The Internet, bringing me into contact with the lower forms of culture on a daily basis, has done bad things to me. (Those who knew me pre-Internet are probably laughing — I was never exactly a connoisseur of high culture). Anyway, the Terre Haute TribStar had a headline that said “Vigo resident reports cougar sighting.” My first thought was that someone saw an attractive older lady which is a fine thing for the person involved, but generally not the stuff of local news. Turns out the cougar was of the feline variety and may well be a 7 year old, wild cougar that escaped from the Clay County exotic feline rescue center in January 2007.

William D. Statom, the Delaware County GOP official who hit IN-06 Democratic candidate Barry Welsh, has been charged with battery resulting in bodily injury. Statom hit Welsh as Welsh was trying to intervene after Statom assaulted a Muncie Star Press reporter, apparently because he was upset at some recent coverage concerning a voter registration meeting.

I’m not sure why it has taken so long, but this Memorial Day Weekend, our family made full use of the Cattail Trail/Northwest Greenway Trail in West Lafayette/Tippecanoe County. I think it amounts to 4 – 6 miles of paved trail. It runs through a natural feature in West Lafayette called the Celery Bog — kind of a swampy area that’s been turned into a nature preserve. That area has a network of foot paths as well.

On Saturday, the kids and I mainly just walked around the foot paths; the highlight being when we hunkered down near a pond and chucked sticks into it. There is something deeply satisfying about throwing stuff into water — my preference is rocks, but sticks are fine. On Sunday, Cole and I took his bike there. He’s not yet fast enough where it makes sense for me to ride with him, but I can run along side him easily enough unless he hits a steep downhill grade. He’s four, and by my calculations, he rode his bike a good three miles. On Monday, I went for a 6 mile run.

It’s quite a luxury to have a resource like that. My only problem is that these trails are probably 8 miles from my house. So, they are available for exercise, but I am not saving any energy. And, I wonder how much the average family would use a network of trails if given the opportunity — particularly if such trails were within close proximity to their home and, more importantly, took you close to the places you wanted to go: grocery store, restaurants, downtown, whatever. In other words, would an extensive network of trails be more likely to be a fuel saving, health enhancing public resource or an expensive boondoggle for elitist outdoor fitness enthusiasts?

In any event, it’s clear I need something since my house has a “Walk Score” of 14 out of 100; meaning it is not conducive at all to performing daily activities by walking.

NASA’s Phoenix Mission has chalked up a successful landing on Mars in its northern polar regions.

The Phoenix Mission has two bold objectives to support these goals, which are to (1) study the history of water in the Martian arctic and (2) search for evidence of a habitable zone and assess the biological potential of the ice-soil boundary.

Memorial Day was once known as Decoration day. It is dedicated to men and women who died while in military service to the United States. Military actions in which the United States suffered casualties:

American Revolutionary War (1775 – 1783): 25,000
Quasi War with France (1798 – 1800): 20
Barbary Wars (1801 – 1815): 35
Various Pirate Actions (1800 – 1900): 10
Northwest Indian War (1785 – 1795): 1,221
War of 1812 (1812 – 1815): 20,000
First Seminole War (1817 – 1818): 30
Black Hawk War (1832): 60
Second Seminole War (1835 – 1842): 1,500
Mexican-American War (1846 – 1848): 13,283
Third Seminole War (1855 – 1858): 26
Civil War (1861 – 1865): 364,511 (Union only)
Indian Wars (1865 – 1898): 919
Korean Expedition (1871): 3
Spanish American War (1898): 2,446
Phillipine War (1898 – 1902): 4,196
Boxer Rebellion (1900 – 1901): 37
Mexican Revolution (1914 – 1919): 35
Occupation of Haiti (1915 – 1934): 146
World War I (1917 – 1918): 116,516
Northern Russia (1918 – 1920): 424
China (1918 – 1937): 5
Nicaragua (1927 – 1933): 48
World War II (1941 – 1945): 405,399
China (1945 – 1947): 13
Berlin (1948 – 1949): 31
Korean War (1950 – 1953): 36,516
Russia – Cold War (1950 – 1955): 32
China (1956): 16
Bay of Pigs (1961): 4
Vietnam War (1957 – 1973): 58,209
Dominican Republic (1965 -1966): 13
El Salvador Civil War (1980 – 1992): 20
Beirut (1982 – 1984): 266
Grenda (1983): 19
Persian Gulf escorts (1987 -1988): 39
Panama (1989): 40
Gulf War (1990 – 1991): 299
Somalia (1992 – 1993): 43
Haiti (1994 – 1995): 4
Bosnia (1995): 12
Afghanistan (2001 – present): 505
Iraq (2003 – present): 4,079

Ranked by combat deaths, the top 10 most costly wars have been: 1) World War II; 2) Civil War; 3) World War I; 4) Vietnam; 5) Korea; 6) Revolutionary War; 7) Iraq; 8) War of 1812; 9) Mexican-American; and 10) Phillipine War.

In terms of usefulness, I’d say that numbers 1, 2, 6, 8, and to some extent 9 did the U.S. some good. Regardless of usefulness, however, we owe thanks to all of the soldiers who died in service to our country. They don’t pick the policies; they just serve and sometimes die.

In honor of Douglas Adams, late author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; today — May 25 — is “Towel Day.”

Adams, on the value of a towel:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

My site got shut down by my host, apparently for using too many resources. This is a run of the mill blog in terms of layout and traffic, so I went looking elsewhere for an explanation. I’m not positive, but it looks like I’ve been getting hammered with visits from an IP in Viet Nam over the past day or two. Not sure what that is, but I have blocked the IP. Hopefully that was the problem, and I have fixed it.

It’s also possible that one of my scripts has gone haywire or something along those lines.

In any event, that’s why I was down; and, if the site goes down again, that’s probably the reason.

I’ve got nothing. Anything we should be talking about?

O.k., here is something – a profile on the Republican California Chief Justice that cast the deciding opinion and wrote the opinion deciding that denying gays the right to marry was an equal rights violation comparable to old laws preventing interracial marriage. So, what do you think, are anti-gay marriage laws more rational and less violative of equal protection guarantees than anti-interracial marriage laws? (Or, on the flip side, do you think courts should have allowed bans on interracial marriage to remain on the books?)

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a picture of a gardener planting geraniums in front of the Allen County Court House. Obviously that’s not why I’m mentioning it. But, the headline rocks. It’s entitled “Can You Dig It?”

It could’ve come from elsewhere, but I choose to believe that this was a subtle call back to the awesome 1979 movie, The Warriors where Cyrus stands in front of a crowd of gang members in Central Park punctuating his speech with “Can you Dig It?”