September 23 - 30, 2009
editorial@boulderweekly.com

More liberal whining
Dag blast it and gosh darnit! We wish them liberal faculty over at the University of Colorado would stop issuing so many press releases every year about the Arctic sea ice declining! It’s clearly the Democrats’ agenda to sound the alarm about global warming, which is a political issue, not a scientific one. We miss the good old days of the George W. Bush administration, when such news was often stifled because global warming is bad for business — specifically corporate interests that contribute so much to greenhouse gases and Republican politicians!

The latest is that the Arctic Sea ice has reached its lowest extent of the year, and is the third-lowest ever recorded. What they don’t tell you until the second sentence of the press release is that this year’s ice loss is not as severe as the previous two years of record-setting lows, so what’s the panic? Yeah, we know it’s significantly below the long-term average, but what’s 30 years of data but a blip on the radar compared to millions and millions of years in Earth’s natural patterns of lava flows and ice ages? Just ask CU President Bruce Benson. He’s an oilman, and he’ll tell you it’s much ado about nothing. In the meantime, just disregard the scientists at CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. We can expect a more extensive update in October, now that President Barack Obama is in power and the administration is no longer putting pressure on faculty and scientists to water down their results for political reasons.

Death by weather balloon
A 12-year-old middle-school student was hospitalized on Sept. 15, as a precaution, after complaining that he was shocked by an overheated battery attached to a weather balloon that fell in the playground of Niver Creek Middle School in Thornton. The Denver Post and 7News reported that the balloon was the property of the National Weather Service, and that some kids took it inside the school on their lunch break. The NWS said the battery in the “radiosonde” of the balloon is harmless, is packed in Styrofoam and only lasts about four hours.

Oh, and the balloons are launched at 5 a.m.

We’re no mathematicians, but if the kid took it inside at lunchtime and the battery lasts until 9 a.m., there shouldn’t have been much of a charge left in it.

Kind of reminds us of The Red Balloon, that short French film they showed us in grade school about the kid who chases a balloon that had a mind of its own.

Hey, not to question the kid who got shocked, but in middle school we would have been hard-pressed to find a better excuse to skip class. Way better than the stomach flu.

And where do the rest of these weather balloons end up every day? Does the NWS track them and their landing sites? Is this a public health concern that the government needs to crack down on? Is a weather-balloon injury covered by health insurance?

Proof of aliens
We’re happy to say we’ve received a press invitation to “A Galactic Gathering: A Conference on Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” to be held Sept. 25-27 in Denver.

Apparently the guest speakers will be “offering astounding proof of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and evidence that they have been interacting with humanity for eons,” according to a news release.

The event features Franklin Carter, “the spokesperson, co-founder and vice president of the Institute for the Study of Galactic Civilizations (ISGC) that has been established to raise awareness on how extraterrestials have influenced our civilization from the very beginning.”

Dudes, you’re preaching to the choir! We’ve got firsthand evidence of aliens from that one time we took mushrooms after riding horses up to that remote mountain cabin, when the forest got all wavy and we saw those four colored lights cruise across the sky in formation!
Not to mention that one time that George W. Bush got re-elected!

Weed and Wii
Undercover drug agents just wanna have fun. That seems to be the case with several agents caught on camera playing Wii bowling during a nine-hour drug raid in Florida. They arrived at the property loaded for bear and ready to kick ass, but 20 minutes later they apparently felt they needed a break from the War on Some Drugs and settled in with the suspect’s Wii set.

But the joke is on them. The suspect in the case — one Michael Difalco — had rigged his computer with a hidden security camera, which filmed the whole thing. This reportedly includes a female agent’s euphoria when she stopped throwing strikes and gutter balls and threw a double.

Police say they found marijuana, meth, weapons, drug paraphernalia and more than $30,000 of stolen property during the raid. No word on their bowling scores, however.