Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab.

Some facts about the Christmas Day bomber:

1. He was an engineering student who lived in a $4 million apartment in London.

2. His father, a banker, warned American authorities about his son months ago. (How much will Obama be blamed?)

3. His bombing was interrupted by a passenger, Dutch video director Jasper Schuringa, who heard a noise and saw that "he was holding a burning object between his legs. 'I pulled the object from him and tried to extinguish the fire with my hands and threw it away.'"

4. "He was staring into nothing."

ADDED: Mutallab had a 2-year visa that was issued in 2008, and "the initial information was not specific enough to raise alarms that he could potentially carry out a terrorist attack":

“The information was passed into the system, but the expression of radical extremist views were very nonspecific,” said the senior administration official, who has been briefed on the inquiry but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is continuing. “We were evaluating him, but the information we had was not a lot to go on.”

Satisfied with the job the administration is doing protecting us from terrorism? George Bush protected the American homeland after 9/11. Is Obama taking it seriously enough? Would Bush have kept Mutallab off that plane?

"My 'C,' 'D,' and 'F' students this semester are almost exclusively American..."

"... while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants."

The Shalala Bowl.

Miami and Wisconsin.

At the Old Snowman Café...

... melt with us.



Is it baseball time yet?

"10 Reasons This Was TV's Decade."

10 reasons...

Add an 11th: We got older and stopped going out so much (which is the same reason every decade is TV's.)

Let the President stay in the White House — or, at most, retreat to Camp David.

"President Barack Obama’s Christmas Day began with a briefing about a botched attack on an airliner in Detroit and ended with a visit to a dining hall for members of the military. His holiday vacation was designed to be an island respite from the pressures of the White House."

Well, tough. Whoever puts himself forward to become President is asking to be on call constantly for the next 4 years — every day of the year, around the clock.

"Obama and first lady Michelle Obama made a quick trip to Marine Corps Base Hawaii after a private day exchanging gifts and eating a holiday meal of roast beef at their rented home in Kailua — between briefings on the disrupted plot of suspected terrorism."

Why, exactly, are they in Hawaii — over 5,000 miles* from the White House? I'm not criticizing Obama in particular for going on vacations. I mean to criticize all the Presidents who go far away from Washington. If they need respite, let them go to Camp David. It's close to the White House, and it's set up for security. I can see returning to one's permanent residence, but even that is a luxury the President should eschew. The Christmas Day terror attempt may seem paltry, but it is a reminder of what can happen. And when it does, it would be better if the President were not out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (or even in some schoolhouse in Florida).

***

* I came up with the 5,000 miles figure the way I normally get the miles between 2 places in the U.S.: I put the names of the 2 places into Google maps to get driving directions. What does Google maps do when there is a big ocean in the middle of the drive? Check it out. It's funny.

ADDED: Instapundit thinks it's okay for the Prez, like anybody else, to take "a tropical island trip," as long as he shuts up about carbon emissions. (I'd take that deal too.)

Tigerhawk thinks we ought to cut the Prez some slack because "for him, it is going home." He got to be President via Chicago. He cultivated deep roots in Chicago as a very conscious political scheme. So I'll accept the "home for Christmas" argument if he goes to Chicago.

At the Christmas Inn...

... I hope you got everything you wanted.

A Christmas day terror attack.

"The 23-year-old suspect lighted a powdery substance as the aircraft was preparing for landing, around noon, a federal counterterrorism official said. Two other passengers on the flight noticed, and a third person jumped on the man, the official said...."

Memories, at the cellular level.

When something is in your memory it exists in the cellular structure of your brain. I'll never get over how weird that is. If you have the most casual encounter with another person, they become part of your body. How dare they! How intimately invasive!

I get distracted at that level, and I suppose that means I'm restructuring the cells of my brain, since I'm thinking about it. But right now, I want to think about exactly what is going on:

"When something comes into your brain -- a thought, some sort of stimulus, you see something interesting, you hear some music -- synapses get activated," said [Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute]. "What happens next is really interesting, but to follow the pathway our experiments moved to cultured neurons. When synapses got activated, one of the proteins wrapped around that silencing complex gets degraded."

When the signal comes in, the wrapping protein degrades or gets fragmented. Then the RNA is suddenly free to synthesize a new protein.

"One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you need to have proteins degrade and also make new proteins," said Kosik. "You have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis to occur. That's the elegant scientific finding that comes out of this."

See? Something elegant just happened.

Fat or wrinkly...

You choose.

On the night of the crash, Elin Nordegren "roused Woods from an Ambien-enhanced sleep by whacking him with a golf club."

That's the report. If it's true, then Nordegren committed a very serious criminal attack. Attempted murder, perhaps.

IN THE COMMENTS: AllenS wrote: "Nonsense, it was a wake up call." Now, I was going to use a "wake-up call" wisecrack in the original post. Why did I reject it? Because it would signal that women's violence against men isn't really dangerous, isn't really a crime. It would say that when a woman has a righteous reason to be angry at her man, what would otherwise be a crime is not a crime. Think about how ugly it is to hit someone with a golf club while he is asleep. Did she know it was an Ambien-induced sleep — from which it will be very difficult to wake up and defend himself? How hard a swing did she take at him? It seems it was scary enough to make him run out of the house and attempt to drive — quickly — when he was in no condition to drive.

ADDED: Dr. Helen writes:

[T]o use a weapon to whack him and run him out to the car to escape, if this is what really happened, is not the way to resolve a problem like this, nor should it be legal for a male or female to beat their spouse with a weapon for cheating. It is very dangerous in this case, because, as a man, Woods probably had no other recourse than to get in the car and get away, or face being put in jail for defending himself.

Christmas breakfast.

I'm blogging Christmas breakfast. Here at Meadhouse, there's a choice of: 1. blueberry waffles, and 2. fried mush.

What are you having?

Lactose intolerance.

Remember when there was an epidemic of claims of lactose intolerance? It was such that there was a "Seinfeld" bit about it:

Jerry: I have never seen one episode of "I Love Lucy" in my life ever.

Donna: That's amazing.

Jerry: Thank you.

Donna: Is there anything else about you I should know?

Jerry: Yes, I'm lactose intolerant.

Donna: Really?

Jerry: I have no patience for lactose. And I won't stand for it. Uhm, I'll be right back. (Goes to bathroom)

You don't hear about lactose intolerance anymore, for some reason. Or I don't. Maybe you do.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

It's Christmas. I hope life is beautiful for you.

"My husband and I both wanted our children to have a traditional childhood, which didn't include being dragged from place to place on the road. So we decided to live a simpler life."

So said rock and roll icon Patti Smith.

"We felt like we were throwing joke Molotov cocktails, and then the room burst into flames."

Stephen Colbert reflects on his infamous performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. (Blogged here at the time.)

When the dinner was over, "I don't think I'm dying. I go to sit down and nobody's meeting my eye. Only [the late journalist-turned-White House spokesman] Tony Snow comes over and says I'm doing a great job." Then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came his way and told him he was brilliant.

"I said, oh, s-, don't let me like Antonin Scalia!"