Came across this today…..

The Rock Snob is a confounding person in your life. On one hand, he brooks no ignorance of pop-music history, and will take violent umbrage at the fact that you’ve never heard of the noted rock arranger and soundtrack composer Jack Nitzsche, much less heard Nitzsche’s ambitious pop-classical album, St. Giles Cripplegate. On the other hand, he will not countenance the notion that you know more than he about a certain area of music. If, for example, you mention that Fun House is your favorite Stooges album, he will respond that it “lacks the visceral punch of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ from a year earlier, but it’s got some superb howling from Iggy and coruscating riffage from Ron Asheton, though not on the level of James Williamson’s on Raw Power”—this indigestible clump of words acting as a cudgel with which the Rock Snob is trumping you and marking the turf as his.

Do you know what the worst thing about this para is? I completely agree with it!!! For those who know me, do you think I am a rock snob?

Do not waste your time with this. I saw it and I swear a couple of times I actually fell asleep. OK, not really but you know what I mean.

‘Ghost Rider’ lights box-office fire

Satan’s bounty hunter has looted the wallets of moviegoers.

“Ghost Rider,” Sony’s comic-book adaptation starring Nicolas Cage as a motorcycle stunt driver moonlighting as a collector of evil souls for the devil, debuted as the top weekend movie with $44.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday

Is Dark Matter the new Black Holes in cosmology?

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A new cosmic map confirms a close relationship between galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers and the distribution of the invisible dark matter in the early universe.

The new map reveals a close relationship between quasars and dark matter, as predicted from theory.

‘By measuring the clustering of quasars, we can learn about the dark matter halos in which they sit, and we find that they live in these very rare and very massive dark matter halos in the early universe,’ said study team member Michael Strauss of Princeton University.

The new map will be detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal.

Dark matter is a mysterious hypothetical substance that does not interact with light photons and is thus invisible to current detection instruments. Scientists estimate that only about one-sixth of the matter in the universe is visible, while the rest is dark matter.

Current theories predict that matter-both the dark and visible variety-was smoothly distributed in the early universe, and that over time, it became more concentrated.

‘Dark matter halos are a dime a dozen in the present day universe, but in the young universe, they were really quite rare,’ Strauss said.

From 1930’s to about 1970’s there was a big argument between the leading scientists about the existence of black holes until it was finally put to rest by Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and John Wheeler. They (alone and in collaboration) proved the existence of Black Holes based upon Einstein’s theory of gravity which was then confirmed by the existence of Quasars and White Dwarfs and the Hubble telescope which laid the matter to rest by taking breath-taking pictures of blacks holes (actually you cannot take pictures of black holes but rather of the area surrounding the black holes).

And that’s what is happening with Dark matter. There are scientist who support the theory and those who oppose it. But with more and more evidence coming forth on the existence of Dark Matter, the “for” camp is winning.

Once again it has been proven that to be right, you only need to speak the truth.

(CNN) — The Grammy Awards were nice to the Dixie Chicks, who won song of the year, a songwriter’s award, for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”

“I, for the first time in my life, am speechless,” said Maines, who became a controversial figure in 2003 after making critical comments about President Bush. “Not Ready to Make Nice” was a response to the controversy; after Maines’ comments, the Chicks’ songs were pulled from a number of country music stations and the group was pilloried by former fans.

The Chicks have won three awards. They also won best country performance by a duo or group with vocal and, after the song of the year award, were honored with best country album for “Taking the Long Way.”

“A lot of people just turned their TVs off right now,” Maines said after the country album award.