’re near
 To the start of a year,
Hereupon we are resolving
To do some things, involving
Improving our minds or hitting the gym.
With a determination grim,
 We swear that in this anno
We’ll have “mens sana in corpore sano”.
(To steal a bit from Juvenal)
We swear that we’ll improve in all
Of the respects that matter.
But—our hopes not too much to flatter–
Does anyone remember
If we did this last December?

I have to say, this is not my most creative effort ever. The joke of people making resolutions and not keeping them is kind of overused.

Some annotations: “anno” means “year” in a couple languages, and “mens sana in corpore sano” means “a sound mind in a healthy body” and is a quote from the poet Juvenal. I suspect making obscure references in foreign languages for the sake of forced rhymes is not really the best practice for poetry, but sometimes I just can’t help it.