Chuck Norris is batshit crazy

So normally I'd write this off with "well, he's just some actor" and not think any further about Chuck Norris' personal paranoia. After all, in the greater scheme of things, his fantasies are not any crazier than those worried about Xenu's crimes in ages past... perhaps actors as a group are just weird.

Mr Norris, however, is politically active and is among those genuflecting to Glenn Beck and spreading poisonous fantasies about the President being a Manchurian Candidate planted at birth (and of course completely missing the point that in order to be a good Manchurian Candidate, one must first be above suspicion. I never said I thought rabid actors were necessarily smart.)

Chuck Norris apparently believes that Mr. Obama's support of sharing intelligence with Interpol is just a ruse to allow the President to hide important records about the war on terror from Americans. Seriously. Norris finds it surprising that it might be necessary to allow Interpol to maintain the confidentiality of international sources of intelligence, but he probably thought it was perfectly fine to allow suspects to be "disappeared" to black sites by the CIA without a hint of due process.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is alive and well, even a year after his inauguration. One can only hope that it causes at least as much distress to the afflicted as their foaming at the mouth does to the sane.

Jeremy Clarkson is helping to destroy the English language

What the hell are "torques?" I realize that there is a valid way to use the word, such as to say "calculate the torques exerted at points A and B" but that's not what I'm bitching about.

Jeremy Clarkson often babbles on about whatever car he has just smoked the tread off of while hooning around the track as having "500 hp and 600 torques." I know he's an entertainer and as such about as into accuracy as Rush Limbaugh, but "torques" is not a unit. Horsepower is a unit of measure, torque is a way to describe twisting forces and common units for quantifying torque are newton meter (SI) and foot pound (Imperial.)

It grates on my nerves whenever I hear Clarkson say it, and now I'm starting to see that butchery of the language parroted in automotive blogs. Even Wikipedia has it more or less right, it's NOT hard to find the right way to express such things on the internet.