Wager

$50 says this story will be ultimately exposed as a complete hoax.

White roofs

Interesting.

Since he took over as energy secretary last year, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, has urged Americans to help cool the planet by painting their roofs a lighter color that reflects sunlight.

“When you’re thinking of putting on a new roof, make it white,” Dr. Chu told Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” audience in 2009. “It costs no more to make it white than to make it black.”

Now he is following his own advice: on Monday, Dr. Chu directed all Energy Department offices to install white roofs during new construction, when replacing old roofs and wherever an installation is cost-effective over the lifetime of the roof. The secretary urged other federal agencies to follow suit.

“Cool roofs are one of the quickest and lowest-cost ways we can reduce our global carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate change,” he said in a statement.

Glass 1/2 Full

As much as the economy and our 401ks have struggled in the last two years, the news is not all bad. After we close our current mortgage refinance, our interest rate will be 4.5% lower than the day we were married.

Financial freedom doesn't come in just one form.

Two Washington Post columnists

Well said, Eugene Robinson. Shame on you, Richard Cohen.

Speechless

Link.

Duct Tape

You can't make it up.

The most talked-about phone in the U.S. -- Apple's iPhone 4 -- has a design flaw that's best fixed with a sliver of duct tape, according to Consumer Reports.

"It may not be pretty, but it works," writes Mike Gikas on that nonprofit consumer group's electronics blog.

The patch -- which sounds like it'd be more appropriate for kitchen plumbing than for a phone that retails for $200 to $300, plus an AT&T contract -- is supposed to correct an apparent problem with the iPhone 4's metal antenna.

Rev. Jackass

Jesse Jackson.

"He speaks as an owner of LeBron and not the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers," the reverend said in a release from his Chicago-based civil rights group, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. "His feelings of betrayal personify a slave master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave."

No, LeBron had every right to leave. But to ask the world to tune into a one hour television event in Cleveland--his hometown and where he was worshipped--to announce that rather than renew his vows, he wanted a divorce, was about the most classless act I have ever witnessed.

Not that I need more evidence to support my opinion that Jesse Jackson is a jackass, but here is some anyway.


And who could forget this?

Rev. Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown" in January 1984 during a conversation with a black Washington Post reporter, Milton Coleman. Jackson had assumed the references would not be printed because of his racial bond with Coleman, but several weeks later Coleman permitted the slurs to be included far down in an article by another Post reporter on Jackson's rocky relations with American Jews.

A storm of protest erupted, and Jackson at first denied the remarks, then accused Jews of conspiring to defeat him.

Just go away.

Two stories to ruin your Monday

Link.

76-year-old iconic director, Roman Polanski, is free to drug and sex 13-year-old girls across the European continent. . .

Elsewhere.

(CNN) -- A veteran Iranian human rights activist has warned that Sakineh Mohammadie shtiani, a mother of two, could be stoned to death at any moment under the terms of a death sentence handed down by Iranian authorities. . .

Ashtiani, 42, will be buried up to her chest, according to an Amnesty International report citing the Iranian penal code. The stones that will be hurled at her will be large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill her immediately.

Ashtiani, who is from the northern city of Tabriz, was convicted of adultery in 2006. She was forced to confess after being subjected to 99 lashes. . .

The world is messed up.

LeBron James

He had every right to pick his employer. But to do it in such asshole-iss fashion is really repulsive. Link.

I'm a little more proud today that our hometown hero is Joe Mauer.

59

A piece of golf history.

[Paul Goydos] shot a 59. An 18-hole, 12-under-par, 59. It was only the
fourth score of that total n PGA Tour history, tying the mark of Al Geiberger, Chip Beck and David Duval.

“That’s just a mythical number in our game,” Goydos said.

It was the kind of performance that had a few other Tour pros watching with the fans as Goydos arrived at the 18th green with a 7-footer left for a birdie and the 59.

“I was probably as nervous as I’ve been over a putt in my life,” Goydos said. But he rolled the downhill putt perfectly, saying “the ball couldn’t have gone more in the center of the hole with a laser on it.”

BP spills coffee