What I Missed

...while I was away.  Of course, with a new baby, one tends to be distracted and one's sense of time goes flooey.

Some interesting stuff:

I think Cousin Dick was found just before I took off. After centuries of debate, the unearthing of the skeleton now confirmed as that of Richard III revealed why he was called Crookback Dick.  Even while still in situ, the skeleton shows his scoliosis clearly.

It's too much trouble to go back over the number of once, twice, thrice removeds of the family tree, so I'll use our running joke of him being my fourth cousin.  Richard descended from Edward I "Longshanks" Plantagenet (reigned 1272 - 1307), who was so badly and inaccurately treated in Mel Gibson's "Braveheart".  My Felton line is descended from Longshanks' brother Edmund Plantagenet, 1st Earl of Leicester and Lancaster (1245 - 1296).

Grandpa Edmund's Coat of Arms

Of course, the debate still rages as to Richard's culpability in the deaths of his nephews and whether he was a monster or not.  Unfortunately for Richard and for those interested in the facts, just the facts, Tudors wrote his history after taking his throne and his life and we may never know any more than we do now.

And then there was the fireball that blasted the heck out of an area of Russia.  That was a serious Wow!, particularly since it occured during an asteroid fly-by and a couple other smaller fireballs were seen within the next few days.  I thought at first that maybe the asteroid wasn't traveling alone, but the trajectories of the fireballs were so radically different from the asteroid and the big fireball that it was just coincidence.  The fact that the explosion affected a populated area gave scientists something to chew on in their research on the 1908 Tunguska event. 

Tunguska BOOM

Oh, and hearing a media interviewer asked if the fact that a large asteroid passing relatively close by on the same day was because of global warming pretty much confirmed my opinion that news and interview shows are worthless. 

And the resignation of Pope Benedict.  Which I think is brilliant.  He has headed off the worst of the descent into bureaucracy that happens when a pope is physically disabled at the end of his life.  Nobody knows better than Benedict what his action means, and he didn't do it lightly.  But of course the loss of a pope always triggers the silly season.  Creative Minority Report posted the funniest and most spot on video about that I've ever seen, put together by Lutheran Satire:

Old Senile Joe appears to have been on a shotgun tear, emphatically advising us to do what is not only illegal but highly dangerous.  People need to remember that it's not his stupidity or Obama's corruption that are really at issue so much as the stupidity and corruption of those who put them in office and the stupidity and corruption of a Congress that either supports them or rolls over for them.

And the Obama's spent a lot more of our tax dollars for their vacations.  That isn't surprising.  See my stupidity and corruption reference above.

The world is ending, I gather, because of "cuts" that Obama supported before he was against them.  It probably would have been a lot easier for him to go up to the Capitol and meet with the folks in Congress than to fly thousands of miles fighting the cuts he signed into law, but I guess once he got into the campaign mode he hasn't been able to get out of it.  And maybe Air Force One is a lot more comfortable than any other meeting space available to him.  It might be helpful if the Senate actually did their job and brought out a budget, but breaking the law seems to be OK these days.

And I say "cuts", but only in government can a decrease in growth be a cut, and only in government can agencies who will have higher budgets this year than last scream that they are devastated by those "cuts".

That's pretty much all I noticed.  Except the Dow Jones numbers.  It's so hard to pull into the pre-retirement safe investment zone when the market is hot.