I’m not sure which is more disturbing: the idea of collateral cheese, or the revelation that a parmesan is worth $3,000.

An NPR story led me to this brilliant bit of geek arcana: Star Trek: The Original Series set to Leonard Nimoy singing “Both Sides Now.”

Both Sides Now – Kandy Fong

Addendum: another one from the same article, Monty meets Star Trek:

Dana Milbank casts aspersions on the TV image of Congressmembers on thumbboards during the presidential speech tonight. I disagree. The preference is a “polite” Congress who spends the entire time pantomiming rapt attention to the president?

Please. We’ve had eight years of a Congress who rolled over for the president and kept their mouths shut, in both parties. Enough with the theater and the actuality of that. I’d rather have Republicans twittering:

Then there was Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), in whose name this text message was sent at about the time the president spoke of the need to pull the country together: “Aggie basketball game is about to start on espn2 for those of you that aren’t going to bother watching pelosi smirk for the next hour.” A few minutes later, another message came through: “Disregard that last Tweet from a staffer.”

And I’d rather have his constituents accordingly think of him as a real human being with bad opinions of Pelosi, or a rude lout, or both.

Would also be nice to establish the rule that if your name is on it, it wasn’t written by a staffer—even if it was. And for politicians to learn that you can’t take back everything you say, and that our discourse will be improved with some off the cuff humanity anyway.

NYT reports that the Neanderthal genome has been reconstructed, raising the fascinating possibility that we might decide to resurrect the species. Which is somewhat poetic since homo sapiens is likely the species that exterminated Neanderthals in the first place, back when we did such things with big clubs and resource monopolization.

Interestingly, in my opinion the NYT whiffs on the question of whether humans and Neanderthals interbred: “An early inference that can be drawn from the new findings, which were announced Thursday in Leipzig, Germany, is that there is no significant trace of Neanderthal genes in modern humans. This confounds the speculation that modern humans could have interbred with Neanderthals, thus benefiting from the genes that adapted the Neanderthals to the cold climate that prevailed in Europe in last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago.”

Well, not really. It means that there are no known surviving Neanderthal genes in human DNA, but early human tribes had a knack for intraspecies genocidal behavior, so it seems to me that a hybrid group could easily have been wiped out along the way by their neighbors or a harsh environment. And not to nitpick, but we’re still living in the “last ice age”, at least until we manage to melt both Poles; you probably meant to say the last “glaciation period,” Times. If you don’t get this right, no wonder few others do.

I went over to Dave Mark’s website to get Mac programming information, and found this instead. Hysterical.

Listening to a fascinating interview on Fresh Air with Christopher Dickey, about his book on the NYPD counterterrorism unit. I don’t agree with some of the tactics he’s describing, but this should be cited as great evidence that the way to prevent and prosecute terrorism is as a police and a criminal matter. Somehow the NYPD operates without setting up a Gitmo; I wonder why the federal government could not.

I’ve been a fan of Sinfest for years, but this strip has the best comic panel of the new millennium: