Vacation time.

I'm heading down to Hilton Head Island for a week and a few days, so I've shut off comments for the time being, as the site is under a relentless spam deluge. I may or may not resurface during that time, depending on whether I'm able to piggyback onto the neighbors' unprotected wireless network like last year.

In the meantime, ROBOGEISHA!

C.H.U.D., Tar Heel Edition.

There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world. Also in Raleigh, as a sewer snake camera discovered under Cameron Village.

ZOMG. Thanks for the nightmares, Carin.

I'll take Door #3, Bob.

I wasn't actually shopping for mosquito traps, but mostly by random, I ended up at the Amazon page for SpringStar Mosquito Traps with Pheromones. Because, you know, that sort of thing happens to me a lot. At that page was perhaps the most useful product review ever written. And surprisingly compelling reading, to boot. Almost like a Raymond Carver short story. Once I finished, I went back to the top and noticed that the Amazon username of the poster is ChurchOfJesusChrist.Net, with the location of Southern Republik of California, USA.

Huh.

So, ChurchOfJesusChrist.Net is of course my next stop, and they do not like circumcision. Or fluoride, aluminum, or chlorine. Also a bunch of stuff about Mormons that I'm guessing makes sense to other Mormons. Pleasant about it all, though, and he's one of the world's biggest Fat Boys fans. And I don't have any real point except that I sure do love the unfathomable randomness of the internet.

Publish or perish.

As part of my job, I spend a lot of time checking references in PubMed—a LOT of time—and so I'm probably more amused by NCBI ROFL than the average bear, but it sure is amusing. SCIENCE!

Headline of the day.

BBC: 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said. [...] Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added.

The comments on the article are even funnier.

Sanctity of something or other.

Argentinian mistress? Booo-ring.

I will note for the record, though, that when Mark Sanford was a member of the SC House delegation, he voted for 3 of the 4 articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton.

Oh, just shut the fox up already.

Unprecedented! Unprecedented, I tell you! Journalism is dead!

Everything has to breathe.

If only I'd thought as quickly as this guy, maybe I could still drop my kids off in front of the school instead of two blocks away.

The witness told the officers the man was sitting on a park bench with his penis out and was masturbating. Police say 41-year-old Augustus Hudgins was arrested for indecent exposure. Hudgins told the officers that there was a misunderstanding. He said he was just giving his penis some air, according to the court document.

Really, it's the humane thing to do.

Petard.

I'm very forgiving of extramarital affairs in politicians, because it's really the most common, mundane sort of transgression and honestly doesn't tell you one thing about what kind of job they'll do as an officeholder.

However, I throw that shit out the window when it's somebody who has spent their political career banging their Bible on a desk and pontificating about morality and how they are well-placed to pass judgment on other people's relationships. You know where this is headed. To that great Mecca of traditional-marriage morality, Nevada.

Exhibit A:

In 2004, he published a release titled "ENSIGN DEFENDS SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE ON SENATE FLOOR," where he "took to the floor of the United States Senate today to defend the sanctity of marriage and urge passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment Act." He told fellow senators, "Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied. [...] It is not right to mold marriage to fit the desires of a few, against the wishes of so many, and to ignore the important role of marriage."

Exhibit B:

"I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it's because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through," Ensign said Thursday, becoming the first member of the Nevada delegation to call for Clinton to quit. "He has no credibility left."

And I could go on, but you get the picture. Also, boning the wife of your trusted aide? Classy.

Not in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.

Huge Pre-Stonehenge Complex Found via "Crop Circles"

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise. A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is "completely amazing," said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London. [...] Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth. True crop circles are vast designs created by flattening crops.

The central features are two great tombs topped by massive mounds—made shorter by centuries of plowing—called long barrows. The larger of the two tombs is 70 meters (230 feet) long.

Stop, look, listen, repeat.

I'm as fascinated by the unfolding events in Iran as the next guy, but it bears repeating as often as possible: 1) this isn't about us, and 2) very, very few Americans understand the first thing about Iranian politics, including who is on what side. Larison:

Western policing of other nations' elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country's people. In Lebanon, the right people won, so the structural biases built into the Lebanese system are not only tolerated in the West, while similarly crude biases in the Iranian system are decried as outrageous, but the fruits of the Lebanese system are celebrated as a great triumph for freedom and light. The absurdity of avidly cheering Mousavi's supporters, who voted for a man likely instrumental in the creation of Hizbullah, a few days after avidly cheering the so-called "crushing defeat" of Hizbullah in Lebanese elections earlier in the week should be apparent to everyone, but it is not clear to many people at all. [...]

How would the election controversy look if we viewed it as a contest between Iran's Huey Long and the representatives of an entrenched economic elite? Would Western sympathies shift at all? Would Westerners be less inclined to champion the cause of Mousavi as a result? Either way, we should all reflect on how easily we are biased in favor of one side or another in a foreign election based on partial, tendentious or misleading characterizations of the vying factions.

We pick sides like this all the time, and when we do it is almost always arbitrary, ill-informed and mistaken. For various reasons, one side in a contest is deemed to be more "pro-Western," which occasionally even has the virtue of being true, and this side's victory is then lauded as a great step forward, and anything preventing that victory is deemed inherently suspicious and illegitimate. In many cases, there really is fraud being perpetrated by the other, "anti-Western" side, and I don't doubt that this is true to some extent in Iran, but the truly incomprehensible thing for so many Westerners is the possibility that the authoritarian populist whom Washington loathes actually commands majority support in his own country and could probably win without fraud. Why would such a person commit fraud and use violence to increase the scale of a victory that was already in his hands? Ask Hugo Chavez or Vladimir Putin. They know the answer, and the answer is fairly straightforward. The reason for doing this is to acquire and consolidate power. One way to do this is to provoke the opposition, bait them into resistance and then pose as the defender of social and political order. The Kremlin has been doing this to Russian liberals for the better part of a decade.

Many of the same people who wore the most garish war paint and sported the most veins in their teeth during the run-up to the Iraq War have now suddenly latched onto this as the latest proxy battle between good and evil that they will help move into the win column by dint of turning their blog colors green or some other amorphous but mystical strategy:

[John McCain's] twitterview today with Jake Tapper is full of examples as he talks about Iran not so much as an actual country full of actual people doing actual things in a difficult situation, but instead as a kind of phantasmagoric canvas onto which we should paint a tableau of American hubris and militarism. But nothing sums it up better than this Tweet:

@jaketapper no prediction, but if we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail. But this regime has tight control.

That's right. Whether or not the Iranian people prevail depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services?

Sullivan is even quoting, without comment, Michael Ledeen, who has never been anything but absolutely batshit insane on the issue of Iran. What, Lyndon LaRouche wasn't available for comment? Indeed, there are an entire host of people whose records on Iran make it obvious that they should be ignored with great force, but oh man, are they out with the bullhorns. Greenwald:

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

It's a riveting drama, to be sure, but it isn't in any way our drama, no matter what all the furiously masturbating neo-conservative cheerleaders keep yelping.

The queen is dead.

Koko Taylor, 1928-2009.

Still the lesser of two evils.

But not by all that much, really.

This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There's always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They're all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they've basically codified the closet by ushering in Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along — and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there's this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn't that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them on rocks in the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by "civilized" cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it's been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko. It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He's going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand — he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama's decision, it's weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he's bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it's wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It's shameful and disgusting, but it's not very surprising. This is what they do.

Update: And this is just indefensible. Way to go, Obama. Just when it seemed like we could quit being ashamed of our government.

Euphemism of the day.

You might shit yourself at work. Erm, I mean, there may be "treatment effects." Nothing to worry about, really.

Hot dogs strikes back, tentatively.

The only English on the page:

For the english speakers: i collect in this lj blog photos and links to this new form of food art, we tentatively call "hot dogs strikes back". it is primarily made by inserting dried spaghetti into the hot dogs and then boiling the resulting concoctions. it is fun to make and fun to eat for the whole family and the variations seem endless. if you do engage into experimenting with different forms of this "art", please take photos and drop me a link. i will post it here, so we can keep the project alive.

Via Blort.

Quick hits.

How Down syndrome prevents cancer.

Five-dimensional data storage.

Orangutan cannibalism.

Presidents who could also be strippers.

Galactic center rising.

President Obama, Afghanistan, and the March of Folly.

Goths in hot weather.

Lipstick reflex got me wound.

The YouTube version is here, but you really should go watch the high-def version at Philips' site.

Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic frozen moment cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings. This epic film is the centrepiece of the project. On its own, it clocks in at a (totally coincidental) two minutes and 19 seconds, but Berg conceived it to work as an endless loop. Visitors to the microsite therefore have the option to spin through the films single take shot repeatedly, to stop on a specific frame, or to watch it at the preordained speed. The film also contains embedded hotspots, which, when triggered, transport the viewer seamlessly from the heavily posted film to a behind-the-scenes version of the same shot.

Then after you watch it, the how they did it video is interesting, too.