Alex:

The story has been snowballing with every new development.

The initial kidnapping of the child was in of itself quite unusual here - and then to hear that the suspect was a Rockefeller indeed kept it in the news. I think it is safe to say now, however, that his name is NOT Rockefeller.

Here are a few of the twists the story has taken which has made it all the more interesting and kept it in the news here:

* The kidnapping happened...
* They initiated the AMBER alert - once again rare for here...
* They DROPPED the AMBER alert the next day because they had "credible information" that he and his daughter were seen in New York State
* For some reason the police believed that the father and daughter might have fled via yacht to the Caribbean and this was reported
* The ultimate New England WASP mom - salary $1.4MM+ per year as a consultant - recorded a video begging her husband to return the child "Snooks."
* A tip from a real estate agent in Baltimore led the authorities to the apartment where they were hiding. The FBI effectively used a ruse to lure "Rockefeller" from the apartment they were staying in and arrest him.
* "Snooks" and Super-WASP-Mom were reunited
* While in custody in Maryland, it was discovered that Rockefeller's fingerprints may have been found at the scene of the disappearance of a California couple in 1985
* Detectives from California fly out to interview Rockefeller but he refuses to cooperate
* A family in Connecticut steps forward to reveal that they think that Rockefeller is actually a one-time German exchange student who stayed with them in the 1970s/1980s
* Stories emerge from friends, neighbors and acquaintances of strange behavior over the years including financial transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes in gold, the use of different names and unusual precautions taken at one of the family's three homes - this one in an artist's colony in New Hampshire
* German authorities have become involved and a man in Germany claiming to be Rockefeller's brother makes a public statement saying that his brother left Germany as a young man to make a big life for himself in the United States, but that the family hasn't heard from him in 20 years
* Rockefeller claims that he can't remember anything prior to 1993
* Rockefeller's lawyer concedes that his client "knows German," but denies that he was born in Germany or is a German citizen

Craziness! Fascinating.

Miss C:

I'm terribly sorry to have to have placed you in a list that also includes Michelle Malkin.

Off the top of my head:

Amanda Marcotte, the horrible Michelle Malkin, the equally horrible Pam Gellar (Atlas Shrugs anti-Muslim bigotry blog), Jill Filipovic, Pam Spaulding, Debbie "Ask me why Muslims suck" Schlussel, Jane Hamsher, Ana Marie Cox, Jacqui "Ars Technica" Cheng, Xeni Jardin, Juliette "Baldilocks" Ochieng, Kathryn "K-Lo" Lopez, MISS CELLENIA, Lindsay Beyerstein, Garance Franke-Ruta, Roxanne Cooper, Rebecca Traister, Joan Walsh, Carol Avedon, Lauren Bruce, Tammy Bruce, "Hecate," Susan Hu, "Echidne of the Snakes," the politically confused but otherwise exceptional Beth "Alabama Pachyderm" Cleaver, Melissa "Shakespeare's Sister" McEwan, the criminally stupid La Shawn Barber, Sharon Weinberger, Elizabeth "The Anchoress" Scalia, Dr. Helen "Mrs. Instapundit" Smith, and on and on... And this list (with the exception of Miss C., Sharon W., Jacqui Cheng and Xeni Jardin) only covers political bloggers, left and right.

I read tons of blogs and I certainly don't choose which ones to "take seriously" based on the sex of the poster and I think the rest of the blog-reading world participates similarly. If Blogger X, regardless of his or her sex can maintain a schedule of engaging and provocative posts, then readers will flock to them. If they lose their edge and it starts to show in their work then they may lose some of their audience. I couldn't imagine a reader deciding that their favorite blog has gotten tediously boring but that they would consider the sex of the blogger in question as part of their decision whether to stick around or participate elsewhere.

Vive les bloggers féminins - même les wingnuts belliqueux parmi eux!

James E:

What does that mean?

They never got Rushdie, though - so in his case, the pen is mightier!

When I was at Berkeley one of the bookstores on Telepgraph got pipe-bombed (Cody's? Corner of Haste and Telegraph...) ostensibly because of the Satanic Verses window display they had at the time. One bomb exploded on its own - the other had to be detonated in the store by the BPD Bomb Squad. I happened to be walking to school during the excitement and witnessed the bomb squad detonating the second bomb IN THE STORE! Messy.

No - you're right - of course I can't.

You've brought the concept of gravitational mass changing over a finite and presumably measurable period of time, however. If you're going to cite the dinosaurs as evidence of possible less gravity, surely you must have an idea as to how/why less gravity became more gravity over time?

Mr. Gamma:

The "less gravity hence larger dinosaurs with anatomies that can support the weight" item fails in my view. The density of our planet is behind its mass. In order for there to have been a significant change in gravity between the dinosaur age and now, there would have had to have been a significant increase in mass. Where is the evidence of a significant increase in earth's mass between the dinosaur age and now? This increase can't be explained through evidence of a simple non-apocalyptic meteor or comet strike.

Kahm:

Thanks for the tip re: septuagenarian. I had it wrong originally, but Google suggested the spelling that I ended up using, believe it or not. Your spelling is definitely the correct one.

Thanks again, Ace.

Adam

I'm always a tad disappointed when dear old Cal fails to make this list. I don't think the survey considers LSD a "party" drug, however, which probably continues to handicap Berkeley to this day.

That wonderful spicy, sour, seafood soup that everyone loves at Thai restaurants is called Dom Yam and it is flavored with tamarind, chili, lime, lemongrass, galanga (a root relative of ginger), fish sauce and more.

One of the neatest non-standard ice creams I've encountered was Dom Yam-flavored ice cream in Nakhon Sitammarat Province in Southern Thailand - basically a sherbert flavored with tamarind (sour), lemongrass, lime - and chili.

Arroy maak!

1. Studios need to maintain control over the different varieties of trailers they produce for a given film. If Trailer A ends up testing bad in Market X, they will move quickly to replace Trailer A with Trailer B. They cannot maintain that degree of control with trailers hosted on YouTube.

2. A *significant* percentages of EMBEDDED YouTube videos will report, "That video is no longer available" in the embedded version - when in fact the embed is simply unable to talk to the server. Anytime you get the "no longer available" message in an embedded YouTube video, get the URL of the video itself on YouTube and attempt to watch it there. You'll find more often than not that the video is there and has not been pulled.

The mugshot photo makes this story.

It kept on coming up in my various news feeds and RSS readers.

"Why is this story so interesting?," I asked myself. Surely anyone growing up rurally and living amongst machines has felt the urge to shoot a misbehaving machine? That's not news.

The mugshot makes the news, however.

As "whale farts" are wholly seafood based, I'll bet they're exceptionally offensive.

And the colors are so great! I only wish we could see as many colors as the camera that captured those images.

What a cool idea, Chris A. I never would have thought of it that way.

Brian:

I did not know that story. Thanks for sharing it!