OK. I’m stumped.
What the heck are the sheep talking about at the end of this sesame street classic?
UPDATE. Ah, this Andrews Sisters song.

Here in Ontario, the provincial government last year started our own super subsidized solar microgeneration program – $0.81/kWh “earned”, if generated from a rooftop photovoltaic panel, which is about ten times the value of that same electricity flowing the other way, purchased from the grid. I’ve been tempted to jump into it, just on the charming theory of personal backup power in case the grid goes down. (I will leave aside whether such a subsidy makes any economic or environmental sense.)

But for the scruple-free, it provides an opportunity to maximize profit using this European technique:

A German aristocrat of my acquaintance has figured out that the price he will be paid for the output of a solar panel is so high compared with the price he will pay for his input of normal electricity, that he is thinking of rigging up powerful arc lamps to shine on solar panels on his extensive roof.

UPDATE: Someone’s actually tried this scam.

My humble brag(*) responding to AOPA’s airplane/car naming coincidence article(*) refers to this pair of beasts.
Now you know.

(*): AOPA member-only links. Pieces transcribed below the fold.

The article:

What’s in a name?
Aircraft and cars share monikers

By Peter A. Bedell

Some awful names have been affixed to vehicles meant to roll or soar […]
There's simply not enough magazine space to poke fun at all the horrid names of cars and airplanes of the airline, military, and GA ranks. So we limited this article to shared names of certified general aviation airplanes and automobiles.
Aztec/Aztek

Even though Piper's Aztec is not the prettiest of airplanes, to discuss it in the same paragraph as the Pontiac Aztek is almost offensive. Introduced for the 2001 model year, the Pontiac Aztek is one of those automobiles that make you wince - like seeing Rocky Balboa's face after a bout. […] the model was dropped after 2005.

Piper's Aztec is a heavy hauling twin […] It excels at hauling big loads out of short fields of nearly any surface. […] The Aztec lacks the sex appeal and speed of Cessna's 310 or Beechcraft's Baron but earned a loyal following until its discontinuation after the 1981 model year. […]

My letter:

Your article describes car/airplane-naming coincidences. It turns out that I am an exemplar owner - perhaps the only one - of the Aztec/Aztek one, because I own one of each! Both vehicles have quirks, but have proved to be dependable, capable, fun machines.

Frank Ch. Eigler, AOPA 5114494
Brantford, Ontario, Canada

Eric insisted I publish this today. It has something to do with this video.

Wubba wubba wubba is a monster song.
There are other people singing the same thing after Grover.
The monster in the mirror is not really in the mirror. The mirror is fake.
And in the beginning. the monster in the mirror is waking up. They say
“Let’s wubba you!” at the end.

There is something you need to know about the person calling himself with first name Leslie, Lester, Len, Les, Lesley, Steve, and/or Stephan and last name Lankovich, Lonkovic, Rankovic, Lokovic, and/or Lonkrovic.

3.3-year-old Stuart has started asking some challenging questions. They are not only difficult to explain to someone at his level in general, but also requires us to study some to brush up on the respective areas.

Some examples:

“What’s the biggest number?” “Infinity? What’s that?” “If not 100, then 101? 1 million?” “Or is it just ‘many’?”
“Why does wood burn?”
“How does melted plastic stick to another piece?”

(More forthcoming.)

Every budget season, almost every lower level of government whines and moans about how it needs some sort of handout from a higher level of government. This sucks, and here is how you can see it sucks too. The key is to ask “Why should X pay for Y?”, where X is some sibling place and Y is some supposedly threatened local expenditure. It only sounds rhetorical.

When a city like NYC is asking for state money, ask yourself “Why should taxpayers in Buffalo, Rochester, or Springville be made to pay for a park worker in NYC?

When a city like Toronto is outraged about not getting enough from the province, ask yourself “Why should taxpayers in Sudbury and Windsor pay for a Toronto streetcar?”.

When a state like California is asking for a bailout from the feds, ask yourself “Why should a taxpayer in North Dakota and New York pay for health coverage for illegals in Los Angeles?”.

See, that’s not rhetorical. That’s absurd. All that transferred money comes from someone’s piggybank – whether direct taxes now, or unconscionable debts on their children, or stolen assets in the form of inflation.

Local problems should be dealt by the locals. If local taxes are not high enough to pay for all the locally voted expenditures, raise them there. If a higher level of government has enough cash that they can consider transferring the money, give all that back to the taxpayers and reduce the rates in the future. People who had nothing to do with you getting into financial trouble, people who have their own problems, should not be treated like a remote piggybank, anonymized and disempowered by aggregation, casually raped on demand.

That is if your dreams include Ms. Palin

If this announcement is not a joke, then Sony’s move would turn off the most accessible machine on which one can develop/test software on the powerpc architectures. For fans, or conscientious programmers who wish to test the portability of their code, this means that ppc is becoming ephemeral. It is not worth $severalK to buy an IBM box, and simulators may or may not be good enough. With linux distributions also dropping powerpc, there will be less and less software to run on the thing in whatever form. IBM must be thrilled. Intel might feel some schadenfreude, but then again the ia64 was never a hobbyist platform.

Sony, you suck.

This fine document serves as the master copy of where private airplanes may land within the US for customs clearance purposes. It is delightful for reading on paper, but not helpful for geographical flight-planning purposes. Say, this humble canadian wants to visit the Shenandoah Caverns: where best to land to clear customs? Good luck answering that one by just looking at the CBP document, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of towns within a few-hundred-mile radius of any random point.

As I have found no other web site with this data, I’ve started a wee google map where some of the CBP-staffed airports are graphed. The map is currently open to public edits, so is just aching for a transcription slave to fill in the other airports and contact info. Please help! I hope eventually airnav.com or ourairports.com or runwayfinder.com or some other aviation-oriented community database site, or even the CBP itself (gasp!), will supplant this.