A Texan goes to hell...

The Rangers are in the playoffs for the first time since sometime in the last millennium so I thought this joke was worth retelling. It's been around awhile and I've heard it with other teams names but here's my take...

A Texan dies and goes to hell. One day Lucifer comes wandering by and sees him relaxing and having a barbecue. Surprised, Lucifer goes over and inquires, "You seem to be enjoying yourself. What's up?"

The Texan, a bit taken aback at talking to the Devil himself says, "Well, it's pretty nice here but I didn't expect to see you here?"

"What!?!" exclaims Lucifer. "Why wouldn't you expect to see me here? Where do you think you are anyway?"

"Well," says the Texan, "Isn't this Heaven? I didn't think the Devil could go to Heaven."

Incensed, Lucifer replies, "Heavens, NO! Are you kidding? This is Hell. How on earth do you think this is Heaven?"

Well," drawls the Texan again, "It feels like Dallas in June so I figured I must be in Heaven."

At this, Lucifer hollers over to Beelzebub, "Get a load of this. This Texan thinks he's in Heaven."

Now it's Beelzebub's turn to be surprised, "What? Heaven? How can that be?"

Lucifer explains, "He says it feels like Dallas in June. Can you believe that?"

Beelzebub turns back to his desk, scrolls through a list of names and suddenly realizes he's made a mistake. "I'm sorry Lucifer. It looks like this Texan got placed in the wrong section here in Hell. Since Texans live where it gets so hot, we have a special place for them." With that, he types on his console for a minute and poof, the Texan disappears.

A few days later, Lucifer happens by the "Texas section" and sees the same guy, sweating a bit this time but otherwise not so much the worse for wear. He inquires as to the Texan's well being.

"It's not so bad really," replies the Texan. "It feels like Dallas in July."

Now Lucifer is getting a little bit mad and he turns to Beelzebub, "I thought you said this was a special place for Texans. He says it just feels like Dallas in July."

"Oh, drat!" exclaims Beelzebub, "the thermostat must be broken and didn't tell me when to add more fuel. I'll get right on that." With that, Beelzebub shuffles through his desk until he finds another thermostat and replaces it. Next he adds more fuel so that the fires are really flaming.

Awhile later, Lucifer comes back to check on Beelzebub's work. He sees the Texan again, really sweating but otherwise seemingly ok. "Starting to feel the heat, are we" he inquires.

"Well, yeah, a little bit. It feels about like Dallas in August."

With that, now Lucifer is really, really mad. "Dallas in August? I'll fix you, you Texan!" He strolls over to the thermostat and cranks it down as far as it will go. Within seconds a cold wind starts blowing about 50 miles per hour, it's 40 degrees below zero, snow is piling up and soon there are 6 foot drifts everywhere.

As Lucifer turns to see how the Texan likes things now, he's stunned to see the Texan jumping up and down and hollering.

"The Rangers won the Series! The Rangers won the Series!"

Himalayas melting only speculation?

Someone said the Himalayas would melt by 2035. But now, it turns out they were speculating. How much more of this report by the IPCC was just speculation?

Watch out for global cooling

Apparently, at least one scientist thinks we're in for 20-30 years of global cooling rather than global warming. According to him there's a "multi-decadal oscillation" in the oceans that correlates to global warming and cooling trends observed over the last century or so that much more closely corresponds to recent changes in climate than the AGW theories do.

Bigfoot showed up in Minnesota again

The story sounds plausible but, as it says towards the end, let's see a real carcass first.

Climategate

The Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is coming unraveled it appears. Apparently some sort of hacker broke in to some computer somewhere and stole thousands of e-mails showing the conspiracy to perpetrate this hoax on the rest of us. Here are some stories about it:

The Final Nail
Congressional investigation
Junk Science
The Fix is In

I don't know how this will percolate out but it's definitely a big earthquake in the AGW proponent's world.

Friends of Science

Here's a website about the failure of the computer models that predicted global warming. In the last 10 years, scientists can't figure out why average global temperatures haven't continued to increase. Because all the models said it would. Now they're baffled. Maybe they need to check some of their assumptions in the computer models?

Government failures

Comment from a reader on this article:

So non existent jobs were created or saved (a non existent metric) in districts that don't exist using money that hasn't been printed yet that will be collected from children that haven't been born yet.

If they can't get a simple "stimulus bill" right for only 878 billion, how are they going to fix healthcare that costs 1/7th of the economy?