So my wife calls me from a bar where she and the Splendora team are celebrating someone’s birthday.

I pick up the phone and she says: “Someone just told us there is a tsunami warning for San Francisco and we’re at Pier 23, right on the water. It’s not true is it?”

I take to the web thinking someone is pulling her leg (and mine given I’ve got the house to myself and am deep in my blog template redesign and simply can’t be bothered).

But it turns out the story is true.

Now that I’m into the story, I’m going to continue looking for clues about what caused the massive offshore quake that led to the warnings.

I’m guessing it has something to do with Jacko.

1-15-1929…
Martin Luther King is born

11-9-1989
The Berlin Wall falls

2-11-1990
Nelson Mandela is freed

June 13th, 2005:
Remember this date for it is part of HIStory.

This and other ridiculousness can be found at the The Official Source for Michael Jackson News and Information.

The line of the day came from the jury foreman who during an interview on CNN was asked whether jurors hoped Jacko had learned any lessons from the trial.

“We would hope … that he doesn’t sleep with children anymore.”

What’s scarier: A free Jacko or yet another person being recruited into Scientology by Tom Cruise (and he doesn’t even need the cans of wine)?

Isn’t about time that we located the Scientology cells, smoked and rooted them out and destroyed them with a remote controlled armed drone?

Forget Jacko.

Free Katie

Look, up in the sky. Is it a UFO? A new universe. A cosmological reaction to the romantic scenes in the final Star Wars movie?

Or maybe it’s just a Nike swoosh…

Sound far fetched? Well it’s not that far from the minds of some folks at the FAA. In fact, they are so concerned about the prospect of Spacevertising that they’ve already released a statement on the matter that calls for a total ban on “advertising in outer space that is capable of being recognized by a human being on the surface of the Earth without the aid of a telescope or other technological device.”

Space ads might seem like a crazy idea. But come on. How long do you think it will be before we look back at that statement by the FAA and get nostalgic for the innocence of our galactic past?

Steve Jobs addressed the graduates at Stanford this weekend. Those who were expecting a demo of the new Tiger Dashboard Widgets got something, well, different:

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.

Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

If you read between the lines, that’s basically an argument against using Windows.

Jeffrey Rosen has a very interesting piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine in which he argues that (for better or possibly worse) the courts may be the last institution in America that is speaking with the same voice as citizens.

On why our representatives (or representatives of something) have moved to the extremes:

How did we get to this odd moment in American history, when unelected Supreme Court justices are expressing the views of popular majorities more faithfully than the people’s elected representatives? The most obvious culprit is partisan gerrymandering. In the 2000 elections, 98.5 percent of Congressional incumbents won their races definitively (75 percent of them by more than 20 percentage points), thanks to increasingly sophisticated computer technology that makes it possible to draw House districts in which incumbents are guaranteed easy re-election simply by catering to their ideological bases. As a result, Democrats and Republicans in Congress no longer have an incentive to court the moderate center in general elections. This, in turn, has created parties that are more polarized than at any other point in the past 50 years. And since more than half of the current senators previously served as representatives, the radically partisan culture of the House is now contaminating the Senate.

Think about that for a second. 98.5% of the time we know who’s going to win. And yet we watch, we fund, we blog, we argue, we obsess. Pretty neat trick, eh?

On those activist judges:

... The conservative interest groups have it exactly backward. Their standard charge is that unelected judges are thwarting the will of the people by overturning laws passed by elected representatives. But in our new topsy-turvy world, it’s the elected representatives who are thwarting the will of the people, which is being channeled instead by unelected judges.

On where this is heading:

If Congressional Republicans and Democrats repeatedly put the wishes of their bases above the wishes of the public, a provoked national majority may eventually try to throw them out. And if unable to do so because of gerrymandered districts, that majority may be mobilized to elect more moderate politicians by popular initiative, as California voters essentially did in choosing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger … Maybe what’s happened in California is the only way to empower the silent majority of Americans to take back their country.

The moderatorinator?