Every superhero has to have some sort of weakness.  Unfortunately, my weakness has much more impact than my super power, which is an untiring devotion to solving problems that I get myself into.

See?  Worst. Superpower. Ever.

Christmas is nearly on top of us, you and I.  My car is in the shop, getting $2200 or so worth of work.  Timing is everything.

Our plan for Xmas is to not repeat our trip from Thanksgiving, because to do so would probably signal the end of our marriage and the beginning of my wife's new life as the smartest person on murder row.

So instead of the inevitable torture of travel to see people who hardly want to see us, we will instead sit at home by ourselves and stare at the walls we have wrought from the very earth.  If this sounds like fun to you, please drop by.

My car needed brakes, and in fact needed a broken part of the mounting bracket for the right front strut welded back into place, which is costing me enough that I told 'em to scrap the suspension and get me something more Fast and Furious.  My car, already ridiculously low slung and stupidly tiny, will now sit 1.5 American Inches closer to the ground.  I have been advised to take steep driveways, speed humps and steep onramps at an angle.  I don't own the car because it is practical.  I own it because in second gear at 8000rpm, the goddamn thing sandblasts my fears away and gives me one brief second of glorious stonking petrochemical freedom, which lasts at least an hour or two.

Just read a printout that someone left on the printer about how global warming isn't caused by carbon dioxide.  The premise is, global warming can be proved to be caused by carbon emissions in a lab, but in the really real world, those scientists and their sneaky science are politically aligned with the guys who pay them to find these results.

In other words, the scientists are lying, to ensure their paychecks.  The politicians are pushing them to lie, to ensure their own paychecks. 

This is the sort of anti-intellectualism that is very, very common in my peer group.  Those darn scientists, the same ones that say everything causes cancer?  Well, they're in AlGores payroll, see, and they all wanna get paid.

Bah.  Science is science.  Published results are often verified, sometimes attacked, and rarely the result of a targeted conspiracy to campaign for fear of the natural world.