Beware! Earworm ahead

At least, the above and foregoing sign will trigger an earworm if you are of a certain age.

And, if not, you can 'tuck in your hair up under your hat' and ask an elder why this is funny.

If the elder of whom you inquire has access to the song, and offers to play it for you, run -- do not walk -- away quickly.

You have been warned.

Did you put your shoes out last night for St. Nicholas?

(Photo credit: nestfullofeggs.blogspot.com)

Today, December 6, is the Feast of St. Nicholas. When we were kids we'd put our shoes somewhere where St. Nicholas could fill them with candy or other sweets. Depending on how the religious calendars coincided, St. Nicholas would sometimes bring marked down, post-Hanukkah gelt. (If Hanukkah came late in a given year, the Hanukkah gelt would wind up in our Christmas stockings instead.)

Very ecumenical and economical.

Naturally I tried (at least once) to leave my boots out for St. Nicholas, as opposed to mere shoes. My parents vetoed the plan.

The thought -- now -- of eating something that had been left to linger in my shoes overnight strikes me as awful. What were we thinking?

But, of course, what we were thinking -- then -- was that this was an opportunity to get candy and we really didn't care if it had to marinate in our stinky gym shoes for some hours before we could get at it. Chocolate is chocolate.

Nor were we overly concerned with whether St. Nicholas was or was not the same guy as Santa Claus. I suppose if we thought about it, we might have wondered why the same old guy would come by on both the 6th and the 24th. With a different modus operandi on each occasion. But no self-respecting kid wonders long about where candy is coming from, as long as it's coming in sufficiently copious quantities.

I've been meaning to put this up for years now....

No, it doesn't make any sense for most of my readers, as if I had that many, but Bee will probably be surprised that I figured out her deep, dark secret.... And, yes, this is a real place, on Touhy Avenue in Niles, just outside the Chicago city limits.

By the way, that featureless gray above the top of the building? That's what a February sky looks like in Chicago, more times than not.

The sad, desperate world of Clash of Clans

I'd seen the ads in the subway for some time prior to the baseball playoffs this fall.

The gentleman at the left was featured prominently in most of them: Gaze into my mustache and despair! read the caption on the poster.

Seriously? I admit I had to look it up in order to get the words right, but I at least remembered that this slogan was meant to evoke a famous poem. It's Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in case you're at all curious: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Then came the MLB playoffs and the commercials -- hundreds of them, thousands of them -- for this stupid game. I watched and I wondered: Who would be goofy enough to waste their time on nonsense like this?

At a family gathering I found out: My sons had all downloaded the game and were happily destroying each other's villages.

"Can't you peacefully coexist with your neighbors?" I asked. "Can't you grow and prosper by trade or diplomacy instead of warfare? Must everything end in violence?"

My kids regarded me with that pitying look reserved for hopeless cases. They hated the way I'd played the one computer game of theirs that I had attempted (a few different incarnations, over the years, of Sid Meier's Civilization) -- "your turns take 45 minutes," they'd complain, as I built railroads and cleared forests and negotiated trade routes. "No, Dad," they told me, "this is just kill or be killed."

It sounded awful... but the kids were clearly enjoying themselves. And I have this iPad at home and you can only play so much Sudoku or Solitaire and, well, one thing led to another. I downloaded Clash of Clans.

I liked building up my village. I liked clearing the obstacles and setting up my gold mines and building defensive walls. It's hard to build up quickly, because you have to carefully husband your resources. (Either that or spend real money to buy "gems" that can be used to spur production. Well, that wasn't going to happen in my case.)

Still, I started to feel a certain affinity for my villagers, all of whom, apparently, resemble the nice young lady at right who calls me "Chief."

At first, she offered helpful hints about what to build first and where to build.

But all too soon, her messages became darker: "While you were gone, our village was destroyed by MetalMan" -- and, sure enough, I could watch a "replay," starting with my villagers fleeing in terror to the village hall for protection while my cannons and archer towers spat death at my attackers, only to be overwhelmed by force and numbers. Then my mines were destroyed and the builder's huts and resource storage units and, finally, my poor village hall and all the poor creatures huddled within whom I had failed by not upgrading my walls from wood to stone.

But, somehow, all my villagers survived. "We must build up our defenses!" my villager told me, but with no seeming bitterness. If I were them, I'd get me a new Chief pronto, one who could keep the invaders at bay.

But my villagers are stuck with me.

And now I perceive the true horror of their plight. I upgraded the walls, I improved the cannons, I strengthened the archer towers, and still the invaders come as soon as I move onto something else (you know, like work?), and each invasion is more terrible than the last, the attackers always just a bit stronger than anything I'd prepared to repel them, overwhelming my defenses and destroying the town hall where the villagers tremble in fear.

And it never stops.

As soon as I come back, they are made whole again, ready to keep building as I direct even though they should be moving out in droves.

After the village is destroyed, there is a breathing space -- a shield is set up (no thanks to me) -- that keeps the villagers safe for 12 hours or even 16 depending on the extent of the carnage. My villagers are behind such a shield now. But I don't have enough gold to upgrade to level 4 walls -- and if and when I do, stronger armies will come to knock those walls down, too....

Am I taking this a little too seriously?

At a certain point, everybody looks familiar

In the course of a typical day, I will wander back and forth through the City Hall and County Building on my way to and from the Daley Center or run to this bank or that one, there to pay a bill or (¡ojalá!) make an actual deposit.

Along the way I will see, and nod at, a great many men and women.

It wouldn't do to walk past someone with whom one is acquainted and ignore them entirely; that would be rude.

The problem is that in strolling quickly through City Hall or down LaSalle Street I really can't stop to scrutinize the faces of passers by and see if I really do know them. I would probably be arrested if I tried. Or slugged. So, rather than commit a serious social blunder, I nod courteously to anyone who looks familiar.

Problem is, these days, just about everyone looks familiar.

There are probably multiple reasons for this. Certainly, I have worked in downtown Chicago for well over 30 years at this point; one can't help but see many of the same people day in and day out when one works in the same place that long. And, of course, with the passage of so much time, I have become acquainted with more and more people each year. By this time, of course, many are dying off -- but there are more than enough new acquaintances to take their places.

Also, although the Irish are no longer dominant in most Chicago demographics, there are still a lot of us working in the Loop. Many of the Chicago Irish hail from a handful of villages in County Mayo, God help us, and we're pretty much all related somehow. And genetics is funny: Your good friend's fourth cousin twice removed may look an awful lot like your your good friend, at least at a distance, even if the two of them have never met. Baseball writer Peter Gammons -- Youngest Son watches the MLB channel a lot when he's home -- looks eerily like a guy I went to college with.

But the biggest single reason that so many people look familiar to me is that, with each passing year, my eyesight gets worse and worse. Everyone has started to look the same -- in a blurry sort of way -- even when I wear my glasses.

I remember when I first realized this. I was in a Costco a few years back and I saw someone that -- from a distance at least -- looked like someone I knew from court. I put on my best lodge brother face and strode forward to greet this person only to realize, as I closed in, that this wasn't who I thought it was at all.

"You don't have the first clue who I am, do you?" said my quarry.

"No. Sorry. I thought you were someone else."

"It happens."

And it does -- to me at least -- more and more.

So, these days, I just nod and keep going, my purposeful stride discouraging any embarrassing conversations of the type I had that day in Costco.

But I notice, too, that, these days, a lot of people nod back. So I don't think I'm alone in this....

How Warren Buffett proved that time travel will not exist for the foreseeable future

Mr. Buffett

Even those who don't follow sports will recall that Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to offer a billion dollars (that's billion with a "b") to anyone who could accurately predict the outcome of each and every game in this year's NCAA tournament.

Oh, sure, most people have office pools -- the winners in these may have two or three of the Final Four pegged accurately -- but Mr. Buffet's contest required entrants to correctly forecast the outcome of every game -- predict every single upset -- and identify all the winners. Mathematicians calculated odds of anywhere from 1 in a billion to something like 9.2 quintillion to 1 against -- and you had better believe all those smarty-pants mathematicians heaved a sigh of relief when the last perfect bracket was eliminated just days after the tournament began (Mercer's upset of Duke wiped out most entries).

But what does this have to do with time travel?

Think about it. Here's this immensely rich guy who made arrangements to have a billion dollars available (no, he wasn't really going to write a personal check -- you don't get to be the Oracle of Omaha by doing stupid stuff). Actually, Buffett was going to use one of his insurance companies to insure the billion and he probably had Quicken Loans, his co-sponsor, pay the premium, estimated by some at $15 million. You can probably guarantee Buffett made a profit on this deal. That's how you get to be an Oracle. Or Wizard. I hear tell he's been called both.

Anyway, Buffett's announcement makes huge news -- the Intertubes are ablaze with the billion dollar bet -- it's a PR stunt that will long be remembered... you know, well into the future?

And yet, not one of my great-great-great grandkids showed up with a cheat sheet for me to use as an entry.

In fact, nobody's did. Because if somebody's great-great-great grandson or daughter showed up with the perfect bracket, Buffett and his fellow investors would, at this point, be getting just a wee bit concerned about having to make good on the bet.

And you can imagine our little time traveler passing out investment advice after the billion is paid out, too, feathering his or her nest for a very comfortable future.

Now, this doesn't prove that time travel is impossible any more than travel into outer space proves there's no Heaven. Warren Buffett, for all his wealth and fame now, will presumably be largely forgotten in time -- it may take centuries before he is unfamiliar to historians specializing in 21st Century America, but it probably will will happen. Therefore, what this proves is that time travel will not be invented while this March Madness bet is still remembered. Time travel might be invented after Warren Buffett has faded from the footnotes of history so that no one knows what a golden opportunity the inventors of the time machine missed by not looking up their old ancestors.

Alternatively, I suppose, it could indicate that, in the future, our descendants won't care so much about money.

But that seems about as likely as correctly predicting the outcome of each and every NCAA tournament game.

Paper still has a place in the world

I like my tablet and I've reached a rapprochement with my smart phone. I've been blogging, off and on, for almost a decade (this is, after all, my Second Effort). So I'm not totally tech-averse. I'm not a doctrinaire Luddite, whatever my kids may tell you.

Still, my desk at the Undisclosed Location is choked with paper. Stacked high. I still find I read better on paper than I do on the screen. I read newspapers. I read books. No one steals a newspaper or book from you on the el going home; iPhone users have to be aware of "Apple pickers."

Perhaps that explains why I really laughed out loud when I saw this commercial online this morning. Perhaps no explanation is really needed.

No self-esteem problems here

This is the English language business card of Chinese multimillionaire Chen Guangbiao, who recently tried (and failed) to buy the New York Times.

Chen is not a man afflicted with the sin of false modesty, not where his business card touts him as China's most influential person and most prominent philanthropist -- and a moral leader besides. And so forth and so on....

The Yahoo! News article, by Mike Krumboltz, from which I grabbed the accompanying image, cites a Business Insider report estimating Chen's wealth at $740 million.

With that kind of money, Krumboltz writes, Chen can print any kind of business card he likes. Actually, the last time I printed up business cards (black and white, no picture), it cost about $70. I suppose cards like these would cost a little more -- but not millions. Therefore, you too can probably afford a business card just as loud and proud as Chen Guangbiao's.

But could you ever imagine giving it to anyone?

Me neither.

Woman marries bridge? I just can't keep up with these changing definitions of marriage

One half of the happy couple? The Le Pont du Diable Bridge.

Zay N. Smith's QT column today references a headline from the free British tabloid, Metro, "I pronounce you bridge and wife: Woman marries 600-year-old French bridge."

I looked the article up. Apparently there really was a ceremony in which Jodi Rose, an Australian artist, was 'married' to the Le Pont du Diable Bridge in Céret, in southern France.

This was evidently no spur of the moment decision. Ms. Rose has traveled the world since 2002 on bridge-related projects. First was Singing Bridges, "a conceptual sound work using the cables of bridges as musical instruments on a global scale." A CD was released in February 2005. And then came Global Bridge Symphony, "an ongoing project to link the sounds of bridges a round the world in collaboration with engineers, architects, software developers, composers, musicians, designers, visual and video artists." So Ms. Rose did not fall for the first bridge she had to cross.

But -- still -- it's hard not to see that there might be some obstacles to the union. There was the age difference, of course. The Le Pont du Diable Bridge dates to the 14th Century; I couldn't find her exact age online, but Ms. Rose is considerably younger. And Ms. Rose is human; the bridge is inanimate. Several of the articles I consulted said that Ms. Rose was a trifle vague as to how she determined the bridge's gender, but she says the bridge is male. However, even though France recently suffered a wave of protests because of same sex marriage legislation, gender in this case seems the least of the obstacles to a happy union. Consummation (no matter how devoutly wished) strikes me as a potentially bigger issue... and, for that matter, consent.

The bride and... groom?

Although there was no church wedding (bridges generally don't fit in even the largest churches, and a bridge whose name translates as the Devil's Bridge would probably be particularly opposed to a church ceremony, even if one could be arranged), the Mayor of nearby Saint-Jean-de-Fos was present to give his blessing to the union.

Anything for tourism, I suppose.

I guess, in the modern age, one can only hope the happy couple can, er, bridge their many differences.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related: Jodi Rose bridges differences to marry Le Pont du Diable Bridge in France;
Woman marries bridge like that's a totally normal thing to do;
Rock-solid love: Australian woman marries a bridge in France - and even gets the mayor's blessing; and
Australian woman Jodi Rose marries a bridge in France - and even gets the mayor's blessing

Frivolous Friday -- very abbreviated edition

Obtained from FAIL Blog.

Where was this idea when I really needed it?

Obtained from the webcomic SMBC.

Ah, statistics. The cartoonist could have put almost anything after that "and/or" and not changed the pie chart one bit. He could have put meteor strikes, for example. Or, if he insisted on stampedes, he could have used elephants or creditors or angry birds. But, no, Mr. Weiner chose clowns. Why do so many people hate clowns?

A modest proposal about how to make this time change more palatable

Daylight Savings Time was supposed to save energy -- and it would, too, if we didn't spring ahead so darn early. It was just starting to be light out when we began our day at the Curmudgeon home last week. In another couple of weeks, but for the time change, we'd not need lights at all in the morning. But today, after the time change, it was full dark when the alarm clock called us back to consciousness.

Everyone likes the time change in the fall -- that one happy weekend is an hour longer -- but it is so much harder to lose an hour.

Long Suffering Spouse particularly hates this time change -- and she let me know all about it, in no uncertain terms, both last night and this morning.

Thus inspired, I've been trying to come up with a way to make this time change a little less awful.

As usual, the comics have pointed the way for me.

Perhaps you saw Tim Rickard's Brewster Rockit: Space Guy yesterday?

Brewster got me thinking. Why does the lost hour have to be sliced out of the middle of the night? Adding an extra hour to Saturday night makes sense in the fall, but taking one out in the spring... well, let's put it this way: I need all the beauty sleep I can get. Surely we could pick a better hour to lose than that.

So here's my modest proposal: Next year, let's start DST a few weeks later -- so we recapture the potential for energy savings -- and instead of having the clock go from 1:59 am to 3:00 am on Sunday morning, why not have the clocks jump from 1:59 pm to 3:00 pm on Friday afternoon.

Same lost hour -- but an entirely different attitude, don't you think?

Write your Congressman.

Are bars of soap now an endangered species?

I saw a bottle very much like this on the counter in the bathroom on Friday morning. (It may have been there for days... or weeks... but that's when I saw it.)

I had no idea they now sell "body wash" for babies.

I know "body washes" are increasingly popular for men and women. I don't understand why.

What's the matter with plain old soap?

Here is the power of advertising on overdrive: The young people have been seduced into believing that shampoo is better than soap. It certainly is more expensive.

Advertising is an amazing thing. In the early 1970s no manly man would be caught dead drinking Lite Beer. Then Bob Uecker and many other retired jocks were recruited to do funny ads for the product -- and the stigma was removed. (Dr. Pepper is trying to replicate this phenomenon with diet soda -- a 10 calorie drink in a powder blue can. Dr. Pepper and its ad agency are not using ex-athletes but they are trying to portray the product as for men only. I can't believe it will work -- but you never know....)

Remember when no self-respecting male would wear perfume? English Leather made a bid for the market in the 1960s with the tag line, delivered by a voluptuous blonde -- 'all my men wear English Leather, or they don't wear anything at all.' It didn't really work: This appeared to be an either-or choice -- and most men watching would have gladly chosen the latter over the former. Meanwhile, the woman in question, for obvious economic reasons, preferred the former over the latter. This created conflict. But in recent years, a truly stinky product called Axe has made obscene profits by running nearly obscene commercials, showing women who can't help but tear at the clothes of any male daring enough to put the product on. (See the difference? Men use the product and then they still get to wear nothing at all in the company of similarly inclined women. Conflict resolved: Win-win.) The product certainly made an impression on my muy macho, athletic sons. They'd go out on a Saturday evening so thoroughly doused in the stuff that they left clouds of opaque vapor behind them. It made the once-celebrated L.A. smog look transparent by comparison.

Zits cartoon, by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. I am not alone in my opinion about 'body sprays.'

I'd tell the kids that they could knock a buzzard off a sh*twagon with that stink, and they'd just favor me with a patronizing look -- you know, the look that says, you're old, Dad, but you're amusing in your antique way. Eyes watering, gagging on the stench, I'd try to tell them not to stay out too late. Who knows? Maybe the girls watched the same commercials and thought that was how they were supposed to behave. Maybe tearing off the boy's clothes would help dissipate the odor.... In order to find out whether this might be the case, I suppose I might have tried the spray -- at least once -- if I was their age (in a sense of strictly scientific inquiry, you understand).

But what's the attraction of "body wash" over bar soap? It leaves the bathtub slippery and seems to slow the drain. All that residue on the porcelain and in the plumbing suggests that plenty would be left on the skin as well. Why would anyone use a product that costs more than soap but doesn't get one as clean? I'd ask my granddaughter why she's using the 'head to toe' baby wash, but she doesn't talk yet. But she will eventually. And who knows what products she will demand of her parents then?

Frivolous Friday: Today is allegedly the first day of meteorological spring

From Real Life Adventures, by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich.

March 1 is allegedly the first day of meteorological spring. You wouldn't know it by the weather in Chicago.

Spring officially begins later this month. Bold and fearless prediction? You won't know it by the weather in Chicago.

Regarding the recent developments in Rome: From a certain point of view, can't one say that Benedict XVI gave up the papacy for Lent? Why are you grousing, then, about cutting back on chocolate?

Frivolous Friday: This would be cute even if it weren't true

I saw this at a site called Cheezburger and I immediately snagged the image with the intent of posting it here... but then it occurred to me... did Sir Paul really say this? (In this one small corner of the Internet, we are actually concerned with accuracy. Most of the time, anyway.)

Thanks to the miracle of Lexis/Nexis, I could check the alleged source -- and confirm that, indeed, Macca really did tell interviewer Dave Itzkoff, "My grandkids always beat me at Rock Band. And I say, Listen, you may beat me at Rock Band, but I made the original records, so shut up." (The interview, which was really about McCartney's recent Grammy Award, appeared in the Saturday, February 16, 2013 edition of the New York Times -- genuflection optional.)

Before you ask, Mr. Itzkoff apparently did not ask the obvious follow-up question, namely, what did your grandkids say to that?

Frivolous Friday: Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,795

Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic had this one a few days back... and it struck me as uncomfortably close to true.

Even casual readers will be able to plot my position on this bell curve. Although... Mr. Weiner, Zach (if you'll pardon the familiarity): I have to take issue with you on the labeling of the horizontal axis of your graph. Retirement? A fiction. A fantasy. A fraud. No more real than crystal skulls with mystic powers... or unicorns. (Well, you are young still; sadly, you'll find out.)

Speaking of unicorns, Wednesday's Bizarro, by Dan Piraro, stuck me as funny. Although I've had an office on the 13th floor of a building before, I've also worked in a number of buildings where there really is no such thing -- the floor immediately above 12 is 14. Since this was the subject of a comic, I guess this must be at least a national phenomenon. Does triskaidekaphobia extend overseas as well? Do office towers in London, Rome or Paris have 13th floors? If the MacArthur Foundation is listening, I'm willing to do field research on this. Starting right now.

Long Suffering Spouse might have appreciated Wednesday's installment of Grand Avenue, by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson, with the principal coming to evaluate the teacher. But my wife, a teacher, doesn't read this blog (or know of it's existence); she doesn't even read the comics. She works too hard. I don't work enough (but I'd still make time to read the comics even if I had more work than I knew what to do with).

I didn't intentionally set out to do a post on comics from Wednesday (although that would be like me, a couple of days late on the uptake); it's just that Wednesday's installment of the ever-sly Brewster Rockit, by Tim Rickard, struck me as the funniest of the week.

I could use a jolt of Dr. Mel's anti-stupidity ray this morning -- if he could just get the settings right.

Gentlemen, we've been sold a bill of goods about housework

Does this quotation sound familiar?

I like hugs and I like kisses,
But what I really love is help with the dishes!
-- Author Unknown

Maybe you've seen statements like this one in newspapers or magazines:

Seriously, seeing a guy put much thought into helping out with the daily doldrums shows he cares, which is a MAJOR turn-on. And, heck: If your woman isn't tired from housework, she'll feel more like... Well, you know...

Or maybe you've seen books like this one (available on Amazon):

Lies, gentlemen. All lies. Propaganda.

A new study just released by the University of Washington shows that "men and women who divide household chores in traditional ways report having more sex than couples who share so-called men’s and women’s work." By "traditional" the study's authors mean "traditional gender roles around the house – wives doing the cooking, cleaning and shopping; men doing yard work, paying bills and auto maintenance."

Of course, the linked press release from the University of Washington, by Molly McElroy, contains a politically correct disclaimer:

Husbands shouldn’t take these findings as justification for not cooking, cleaning, shopping or performing other traditionally female household tasks, warned lead author Sabino Kornrich, a former UW graduate student who is now a researcher at the Juan March Institute in Madrid. “Men who refuse to help around the house could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives’ marital satisfaction.”

But I thought rebellious thoughts anyway last night, as I scrubbed the dinner dishes... and then it occurred to me: Never increase conflict in a marriage in a room where there are all sorts of knives....

Look! Up in the sky --

The webcomic Cyanide & Happiness is frequently too crude and raunchy for my taste, but this particular installment made me laugh out loud.

(Hey, look, I can't only do overlong essays here; sometimes I have to switch it up, OK?)

Sure-fire method to make money from Facebook

Obtained from lamebook.com.

Interestingly, while visiting Facebook too frequently destroys productivity, regularly reading this blog will help you lose weight, clear your skin, grow hair where you want it, and remove it where you don't.

Even in Taiwan, they hate Jeffrey Loria

NMA.TV has jumped all over Jeffry Loria for dumping most of the big paychecks on his team on the Toronto Blue Jays, including long-time White Sox favorite Mark Buehrle. Yes, these high-paid free agents underperformed in Miami; so did their manager, Ozzie Guillen. I blame Loria (OK, I blame Ozzie a little, too, for cozying up to this doofus -- Ozzie should have known better). Anyway, I'll bet Toronto gets more out of all of them than ever Loria did. And Ozzie will land on his feet, too. (Although he won't ever become a Shakespearean actor.)

NMA.TV is a product of Next Media Animation, a Taiwanese subsidiary (says Wikipedia) of Next Media, a Hong Kong media conglomerate. Their Sims-like animations of events in the news are often quite funny.

Curiosity travels millions of miles, finds litter

Well, this has been an unfocused week here at Second Effort: A family story, a computer gripe, personal angst, and outrage at the Taliban. How can we tie this all up, neat and tidy, for a Friday?

Well, we can't.

So we'll change the subject -- again....

This artist's concept, obtained from the Huffington Post,
shows the rover Curiosity, of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission,
as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate
the composition of a rock surface.

You're looking at an artist's depiction of NASA's Mars Rover, Curiosity, as it rolls around the Martian landscape testing rocks and looking for signs of life.

This isn't an actual photo, of course, because -- at least as far as we know -- there's no one there to snap the rover's picture.

But we have to hedge here. The Huffington Post is reporting that Curiosity has found a "shiny object" in one of its first probes of the Martian surface. Herewith the object:

No, take a look again. You'll see it. There's a speck here that clearly does not match the surrounding dirt.

The linked HuffPost article says NASA scientists are not yet ready to say what the speck is -- but they're pretty sure it didn't fall off the rover or the lander that brought the rover to the surface. It appears, they say, to be of Martian origin.

Some dumb Martian may have left a gum wrapper behind. Littering may be a universal constant. But did Blxrrszt leave that there recently... or many millions of years ago?

Or maybe it's a piece of plastic from an ancient Martian landfill. That stuff never breaks down, does it?

Here is a story to watch with great interest.

But in the meantime, does anyone else notice the similarity between Curiosity and these two Hollywood space robots?














Johnny 5 from Short Circuit and WALL-E from, well, Pixar's WALL-E, bear a distinct resemblance to NASA's Curiosity, don't you think? Is this an accident? I think not.