Heel, heel, heel, sit, down, stay...it's all so tiring:

MSNBC reported overnight that U.S. troops have entered Sadr City in Baghdad. That's newsworthy in itself, but they added an extra level of irony by running their nightly headline-roundup email through an over-zealous spell check:

U.S. troops enter Sadder City

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers entered the Shiite stronghold of Sadder City on Sunday in the first major push into the area since an American-led security sweep began last month around Baghdad.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17450016/

Sigh.

The clouds broke this evening just long enough for me to see the eclipse. As they say in Boston: wicked cool.

The eclipse will be total from 4:44 pm CT to 5:58 pm, so when the moon rises over Chicago at 5:39 pm it will appear a deep red. (If it appears at all, of course; the weather will likely be cloudy.)

Observers on the East Coast will have a better view; Europeans will get to see the whole thing.

...and I don't mean on the locker-room floor. Just now NPR's Weekend Edition reported on a gym in Hong Kong that uses the kinetic energy from people walking on treadmills and using exercise bikes to power its lights. Neat.

Parker's second training session finished up well, but according to the trainer, Joe Hislop, Parker is a smart dog who got a little spoiled. Actually, he got a lot spoiled, which is totally my fault. But now, Parker isn't so spoiled any more. In fact, he knows how to stay down for as long as necessary now. Last night, aided a little by fatigue, he stayed in a down position munching on a bully stick for an hour. Here he is being quite a well-mannered dog while I walked out of sight and back in my office building's lobby:

At least one of my friends (ND-D) would be proud of me: as of tonight, all 21 of the lightbulbs in my apartment are compact fluoroescent, and in some cases of lesser luminosity than the ones they replaced. All told, if every light bulb in the place is blazing away, I'm still using less electricity than if only my kitchen and bathroom lights were on before replacing the bulbs.

Plus, unless I live here 20 years, it's unlikely any of them will ever need replacing.

It's a little thing, but if everyone did it, we'd use a lot less energy.

You will notice that the ParkerCam isn't being updated today. Parker is in his crate, which I had hoped not to use, but circumstances required it:

Wow, do I have a lot of movies to see.

Update, 11:08 pm CT: Wow, Scorsese finally won!

Last update, 11:14 pm CT: Scorsese won again! It never rains...

One more update, 11:18 pm CT: MSNBC just sent a news alert out about the Best Actress Oscar™. I'm wondering: who is checking email from a place they can't see the actual Oscars broadcast? Anyone? Bueller?

Through the ParkerCam I just got to watch my darling soon-to-be-crated-from-now-on puppy disemboweled my comforter:

Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (sub.req.) points out that serious energy conservation does not equal economic disaster:

[T]he assumption, explicit or implicit, that any substantial cut in energy use would require a drastic change in the way we live...is false. Let me tell you about a real-world counterexample: an advanced economy that has managed to combine rising living standards with a substantial decline in per capita energy consumption, and managed to keep total carbon dioxide emissions more or less flat for two decades, even as both its economy and its population grew rapidly. And it achieved all this without fundamentally changing a lifestyle centered on automobiles and single-family houses.

The name of the economy? California.