Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

Cheryl Holdridge, former Mouseketeer, dies at 64 - Yahoo! News:

Cheryl Holdridge, a popular Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" TV show in the 1950s, has died. She was 64.

Holdridge died Tuesday at her Santa Monica home after a two-year battle with lung cancer, Doreen Tracey, another former Mouseketeer, told the Los Angeles Times.

Born Cheryl Lynn Phelps on June 20, 1944, in New Orleans, Holdridge moved to Los Angeles when she was 2. She became a Mouseketeer in 1956 at the start of the second season of "The Mickey Mouse Club," which featured 24 young singers and dancers.

"She was a good technical dancer, but I think she was picked mostly because she had this angelic look and a great smile; she's known for her smile," Tracey said. "We used to try to keep her quiet when she started singing because she sang off-key."

Still, it was nice that she was around for the Disney Treasures dvds of the club days, so we could have some of her memories with some of the rest of the team.

you don't need to appeal to the anti-science idiots in your party anymore...

McCain Repeats Palin's Attack On Fruit Fly Research:

John McCain reached back into the presidential campaign on Wednesday to pull out a scientific critique that had first been made by his running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, when she ridiculed funding for fruit fly research. In a late-October speech, Palin noted that the research was going on in "Paris, France" and added "I kid you not."

On Wednesday, McCain himself grabbed for the fruit-fly swatter at a press conference to unveil his new anti-earmark legislation.

After a long takedown of research into lobsters by the University of Maine that involves a "Lobster Cam," McCain, a Senator from Arizona, turned on the fruit flies, saying, "also, there's one in Paris that -- yes -- $212,000 for Olive Fruit Fly research in Paris, France."

During the campaign, Palin's criticism of fruit-fly research was heavily attacked by the scientific community, which argued that fruit flies, because of their brief life-spans, make up a cornerstone of scientific and medical research. In 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for his work with fruit flies, which showed how genes are passed on through chromosomes.

Palin was considered at the time to have been scientifically freelancing, but McCain's comments today indicate that the objection to fruit-fly research came from the top.

The specific earmark in question was requested by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.). The money was for a lab set up by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Europe to study emerging threats from insects. "The Olive Fruit Fly has infested thousands of California olive groves and is the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries," said Thompson. "The research facility is located in France because Mediterranean countries like France have dealt with the Olive Fruit Fly for decades, while California has only been exposed since the 1990s."

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Coming DTV Nightmare - Cringely on technology:

Next month there will be howls of outrage from people who have somehow gone an entire decade watching TV and ignoring all those Public Service Announcements about the switchover. What does that say about the true power of advertising? Pitiful.

Just this week the Consumer Electronics Association released the results of a poll trumpeting the fact that 90 PERCENT of TV viewers now know the DTV switchover is coming. That’s supposed to be good news.

Think about it for a moment. There are 110 million households in the U.S. with televisions. According to the Consumer Electronics Association after a decade of explaining and promoting the changeover at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, ELEVEN MILLION HOUSEHOLDS STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT’S COMING.