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Especially fervent in the United States, the enthusiasm has been described as forming a “Bacon Nation”.

We got it.

The Other McCain pulls no punches.

Not since Americans were intoduced to the term “Scozzafava” (a synonym for two-faced backstabber) has any new hipster phrase caught on as quickly as “Murkowski,” meaning selfish bitch.

And that says pretty much all that needs to be said on the subject.

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At first blush, it’s a familiar story: A small-town girl beats the odds to win fame and fortune at a beauty pageant. But the twist is that the small town of Anysha Panesar, newly crowned America’s Perfect Teen, is not in America at all — and that has some folks up in arms.

Anysha, 16, hails from Llangan, Wales — some 3,500 miles from U.S. shores. While on a family vacation in Kissimmee, Fla., last month, she entered the America’s Perfect Teen pageant on a whim. But lo and behold, when the winner was announced, she was the last young woman standing among 30 contestants.

Had she been Mexican — or Somalian — nobody would have dared say anything.

The pageant’s sponsors also had a few choice words for its founder, Michael Galanes, who steadfastly maintains the right girl won America’s Perfect Teen — even if she doesn’t happen to be American. “There really is no reason for any sort of uproar,” Galanes told NBC’s Michelle Kosinski. “You know how you say, that girl had ‘it’? Well, she truly did.”

We’ve always said that being an American is an attitude, not an ethnicity. This just proves it.

Anysha said she’s going to put her scholarship money to good use; after completing high school in Wales, she plans to relocate to the U.S. to study broadcasting. In fact, she is already in talks to launch her own reality TV show about her year as America’s Perfect Teen’s reigning queen.

There are many people in this world who are Americans at heart; they just haven’t gotten here yet. She’s obviously one of them.

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A court has ruled that women’s nipples do not enjoy freedom of expression under the US Constitution.

The case was brought by a 16 year old girl, who was one of three women accused of exposing their breasts to passing traffic on an Indianapolis street last year.

According to the Indiana Star, Judge Cale Bradford wrote, “In the end, (the girl) would have us declare by judicial fiat that the public display of fully-uncovered female breasts is no different than the public display of male breasts, when the citizens of Indiana, speaking through their elected representatives, say otherwise. This we will not do.”

Read it.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

This is not a list of one hundred greatest movie scenes, and it isn’t a list of one hundred long movie scenes.

These are movie scenes that promise something wonderful, and compel you to watch them. They assert themselves. They do not merely tempt you to put off a potty break. That would not work; that is what pause buttons are for. These are scenes that you can intuitively sense must be kept intact, no matter how long they are, and you have to consume them that way.

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The plan is to first upgrade each cell site’s backhaul connection to Gigabit Ethernet so they’ll have the necessary bandwidth to support the 5-12Mbps down and 2-5Mbps up speeds with 30-150ms latency promised for Big Red’s LTE network at launch.

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Who cares about the corn genome when you can study chocolate instead?

The genome sequence, which enters the public domain today, is the result of a partnership among a few unlikely bedfellows: Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms, Milky Way bars and other treats; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service; and IBM. The trio hopes international agricultural researchers will immediately start refining the sequence. As with any gene mapping project, decoding the complete genome will take some time.

Pogue is. Of course, he’s paid to be.

Hipmunk is a flight-search site, a rival to Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia or Orbitz. But it’s far less cluttered. Its main screen has only 14 buttons and controls (From, To, Depart and various corporate links). Travelocity and Expedia each have over 40—not including ads, which don’t appear on Hipmunk.

So you type in JFK, SFO, 9/30 or whatever, and hit Search. Then, instead of an all-text table, the flights are laid out, color-coded by airline, as bars on a timeline of the day. You see exactly when they leave and land, and how many hours you’re traveling, based on the lengths of the bars.

Sounds like a winner. If I traveled by air — which thank God I don’t — I would love it.

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Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we’re sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out? Those who weren’t rescued simply vanished from the script: It’s too late—he’s gone.

Proof positive that Slate isn’t inhabited solely by humorless leftist tools.

(Or maybe it is, but they occasionally take drugs.)

Freeberg is the gift that keeps on giving.

The President is complaining “they [My critics, special interests, the enemy] talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Besides the obvious one: What a whiny-butt.

If a dog makes an accident on the rug, he doesn’t blame it on the previous dog.

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The free channel, which the Associated Press reports will allow teachers to upload class material and expand upon their research, and students to download podcasts, videos and other multimedia lessons, comes after a nearly year-long effort by the state to gather the best of existing teacher training videos and programs for students. Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, told students at a Houston high school yesterday that the program “will really consolidate” existing content.

Watch it.

This. Is. So. Cool. I want one of these so badly, I’m speechless.

Read it.

When even the fish are against you, it’s time to quit.

Watch it.

The most valuable thing in this video is the lady herself. Where these days can you find a young woman who can build something this? Or even a young man?

Girl, you are worth more than rubies. God grant you many years.

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The device, popularly known as a ‘pain gun,’ is a non-lethal weapon designed to deliver an overwhelming heat to say, members of a mob scene or rioters at a prison, causing an immediate flight response. The Air Force, which helped test the device, has assured the world of its safety, and recently the devices went on sale.

A useful appendage to any public space. (Coming to an anti-WTO riot near you?)

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“I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could take a photograph of her page of music and hear it instantaneously,” he recalled. “She’d know what the right notes are, and what the right rhythms are, and she could imitate what she heard.”

Soon he was dreaming of a device — or maybe just software running on a computer — that could do everything he had learned to do in music theory class: read and play a printed musical score, and listen to a passage of music and transcribe it, down to the key signature, the tempo and the time signature. He said that a quick check showed that nothing then on the market could do all that.

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There’s a lot of stuff out there that can only be described as “burger junk.” You know, the things sold on late night informercials that try to convince you that your burgers are not good enough, fast enough, or novel enough for discerning modern palates. In the interest of being utterly thorough, this week I’ve decided to round up five of the most popular burger gadgets and put them through their paces.

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Here’s the deal: Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was never seen without that Coach bag dangling from the crook of her arm? Snooki and her Coach were as synonymous as The Situation and his six-pack. But then the winds of change started blowing on Jersey Shore. Every photograph of Guido-huntin’ Snooki showed her toting a new designer purse. Why the sudden disloyalty? Was she trading up? Was she vomiting into her purses and then randomly replacing them? The answer is much more intriguing.

Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors‘ bags!

The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.

Watch it.

Apparently there are a whole collection of these ‘Literal Video Versions’ of famous music videos. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life.

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I suspect that C. Van Carter and I were brothers in an earlier life.

Joel Spolsky turns into a Grumpy Old Man.

When I was a kid, I learned to program on punched cards. If you made a mistake, you didn’t have any of these modern features like a backspace key to correct it. You threw away the card and started over.

Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some sense my argument is no different that the argument made by the pro-Latin people (all four of them). “[Latin] trains your mind. Trains your memory. Unraveling a Latin sentence is an excellent exercise in thought, a real intellectual puzzle, and a good introduction to logical thinking,” writes Scott Barker. But I can’t find a single university that requires Latin any more. Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?

Read it.

The author of ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ displays his genius once again.

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers.

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The pictures follow Sir Elton’s decision to perform at Limbaugh’s wedding to his fourth wife Kathryn Rogers, 33, in June, reportedly for a $1 million (£690,000) fee.

Ah, the dulcet sounds of blue-state heads exploding on both Left Coasts.

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Perfect wedding ring for engineers.

Per Freeberg.

Now that’s comedy.

Actually, this is a good test of how people react to unexpected changes in circumstances. All you have to do is look at the door you came out of and ask yourself how come a meeting room opens onto a port-a-pottie, and you have to realize that All Is Not As It Seems. But most people don’t think that quickly.

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In recent years, most research in the field of regenerative medicine has focused on the hope that stem cells, immature cells that give rise to any specific type of cell needed in the body, can somehow be trained to behave as normal adult cells do. Nature’s method of regeneration is quite different in that it starts with the adult cells at the site of a wound and converts the cells to a stemlike state in which they can grow and divide.

The Stanford team has taken a step toward mimicking the natural process. “What I like is that it’s built on what’s happening in nature,” Dr. Blau said. “We mammals lost this regenerative capacity in order to have better tumor suppression, but if we reawaken it in a careful way we could make use of it in a clinical setting.”

Freeberg has a gift.

A Frumifesto is a manifesto written down by a liberal jackass pretending to be a conservative, crying into his beer grape juice that “today’s” conservatives aren’t acting like “real” conservatives, which means like liberals.

And that about sums up everything you need to know about David Frum. Quite elegantly, too.

Read it.

A Darwin Award nomination waiting to happen. But it’s still pretty cool.

Watch it.

I’d love to know more about this process.

Read it.

Q:  Doctor,  I’ve heard that  cardiovascular exercise can prolong life.   Is this true?   A: Your heart  only good for so many beats, and that it…don’t waste on exercise.   Everything wear out eventually.  Speeding up heart not make you  live longer; it like saying you extend life of car by driving faster.   Want to live longer?  Take nap.

1. The Japanese eat very little fat
and  suffer fewer heart attacks than  us.

2. The  Mexicans eat a lot of fat
and  suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

3. The  Chinese drink very little red wine
and  suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

4. The Italians drink  a lot of red wine
and  suffer fewer heart attacks than us.

5. The  Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of  sausages and fats
and suffer fewer heart  attacks than us.

Read it.

The X2 will definitely need that kind of control, as the designers want it cruising at over 285 mph by the time they’re done. That’d be over 100 mph faster than, say, an Apache attack chopper, which tops out at around 175 mph.

This would be a very cool alternative to flying commercially. Put a chain gun on that puppy and I’m in.

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Like insurance for the very tickets that jack up your actual insurance, TF’ll cover the cost of nearly any violation you incur while driving (for a reasonable annual fee), so you can finally go too fast without getting all too furious.

I am not making this up.

Best. Commercial. Ever.

Makes up for that stupid chav lizard. Not totally, but a lot.

Watch it.

Read it.

OMG! We’re going to be overrun by self-reliant, hardworking pacifists!

Somehow I can’t bring myself to see that as a problem.

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Lawyers and Judges having a good time.

Mostly judges. Lawyers have jobs that they can be fired from.

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Marines. When you care enough to send the very best.

Watch it. Join in if you know the song. If you don’t know the song, you have been badly brought up.

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As the desert landscape unfolds ahead, the jet fighter pilot glances to his right. Spotting an enemy target, a sensor attached to his helmet relays the information straight back to his flight controls, allowing him to fire immediately without turning his aircraft.

U.S. defense company Raytheon Inc. is giving the first glimpse of its Scorpion helmet technology for F-16 and A-10 combat jets on a simulator at the Farnborough International Airshow after this week announcing a $12.6 million contract with the U.S. Air Force.

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We have the technology.

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Underneath West Virginia is a series of underground chambers.  They constitute an emergency shelter for the entire United States Congress, a hideout and bolt hole in case of nuclear war, hidden away beneath a benign-looking hotel.

The neat thing is that eventually they become outdated and are sold for cheap. Really cool if you can afford to buy one, not so much if not.

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Read it.

Read it.

And guess what? You can now bring that same frustration  enjoyment to Google Android. Available now via Market, the free, OS-wide keyboard alternative comes care of Access, who gained the rights to Graffiti following the Palm / Xerox settlement from way back in 2006. The future is the past as remembered by the present, or something like that — download away.

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How can you keep them down in Little Rock after they’ve seen Georgetown?

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Prevailing wisdom holds that elected officials work for the public good, while private individuals are motivated by their own personal goals—including selfish things like profits. But does this notion hold true in practice? Definitely not in Detroit. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that with the Motor City no longer financially capable of providing many basic services, private volunteers are filling in the gaps.

Holly Lisle, famous (well, to me, anyway) SFF author, is embarking on a new venture that deserves the support of all right-thinking people. Hit the link and do your bit.

Here’s the battlefield.