As is becoming routine, here’s a digest of energy related stories posted at the Renewable Energy Journal this week.

RE Investments hit the Mainstream – Traditional Wall Street firms are now waking up to smell the profit in renewable energy projects, see their take on the segment.

Zero Emissions Motorcycle – Well, let’s call it a scooter, at less than $0.01/mile of operations cost, it might catch your attention.

$98/MWh Power Purchase Agreement – For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a $20/MWh premium over the last PPA…Also for consumers, that’s $0.098/kwh…

NRG bids for Calpine – Four months after emerging from bankruptcy Calpine gets an unsolicited all-stock bid to combine with NRG.

250MWe from Energy Recycling – It could just get discharged into the atmosphere as heat, instead, it’s offsetting 1.3M tons of CO2 emissions and producing 50% of this facilities energy needs.

As always, you can get this content fresh at the Renewable Energy Journal, drop by if this kind of content is interesting to you…

Watch a puffer fish protect itself and potential predator, an otter, from death. You see, the puffer fish has a poisonous gall bladder that will kill the otter if consumed. The puffer fish gets to be the size of a small beach ball, which is pretty impressive.

You might notice that this week’s posts have been dominated by videos. There are two reasons for that, one I’ve started a new job and my intellectual horsepower has been pretty much fully directed at understanding the new environment and challenge ahead and two, I seem to have developed some sort of writer’s block. I still have much to say, but it’s bottled up a bit.

Moving right along, I was happy to see that Pastor-gate is now behind us with McCain’s rejection of Herr Hagee’s and New World Crusader Parsley’s endorsements. That was a stand-up thing to do Mr. McCain, now can we please ignore the wacky pastors?

Since the nomination for the Democrats has been decided since late March, I’m puzzled why the media seems to give Hillary Clinton more air time, it’s not as if Ron Paul is getting equivalent treatment on the Republican side. As previously predicted, Obama is now in full ignore Hillary mode and that’s as it should be. We can now get down to the campaign which should be framed as politics of the past (failed) vs. new ideas and approaches for the future (with risk of failure, but at least it’s not a continuation of the known policy of failures.)

Undecided super delegates, you know who you are and you undoubtably have MFtC on your RSS feed, get off the fence and put poor Hillary out of her misery, please. Now.

I can’t wait for the 2008 college football season starting the last weekend in August. I particularly can’t wait for the Ohio State/USC game September 13. This is the worst time of year for me sports wise, the NBA sucks, baseball hasn’t been relevant in decades, my interest in the NHL fades as soon as the Sharks lose in the playoffs each year. That leave us with racing, tennis, and golf, which are as interesting as watching paint dry. Man U won both the Premiership and the Champions League, and that leaves a bad taste…At least the USC corruption scandal, curiously not reported by the Worldwide Leader in Sports, can unfold with the addition of OJ Mayo to Reggie Bush. Lack of institutional control seems to have been tailor-made for this situation. Take a look at this video, sorry I couldn’t embed it…but it’s entirely relevant to being bored in the offseason of football.

Acronym for the week: MPLS, MultiProtocol Label Switching, a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based clients and packet-switching clients which provide a datagram service model. I’m rarely more happy than when I get to learn a whole new domain, and I’m doing that now which may explain my lack of desire on the writing front. Watch for more acronyms in the future…

Hope you all enjoy a nice holiday weekend. Check Monday for a Memorial Day post I’ve been working on for some time. Regardless of your stance on US policy, we owe our armed forces a debt of gratitude for their service and sacrifice, while tossing back an adult beverage, watching the Indy 500, and eating a burger, take a moment to remember and thank our veterans.

And one more thing, if you clicked on the video above, I’m sorry for the dirty trick, but I haven’t ever Rick Rolled our readership before and for some reason today, I just couldn’t resist…

Keeping with the video theme this week, here’s another for your amusement. If you don’t want to hear about extreme violence inflicted upon vegetables, I suggest you skip this video. If you’d like to learn more, or more appropriately, you’d like to buy a t-shirt, visit People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables. Free the Veggies from human tyranny!

Invest seven minutes in watching this video – it’s creative, interesting, and new. It also must have taken months to create when you consider each frame is backed by a mural. I loved the way the music supported the animation (like old Looney Tunes) and how the animation interacted with “real” world components in various scenes. It’s pretty interesting, I’ve never seen anything like it before. Concept and Art by BLU.

HT: Mike Davis

Keeping with the humorous video theme…another classic from the Pythons. The dead parrot, a Norwegian Blue, the one that was sleeping when sold, nailed to the perch, and is currently pining for the fjords…Enjoy!