Nick's birthday

And Dave was up early for work

Ralph McQuarrie's storyboard paintings for the Star Wars Trilogy

via Drawn! and Flickr:

Details: Stormtroopers with lightsabers, and shields?


Chewie?

Proto B-wings attacking the proto Death Star.


Lucas went to Norway to shoot the scenes based on Hoth. He should have waitied for sunlight like this!

'Stand by, Ion control.. Fire!'
The first transport is away!


Just one more pass!

By now you should've somehow realised what you gotta do

I saw the Cardinals perform at Manchester Academy. It was pretty amazing to hear them play 'Wonderwall', and to have the local crowd really get into it.

Bridgewater

Kristy hides in the cabinet room behind some noisy plumbing.

McCain laments the GOP's romance of Sarah Palin, bursts into tears upon hearing Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson's 'Sweetest waste of time'

Wednesday, Atlantic City Casino buffet:


The beers, tight-but-not-clinical harmonies of Kasey and Shane, and the beautiful pedal steel work of Bill Chambers got too much for old Walnuts McCain, sources say.


If all this waitin'
Just leaves me wantin'

You still would be the sweetest waste of time
I choose Sarah Palin as my running mate.

If I could learn
The ways of your mind


If I could burn
A hole in your cold heart
Damn fundamentalist!

For every time I called your name



If you don't need me
when you get lonely



If you don't want me
to call your own
Don't be using this publicity just to launch your contention for 2012!


If all this hopin'
Just leaves me hurting


You still would be the sweetest waste of time
Hey, we did all right. Did we do all right?

Due to Palin's desire to take out her frustration, Ecologists predict a sharp drop in the 'Alaskan moose population.'

Malkin

'Race' to the White House

From the Daily Dish:

Joe Klein:
...this is a country whose President-elect's middle name is Hussein. That is a fact to be celebrated. I received an email from a young friend, an entrepreneur in Kabul, this morning. He said, "We are all smiling now," and he attached a Pakistani press clipping--the Taliban greeted the new President and said they were ready to commence talks.

'I wrote well over a year ago, when Obama was 20 points behind, and McCain written off:
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.'

-Andrew Sullivan

US Election night

I'm in the worst possible timezone to watch this thing.

Rundle says it:

What makes it powerful is that it is a victory of the global left in the incarnation of a black American, that it is a double blow to power and skin-privilege. Will President Obama be a programmatically radical leader? Of course not. But will he be a shivering neurotic Jesus-freak sycophant like Tony Blair? No, equally.His achievement before anything has occurred is this: that every vector of power -- money, race, media -- has been defeated in the US, the declining but still regnant capitol of the world. That what won was the idea of wisdom, judgement, intelligence, prudence and audacity, conservatism and radicalism, a measuring up to the demands of the world. That, as opposed to past Democratic campaigns, this was not a party machine insider -- a Tennessee grandee or a billionairess's husband -- presenting themselves as the least-worst option. It was someone who, by his own account, had come through the world of the radical left, of radical black action, to the realisation that any change in America had to come not against its traditions, but within them, and who therefore drew on the strengths of every residual radical and progressive notion of this one-time revolutionary society. It was an achievement, but it was also a channelling in to a deeper moment of historical shift.