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Friday Fun, Thursday edition:

Full-contact poetry.

There are rainmakers, and there are snow makers.

Dan Cushing of High Point makes snow, using a snow maker he made. (Got that?) I wrote a bit about it for today's paper. The excellent photo is by Allison Money, one of our fairly new part-timers. She also tipped the newsroom to this story.

After the story ran today, a reader e-mailed to find out how Dan built his machine. I don't give sources' contact info out, so I called Dan to tell him how to get in touch with that reader if he wanted to. During the course of that conversation -- a much less harried one than we had on deadline Monday -- he mentioned that this snow-making gig is quite the hobby these days.

Hmm, I thought. There's been one white Christmas here in my 20 years in town. I'm betting this is news readers could use.

Dan e-mailed me this link to a Yahoo! group on snow making: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Snowcentral/

He cautions that there is a fair amount of off-topic material, but he says the on-topic stuff is very good.

He also suggested a commercial site, SnowatHome.com. I am not mechanical, as we say of the non-engineers in my family, so I would not necessarily know how to evaluate the site. Thus, all the usual disclaimers apply and probably some others I haven't yet thought of.

Finally, Dan said he'd try to dig up the plans from which he built his machine and send them along. If he does, I'll post them as well.

Both here in Greensboro and at Groundhog Ground Zero in Punxsutawey, Pa., groundhogs are calling for an early spring.

I thought that train left the station about the second week of January, but whatever.

Let's do something we haven't done here at The Lex Files for a while: Friday Fun!

Today's Friday Fun is written by Ginmar, who did a tour in Iraq with the Army ("The big question about humvees in my mind, is precisely how many miles does it take for you to get your internal organs so rearranged you're incapable of reproduction?") and worships all manner of monster movies ("I don't know about you, but one thing I look for in my movies about the living, walking dead is a documentary approach"). Her essay on what makes a good movie, although some of the language is NSFW, is the finest piece of film criticism since Pauline Kael died.

Today's Friday Fun: Georgia writer Gordon Lamb, guest-posting at FireDogLake, blogs about REM's induction into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. For many of us of a certain age, REM has been THE most influential band, full stop.

It may not be Friday, but it's still International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arrrrgh!

It's bad enough that the headline on this page reads, "Feds Capture Aliens Illegally Working in Roswell" -- after all, as Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog points out, extraterrestrials have to eat, too. No, when you hover your cursor over the "illegal aliens" link in the first paragraph, an ad pops up saying that you can search for illegal aliens on eBay.

... about our new alien overlords.

I don't care whether Pluto is a planet, an asteroid or a piece missing from my car's fuel injector. Neither do The Editors, but they don't care much more humorously than I don't care. (NSFW: language)

... since I didn't get you any on Friday ...

Some jokes just write themselves:

"God has called me to go and make disciples of the youth of America. That is what I am going to do. And if you try to stop me, I am going to break your face."

-- Actor Stephen Baldwin

As The Weather Channel is owned by the same company that owns the News & Record, I'm a tad bit leery of criticism of "weather porn" ... but only a tad. Here, Jerry Petree reports on the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Alberto.

(Hat tip to frequent commenter Fred Gregory.)

I can't tell if this was a real court order or not, but if it wasn't, it should have been.

Geoffrey Chaucer doth interviewe -- ahem, interviews -- Paris Hilton:

GC: Telle me aboute a daye yn the lyfe of Parys Launcecrona.

PL: Ywis, Y do rise from my bowere and do washe myn selfe, and then, lyk, Y throwe the watir doun to the strete for to coole the browes of poore men and labourers. For Y am lyk alle aboute the charitee.

EW.com picks its 10 greatest movie chase scenes. No. 1 will be no surprise, and of the seven I've seen I can't quarrel with any. But I am surprised that this one didn't make the list.

If you eat nothing but Diet Coke and Mentos, will you explode?

Maybe:

Via my colleague Jim Young: A re-enactment of the recent Michael Barrett-A.J. Pierzynski baseball brawl ... in LEGO®vision! (The whole event becomes much more understandable when you realize that the ESPN replays didn't show that there was a crossbow involved.)

(Possibly NSFW: language)

You can't buy this kind of publicity.

Somehow I can't imagine Kurtwood Smith's Red Forman character from "That '70s Show" being anywhere near as deferential to a congressional committee as Gen. Michael Hayden was this week.

For all the women who wonder why guys never ask for directions ....

The third annual Romenesko parody came out on April Fool's Day. If you visit Jim Romenesko's journalism blog regularly (and a disturbingly high number of nonjournalists do -- don't you people have lives and stuff?), you'll enjoy this.

In the tradition of rock band Van Halen's insistence on backstage bowls of M&Ms with all the brown M&Ms removed, The Smoking Gun is proud to present Vice President Dick Cheney's "concert rider".

For context, there's nothing outrageous here, particularly compared to some contract riders I've seen for some pop-music performers. When one early-1980s pop flash-in-the-pan played at my college, for example, their contract rider specified that we would provide a certain minimum number of condoms. I'm pretty sure we ignored that.

The all-TVs-tuned-to-Fox-News part doesn't surprise me. What does is the specific insistence upon caffeine-free Diet Sprite. I thought all Sprite was caffeine-free. But then, the vice president and I, for some odd reason, do not travel in the same circles, so I could be mistaken.

Apparently, supporting the wrong football team could mean you're trying to commit vote fraud:

Could showing up to the polls in your Emmitt Smith jersey or sending in your mail-in ballot with a stamp promoting testing for sickle-cell disease get you in hot water?

Some watchdog groups claim it could, depending on who's interpreting training materials on voter fraud provided by the [Texas] state attorney general's office.

Common Cause Texas, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and some state Democrats highlighted the concerns after obtaining copies of a PowerPoint presentation used to train law officers to monitor the primary elections for fraud. ...

"They (the examples) reflect the current law in the state of Texas regarding the conduct of elections, and they're geared toward law enforcement officials," Kelley said. ...

One of the controversial issues is this summary of section 61.010: "Other than election officials and peace officers, a person shall not wear a badge, insignia, emblem, etc. ... relating to (a) candidate, measure or political party on the ballot."

As an example, the materials list the Dallas Cowboys emblem as an item that should not be worn at the polls, and offers photos of a T-shirt of the Cowboys, the Cowboys team logo, and a cap with "Cowboys Football" on it. Violating this section of the election code is a class C misdemeanor, the training materials said.

I, for one, welcome the support of Texas law enforcement in the battle to keep people from wearing Dallas Cowboys paraphernalia to vote ... or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Moreover, I believe I have the perfect pattern to use as a basis for designing clothing appropriate for wearing to the polls:

True story: I almost majored in physics rather than English ... not only because I was thinking about astronomy as a career, but also because of cool stuff like this:

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine -- the former dark horse among accelerators meant to produce conditions required for nuclear fusion -- have increased the machine's X-ray power output by nearly 10 times in the last two years.

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

The figure represents almost a 40 percent increase over the 210 trillion watts -- itself a world record -- reported last summer.

Strangely, the power used in each trial is only enough to provide electricity to about 100 houses for two minutes. Electricity is provided by ordinary wall current from a local utility company. ...

In a different series of experiments, the accelerator achieved a temperature of approximately 1.6 million degrees Celsius (140 electron volts) in a container the size of a spool of thread. [Just for comparison purposes the surface temp of the sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius -- Lex]

Wordsworth was cool, but if he ever talked about holding a thimbleful of sunlight in his hand, he probably was only speaking metaphorically. And sometimes, metaphors just ain't enough.

UPDATE: Biology and its derivatives, on the other hand, never appealed to me as a vocation. This thread gives you an idea of why. (NSFW: language)

If you missed the wire story on today's Sports front (not online) about a high-school senior with autism who hit six 3-pointers in the last four minutes of his first and only basketball game, don't miss the CBS Evening News story on him here at YouTube.

... even though it's Friday.

Good news! Our second Hometown Hub, for the Rock Creek area, goes live tomorrow! As an interim step, some of the content from the free-distribution Rock Creek Record will be republished here. Community Editor Betsi Robinson and her reporting team will be out in the community recruiting columnists and correspondents after the holidays, but we didn't want to wait any longer on launching the site, so up it goes. (Props to RCR editor Jeff Hahne for helping us out.) And we're already accepting reader content -- news, opinion, images, whatever you've got. Thanks also to Herb Everett in News and Charlie Stafford and the indefatigible Stephen Paschall in Interactive for working their technical magic once again.

OK, now on to the Friday fun: If you like pretty pictures, you'll want to check out the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum blog, called Eye Level.

Have a great weekend.

I'm never going to write the Great American Novel, but even I know that if you're running a newspaper that is losing audience and trying to gain some back by crafting hip writing to appeal to the youth market, you should not try stuff like this:

John G. Roberts Jr. is breathing the kind of air that the rest of us can only dream about, the air of kings and queens and one-name celebrities like Oprah.

He's got Mick Jagger juice now, baby.

Leaving aside the fact that the last Stones album that was anywhere near great was "Tattoo You," released almost a quarter-century ago, I'm pretty sure that if you were to poll 100 people who knew much about the Stones, upwards of 90 of them would say that having "Mick Jagger juice" would equate to having sold one's soul to the devil, a connotation I'm reasonably sure the reporter did not intend. (As for what the rest would say, I'm not even going there.)

In all fairness, the rest of the article isn't that hideous -- it's a light, and lightweight, piece about the benefits of actual or effective lifetime employment. But after reading the first two grafs, I had to force myself to read the rest to reach that conclusion. And that's a minute of my life I'm not ever going to get back.

... and once you've killed it, what do its insides look like?

The brave folks at Ars Technica answer both questions.

(Please don't tell my friends Herb and the iHo about this testing. It will make them cry.)

The World Beard and Moustache Championships are being held Oct. 1 in Berlin ...

... and it looks like JR has entered!

Holy jumping cats!

(And how does his floor stay so clean with two cats?)

(More here)