television will cure all

Yesterday I failed to report that I learned by watching Sudden Death that if you don't just kill the bad guys like Jack Bauer does, they will feel better right at the end of the movie and kidnap your bespectacled little girl. Then, after you extract her from their clutches and shoot them, they will slowly fly their getaway helicopter tail-first onto the ice of the hockey arena where they were holding the Vice President hostage during the Stanley Cup. This helicopter flew so straight, you'd think it had been hung by the nose from a crane.

I think the whole point of having a perfectly good looking little girl wear enormous nerd glasses was so we could watch the helicopter explosion reflected in them.

Today I learned that:

• Arizona is a good place to build funky houses. It's not just the cave house - there's an artist house up near Sedona.
• If your ammunition is old, it can bounce off the forehead of the guy breaking into your house, and your retired Green-Beret peers will tease you for using a weapon of insufficient caliber (scroll down for the pasted-in article text).
• There has been a whale corpse rotting on the beach in Pacifica, CA, for seven months, and Pacifica finally decided to bury it despite the fact the land is attached to a golf course owned by San Francisco. It's California. They're pretty laid back about their rotting whale corpses.
• The city of Tucson wants to be an inland port and has for the last ten years. I guess they should discuss that with the people who are working on picking a route for a truck bypass of Tucson.

In quotes of the day, here's one I missed on January 13:

Michael German, the ACLU's national security policy expert and a former FBI agent, said: "It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being 'good patriots' when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills."

And here's one from the 27th from a young man who stuck his tongue to a flagpole like the kid in A Christmas Story:

"I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong," Gavin said.