I'd just like to take a minute to link to a few articles. It turns out that the man who attacked a Jewish community center is Seattle is a very troubled man. I'm not pointing this out to justify murder, but in hope that nobody who reads my blog will rush to condemn an entire community of people for this one horrific act.

Family Friend: Wash. Suspect Was Troubled

Muslim Community Reaches Out After Seattle Shooting

Morgan Spurlock has it all wrong.

Want to turn people off on eating McDonalds? Tell them that this is what happens to you:

I was in the process of writing a post asking if there was a service that would email me when my favorite bands were coming to town, even if they performed outside the Ticketmaster sphere of influence. Well, Amy pointed me to Pollstar, whose "notify" service will do just that. You can get notifications on up to 5 acts or venues for free, or up to 99 for only $10 a year. I think it might be worth ponying up the $10 just to stay in the loop.

A couple space-related articles caught my eye today…

First, a new documentary on the first moon landing reveals just how thrown-together the landings really were. Many sources are reporting on some of the anecdotes in "Apollo 11: The Untold Story", including the story of how one of the astronauts snapped the switch off a critical circuit breaker in the lunar lander, forcing Buzz Aldrin to lodge a pen into the breaker to use as a switch lever during liftoff. Now there's the kind of creative problem solving I like to see!

Next, John Berman at ABCNews.com reports on bird droppings on the space shuttle. They were apparently noticed on the shuttle's wing while it was sitting on the pad, but NASA employees figured they'd get washed off by thunderstorms or the tons of water sprayed on the shuttle's engines prior to take-off, or get burned off during lift off. According to some sources, remants of the droppings were still there when the shuttle returned to Earth.