A black and white display.  A thin man in a dark suit comes on and intones with a deep voice:

Consider if you will DaddyBear, a middle-aged man in American suburbia. He is trying to get ready to take his daughter to her chorus recital, but is instead having a nervous breakdown.
He has spent the past 45 minutes looking for his camera, which he had used less than 12 hours before.
He found the camera itself tucked inside a toy box, under a pile of Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars.
The batteries to the camera are still lost, but have been replaced with the batteries from a flashlight.
The memory card for the camera was, however, not in the camera.
A search of his home was fruitless, until he went to take out a DVD for his smallest son to watch for the evening while he is home with his mother.
Inside the DVD case for “Frosty the Snowman/Rudolph the Reindeer”, instead of the expected DVD, he found his memory stick.
His mind finally snapped when he took it out and found it liberally coated with honey.

He is about to enter….. The Parenting Zone

Lutefisk – Norwegians put butter on it, Swedes put brown sugar on it,  the cats put sand on it.

Tom Griswold, of the Bob and Tom Show,* reading from a reader letter about Scandinavian food.

I have had lutefisk precisely three times in my life, all three in an attempt to bring joy to the heart of my grandmother, a German woman who wholly took on Norwegian culture and ‘cuisine’ when she married my Norwegian grandfather.  Now that I’m grown and she’s up in heaven giving my grandfather an earful about his verdammte grandson, I don’t let it in the house.

*That link is probably NSFW.

DaddyBear – It’s Christmas, not the Manhattan Project.

Said during a conversation in which Irish Woman was being cryptic about what she is buying for use as stocking stuffers for the children.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Time Enough For Love

Is someone spiking the water at mosques across the world?

Snarfle allergies snurgle read this sniff.

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man makes a good case that we may be on the downward slope towards either a large regional war or the next world war.  I’m not going to argue about whether or not he’s right.  I certainly hope that he and his sources are being too pessimistic, but I won’t be surprised if they’re spot on.

Let’s say that a regional conflict between the Arab states and Iran spreads to become something that China gets involved in.  Or maybe India and Pakistan finally decide to settle their feud by turning their respective capitols into ex-cities.    Where will the manufacturing capacity be found to provide the stuff needed to equip new formations as well as replace things that are lost, damaged, or just plain wear out?

When the last two world wars happened, the United States was still the largest manufacturing economy in the world.  The tanks, ships, trucks, uniforms, bullets, guns, and all of the other sundry things needed to fight a modern war were made here.  Prior to our entry in World War II, we freely gave war materielle to Great Britain to help her stay in the fight and still had the capacity to build up our own military.

How quickly can we turn the existing manufacturing capacity of the United States towards total dedication to manufacturing war materielle?  Can we even manufacture Abrams tanks, F-18’s, or the ships to convoy them across the big water in the numbers that would be needed?

We’ve sent a lot of our manufacturing capacity overseas in the past 40 years or so, for good and bad.  The good is that products come from a more varied set of suppliers, which brings down costs and stimulates innovation. The bad is that we may have sent so much of our heavy manufacturing away that we do not have the capacity to surge our production of the things we and our allies would need in time of war.  Heck, we can’t even start up the old factories.  If the buildings still exist, the machinery has often been sold for scrap or shipped overseas. If the equipment is intact, where are we going to find the people who are physically and mentally prepared to do heavy manufacturing in the numbers that we would need?

Like I said, I hope that the worries about war are overblown, but I’m a big believer in “hope for the best, and prepare for the worst”.

UPDATE – As usual, if you ask the Internet, someone smart will give you an answer.  Borepatch gives good cause to have a bit of hope that we could once again be the Arsenal of Freedom.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I pretty much summed up my thoughts last year, and I can’t improve on it.

To all the men and women who answered the call after December 7, thank you.

News media are reporting that a cannonball fired by the crew of the TV show MythBusters took a series of unfortunate bounces and slammed into a home in Dublin, California.

H/T to Chris Muir over at Day by Day!