Happy New Year. Truncated, link intensive version of Hobbsblog tonight, partly to clean out my links file and also partly due to the fact that I'm about to go out and drive my wife and some friends around as they drink. Someone posted an article on Cassini's pictures of Jupiter on Metafilter, and this discussion resulted. I was forced to post some information after someone referred to the anti-nukes in space camp as a bunch of Luddites.

Last week, I heard on the news that Russia admitted that the USSR had held Raoul Wallenberg on trumped up charges and that he had died in prison. Wallenberg, as you may or may not recall, was the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during WWII by use of forged papers. Well, the fact that this guy who was a hero to humanity had been unjustly jailed is tragic, but the story gets weirder. Now there's a report that he's actually not dead but is alive if not well in a Moscow mental hospital.

Talk about weird: there's a freshman at the University of Louisville whose name is also Nathan P. Hobbs. It wouldn't have taken that many different turns in my life for me to have gone to the U of L. Here's his lame website.

This link is especially for my father. The TRS-80 was the first computer we owned (with 4k of RAM!). (Link via PCJM)

Don't think that I've forgotten about next week's Orange Bowl between the evil, culturally imperialistic yokels from Florida State and our beloved land thieves from Oklahoma. ESPN's magazine has a nice writeup about the Sooners' return to glory that will warm the hearts of all the members of the diaspora of the Sooner Nation. Oh, and if anyone needs an explanation of the land thieves comment, let me know.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks John "I lost to a dead man" Ashcroft is an asshole.

Have a good new year. Drive carefully all, enjoy the snow, quaff a potent potable for me.