What a great story—a Japanese whaling ship is disabled and begging for help, and guess who is available to rescue them? A Greenpeace vessel.

Seriously, John, you
shouldn’t watch this video.

Greg Laden was there, and has a nice blurry picture of me picking my nose.

So Scott Adams shouldn’t be too irritated at this amusing depiction of his mental state.

Zeke is gone.

…is to go say Happy Birdday to GrrlScientist.

Molly Ivins has died.

I’m surprised at how this affects me. She was a wonderful woman, wise and funny, and this is a great loss to the nation. Whenever I’m tempted to just write off the whole state of Texas (thanks to a few of its rather prominent representatives), I just remind myself, “Molly Ivins,” and know that I’m being unfair.

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Kevin Hayden has put together a sweet tribute to Molly Ivins. We’re all going to miss her.

Since I got ribbed a bit for my antique D&D lore in a previous comment, I have to defend myself from charges of extreme nerdlitude by distracting you all with a real nerdfest: a discussion of who would win in hand-to-hand combat between a first level magic-user and a housecat, complete with computer simulations.

The answer: under the modern rules, the cat usually wins. (When I played, if you said something like “I whack the cat with my staff”, there might be a quick check to see if the cat dodged, and otherwise, we’d just say, “OK, you killed the cat. Now what?” Dang rules lawyers and proliferating nit-pickery.)

Everyone should congratulate ScienceWoman—she manage to land a 7 pound minnow.

Read Twisty and Amanda for an encouraging story about how community activism can shut down a sleazebag operation, “Girls Gone Wild”. It’s a good lesson that I hope gets spread far and wide, and leads more people to cut off exploiters like Joe Francis.