Saturday Evening Post.  (Wow, good name for a magazine.) 

I am REALLY HAPPY today.  Let me count the ways.  First, tomorrow is the seventeenth anniversary of my marriage to Shirley.  We're celebrating tonight with a fantabulous dinner and I will shortly retreat into the caves for a '97 Cabernet as accompaniment.  Second, still buzzing from that great TdF stage this morning up Mont Ventoux.  I know it is just a bunch of guys riding bikes in France, but pro cycling is the coolest sport ever, what can I say, and for a Rabo rider to win, and Lance to be on the podium, well, it was excellent.  Third, I was able to get something really knarly and technical to work today, I've been back-burnering it for days weeks while I paid attention to other stuff. And fourth, I have this really cool trophy sitting in my office which Megan won when we sailed the C-15 North Americans together.  The trophy is a framed picture of us sailing together, planing on a dead run (as at right; click to enbiggen).  I keep looking at it and it brings a smile to my face (and a tear to my eye); I bought / built that boat in the summer of 1979, when I was nineteen, little knowing that thirty years later I'd be sailing it with my 12-year-old daughter.  How cool is that?

Here we have the strangest plants on Earth.  Quite a collection.  The adaptations are even more amazing than those found among animals; after looking through these you have to conclude that evolution is even more creative than Dr. Suess!

Rand Simberg: A Space Program For The Rest of Us .  "Let us finally abandon our race with the Soviet Union, the race we won four decades ago against an adversary two decades vanquished and vanished.  We don’t need to remake Apollo; we need to open up the new space frontier the way the old American frontier was opened.  Let us unleash private enterprise and create not just jobs but true wealth."  Amen brother.  I know SpaceX would agree :)  [ via Instapundit ]

This looks amazing: the trailer for Tron Legacy.  Yay, another cool movie to watch!  Cannot wait...

Well that's it for a Saturday Evening Post; hope this finds y'all well and see you tomorrow...