INTERESTED IN DISASTER PREPAREDNESS? Check out Bill Quick’s new online forum.

Related: Post-Apocalyptic survival gear.

UNITED NATIONS APPOINTS official representative for space aliens. But why should the space aliens listen to the U.N.? Nobody else does.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE won’t endorse Barbara Boxer.

6 ROMANTIC MOVIE GESTURES that can get you prison time.

SCOTT BROWN UPDATE: Senator Hits Harvard Over Stance on ROTC and Immigrants.

LIST: Real Cookbooks For Real Families.

RECOVERY SUMMER! Treasury Can’t Seem To Unload Citi Stock.

BILL CLINTON STUMPS FOR BARNEY FRANK, 250 Sean Bielat supporters protest.

UPDATE: More: “There’s an arrogance of power when people stay in power too long.”

WISCONSIN SENATE RACE: A Bellwether For The Nation?

FULL CIRCLE: What, we’re back to worrying about “global cooling” again? If that happens, we’re going to wish we’d spent the last decade coming up with new strains of frost-tolerant food crops, instead of banning incandescent bulbs. And Fallen Angels is looking steadily more prophetic . . . .

UPDATE: Reader John Chalupa writes: “Fallen Angels is available for download at the Baen Free Library.”

MAPPING THE racial breakdown of American cities.

LOOKING AT the new iPods.

AND I HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN AROUND TO HOOKING UP MY OLD ONE YET: New Roku Boxes Announced.

PJTV: Kruiser Control: Carter’s Superiority Complex, Matthews’ Moment of Clarity, and Crist’s Change of Stripes.

HOW OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS REDUCE INFLAMMATION.

OH, GOODY: Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management Makes Your Computer Vulnerable.

HOWARD LOVY: Leelanau at last after 24 years in journalism.

THE RISE OF THE political unicorns. “27% of self-identified gay and lesbian voters chose John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. That’s a figure that translates to roughly 1.7 million gay votes for McCain/Palin. If gay conservatives are unicorns, our herd is huge.”

Related: Politico: They’re Gay, Conservative, And Proud. “Even among the gays, the right is on the rise.”

Hey, this is only news if you haven’t been paying attention to the leading indicators.

WALTER SHAPIRO: The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate: Are We Better Off than 50 Years Ago?

COMING: Machine co-processors for the brain.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Things that you’d better not have on you if you want to walk through Library Mall on Tuesday afternoon. “Ah, but you need to be respectful and hear out what the President says, which is — I assume — that you really need to vote for Democrats in November. That’s the message. It’s nothing loftier than that. It’s a big political rally, snarling Madison traffic — on our narrow isthmus — blocking passage through the center of campus, and depriving us of our computers and our freedom of expression.” Plus, from the comments: “A person doesn’t have to dislike a president to wish that he’d stay home.” I’m not sure what I think about this. Presidents live in enough of a bubble already. On the other hand, if this degree of security is really necessary — which I tend to doubt — then Presidents ought to think twice.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes:

Two years after the “revolution” and a few weeks out from the midterms finds Obama carrying the fight to . . . Madison? Given pre-election expectations, I’d have thought he’d be storming the last redoubts in Tulsa and Dallas-Fort Worth and watching as his troops scattered the ragged remnants of his opposition into west Texas and the Great Plains.

Now focusing on boosting turnout in the areas that might still be heavily Democratic. Like the University of Wisconsin campus.

Related: “Momentum Watch.”

IN THE MAIL: The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.

STILL MORE ON that Erik Scott shooting in Las Vegas. “As expected, no Costco or other video was presented at the Inquest. Recent information indicates that the police will claim that all of the Costco video from every camera that might have captured an image simply does not exist due to an technical malfunction known to Costco before the event which was not corrected until after the event. While this is possible, one would surely be forgiven for questioning the convenience–for the police–of this kind of coincidence, particularly when such video has the potential to unambiguously resolve the central issues in the case. . . . The potentially missing video remains, at the very least, a public relations disaster for the police, and one which may not go unnoticed by local political leaders.”

IF YOU MISSED IT LAST WEEK, you might want to check out this post-hearing analysis of the DOJ’s racial scandals. And here’s the full hearing video.

OUR HEALTH CARE Happy Meal.