It’s a year off and I’m already getting excited after seeing the trailer. I love seeing Ian Mckellen as Gandalf again.

NYTimes.com: Boehner Ties Payroll Tax Cut Extension to Pipeline

Speaker John A. Boehner said Friday that House Republicans would insist on including the Keystone XL oil pipeline in any legislation that extended the tax cut and unemployment benefits.

This is how dysfunctional our government is. Projects and ideas should be be forwarded on based on their merits instead of being tacked as a negotiation tactic.

StarTribune.com: Peterson will play for pride, Fantasy

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson said he will play against the Saints on Sunday. As for why he’d actually want to play for a 2-11 team on a left ankle that he says is “85 percent,” well, he has his reasons.

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“It’s very important, especially for my fantasy team owners,” Peterson said with a smile. “They’ve been giving me a hard time.”

It’s funny to hear a football player playing in a lost season acknowledging fantasy football.

Purists probably hate it, but fantasy football has helped make the NFL into the most popular sport. The only baseball games I watch are games that involve my hometown team, the Cincinnati Reds. But, I can pretty much watch any NFL game because I either have a player that’s on my fantasy team or I’m scouting players to add to my team.

WikiHow.com: How to Crack a “Master Lock” Combination Lock

This is kind of scary if you use Master Locks, but the instructions actually work.

I just cracked a lock that I had from high school. With no memory of the combination and following the directions, it took me about 30 minutes to crack it. The method is part mechanical, part mathematical, and part trial and error.

Cracking the lock gave me a strange sense of accomplishment, opening something that was not supposed to be able to be opened in this way.  It’s not quite as sexy as cracking a safe with a stethoscope or picking a lock, but I think my dance with the dark side will end here.

The question is, should one use a combination lock like this, even though they are not completely secure. For most short term uses like a locker at a gym or at school it’s probably ok. With practice one could probably learn to open a combination lock in 10-15 minutes, but doing so is a pretty conspicuous task.

North Korea warns South over Christmas lights

A church group in Seoul wants to put up the Christmas lights on a massive steel tower shaped like a tree on top of a military-controlled hill just 3 kilometres from the border with North Korea.

When lit up, it will be able to be seen in the northern city of Kaesong, prompting Kim Jong-il’s regime to denounce the display as “a mean attempt for psychological warfare” aimed at promoting Christianity, according to the North’s official website, Uriminzokkiri.

I’ve seen Christmas displays around here that I’d also describe as psychological warfare.

TIME’s Person of the Year: The Protester cover designed by Shepard Fairey

WANT TO STEAL BANKSY?

One of the weirder promotions I’ve ever seen. Art Series Hotels in Australia is hiding a piece of art from the street artist, Banksy in one of their hotels and challenging someone to steal it.

Find the art and try and steal it. If you don’t get caught it’s yours to keep. If you do get caught then back up on the wall it goes.

I wonder how many other pieces of artwork they’ll lose during this promotion.

Yahoo News: Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’

Top schools that don’t ask about race in admissions process have very high percentages of Asian students. The California Institute of Technology, a private school that chooses not to consider race, is about one-third Asian. (Thirteen percent of California residents have Asian heritage.) The University of California-Berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent Asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed.
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Noting that most Ivy League schools have roughly the same percentage of Asians, he wonders if “that’s the maximum number where diversity is still good, and it’s not, ‘we’re being overwhelmed by the yellow horde.”

Dailymail.co.uk: Climate change episode of Frozen Planet won’t be shown in the U.S. as viewers don’t believe in global warming

An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.

British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.

But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.

It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change.

I saw this in a petition sent out by Change.org asking Discovery Channel to air the final (seventh) episode. It’s frightening that Discovery Channel is not showing this episode because it might upset those that are too ignorant to believe in climate change.