Rick Herrick Central - Hi there.

Boy, some people are just no fun.  There's been an on-going thread on Andrew Sullivan's site about weddings, diamond rings, and the money spent on ceremony, ornamentation, etc., all in (conscious or unconscious) signalling ploys.  But one writer took this to the extreme in this post (look for the reader who "finds all wedding expenses unnecessary"):

I'm getting super bummed at the layout of this blog.  I need a new Drupal theme.  I want my fonts to be more refined.

Updated: OK, I have a new theme.  Deco.  It's OK for now, I guess.  At least it's not the old theme.

I live under a rock buried beneath a pile of bigger rocks, for I have not heard California Gurls.  I have heard Paparazzi repeatedly but that's because a (non-Lady Gaga) version of it is on Kidz Bop 17 (I'm thinking about doing a blues version of that song).

I've been watching Louie, which is the relatively new Louie C.K. comedy on FX (as in, this is its first season and it's a few episodes in).  I had to wait a bit and kind of digest it before I could distill what I think about it and I'm still equivocating a bit, but here goes...

Via Ezra Klein.

In this sensational leaked video, Katie Couric is "disdainful" and "contemptuous" of Sarah Palin's children, takes "a shot at female basketball players" and makes fun of Wasilla, "one of the fastest growing areas in the country, and the fifth largest city in Alaska."

Go ahead and watch the video and come back.  You'll be completely and totally shocked.

Stop me if you've heard this one, a Bilderberger walks into a bar...

[O]n the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks.

Via Kevin Drum:

The basic idea is simple: the wind gets stronger the higher up you are, so why not build flying turbines that hover a mile or two above the earth and crank out the megawatts?

The only question I have would be how much reduced atmospheric pressure at high altitude would affect the kinetic energy transmitted from the moving air to the generator itself, but I'd imagine they've already thought of that and that it's not a factor.

Scott McNealy has an interesting idea.  His non-profit company, Curriki, aggregates and develops online educational resources from a community of contributors:

Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of 'curriculum' and 'wiki' which is the technology we're using to make education universally accessible.

As anyone who's been to college knows, textbooks have been a scam for a long time.  In universities, new editions of books come out every couple of years with the primary goal of thwarting the used textbook market: just enough changes to move the paging, for example, making previous editions obsolete even though the information hasn't changed substantially if at all.  I have a number of friends in academics, and I know that they're not in it for the money.  But the publishers are and they'll do whatever they can to sell more new books.

Like most other people on the more non-conservative side of things, I was pretty disappointed with the administration's actions in the recent Shirley Sherrod dust-up.  But I thought that their actions were somewhat mitigated by the fact that they fairly quickly did the right thing: admitted they were wrong, apologized, and tried to take steps to make things as right as they could be under the circumstances.