On the bright side, we won’t need umbrellas….

Oh. dear.

I’m used to stupid, honestly I am. I see stupid all of the time. I’m lucky enough to neither live nor work in close proximity to stupid, but it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the concept. For the most part, I try to let stupid just bounce right off of me, and pay it no heed. But every now and then I am confronted with stupid so profound, so earth-shattering, so… stupid… that I can’t help but feel slightly scared for the future of the human race.

Courtesy of FAIL Blog, one of the most concentrated sources of stupid on the Internet, I am once again faced with this level of stupid. Yes, stupid is hardly new to FAIL Blog, but this may well be one of the most staggeringly stupid examples I’ve seen there yet. Here is the link, so you all can look for yourself.

To summarize, the image is of a letter-to-the-editor from a Australian (I believe) regional newspaper. The writer laments that “when I was a kid, we never had drought after drought.” Lucky for us, though, he’s deduced the cause of this climate change. Global warming, perhaps? How about standard climatic pattern changes corresponding to long-term geological and atmospheric trends? Not in the slightest. The problem, he has realized, is daylight savings time! You see, “this one hour extra sun is slowly evaporating all the moisture out of everything.” It’s so simple! How could we have missed this?

I’m hoping, nay, praying, that the writer was making a joke. I’m much more comfortable with that than with the idea that there are really people that ignorant out there.

Change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon!

A couple of notes about my new digs….

If you’re a regular visitor to my blog (and I’m not sure such a breed actually exists…), then you’ll notice how things have changed around here. My one year contract with Dreamhost expired, and I really wasn’t using the service enough to justify flushing another $100 down the drain to renew it. So I made the financial decision to move to a free blog service, and so, here I am at WordPress. Unfortunately, this means I’ve had to abandon a lot of my customizations to the skin I was using, as well as bidding a sad farewell to my random lyric widget. But, hey, not being broke is a good thing, right?

I probably could have imported or copied my older posts here, but I didn’t see much point in it. It’s not like I said anything of particular interest in that time. Besides, I’m looking forward to using this relaunch as a kind of fresh start. I actually want to start using my blog as if it were a blog, which means more regular posting and a more freewheeling style. For that, I don’t need the past hanging around my neck like an albatross.

On a related topic, I was bemused the other day when I found this Universe Today story linked from Slashdot’s main page. Here’s an excerpt for those who don’t care to read the entire article:

A team of researchers is proposing that massive quantities of dark matter formed dark stars in the early Universe, preventing the first generations of stars from entering their main sequence stage. Instead of burning with hydrogen fusion, these “dark stars” were heated by the annihilation of dark matter.

I’ve been using the blog name “Darkstar Rising” for over a year now, and the online nickname “Wildfire Darkstar” for considerably longer than that. But now I feel like I’m at the cutting edge of astrophysics. Plus, it gave me a new image header, which I personally think is a lot snazzier than the old solar eclipse image I used to use. Woo!