Courtney Love is described as mentally unstable in newly released deposition papers filed by her daughter Frances Bean Cobain, who sought a restraining order in 2009.

Frances Bean, now 19, says Love’s behavior even caused her pets’ death.

Their cat kicked it after getting entangled in Love’s messy piles of “Etsy fabrics, boxes of paperwork, trash and other possessions,” according to the court papers, while the dog swallowed several of Love’s stash of prescription pills.

No surprise with Love’s tabloid lifestyle the past decade. I’m just glad Frances Bean has sense enough to get away from her mother. Hat tip to the missus.

Good stuff. The Mark Wallace video he links is even better:

I understood the basic concept and I still learned a lot. I didn’t appreciate how quickly in percentage terms flash falls off with distance, how quickly the fall-off flattens out, or how to take advantage of the fall-off to get evenly-lit group photos. That’s good instructin’.

It happened in December, but I completely missed it. They’re even emptying the Saab museum. Kinda sad.

Special Note Regarding Robot Monkeys

We are no longer accepting robot-monkey-themed work, be they drawings, stories, or whatever. We’ve had it up to here with robot monkeys. Yes, robot monkeys are “funny” and “cool” and they make “amazing” beeping sounds, but enough is enough with the robot monkeys. Robot monkeys are so last July. And no saying that something is a tree and then later telling us it’s a robot monkey. That will lead to immediate removal from our refrigerator door, and no amount of crying and spinning wildly on the floor will make us put it back up.

Three Questions You Must Ask Yourself
Before Submitting Your Work

• Have I spelled my name correctly on my submission?

• Is my submission robot-monkey-free?

• Does my submission seek to make a difference in people’s lives?

Commonly found on houses in the American South, Haint Blue is a paint color used on porch ceilings and door and window trim.

Tradition holds that it orginated in the Carribean as a way to ward off evil spirits (“haints”). Indigo was used to get the blue color. Also, lime was commonly used in the blue paint which helped keep insects away.

“…folks from the South who believe blue ceilings scare evil spirits.

That can be credited to the Gullah/Geechee culture, a mix of African tribes that made up a large part of the slave population once found in the Carolina Low Country…

These people brought many customs and myths with them to the United States, including the superstition that the color blue warded off evil spirits (“haints,” or haunts). The Gullah people would paint the woodwork around their windows and doorways to ward off the haints… The practice spilled over onto porch ceilings, and the color came to be known as “haint blue.” Source

“Haint Blue” isn’t one specific color. It can vary from a pale pale light blue to a more deep turquoise or teal color. As long as we see it as the color of aporch ceiling or around a door/window, we can consider it Haint Blue.

“Legend has it that the color was brought to the United States with the slaves who believed that it had the ability to ward off evil spirits. In the South, a “Haint” is a spirit (a derivation of “haunt”) and the color supposedly keeps them away. This is why many houses in the South have blue porches or blue trim on the house.

Via Cracked’s 6 Bizarre Ways Architecture Is Designed to Ward Off Ghosts.

Previous WOTD – Major Non-NATO Ally

I loves me some stainless steel in guns, knives, and lots of other things. It’s resistant to rust and it’s a continuous material – it’s the same on the surface as it is on the inside, so scratches aren’t a big deal.

I guess I’d like it in a kitchen, but I’m not lusting after it in a big way. Enamel is remarkably good and kitchen appliances don’t get that much wear. Plus, stainless steel is non-magnetic, so you can’t put magnets on your stainless fridge. Howya gonna display little darlin’s refrigerator art?

What kind of behavior? He’s trying to pass “Don’t Say Gay legislation” that would prevent schools from discussing homosexuality in the classroom. He’s also vocal in the media advocating the discredited theory that AIDS started when a gay man had sex with a monkey in Africa. He also tries to makes light of bullying of gay children in schools. This a few weeks after a gay kid who was bullied committed suicide in Campfield’s home state of Tennessee.

Some local bloggers that I’m often in agreement with – Linoge and Rich Hailey – have a difference of opinion with Boggs. Basically, they feel that intolerance is intolerance and Boggs is no better than Campfield. I disagree.

Campfield’s intolerance is towards an entire group of people – homosexuals. There’s a word for that kind of intolerance. It’s called prejudice or bigotry.

Boggs wasn’t intolerant of Campfield because he just happened to belong to a group she was bigoted against. She was intolerant of the individual behavior of state legislator Stacey Campfield himself because of his bigoted, intolerant, ignorant behavior.

Since there seems to be some confusion, here’s how it breaks down:

• It would have been wrong (and illegal) for the Bistro to put up a sign that said “No Blacks Allowed.”
• If Campfield had been black it would have been wrong (and illegal) for Boggs to throw him out for having black skin.
• If Campfield had been black it would still have been A-OK for Boggs to throw him out for being a bigoted idiot. She’s free to refuse service to anyone. She just can’t do it on the basis of race, religion, or nationality. Thankfully, bigoted morons aren’t a protected class.

Campfield is a bigot and a national embarrassment to the people of Knox County. Boggs stood up to a bigot. Good for her. Bigots should be shunned. I liked her restaurant on Facebook. I plan on eating there the next time I’m downtown.

Others of course may feel otherwise and choose not to eat there. (In which case, they’re discriminating against the restaurant. See what I did there? Discriminating is not the nuclear bomb dirty word Rich and Linoge make it out to be. What matters is the reason for the discrimination.)

So far people seem to be supporting Boggs and the Bistro. Their Facebook likes have jumped from 600 to over 8000 in just two days.

 This review is from: Officially Licensed Star Wars Luke Skywalker Ceremonial Jacket with Medal Of Yavin (M) (Toy)

I used to be an unemployed movie theater usher, but that all changed when I bought this jacket. Now I’m an unemployed movie theater usher with one of these jackets.

Accoutrements Horse Head Mask

And I’ve kind of had it up to here with Sarah Jessica Parker jokes. We get it. It’s funny that a horse is cast in human roles in a variety of television shows and movies, and it’s funny that they write it so that all the other characters talk to it like it’s a human. I just don’t get what’s so funny about repeating the same joke the show is making. It’s like expecting laughs when you point out that Mr. Ed is a horse. Duh. That’s the point of the show.

This week both of California’s largest government employee pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS, released their portfolio earnings numbers for the most recent twelve months. In a statement released on January 24th, “CalSTRS Calendar Year-End Investment Returns Show Slight Gains,” CalSTRS disclosed “Investment returns for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) ended the 2011 calendar year posting a 2.3 percent gain.” CalPER’s statement released on January 23rd, was titled “[CalPERS} Pension Fund earns 1.1 percent return for 2011 calendar year.”

These funds, and the rest of California’s many local government employee pension funds, are still clinging to long-term rate of return assumptions of between 7.5% and 7.75% per year. So how much would taxpayers be on the hook for if rates of return stay this low?

If the pension fund’s return is 7.75%, the state pays $23 billion to pension funds each year.
If the pension fund’s return is 6.75%, the state pays $29 billion to pension funds each year.
If the pension fund’s return is 5.75%, the state pays $39 billion to pension funds each year.
If the pension fund’s return is 4.75%, the state pays $51 billion to pension funds each year.
If the pension fund’s return is 3.75%, the state pays $66 billion to pension funds each year.

It is interesting to note that both CalPERS and CalSTRS failed to even achieve a 3.75% return in calendar year 2011, the lowest amount used in these examples and the lowest amount that can even keep pace with inflation.

Which may be part of the reason California is going to run out of cash in one month.

Different bloggers handle that in different ways. Some people would just change it. Since it came up in comments I decided to leave the MB, but strike it out, like this: MB, and type in GB. That way the original mistake is there alongside the correct information. Anyone reading the comments can follow what happened without getting bumfuzzled.

When I struck out the MB in the WordPress blogging software I noticed something. The latest WordPress puts a note in the del tag showing the date and time of the strikethrough.

SanDisk 32 <del datetime=”2012-01-31T19:05:24+00:00″>MB</del> GB SanDisk thumbdrive

Pretty cool.

P.S. Playing around with it, though, I noticed that in WordPress 3.3.1 that only works in HTML view, not Visual view. Buggy.

Now via Oddball at Gun, Cars, and Tech I find out about Portableapps.com, a source of apps that run directly from a USB or other drive without installation. That’s even better, since some apps can’t be installed without administrator privileges. They’re small, too. I download 38 apps and they total just a whisker over 2 gigabytes uncompressed.

Oddball has some ideas for documents you may want to keep handy (and encrypted) on your thumbdrive. Check him out.

* Installers I keep handy:

• Firefox
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
  
• Adobe Flashplayer
• A Zip utility
• Google Picasa for photos
• Putty Telnet client (no install needed – can run straight from the USB drive)
• Security and repair utility software for PCs having problems:
  
• IObit’s Windows Advanced SystemCare and Malware Fighter
  
• HiJackThis
• Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
  
• Avast’s free antivirus

I hope you got some while it was on sale. If not and you’ve been wanting in, you probably shouldn’t wait. I’m just a simple caveman, but I think the days of gold in the 1500s and silver in the 20s are rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror. Anyone waiting for levels even further below those recent lows to get into precious metals is probably kidding themselves.

Year-To-Date Performance: Silver, Gold, SP 500, and the Dollar – Fitch Downgrades Europe :

Here’s how things stack up so far.

Silver +22%
Gold +10.8%
SP500 + 4.7%
US$ – 0.1%

Biggest Week For Gold In 3 Months:

While Silver had a better week than Gold (+5.4% vs 4.3%), Gold managed its biggest gain in three months as the Fed’s QE-ness seemed to separate the precious metals from other asset classes. Oil underperformed relative to the USD’s weakness (-2% on the week in DXY) managing only a 1.3% gain (and ending below $100). Silver and Gold have no managed four weeks in a row of gains as the latter has more than retraced half of the all-time high sell-off range.

What the Fed is saying, in essence, is that as the economy improves, it’s appropriate to provide as much stimulus, or support, as it did in late 2008, when the economy was contracting and the financial system was imploding.

This is a dramatic shift. Given the long and variable lags with which monetary policy operates, past Fed officials at least paid lip service to the notion of acting preemptively: withdrawing excess stimulus — a fancy way of saying they will raise interest rates — as the economy improved.

Not so the current committee, which is tilted toward doves after the annual rotation of voting members. This group seems to think it should “continue to ease as long as there is economic slack,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s a classic, elemental mistake,” he said, one described by the late Nobel economist Milton Friedman as the “fool in the shower.”

The fool turns on the water in the shower, steps in and finds that it’s still cold. So he turns the knob all the way to hot, only to get scalded when the water heats up with a predictable lag.

And it was low interest rates that helped fuel the housing bubble. Low interest rates got us into this mess and by golly they’ll got us out, sez the Fed.

I would have been disappointed if I had paid full price to see it in a theater on Saturday night, but it was fun to watch on a rainy Saturday morning. Expectations are everything.

Cracked – The 5 Worst Deaths Written for Great Characters (And Why):

What Really Happened:

[Cyclops actor James] Marsden was being unfaithful. He was cheating on the X-Men with another comic book franchise, Superman. He didn’t have much time on the set of X-Men: The Last Stand because he was cast in Superman Returns, which was shooting at the same time.

Rumors floated around the Internet that Cyclops’ death was intentionally bad, as Fox was upset over Marsden’s choice (Superman Returns was owned by another studio and helmed by X-Men 1 and 2 director Bryan Singer). While we are not ones to indulge in unconfirmed Internet rumors, yeah, that’s what probably happened.

The bigger question is, why would Marsden do it? Keep in mind, he didn’t leave to play Superman, or Lex Luthor (possibly the only two characters in the Superman universe worth playing). No, he bailed on being Cyclops just to play the guy who bones Superman’s girlfriend when Supe’s is out of town. There can’t be much job security in stealing Superman’s girlfriend.