Everyone view the eclipse safely. Never look directly at the sun with unprotected eyes. Sunglasses are not nearly dark enough; use only certified eclipse glasses from an approved source.

Man oh man... truth is where you find it.

The Big Dig, Day One.

And so it begins, the Big Dig.

Snowpocalypse 2016. This is my driveway. That indistinct blob is my car, a full size four-door sedan. Maybe I’ll be able to find it again after the spring thaw. 20" - 24" depending on where I measure; it’s around 10am and the snow is still hammering down.

My house remains Ground Zero for the DC Snowpocalypse. Our most likely snowfall total is up to 28; the max is 35".

Snowpocalypse 2016

Amazon is now accepting orders for their new Echo device. Amazon Prime members who requested an invitation are now receiving them, and can place orders now for shipment in late April. The normal $200 price is discounted to $100.

NBC has green-lighted a Will Ferrell pilot for an astronaut show: "A workplace ensemble in the tone of Anchorman examines what happens when a strong woman butts heads with a macho astronaut in the race to land on the moon." It's to be called Mission Control, and it makes my skin crawl. Also, it sounds kind of…

Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, is dead at the age of 94 after a month in hospital for unspecified health problems. Of the widespread use of his invention he said: "I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence."

October 18th marks the 59th anniversary of the transistor radio. The Regency TR-1 was announced on that date in 1954, and went on sale the following month; they sold nearly 100,000 the first year alone. The transistor radio was a watershed in entertainment, in some ways more significant than television. The first wave…

Scott Carpenter, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts is dead at age 88; the cause of death has not been announced. A combat pilot in the Korean war and later a test pilot, Carpenter flew the second US orbital mission in May 1962. It was his only space flight; he later became active in ocean habitat research.…

I just watched the Zero Hour series finale. I won't even attempt to catalog all of the logical, spiritual and cinematic fallacies; I'll just say that on a scale of one to ten, my Batshit-O-Meter was reading about a hundred. The show was a train wreck in every way; awful, but I couldn't look away. Here at the end, I…

I just watched the next two un-aired episodes of the now-cancelled Zero Hour. By the end, my Batshit-O-Meter was off-scale high. Spoilers, but who cares: Let's see, the Shepherds have the True Cross, the bad guys are The Pirates, Laila is really a secret agent nun for the Shepherds who was lying to Hank the whole time…

When I graduated from college in 1971 my student draft deferment expired and, like every other guy, I had to deal with the draft. By that time it was obvious that we were going to lose, and no one wanted to be the last American killed in Viet Nam. There were only a few options. You could sit around and wait to be…

I'm playing Uncharted 3. I just survived the plane crash, found the ghost town and have met up with the Salim and his desert horse guys. Whew! Allow me to make the following comment about this game: Holy Screaming Camel Shit!™ I'm a Gen-1 gamer; my first video game was Pong. I stayed up all night playing Space…