Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been following the whole gulf oil leak with growing feelings of dread and gloom. He was hopeful that the first capping device was going to work. Then it froze up and got clogged. Since then it has been one failure after another.

Are you ready for a prediction?

This gusher will be still be gushing on Election Day.

Yes. Election Day.

Your Maximum Leader has no confidence that anything is going to stop this in the near term. He also doubts that the “relief wells” that “should” be active in August will do the trick.

This is the worst ecological disaster since Chernobyl. And in some respects it might turn out being worse.

Just wait until hurricane season gets fully underway. Your Maximum Leader foresees oil everywhere along the gulf coast from Guatemala to the Florida Keys. At this stage he would not be surprised to find oil from this gusher wind up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Your Maximum Leader will wait to get a full and final report on what happened before he starts placing blame on any entity. It seems as though BP will come out holding the short straw in all this. But you can’t tell that right now with certainty. If BP is culpable, then we can all hope that they remain very profitable. Because if they go tits-up due to this the US taxpayer will be stuck with a clean-up bill. (Okay… Let’s be honest… The US taxpayer is going to be stuck with a big bill on this anyway. Lucky for us health care reform will save us so much money!)

Your Maximum Leader hopes you’ve seen the white-sand beaches of the Florida panhandle, because they aren’t going to be white for much longer.

Carry on.

UPDATE: Your Maximum Leader was recently reminded that Chernobyl is still worse in so many ways. Not the least of which is that the containment dome is collapsing and another will have to be built. This cycle will continue for centuries.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has a problem. One of the computers he uses got infected with some malware. The ms-antivirus.net malware to be exact. He found a number of web sites that recommened the same process for eliminating the malware. Here is one representative sample. He followed these steps. He also uninstalled and re-installed Internet Explorer. He also installed Opera.

Most of the affects seem to be gone, but there is one nagging problem that makes him thing he’s not gotten the whole program out. He keeps getting these pop-up ads in both IE and Opera. And he has checked and double checked to make sure that the pop-up blockers are active.

The computer was still running a virus scan last time he looked at it (it had been running for 6 hours and wasn’t finished).

If anyone out there is familiar with getting rid of this malware and confirming it is gone, please contact me.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader saw a particularly long, and particularly interesting, article on the AP news wire a moment ago. The piece is: Pressure rises to stop antibiotics in agriculture.

Your Maximum Leader happens to agree with the thrust of the piece, which is that drugs fed to pigs, chickens and cows are leading to super-bacteria that do not respond to antibiotic drugs. These super-bacteria can, and do, move to humans and pose a tremendous threat to human health. What surprised your Maximum Leader about the AP piece is that they attempted to show the other side of the argument, namely that antibiotics keep healthier herds promote quick growth and reduced feed costs.

Now the peice doesn’t attempt a full-blow economic analysis of the costs of giving antibiotics to herd animals on farms vs not giving them antibiotics; but your Maximum Leader wouldn’t expect that type of analysis from the AP. He hopes that some Ag school somewhere in the US is working with the economics department to do such an analysis…

Yet another reason that your Maximum Leader relies on the Smallholder for the great majority of his beef and pork… Smallholder doesn’t dope his animals.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on the Reuters news wire that a new poll by the Pew Center for Religious and Public Life shows that a suprising number of Americans are superstitious idiots. The article doesn’t put it that way and is actually entitled: Many Americans Haunted by ghosts; look to astrology.

Here is a juicy bit:

The poll released on Wednesday showed that three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with a dead person and 18 percent say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.

Other Pew surveys have shown that relatively few Americans would identify an Eastern religion or New Age spirituality as their core faith. But about a quarter of those surveyed say they believe in aspects of Eastern religions.

Nearly 25 percent said they believed in reincarnation and 23 percent said yoga was a spiritual practice. Twenty six percent said they believed “spiritual energy” could be found in objects such as trees.

A quarter said they believed in astrology, while 16 percent of U.S. adults think that an “evil eye” exists or that some people can cast curses or spells on others. Among black Protestants the evil eye figure is 32 percent.

What can your Maximum Leader say about this except that he weeps for the future.

Until he read this piece he thought that the worst thing he’s read/see/hear today was the drivel that President Obama was spewing out to a room of unfortunate Norsemen (and Norsewomen) and other dignitaries while accepting his Nobel Prize.

The “evil eye!” Really now! People actually believe that people with “powers” can use the “evil eye” to cast spells and curses… Other than the eyes that Elin Nordegen Woods is using on Tiger now, your Maximum Leader is unaware of a curse laden “evil eye.”

Sad. Just sad.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is always on the lookout for science he can use. Although in this case since he is already married with kids, this next story is not of much use to him. It may be of use for some of the single geeky guys out there that read this site…

According to scientists at the University of Sheffield (as reported in Canada’s Globe & Mail) , women who take the pill are more likely to fall for “good providers” (read: geeks) than “aggresive specimens” (read: jocks). Here is the meat of the science in the piece:

During ovulation, women prefer men with symmetrical, masculine features. These men are aggressive, compete with other men, and in some cases exhibit “creative intelligence,” write the authors. More importantly, their major histocompatibility complex genes – the ones that build our immune systems – are considerably unlike the individual woman’s. According to earlier research, being attracted to a person with a different immune system is advantageous because the baby will inherit a larger arsenal to combat disease.

But during the infertile phase, women appear to prefer men who are more genetically similar to their relatives. Others opt for men who exhibit more “feminine” characteristics and have the means to invest in child rearing, Dr. Alvergne said.

Well… That could be useful news for those of you out there looking for a girl or guy with whom to mate. Of course your Maximum Leader didn’t quote the best part of the piece. The one that mentioned how lap dancing strippers figured into this research. Your Maximum Leader will leave that as a tease for you to click through.

Your Maximum Leader wonders if this news is one layer of a giant plot revealed… Afterall, it is more probable that geeks were the ones that invented the contreceptive pill to begin with. Did they know that by reducing the “dual sexuality” (mentioned in the piece) tendencies in women they increased their own chances of scoring? Hummm…. Something to think on…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, while geeky, is not a geek. Sad but true.

When he reads stories of real geeks having cool ideas and carrying them through he feels stupid. Or at least unimaginative and uninspired. (Damn… He must still be funkified…)

So when your Maximum Leader read of how two MIT students spent $150 and got cool photos on a digital camera from space he was feeling particularly uninspired (himself) but proud of their accomplishment. The cool bits:

The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

…

The balloon and camera made it up high enough to see the black sky curling around our blue planet. The Canon was hacked with the CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) open-source firmware, which adds many features to Canon’s cameras. The intervalometer (interval timer) was set to shoot a picture every five seconds, and the 8GB memory card was enough to hold pictures for the five-hour duration of the flight.

The picture you see above [ed: not reproduced here] was shot from around 93,000 feet, just shy of 18 miles high. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took forty minutes to come back to Earth.

Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh… Your Maximum Leader doffs his bejeweled floppy cap in your direction. He will toast your ingenuity and know-how tonight. Color him impressed.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was hoping to have some picture blogging to share with you all (especially Robbo) today. Alas, he’s having a little problem at the Villainschloss. Apparently the washing machine has malfunctioned and partially flooded part of the dungeon. So… That is the pressing problem…

In the meanwhile…

According to the wonders of science… If you are a man and you want to keep your “boys” free from DNA defects or damage (and by “boys” your Maximum Leader means “your swimmers.” Okay… He means sperm.); then you need to have sex every day.

Scientists say so. It is reported on the interwebs so it must be true.

While the context of this piece deals with men getting women pregnant… Your Maximum Leader figures he doesn’t want to have any of his “swimmers” suffering from DNA defects. He’ll have to tell Mrs Villain that more “conjugation” is in order for health reasons.

Also… It would stand to reason that if a man wants to get a woman pregnant he should have sex with her frequently…

Your Maximum Leader should be a scientist…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on the news wire that scientists are predicting that the Earth and Venus (or possibly the Earth and Mars - depending on the model you use) will collide with each other. If they don’t actually collide there is a possibility that the planets will pass so close to one another that they might as well collide.

Yup. That is a nasty firey collision in which all humanity will perish.

Lucky for us it looks like this might not happen for 3.5 billion years.

By that point your Maximum Leader is sure that we would have left our homeworld and settled twelve new colonies. We should also have managed to produce hawt Cylons to serve us…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader’s interwebs connection appears to be working intermittently. He has a call in to his service provider - but no ETA on a technician yet. This little situation annoys your Maximum Leader because yesterday he had a few different items about which he wanted to blog. Alas, he didn’t actually type them out and save them - and now that moment has passed and he doesn’t want to go back and re-think those ideas.

He did, on the other hand, decide to write a little something that seemed to spring from an interesting serendipity of items about Spain. Yesterday night, before the interwebs started acting up, your Maximum Leader read this peice about Sephardic Jews leaving their genetic imprint on Spanish men. According to the AP piece:

From the 15th century on, Spain’s Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found.

“These values are surprisingly high,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

…

Along with researchers from Britain’s University of Leicester and Wellcome Trust, the scientists analyzed DNA samples from 1,140 men in Spain, Portugal and the Balearic Islands and compared them to Moroccans, Algerians, and Sephardic Jews in Istanbul and Israel.

“The work shows that religious conversions and subsequent marriages between people of different lines had a significant impact on modern populations both in the Balearic Islands and in Portugal,” Elena Bosch of the University of Leicester said in a statement.

One of the most surprising findings is the percentage of Spanish genes whose origin can be traced to Sephardic Jews, although Spain had a relatively small Jewish population compared to its Moorish population.

Some of these genes may pre-date the Sephardic Jewish culture, the researchers said, noting that the Phoenicians also share some of the genetic characteristics.

Your Maximum Leader thought that this little bit of information was interesting to learn. Indeed, he was reminded of previous studies have found interesting genetic connections between people that one wouldn’t associate as being so close genetically. (To avoid the risk of citing something wrong, he is going to forego a discussion of some of the other studies that he seems to remember…)

The study of human genetics is a fascinating thing. It is amazing (and sometimes upsetting) to think of what we are learning and theorizing about our own nature due to our growing understanding of the human genome.

But, the AP peice started to upset your Maximum Leader… Not because of the genetics, but because of a little something else. Here is what set off your Maximum Leader: “The Moors invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711 and remained until defeated in battle by the so-called Catholic Monarchs in 1492.” “So-called?” That pissed your Maximum Leader off a little bit. Would you refer to Alexander of Macedonia as “the so-called Alexander the Great?” Would Tsar Ivan IV of Russia be “the so-called Ivan the Terrible?”

Anyone who knows anything about Spanish history knows that Ferdinand and Isabella are known to history as “The Catholic Monarchs.” Why would one throw that “so-called” in there? Is it just to be snide or is it to try and educate people? Sadly, it can’t be the educational option because Ferdinand and Isabella are never mentioned in the article. That “so-called” sticks in your Maximum Leader’s craw and he just can’t get past it.

Something else in this confluence of events… Your Maximum Leader, prior to reading the piece on the Sephardic Jewish genes, was thinking about the Catholic Monarchs. You may be asking yourself, “Self, why would my Maximum Leader be thinking about the Catholic Monarchs?” Well… He sat down and watched “Elizabeth the Golden Age” on his Tivo over the weekend. Your Maximum Leader wonders how he actually made it through the 2 hrs running time. Gawd what a waste of time and money. There were no redeming qualities to that film. Avoid it.

While watching the film you Maximum Leader got to thinking about Phillip II of Spain (the Great-Grandson of the Catholic Monarchs). At first he wondered if the actor portraying Phillip in the film had that weird little walk (small bowlegged steps) because Phillip was described to have walked that way - or if the very tight pants required him to walk that way. After a little contemplation, he decided it was likely neither of those choices but rather an attempt to characature Phillip as a sort of weird little religious fanatic with an odd gait.

Then your Maximum Leader started to think about the historical reputation of Phillip II, his father Charles V, and his Great-Grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella. Other than Isabella do any of them have a favorable reputation that isn’t significantly tainted by Protestant historicism? And frankly isn’t Isabella’s favorable reputation based on “financing” Columbus’ voyages?

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe that Phillip or Charles deserve their bad repuations if you try and look at them as actors in their times. Perhaps from a few hundred years (and secularized society) on we can scoff at their religious wars in Europe. But if one tries to insinuate your mind into their time their actions seem perfectly explainable.

Your Maximum Leader also didn’t realize, until pulling out a book and checking, that Phillip II was married 4 times. He could recall three wives (Mary I of England, Elizabeth of Valois and Anne of Austria - with Mary Tudor and Anne of Austria immediately coming to mind, Elizabeth took a little digging). But he didn’t know that before Mary I of England came Mary of Portugal. He should have known because he knew about Don Carlos of Spain, but he just thought that Don Carlos’ mother was Elizabeth of Valois.

Anyhoo… Your Maximum Leader was thinking about the Catholic Monarchs when he read that piece on the AP and that little “so-called” line annoyed him.

If you would like to share your thoughts on Phillip II, Charles V, The Catholic Monarchs, or human genetics; please feel free to do so in the comments or emails.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader remembers being told growing up that “Tang” was a “space age drink.” It was, afterall, developed for our astronauts. Tang. Velcro. Pens that write while inverted. All tangible commercial products brought to us by the research that went into putting a man on the moon.

Occasionally the unexpected outcome of science makes for a good commerical product. Take for example beer made from million year old yeast. From the Washington Post:

Raul Cano is the real-life “Jurassic Park” scientist. Yes, there is one.

A day before that movie opened in 1993, Cano announced that he had extracted DNA from an ancient Lebanese weevil entombed in amber, just as the fictional employees of InGen do with a mosquito to create their dino-amusement park. One newspaper account said the “achievement” refuted “the long-held view of many biologists that DNA of so great an age” couldn’t be preserved.

But Cano was less interested in extinct reptiles than in Homo sapiens now roaming the earth. He next revivified ancient bacteria from the gut of an amber-encased bee and hoped to turn the strains into new antibiotics. That didn’t work, and Cano, who has a doctorate in medical mycology, put his 1,200-specimen organism collection on the back shelf and returned to more fruitful microbial endeavors, like assessment of petroleum-degrading diversity in sand dunes and the bioinformatics of Lactobacillus acidophilus.

And then, last month, a breakthrough.

The product?

Beer.

“I was going through my collection, going, ‘Gee whiz — this is pretty nifty. Maybe we could use it to make beer,’ ” says Cano, 63 , now the director of the Environmental Biotechnology Institute at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

The result is Fossil Fuels Brewing Co., which ferments a yeast strain Cano found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 million to 45 million years ago. The company — in which Cano is a partner, along with another scientist and a lawyer — introduced its pale ale and German wheat beer with a party last month at one of the two Bay Area pubs where Fossil Fuels is made and served.

Very cool. Your Maximum Leader has been trying to find some of this beer available for sale recently. To no avail yet. But he’ll keep trying.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down.

Why you ask?

Fear of the collider creating a singularity that sucks the Earth into it?

Nope.

Bad cooling mechanism.

Your Maximum Leader supposes that this means we will not have to live in fear of being sucked into a black hole of our own creation in the next few weeks…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have much to add to this graphic other than “Yup. This is all awesome stuff.”

Okay… Your Maximum Leader will add that he doesn’t quibble over most of the elements. But he does think that Elements 32, 33, 37 and 95 aren’t all that awesome. But that is likely just a personal bias. Your Maximum Leader isn’t all that excited about antimony, bromine and selenium either…

Many thanks to the totally tubular bloggers over at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader laughed at himself for the title of this post. As you surely know, the question in the title is that of Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick.” Your Maximum Leader is laughing to himself because whenever he thinks of “Moby Dick” he thinks of a line that he believes is attributed to Gore Vidal who said words to the effect of “‘Moby Dick’ is the greatest American novel; it’s just a shame that Herman Melville was not America’s greatest novelist.” That always makes your Maximum Leader laugh because it is so true.

Anyhoo…

This post really has nothing to do with “Moby Dick.” It has nothing to do with white whales. But it does have to do with another white animal.

The white stag.

According to the news wires, a white stag has been spotted in the wild highlands of Scotland. According to the article:

The rare white stag, from the red deer species, is believed to be among just a tiny handful living in Britain, according to a conservation group.

The John Muir Trust is now keeping the stag’s location secret for fear of poachers.

“To see him amongst the other stags was truly thrilling because he does look like a ghost: you do a double-take,” Trust Partnership Manager Fran Lockhart, who filmed the stag, told Reuters.

White stags are seen as a magical and powerful force in many mythologies.

The animal’s ghostly glow comes from a recessive gene which causes leucism, a condition which reduces the normal brown coloring in hair and skin. They are not albinos, which have red eyes due to lack of pigment.

In Celtic traditions, white stags represent messengers from the afterlife. Arthurian legend has it that the creature can never be caught — King Arthur’s pursuit of the animal represents mankind’s spiritual quest.

It is also said that for those who set eyes on the animal, a momentous moment is near.

Your Maximum Leader would like to see a white stag in the wild. He would especially like to travel to Scotland to see one. Alas, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards. This photo will have to suffice.

Beautiful animal.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wishes all of you, his loyal readers, a very Happy New Year. He hopes that you are all well and not too hung over. Your Maximum Leader, as is his habit, didn’t do too much to celebrate New Years. Indeed, for many years the extent of his celebration consisted of hanging around with his best buddy Kevin. We would watch movies, and then switch over to Dick Clark at about 11:55. We’d watch the ball drop in Times Square, then we would go back to watching movies until we drifted into the clutches of Morpheus. Now that Kevin is in Korea, our old plan is not practical. So, your Maximum Leader stays at home with is family and watches movies and then switches to Dick Clark at about 11:55 and watches the ball drop.

Pretty exciting huh?

Excursus: Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure how he should feel watching Dick Clark. On the one hand, Clark has made great progress since his stroke a few years ago. But on the other hand, your Maximum Leader feels badly watching him. He is overwhelmed by a feeling of being voyeuristic when watching Clark.

You know who your Maximum Leader misses on New Years Eve? Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. He went out and bought a copy of Auld Lang Syne on iTunes to satisfy this nostalgic feeling.

Anyhoo, your Maximum Leader generally does indulge himself with a bottle of Pol Roger on New Years. But this year he opted to go with an Italian sparkling wine from Veneto. It was very good (he should say it is very good, as he hasn’t quite finished the bottle yet). The Processo he bought is dry with undercurrents of fruit (apples or pears). This sparkling wine has the benefit of only being about $17 a bottle - as opposed to the $50 a bottle your Maximum Leader is used to spending on the Pol Roger. Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that he is enjoying the Italian wine as much as he has enjoyed the champagne in the past; but it is still pretty tasty.

Speaking of tasty…

The Almond encrusted pork loin was quite delicious. Your Maximum Leader took is massive pork tenderloin (featured in the post below) and cut it into thirds. He went ahead and prepared two of the three pieces for Christmas. He and his family wound up eating one third on Christmas day. The other prepared third was itself divided into thirds and divied up between your Maximum Leader’s in-laws, parents, and hungry self.

The third portion of tenderloin is thawed out and waiting to be prepared tonight. Your Maximum Leader hasn’t heard from anyone on a good preparation (NB to Mrs P: You teased me with a promise of recipe…). So he thinks he will do a typical rosemary and garlic marinade for a few hours then roast.

In unrelated news, Your Maximum Leader should tell you all that he’s been thinking recently that there is some big question in his life to which he knows the answer. The answer is (apparently) Venice. Yes, the city in Italy. He isn’t sure what the question is, but feels that Venice is the answer.

Anyhoo…

On to New Years resolutions. Your Maximum Leader will share a few of his with you all.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will bring peace to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will compete as his own nation in the summer Olympics in Beijing. He will not finish lower than fourth in every event. He will accomplish this feat by using his heretofore unknown ability to warp the time-space continuum.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will win every Nobel Prize available when he completes his “Grand Unified Theory.” This theory, which will be ultimately be confirmed by scientists from the Gamma-Zeta 294 system 8,433 years from now, will unify all practical questions of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and literature. The key to the unification of science will be the proto-electroneuquark partical - also known affectionately as “The Maxy”.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will end global warming by meditating for 72 hours straight under a blossoming tree surrounded by dancing wood-nymphs.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will be elected President of the United States without receiving a single popular vote. He will win a unanimous vote of the Electoral College. After his inauguration in 2009, Canada, Great Britain, Mexico, Brazil and Lichenstein will voluntarially surrender their national sovreignty to your Maximum Leader and the Mike World Order shall begin.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will wish the previously dreamy Jennifer Love Hewitt a happy married life; he will move on to the passionate Lola Astanova as the object of his platonic affections.

In 2008 your Maximum Leader will try to improve the quality (if not quantity) of blog posts here at Naked Villainy.

There you have them. Your Maximum Leader is pretty sure he can keep up with at least two of them…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is out perusing the interwebs and found this little tidbit on the wire.

7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe.

Among these myths are old canards like you have to drink 8 glasses of water a day (which your Maximum Leader tries to do even though he has known for a few years that this is a myth); and reading in dim light reduces your eyesight.

There is one of these myths with which your Maximum Leader will take exception. The one about humans only using about 10 percent of our brains.

Go to a shopping mall a few days before Christmas and you will see proof that people rarely use more than 5% of their brains.

Q.E.D.

(Excursus: Your Maximum Leader did happen to pass through a shopping mall today. He was walking through the Pentagon City Mall on his way to the Villainmobile. He was getting on/off the Metro on his way to see the “Patterned Feathers Piercing Eyes” exhibit at the Sackler. He will have to back in January by the way… Due to conservation requirements and limited space, only about half of the collection can be shown at a time. By late January, much of the exhibition will have been rotated.)

Carry on.