How does this not completely destroy him?

In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.

“Niggerhead,” it read.

Or this?

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who often waxes nostalgic about his small-town roots, grew up in an almost all-white rural area where many referred to slingshots as “niggershooters.” One elderly black resident recalls being introduced by her boss at a party decades back as “my maid, Nigger Mae Lou,”

But somehow he has.

Even his fiercest critics in Texas say that racism is not on their short, or even long, list of Mr. Perry’s sins.

Ah, Texas!

Job interivew

Why an old folk-music collector has the copyright for a Jay-Z song.

Traffic stop joke

Another great drumming video

Great pole dancing move (seriously)

Smooth recovery

Michelle Bachman tapes a soundbite.

Atheist bake sale. I like the last one.

CNN soundtrack fail

Nailed it.

Deaf person hearing herself for the first time. These always get me.

“Greatest music video ever made” And of course, a parody. I still prefer the high school one from a few years back, even better than Grand Rapids. That one still blows my mind.

Just play it how it’s written!

How stress is killing you

Archie out of context

Celery - Nature’s toothbrush

Arthur is just wrong

Great protest sign.

Honestly, I have no idea what this is telling me to do.

How can you screw up a toilet paper holder? The ‘bumps’ where the holder goes into the wall are big enough that the roll rubs on them. The friction means that the roll doesn’t roll. If it was a quarter inch wider or further from the wall… doesn’t anyone test these things before they are sold? How come the Sheraton is still buying them?

I’ve never been in a hotel room that had overhead lighting. Instead the lighting is from a half-dozen individual lamps. Each of these lamps takes up a lot of space and only illuminates its own area of the room. Even within the same room, they are controlled by different switching interfaces – wall switches, base switches, bulb switches. Why not just have regular overhead lighting, like pretty much every room in America?

Upon further reflection, there is often overhead lighting in the bathrooms. That only makes this phenomenon all the more puzzling, since that shows it’s not the hotel infrastructure that physically prevents overhead lighting from being installed everywhere.

As long as I’m at it, would it kill them to install a dimmer in the bathroom? Either it’s pitch dark or shockingly bright. It would be very helpful to have an in-between setting.

As long as I’m complaining, the Glee version of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I’m told is selling more than the original) is similarly bad. Cheesy and overblown, and that’s before you have to suffer through the video. Clearly lip-synched (more so than usual), featuring a birth sequence that (as usual for bad television) features no pain drugs, no hygiene, no timing of pushes, no cutting the cord, no afterbirth, and finally produces a baby who is clearly a few weeks old already.

(Making fun of Glee is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I must point out that I love their version of Don’t Stop Believing. Although you are again well served by turning off the video and just listening to the music.)

This is a sign for the business center at a conference:

Man, I just want to make a couple xeroxes! Calm down, Hewlett Packard!

OK Go is vastly overrated. Their clever videos hide the fact that their songs aren’t any good.

This goodbye piece, from a long time congressional worker, should be mandatory reading.

James Fallows provides an interesting follow up.

In a related piece, Joe Nocera has a fawning profile of Jim Cooper as “The Last Moderate”. It reinforces one of my perennial themes, the perfidy of Newt Gingrich. “To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich.” Absolutely true. It was Gingrich who put politics before policy, party before country, and set in motion all the forces that have destroyed the institution of Congress.

The world hits seven billion (that’s 7,000,000,000!) people!

A Texas senator I suddenly like. A lot.

Oprah and the yelling goat made me laugh out loud.

Beavis & Butthead are back. Here they are, watching Jersey Shore.

Where the music industry makes profits – 30 years in one graph

Magnetic soap bubbles. Eerie.

On first plane trip, man spots his own house being robbed, saves the day

Trippy Optical Illusion

That seems unpleasant

Firefighter test

Vlad

Even spiders love it

Amazing art morph

If they ever invent Cookies n’ Cream pizza, I’ll never eat anything else for the rest of my life.

90 Great Prince Phillip quotes

Taiwanese Baseball is Truly Awesome

Neat video: Everywhere on earth, 1 second per location

Buzz Lightyear fun

Another great 404 page

Superman’s life story. Sticks with you.

Honest protesters

Oh Google, Who do you love?

Seeing guitar string oscillations

Arrested during haircut

No, we can’t

Extreme fishing

Where is the batdog!?

This parent has failed already.

Parent of the year

How to beat the lottery (at least, this one particularly poorly designed lottery)

Mad scientists

Trim: Best short haircut movie this month

An oral history of The Dana Carvey Show. I loved this show.

Great geek marriage proposal. Watch all the way to the end.

Neat drumming video

Last night, we told the boys the story of the Garden of Eden, man’s fall, original sin, baptism, etc. Of course there were lots of hard questions. Where is the Garden of Eden, is it in America? Why didn’t God give Adam and Eve a time out? Was the snake big or little? Can we call Adam to see if he is still mad at God?

Today on the way to school, this conversation happened.

Five-year old: I wish that snake was still around. I’d get him and keep him, because he can talk.
Me: Wait – you mean the snake that got humans kicked out of paradise, that cursed all men and women ever born in all of history to original sin, you want to get that actual snake and keep it for a pet because it can talk!?
Him: Yeah Dad, that’d be really cool!

We watched The Lion King on Broadway last night. It was exactly as good as advertised. The costume and set design was incredible.

It also reminded me of one of my annoyances with the plot. Nala is a better fighter than Simba. She pins them when they are children and then pins him again as an adult. Why doesn’t Simba have her fight Scar!? Let’s face it, he stinks at it. In the whole story, he never beats anyone at fighting! Nala should have done the dirty work.

Mrs. Muttrox also points out, where are the other male lions? Besides Simba’s family, there are no males at all in the whole pride!

I also wonder if Scar goes up to the stars. All the lion kings are supposed to be there, and he was a king. Maybe Simba and Nala’s kids will turn to Scar for advice. Ooo, that’s the plot to the sequel!

After weeks of asking, the vendor finally sent me the deck on the product they were trying to sell us. Here is Slide 2.

Not a good impression…

Great clone cover of Killer Queen

Terry Pratchett is beginning suicide. Sadly, this is not a joke link.

Japanese home at sea (after earthquake)

Salad is funny

Fight the power

Water and Chemistry

Real endings to fables

Clever pickup approach

Let’s flip a coin

Cookies are a hell of a drug. Meth is even worse.

Great flying carpet picture

What’s waiting for Osama Bin Laden. And the government finally hunts down and kills the leading terrorist

This is highly inefficient

The Japanese soccer team takes on 100 kids at once.

Stealing home

A few reasons Johnny Depp is awesome

Physics is just beautiful

A clever tattoo

Behind the scenes at the movies

The retirement calculators you find all over the web are good. But they never seem to answer the questions I want answered. I created my own. It is designed for someone who is out of debt, actively saving for retirement, and trying to figure out if they are saving enough.

Click here to download the calculator.

How does it work?

1. What do you want?: How many dollars do you want to get per year when you retire? Subtract off what you will already get from Social Security, pensions, or annuities to see how much you need each year generated from your personal retirement savings. This assumes that you want to leave the principal untouched. Then you don’t have to worry about living too long for your savings, and you will have a generous pot of money to leave to your heirs.
2. Calculate the goal: The model uses simple rates of return, inflation, and tax rates to figure out how much money you will need. (This number is usually overwhelming. But remember, to leave the principal untouched takes a lot of money. It also includes decades worth of inflation.)
3. What do you have so far?:
4. How do you get there?:The model figures out the average annual rate of return you need to get from where you are to where you want to go.
5. How much do you need to help it?: Say you need to average a 20% gain every year to get to your goal. Compound interest and the market will take care of some of that for you (you can adjust exactly how much). The difference is the amount you need to contribute every year. This is expressed as both a percentage and dollars.
6. How are you doing?: Put in how many dollars a year you are contributing and compare it to how much you need to put in. This is the answer.

There is also a tab called “Simpler Version”. This was made by made one of the commenters here. It is a much simpler way of looking at the issue. It has a row for each year. Each year it figures out how much inflation has increased the goal, how much your savings grew via contributions and market growth, and spits out how much money you have, and a simple “Keep Working” or “Relax” statement that sums it up.

These models make all kinds of simplifying assumptions. The answers they give are crude. But they are good approximations. You should be able to figure out if you are doing a good job saving for retirement or not.

It is also rewarding to play with the inputs. What if the market does really well? What if I inherit some money? What if I push off retirement by a few years? What if I can’t contribute for a year or two? What if I subtract my pension off the future dollars? What if inflation gets severe? Etc., etc. Playing with the inputs is what really helps. It lets you know how robust the findings are. If you play with a lot of different inputs and the answer is always you are doing okay, you are really doing okay. If no matter what you put in you can’t get to your goal, it’s time to do some hard thinking.

Click here to download the calculator.

Retirement Calculator by Muttroxia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Heat proved they were the better team. They beat the Celtics fair and square, and LeBron got the monkey off his back. Even if they lose in the next round, they’re a different team now.

The Kendrick Perkins trade just destroyed us. Before the playoffs I said that we wouldn’t get very far without a healthy Shaq. And we didn’t. Consider the difference. By the time of the playoffs, our starting center (Perkins) was gone. Our backup center (Shaq) was injured. Our backup-backup (Jermaine O’Neal) played very well, but with injuries. Moving from your first string to injured third-string center does something to your team, and it showed. Fair is fair, but there’s something very frustrating about not having a healthy team. Rondo was not Rondo after the injury, you can make a good argument that with a healthy Rondo or a healthy Shaq that some poor Miami blogger would be writing their version of this post right now.

Wait ’til next year!

I really enjoyed this thoughtful look at how having access to secrets changes the way you see the world.

The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

Did you miss me?

Someone was repeatedly stealing a particular .mp3 file I posted. Strangely, it was the single worst .mp3 around, that was the whole point of the post. Go figure.