Can you imagine being this captain? One moment you've got a gun pointed at you, then BAM BAM BAM and all of your captors are dead.

Quoted: Two of the captors had poked their heads out of a rear hatch of the lifeboat, exposing themselves to clear shots, and the third could be seen through a window in the bow, pointing an automatic rifle at the captain, who was tied up inside the 18-foot lifeboat, senior Navy officials said.

Quoted: It took only three remarkable shots — one each by snipers firing from a distance at dusk, using night-vision scopes, the officials said. Within minutes, rescuers slid down ropes from the Bainbridge, climbed aboard the lifeboat and found the three pirates dead. They then untied Captain Phillips, ending the contretemps at sea that had riveted much of the world’s attention. A fourth pirate had surrendered earlier.

Awesome. I live in the 'Bay of Smoke'.

Quoted: Thanks to clear and sunny skies, warm temperatures, stable air, and an onshore sea-breeze, the Los Angeles area is an outstanding natural smog cooker.

Quoted: Indeed, air pollution in the region long predates the arrival of the automobile. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to lay eyes on Santa Monica Bay, saw the area shrouded in smog from native campfires and named it the Bay of Smoke.

Quoted: Hands on buzzers: One's a trash-talking thug trying to stay one step ahead of the law. The other was played by James Gandolfini. Can you identify the speaker of the ten quotes below?

Good to hear, but in the end the Right got what they wanted. Dude was a strong up-and-coming Democrat and now there's no way he can be at the top of any ticket.

Quoted: Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will not be charged in connection with the prostitution scandal that prompted his resignation, the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York said Thursday.

Quoted: Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on trade theory.

Dude is a bad-ass. Here's the best part:

Quoted: Krugman gained his reputation in economics by contributing to strategic trade theory, contending that countries could steal a march on other nations by subsidizing strategic industries. He has found broader fame with his newspaper columns that regularly criticize President George W. Bush's policies.

Aw, hellz yeah. Hey Obama: How about adding a nobel prize-winning economist who was critical of Bush from the start to your administration? If you have noticed, there are some economic problems he could probably help with.

Quoted: A city Health Department study finds that more than a fourth of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes.

That seemed like a lot. Then came this line:

Quoted: The study, released Monday, says about 26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide.

Damn. 19% of all US Americans have the herp? Is it just me, or does that seem incredibly high?

Joel is pissed.

Quoted: Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Gas prices suck.

Quoted: Many commentators have wondered at the ability of Americans to grin and bear higher gas prices. But grinning and bearing it is losing any sense of fun. It's just gotten expensive: Over the first four months of 2008, as Peter Beutel of Cameron-Hanover noted this week, gasoline has cost the United States $757.24 million a day more than in the first four months of 2002. That’s more than the estimated $720 million a day spent in Iraq.

Quick! Somebody tell Nick!

Quoted: Google: “2D barcodes are an especially exciting part of this because they allow readers to "click" on interesting print ads with their cellphones and seamlessly connect to relevant online content.”