more than 2/3rds of Britons are cremated?

eww...I try not to think about what I will have done to my body when I die. It's one of those things that I prefer to not consider, but I read this story with macabre interest---and I bet the problem is even worse in the US.

Funeral directors are having a hard time burning their collective fat arses in conventional furnaces, (maybe they should try convection ovens?) No seriously, people are on average getting too big to fit in standard crematoria (crematoriums sounds silly) so they are retrofitting their existing furnaces (or is it furnaci?) to fit.

What surprised me was that of the 600k Britons that will die this year, over 400k of them will be cremated. That seems awfully high, I wonder if it has anything to do with living on an island, land being scarce, etc...

Jim Carrey is my Janeane Garafolo

I haven’t cut my hair in about 4 months, which means that even though I make fun of tree hugging hippies, I am beginning to look like one.
My wife is beautiful, and people often claim she looks “just like….”
Sometimes she thinks the comparison is more flattering than others. For example, when people say she looks just like Sara Evans, the country music singer, she is flattered. When people say she looks just like Janeane Garafolo…not so much. I tell her that what they mean to say is that she is beautiful with a resemblance to a successful actress.
When someone makes a comparison to a “Hollywood celebrity,” it is probably intended to be a compliment. Recently I have had multiple people say I look just like Jim Carrey, and I know it’s intended to be a compliment—and also a comment on my occasionally strange behavior, so I have to keep telling myself, “smile, it’s a compliment.” But it’s hard not to think they are saying that I look like this:

X Prize, just make that $10 million check out to me

So a few billionaires have gotten together to decide that if there was just the right incentive, say $10 million bucks the car companies or a bunch of pot smoking tree hugging hippies would build a car that can get 100 mpg and be commercially viable.
It never occurs to them that the technology already exists, but nobody wants them due to the fact that cars are not simply about mpg efficiency, they are also about lots of other things including transporting people with a modicum of safety and comfort as well as those intangibles like, styling and how a particular vehicle makes you “feel.”

SO, what’s my point?

I have designed the car that gets 100 mpg.

I know what your thinking, this is a Vespa, it’s not a car. That’s where you are wrong, if you were to encase the rider in a cardboard box you would add aerodynamic stability. If you add training wheels you get a 4 wheel vehicle. And the final modification, you have to push it 30 of every 100 miles because it only gets 70 mpg.

Or how about this?....

Nice huh? And it gets 58 mpg hwy...if you can drive 40% of the time downhill I think you could increase that to 100 mpg. Chrome wheels included. If you take off the doors and tailgate and windows you would save lot's of weight and increase that mpg to somewhere in the 70 range.

So like I said, feel free to email me for my address and I will accept that $10 million dollar prize and get to work on manufacturing my eco friendly vehicle.

It might have something to do with that gigantic ball of liquid fusion 93 million miles away

J-Dub writes a lot about "sustainability" and the coming demise of our lifestyle due to "peak oil" and "consumerism" etc...

He is well intentioned and a really good guy, but you know what road is paved with good intentions....

Why is "global warming" a partisan issue? Why is it that self-identifying Democrats believe not only fervently in the idea of anthropomorphic global climate change, but also in the idea that the government should do something about it and Republicans (in their typical knuckle dragging Neanderthal, creationist believing, right wing nuttery) not only have questions about global warming and it's existence, but also question whether or not we can do anything about it?

Roger Pielke writes at "Prometheus," and I would recommend reading this post about the partisanship behind global warming---it's a great assessment of how we got to where we are politically on the issue.

I am not a climatologist, nor am I a world reknowned astrophysicist, or an expert in ANY field. Heck, I am a barely employable factotum---but it sure seems like the molten ball of fusion that is responsible for all energy, light and heat on our planet might have SOMETHING to do with global temperatures. But if we don't blame ourselves for ruining the garden of Eden, then we take away the opportunity for our "saviors" like Gore and others to "solve" the "problem."

The smart folks at Duke tend to agree. need Adobe to read.