Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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In its 183-year history, the august Oxford Union debating society has heard the wisdom of Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Mother Teresa. But until now, its members have yet to hear from anyone with quite the same resume as Ron Jeremy, star of 1,700 adult films, including "Bang Along With Ron".
"As far as I know it is the first porn star to address the Oxford Union. I'm 99 percent sure of that," Peter Cardwell, spokesman for one of the English-speaking world's most respected debating societies, told Reuters.
Jeremy, who claims to have slept with more than 4,000 women, will address the union on Wednesday, joining many British prime ministers, three U.S. presidents and political figures from the Dalai Lama to Malcolm X in its archival guest list.
"Ron is the biggest and apparently the best in the business, so I'm sure he'll have some fascinating stories to tell," said Oxford Union librarian Vladimir Bermant, who organised the event.
So, my good British readers, do you guys pronounce it hedgehog or 'edge'og?
I've had a fairly long-running fascination with German artist Gunther von Hagens, who takes human corpses and "plastinates" them in varying stages of disassembly. The process is described here and you can donate your body here but the website somehow doesn't quite impart the full creepiness of his vision. However, if you do a google image search on his name, you'll get a better feel for it, particularly the mother/fetus piece.
Anyhow, von Hagens pops up in the news every so often because, predictably, somebody gets freaked out by his exhibitions and raises a stink. The latest dust-up, though, is a bit of a sticky situation.
Controversial German artist Gunther von Hagens, known for his displays of preserved human corpses stripped of skin, wants to build a factory in Poland to mass-produce his art, local officials say. Von Hagens, whose exhibitions made out of human and animal remains have attracted millions of visitors around the world, has already bought land and industrial buildings in the western Polish town of Sieniawa Zarska, near the German border.
[...] The scandal around von Hagen's plans spiced up further when Polish and German press said his 89-year-old father, Gerhard Liebchen, who represents his son's businesses in Poland, is suspected [of] carrying out crimes against Poles in World War Two.
"We will probe if Gerhard Liebchen cooperated in sending 60 Poles to concentration camps, which would give reasons to launch an investigation for participation in genocide," a state institute set up to examine wartime crimes said on Monday.
Well, given the history between the Germans and the Poles, you could see how they might object to a German setting up a corpse rendering factory on their soil.
Pubsociology points me toward some folks after my own, plaque-clogged heart.
bacontarian.com is dedicated to bringing the wonders of bacon to the world. We are a group of bacon/pork enthusiasts, who firmly believe that bacon and affiliated eats are way underrepresented on-line. We will try and bring you the best recipes, write-ups of parties featuring bacon, or just general porkish rants.
Aww yeah, baby.
Remember all the talk about the "grown-ups being in charge again" once the Texas GOP took over the reins of power in Washington? Just take a quick glance at one of the highly intelligent grown-ups that great state sent up to Washington:
Now we know where Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) thinks the weapons of mass destruction are buried: in Syria, which he said he'd like to nuke to smithereens. Speaking at a veterans' celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas, on Feb. 19, Johnson told the crowd that he explained his theory to President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) on the porch of the White House one night.
Johnson said he told the president that night, "Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on 'em and I'll make one pass. We won't have to worry about Syria anymore."
You can bet that the assembled faithful there in Suncreek United Methodist Church just cheered at the suggestion of wiping an entire nation of innocent people off the face of the planet because, really, if Jesus taught us anything it was that indiscriminate mass murder is just peachy keen. What the hell is it with right-wingers and dropping nuclear bombs on people? Just the mention of it makes an awful lot of them go all moist and panting.
Boy, you really have to hate it when your fifteen minutes of fame are for this.
A 63-year-old man is charged with sexual gratification with an animal for allegedly having sex with calves. Harold G. Hart, of Neillsville [WI], allegedly told police that he routinely stopped at a Greenwood farm, usually after bar closing or on trips to strip clubs near Marshfield or Neillsville. [...] Hart told police he had sex with heifers before he went into the service in 1963 and resumed about a year ago at the farm. He admitted to using a rope to tie calves around the neck and estimated he had been to the farm "at least 50 times," according to the complaint.
Yes, plenty embarrassing to end up in the national news for that, but this is the sentence that cracks me up: "He told police he never had sex with animals while maintaining a relationship with a girlfriend or his wife." Because as everybody knows, banging cows ain't weird if you're single.
About a year ago, I linked to Wikipedia's long, long list of obscure racial slurs because sometimes a fellow just gets to wondering how an Ashkenazi Jew would insult a Mizrahi Jew. Chakh-chakh is the answer, by the way, intended to "ridicule the preservation of the pharyngeal (guttural) pronunciations of Hebrew consonants ח ħêth and ע ‘áyin by Mizrahi Jewish immigrants." I mean, you just won't find that sort of knowledge randomly and I'm happy to have played my part in making this a more hostile world.
Anyhow, it's a useful resource, sort of, but it has limitations. Sure, it gives you a word - sometimes several - to hurl at just about any minority you could imagine, but it doesn't translate the truly offensive phrases for you. You know, the ones that generally involve some sort of unsavory conduct with ones parents or some such. Well, thanks to Metafilter, I am now able to present you with the Swearsaurus, which covers a dizzying array of languages, including Esperanto, though God only knows when that would be useful. It's a lot to remember, but you'll be glad you took the time when you find yourself in Afghanistan and want to know how to tell a Pashtun-speaker that his grandmother is dead but her hoo-hoo is still moving ("Ana de mura naighaie shori").
Also linked in the comments and more in the spirit of the original Wiki is the Profanisaurus, though it's only fair to note that it occasionally includes almost helpful definitions like these three:
bott v. A sex act performed by botters (qv).
bottee n. One who is botted by a botter.
botter n. He who botts.
I think I can figure it out, but still. Employ some quality control, you madarchods.
While the neo-cons begin putting on their facepaint and pounding the war drums against Syria for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, Jim Henley gently points out that we actually don't have the first idea who killed Rafiq Hariri and that, further, the assassination was in no way good news for Syria. Hmm.
Stanford freshman Aaron Swartz:
A shocking recent study has discovered that only 13% of Stanford professors are Republicans. The authors compare this to the 51% of 2004 voters who selected a Republican for President and argue this is "evidence of discrimination" and that "academic Republicans are being eradicated by academic Democrats".
Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as "communication between minds without using the traditional five senses"), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil", compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology ("the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives"), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree. (All numbers are from mainstream polls, as reported by Sokal.)
This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation's youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view. Were I to discover that there were no blacks on the Stanford faculty, the Politically Correct community would be all up in arms. But they have no problem squeezing out prospective faculty members whose views they disagree with.
He also has a very good account of the travelling freak show that is David Horowitz coming to visit.
(via boingboing)
New York Times: "Forensic scientists have painstakingly restored a small heap of paper that survived the fiery disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia, a 38-mile fall to Earth and two months of exposure to rain and sun in a Texas field, yielding the flight diary and notes of the Israeli astronaut, Col. Ilan Ramon."
Absolutely amazing pictures from Europe's Mars Express Orbiter showing glacial, volcanic, and fluvial activity. Nice shots of the Valles Marineris are here, along with a discussion of how the enormous canyon may have been formed.
Three newly discovered moons of Saturn were tentatively given the names Methone, Pallene, and Polydeuces. Three other spotted objects are still awaiting confirmation as moons. Polydeuces is a Trojan moon, a three mile wide rock moving in tandem with a larger moon, Dione. Meanwhile, Cassini snapped the first pictures ever of Saturn's radiation belts, along with a massive storm, several previously unseen rings that may imply more unseen moons, and what NASA is calling the greatest Saturn portrait yet.
NASA scientists announced they suspect that rapid formation of kidney stones during space travel may be caused by nanobacteria, "a novel self-replicating, mineralizing agent" discovered in the '90s and found in kidney stones.
To further comprehend the implications of NB, trials were conducted at NASA to examine NB, in a bioreactor chamber which simulates conditions of space travel. In this microgravity environment, NB was found to multiply five times faster compared to normal gravity on Earth, supporting earlier discoveries that microbes have radically different behavior in weightless environments. NB is also shown to possibly be an infectious risk for crew members living in close quarters.
"The concept that nanobacteria are living organisms is still controversial because the research on their putative nucleic acid has not been completed yet," states lead researcher Neva Ciftcioglu, Ph.D.
Finally, giant, dark tadpoles swim on the surface of the sun.
Nine fish, ten fish, wild fish, pen fish.
This one spawned up in the streams,
This one has potato genes,
My, what a lot of fish… or so it seems.
Yes, some are farmed and some are free,
But there’s no difference, can’t you see?
All have tails
All have scales
But lots are large, infertile males.
From sea to hills,
From hills to sea,
Money undoes policy.
&
This one, I think, really stinks.
And that strange color makes me blink.
That funny pink
I think it’s ink!
I think it stinks of blink - pink ink.
SO…
If your fish isn’t adequately pink,
And all your customers start to think…
Just shoot it with pink ink
Wink, wink.
&
Who am I? My name’s Hezzert
My farm sits in a desert.
This land was dry, too dry to grow
But they plugged the river
And up here it flowed
No, it’s not been that long past…
Well, I couldn’t say, Why do you ask?
&
Here are some who like to throw
They throw out nets the way they know
They know how to throw from long ago
What will they do when the fish don’t show?
I do not know. I do not know.
&
Hey there Hezzert, What is new?
Tell me what you plan to do.
How is life in your desert place,
that normally arid, now wet space.
Things have really turned around.
Since that judge rolled into town
The ESA will not apply
No matter if the Coho die.
&
My pen’s a sewer
My drugs are pure
That holey net
Is such a lure
My wild cousins
Are far fewer
//////////////
My wild cousins
Are far fewer
That holey net
Is such a lure
My pen’s a sewer
My drugs are pure
I will get out,
you must be sure
&
Swish, swish, swish.
I am a fish
I am tasty on a dish.
I swish as a fish from sea to dish
But there is one thing I really wish.
To swish as a fish, free as I wish, up the sacred Snohomish.
Blatant plagiarism; so sue me.
Contrary to rumors running rampant, I am not dead. Merely suddenly temporarily unavoidably unemployed and since Russ doesn’t share the monthly royalty or merchandising checks, job-hunting and holding up liquor stores come first and second, respectively.
More when I can,
Froz Gobo
Sure, it's awful that Michael Jackson is probably blowing little boys, but Christ on a crutch, he's killing the elderly.
TBogg and ThinkProgress have been trawling around the dating service at Sean Hannity's website. "No," you say, "such an easy target for derision surely does not exist in the wild. That can only be an invention of snarky, smug left-wing bloggers, right?" No, it's real and oh so worth your time. Just for starters:
Chris in Alabama is looking for a Christian woman who will appriciate his assperations to Christ.
Krista in Michigan would trade her tiara to have "the kind of love that Nancy and Ronald Reagan had," so if you're totally confused and incontinent, drop her an email.
Dave in Oregon's sole hope from placing his personal is "to kill deer with Ann Coulter someday." From the comments at ThinkProgress: "Well, you'd have to swing her over your head real fast, but I bet you could get up enough speed to bring a deer down with her."
Jay in New York believes "there is nothing that can be said that Billy Joel hasn't put in a song" and says "I enjoy getting off at a random subway stop." I love that Billy Joel song about masturbating in the subway.
Nick in Texas says, "I wear glasses, but they fit my face, so they don't look goofy." Unfortunately, as the picture reveals, everything else about Nick is pretty goddamn goofy.
Bill in Idaho finds he "can no longer stomach the warm and fuzzy Liberal feminist Bush hating females." So if you're a cold, prickly, Bush-loving female, he is "making himself available" to you.
Ellaine in Indiana warns "don't yank my chain" or she'll unleash the fury of her mighty Republican cleavage.
Mark in Michigan wants you to know: "I love children (not as much as Micheal Jackson though!)."
Eric in New Mexico attends the New Mexico Institute of Technology and Mining ("the MIT of the DirtySouth"). He also has jungle fever and is a "Conservative Fo Life!"
Bill in Georgia starts his ad with "I have an overdeveloped sense of humor," and then says nothing remotely funny.
Leo in New Jersey reports, "I am kind of athletic it is very nice to have a woman similar physics but it is not a killer option."
Rich in Ohio: "I'm clearly a compassionate conservative, Christian. I donated my kidney to my cousin 7 months ago. This should tell you LOTS about me. I worked about 20 hours on W's campaign in OHIO, but my biggest contribution was 2 years of daily praying. God won this election."
Gary in Ohio has lots, and I mean lots, of requirements if you're going to be his lady but this is the big one: "I am not paying off someone's charge card debt where they bought some fly lookin rims and stereo for pimpin out her ex-boyfriends ride." You know who you are, ladies.
FabFord in California is "tired of looking in wrong places and finding whiny liberals snooty B^&%H. So Please Mr. Hannity find me a women." Also, he needs some longer ties.
Jay in Pennsylvania apparently volunteers with children born without faces.
Robert, whose location is a secret, wants a drop-dead gorgeous musician with four post-graduate degrees and is looking for such a person on the Hannity dating site, which is too funny for me to improve.
Also looking for love from a secret location, Lori reminds us that both "conservative" and "cameltoe" begin with C. If only "peroxide" did too, we'd have the trifecta.
Drew in Washington is 6'7" and candy-coated. How many licks does it take to get to the center?
Laurie in Kentucky says, "I'm you're basic middle school teacher." That explains why half the internet can't discern your from you're.
John in Arkansas might be my favorite, and not just for his enormous head: "Internet dating services are for losers, but Hannity may really have something here... where else could someone be guaranteed to find people whose vocabulary includes: talk radio, Fox News, Weekly Standard, and Drudge? What am I looking for? I don't want to sound conceited, but I'm not going to say looks aren't important because they are. Also, a girl must have some understanding of the aforementioned vocabulary. other than that, ???"
Derek in Texas understands that size doesn't matter: "I can proudly look at myself in the mirror and say I am making a difference no matter how small it is." That's the attitude, PeeWee!
My goodness. You get a post linked by Atrios, Yglesias, and Unfogged, and the hit counter just flies.
So we have this missile defense system that has been rushed into deployment despite the fact that it has never, ever worked. Not surprising, really, given the firm grasp of science never once demonstrated by the current administration. But if you want to get really surreal, check this out:
Canada's announcement that it won't join the U.S. missile shield provoked an immediate warning that it has relinquished sovereignty over its airspace. From now on, the U.S. government will control any decision to fire at incoming missiles over Canadian territory, declared the top U.S. envoy to Canada.
"We will deploy. We will defend North America," said Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada. "We simply cannot understand why Canada would in effect give up its sovereignty - its seat at the table - to decide what to do about a missile that might be coming towards Canada."
The response came just moments after Prime Minister Paul Martin ended months of ambiguity Thursday by announcing that he would not sign on to the controversial missile-defence program. The warning was no slip of the tongue: Cellucci repeated several times that Canada's decision had in effect handed over some of its sovereignty to the United States.
You should read the entire article to get the full effect, but the notion that Canada has relinquished part of its sovereignty by refusing to play host another country's (non-functioning) weapons system is just bizarre. Suggests that perhaps these guys don't really consider any country aside from the United States a sovereign nation. Then again, sovereignty has always been a very slippery concept for these clowns.
Want to see how a bullshit snowball rolls downhill and becomes an avalanche? Watch carefully.
Powerline: How Low Will Senate Democrats Sink?
Hugh Hewitt directs our attention to this post by Carol Platt Liebau regarding potential Supreme Court nominee Michael Luttig. Judge Luttig's father was murdered, and liberals may be poised to argue that this fact would render him impermissibly biased in death penalty cases (but doesn't he hear such cases now as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge?) Liebau notes that, "under this reasoning, every potential female justice should be asked whether she's ever had an abortion -- because abortion cases would come up before the Court. And minority candidates would have to discuss how/whether they ever felt discriminated against." Indeed, it would be appropriate to investigate whether, or to what extent, minority nominees have benefited personally from affirmative action.Are the Senate Democrats dumb enough to make this argument against Luttig?
Okay, let's stop for a moment and examine what we are actually discussing here. Michael Luttig has not been nominated for a Supreme Court position since, you know, there isn't a vacancy there yet. Were a vacancy to open, we don't even know whether Luttig would be Bush's choice. So whether Senate Democrats will even get the chance to oppose him, much less whether they actually would, remains strictly hypothetical. But let's not get bogged down in a hypothetical opposition to a hypothetical nominee by yet-to-be-named Democrats.
No, here's the kicker. What evidence does Carol Platt Liebau have that such a line of reasoning is being considered by Democrats against a nominee who hasn't been nominated for anything? Well, for starters, a nine-year-old article from the local newspaper in Hampton Roads, Virginia about some defense attorneys arguing that Luttig should recuse himself from death penalty appeals. And, um, nothing else. At all. Nada.
"Are the Senate Democrats dumb enough to make this argument against Luttig?" I dunno, Hugh and Deacon, but seeing as you're dumb enough to try to pose the question based on nothing more than this, I suppose anything is possible.
I'll take a triple Venti no-whip Alabama slammer, please.
Starbucks Corp. Thursday launched its first alcoholic drink, a coffee liqueur. Starbucks Coffee Liqueur, made in collaboration with Jim Beam Brands Co., will be sold in restaurants, bars, and liquor stores, not in coffeehouses.
Cool.
A U.S. scientist claims to have thawed out a new life form, which he said raises questions about possible contemporary life on Mars. The organism froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago, and was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, said Richard Hoover from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
The life form -- a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium -- probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Hoover. He discovered the bacterium near the town of Fox, Alaska, in a tunnel drilled through permafrost -- a mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock -- that is kept at a constant temperature of 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 4 degrees Celcius).
Ooooh, kinda like... Mars' newly discovered frozen ocean.
This vast sea is covered by a layer of dust, which might be heated by the sun and could conduct heat down to create sub-surface layers of water from time to time, Hoover said.
"Those layers would be ideal regions for microbiological activity and so that means that the presence of this frozen sea, if that turns out to be precisely what's going on, it greatly enhances the possibility that there may be life existing on Mars today," he said.
The discovery of the living bacteria in Alaska's permafrost raises another possibility, Hoover said. "The other thing that's exciting: Just like we found in the Fox tunnel of Alaska, frozen biology in the form of unicellular bacteria might even have remained alive, frozen in the Martian sea," he said.
Or giant Martian shrimp, which would instantly render obsolete the phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread." Next up: Ted Williams' head.
A British-led team of astronomers have discovered what appears to be the first known galaxy composed entirely of dark matter.
Self-portraits of Spirit and Opportunity.
Your day's off to a bad start when it begins with pulling a six-foot python out of your toilet.
"A former professional boxer who ran on to a football pitch and break-danced naked during an FA Cup tie was today banned from football matches for three years."
Sorry, wrong car: "After tossing back a few drinks with colleagues last weekend, Monroe County assistant prosecutor Albert "A.J." Tasker, 28, stripped off his clothes as a prank and headed toward what he thought was a friend's vehicle. But Tasker jumped into the back seat of the wrong car, where a woman was waiting for her boyfriend. The woman screamed, the boyfriend arrived and Key West police arrested Tasker."
No word as to whether the prosecutor is related to this guy.
From a music review in the Village Voice: "Teabagged by God," a secret track on High on Fire's Blessed Black Wings, is so heavy that guitarist Matt Pike's five tons of Laney amplification groan under its weight. "Deity's crotch, scary crag/now you suffer the god's teabag," Pike mutters. He can't sing and doesn't shout well, either, which makes his calling out "Blessed black wings!" over and over in the title cut cool—second only to the sound of Yahweh's rusty iron testicles smashing around.
And finally, the auction has begun for the naming rights for the new species of titi monkey. Bidding begins at $5K. C'mon people, you know I deserve it.
Remember the teacher here in North Carolina who got canned for proving to thirty-eight students that none of them could drink a gallon of milk without vomiting? I wrote about it last summer. Well, he's back in the news.
A former Johnston County chemistry teacher who lost his job after leading students in an experiment in which they drank milk until they vomited has asked a judge to overturn the school board decision that cost him his job. [...] Ferguson says he can't get a job teaching in another county despite the high scores of his students on end-of-course tests and the need for science teachers.
"Here I sit with nine years of physical science experience, and they have kids there without a teacher," he said in an interview at his Clayton home. "I couldn't even get a job ... tutoring."
Funny as the story is (and it's pretty damn funny) Ferguson is right. Firing him for this was ridiculous; keeping him from teaching is worse. These kids participated willingly and it was nothing that would hurt them. We need teachers much too badly - and especially science teachers - to fire them for something harmless like this.
New Scientist notes that clinical trials of psychedelic drugs for treatment of diseases are finally getting underway with promising results. The trials include treatments for cluster headaches, OCD, PTSD, and heroin addiction. As for the much-ballyhooed dangers of psychedelics:
Halpern's first big foray into psychedelic research was aimed at risk-assessment. In the late 1990s he launched a study of members of the Native American Church, who are permitted by US law to consume peyote. Halpern examined 210 residents of a Navajo reservation in the south-west US, who fell into three categories: church members who had taken peyote at least 100 times but had had little exposure to other drugs or alcohol; non-church members who abstained from alcohol or drugs; and former alcoholics who had been sober for at least three months.
Halpern tested the subjects' IQ, memory, reading ability and other functions. His interim results showed that church members had no cognitive impairment compared with the abstainers, and scored significantly better than recovering alcoholics. Church members also reported no "flashbacks" - sudden recurrences of a psychedelic's effects long after the initial trip. Halpern believes this study, which he expects will be published soon, shows that contrary to the 1971 editorial, peyote at least can be taken repeatedly without adverse effects.
He is now conducting a similar assessment of MDMA.
It's well past time we started treating these substances as medicines, rather than as diseases themselves.
If you read blogs compulsively, you know that the place to go for news on the evolving JeffGannonJimGuckert scandal is John Aravosis' AmericaBlog. Major metropolitan newspapers are picking up the story now, Congressional Democrats are calling for an investigation and links to the Plame scandal, as well as to smear campaigns against John Kerry and Tom Daschle, are coming into focus. Pretty amazing how quickly this all bloomed into something much more serious than the male prostitution issue, which was salacious and attention-grabbing, but ultimately sort of meaningless beyond the (admittedly first-rate) entertainment value.
Anyhow, now that the media spotlight is beginning to shine on the backroom maneuverings of GannonGuckert's fake news employer, Talon News, the organization has turned out the lights and huddled behind locked doors. The site now reads simply:
The recent public focus on Talon News, while much of it malicious, has indeed brought some constructive elements to the surface. It has also brought many kind messages of support, and for that we are extremely grateful. In order to better serve those readers across the country who enjoy Talon News content and look forward to receiving it each day, we feel compelled to reevaluate operations in order to provide the highest quality, most professional product possible.
Thus, Talon News will be offline while we redesign the web site, perform a top-to-bottom review of staff and volunteer contributors, and address future operational procedures. We look forward to bringing an even better product to our readers in the future.
"A top-to-bottom review of staff," you say? Judging by his resume, I'd say Guckert's just the man to perform that.
Regular readers know that I'm a pretty big fan of Oklahoma's current sitting senators because they just say the damnedest things. In so dreary a setting as the United States Senate, you take what laughs you can get and Coburn and Inhofe just keep serving them up. Granted, they aren't actually in on any of the jokes, but somehow that makes it all the more endearing, doesn't it? It's hard to improve upon such organic comédie verité, but Charles Pierce has done it. Just a taste:
Right now the state is represented in the U.S. Senate by two of the most entertaining primates ever to sit in that august body. It is a remarkable achievement. Usually a state will elect one boring senator and one entertaining senator. Look at Pennsylvania: There's bland old Arlen Specter, trying to keep Ralph Reed from using him as a piñata, and there's Rick Santorum, who is the funniest thing about Christianity since the Singing Nun fell off the charts in 1965. For that matter, look at my home state of Massachusetts. We have Teddy Kennedy and we have John Kerry. It's like being represented simultaneously by Falstaff and Ned Flanders.
It only gets funnier from there.
Hundreds of meters below the ocean floor, scientists have found enormous bacterial colonies, some of them as much as 16 million years old.
"It might be that life was developing in the sub-surface long before [3.8 billion years] where it was protected from meteorite impacts," he said. "And as soon as the surface of the Earth became more hospitable, the bacteria were able to move up and colonize it."
[...] Evidence of life in ancient rock sediments was found some time ago but, until now, it was assumed that most of it was long dead. In the past scientists have stained bacterial cells so they stood out against the sediment background, but that method cannot differentiate between living and dead cells. Dr Parkes and his team used a new technique that could identify living cells - and they were surprised to find about 30% of the cells in deep sediment samples are in fact living. [...] Some of the cells are imbedded in sediments that are many millions of years old, which means they must be too.
"These bacteria are growing very slowly in the subsurface," said Dr Parkes. "They could effectively be immortal."
Pretty heady stuff, and leading some to suggest that as much as 60-70% of our bacteria live deep below the Earth's surface. Pair this story with the announcement that the Mars Express Orbiter has located what appears to be a giant ice sea just below the surface that would have formed relatively recently in Mars' history and everything gets very intriguing, doesn't it?
I had a friend tell me that this blog had gone totally lightweight, meaning that the political posts had disappeared in favor of two-headed babies and genital amputations. True enough, and Ogged posted a yesterday about the same phenomenon occurring over there.
Well, I'm sure I'll return to the politics eventually, but I thought I should take a step back when I realized that, following the election, my main political urge was to drive around the country with my middle finger out the window. I don't think such a display would be unjustified, but perhaps undignified and if this blog screams anything, it screams dignity. Heh. Anyhow, this comment at Digby's pretty much summed up my feelings:
Since the November elections, I feel like the woman whose husband refused to listen when she told him not to sell the family cow for magic beans. She's still forced to consider his welfare, but it's neurochemically impossible to be more angry. And she can see that, irresponsible as he was to do it, as soon as it dawns on him that he's been rooked, he won't repent or apologize -- he'll blame her.
Bullseye, and all the more so as the right gleefully charges headlong into neo-McCarthyism (Seymour Hersh is a terrorist! Jimmy Carter is a traitor! The AARP is a tool of the Gay Conspiracy!). What with a new baby disrupting the already minimal amount of sleep to which I was accustomed, well, I just don't have the energy to get as pissed off as discussing 21st century American politics causes me to get. Moreover, what is there to say when the proprietor of Time Magazine's Blog of the Year calls Jimmy Carter a traitor, except: "You, sir, are quite plainly batshit insane." I don't waste my time trying to convince the guy downtown with his shopping cart that the CIA isn't actually beaming those impure thoughts into his head either. Of course, the alternative explanation is that the folks making those accusations are just malignant pricks who will gladly say any damn thing in an attempt to damage those with whom they disagree. However, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and just go with the batshit theory, because I'm magnanimous like that.
So, accusations of lightweightedness around these parts are 100% justified. I don't much care for feeling angry and right now there's entirely too much angering material out there. Maybe once the little guy starts sleeping through the night.
...that Malcolm X was shot and killed. The Guardian reprints its coverage from that day in today's issue. For a lesson on how quickly language can change, notice how anachronistic it feels to read the word "Negro" many times in a short article.
Sculptor Patrick Dougherty, from right here in Chapel Hill, makes enormous installations by weaving together saplings. Click the 'Installations' button and take a look.
But it turns out to be much more difficult than you might have imagined, unless you're really, really patient. Gay marriage won't do it, I'm afraid.
(via MeFi)
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Will you get to use the KY Jelly Brand Warming UltraGel Personal Lubricant with the complete stranger or won't you?
Warning: two-headed baby alert.
As in the case of a girl who died after similar surgery in the Dominican Republic a year ago, the second twin had developed no body. The head that was removed from Manar had been capable of smiling and blinking but not independent life, doctors said. Video footage provided by the hospital, a national center in Egypt for children's medicine, showed Manar smiling and at ease in a cot with the dark-haired "parasitic" twin, attached at the upper left side of the girl's skull, occasionally blinking.
After the 13-hour operation, Reuters journalists saw the baby, her head swathed in bandages and body wreathed by tubes, in an intensive care ward. A separate twin sister, Noora, is healthy after initial problems with the birth on March 30.
Yes, the article has pictures. I guess you really can't be "identical" twins when one of you has an extra head.
War makes men become the evil they set out to destroy. Before you click the link be warned: it contains extremely graphic, stomach-turning photos snapped by US soldiers of dead and (sometimes posthumously) mutilated Iraqis, with mocking captions. I'm having trouble making much moral distinction between this and the beheading videos that make their way out from the other side.
This is not a case of a few "bad apples." This is what the carnage of war can do to otherwise perfectly normal people. It robs people of their humanity and turns them into monsters.
(Via Raed, where you can read through the comments to see the same dehumanization taking hold of people here.)
The world's fastest oscillating nanomachine straddles the line between the worlds of classical and quantum physics. It's about a tenth as wide as a human hair, composed of 50 billion atoms, and vibrates a billion and a half times a second. Because the nanomachine is relatively large, the Boston University physics grad students who built it can attach electrical wiring to it, allowing them to detect motion on the molecular level. It's by far the largest object to exhibit quantum motion.
At a certain frequency, the paddles begin to vibrate in concert, causing the central beam to move at that same high frequency, but at an increased and easily measured amplitude. Where each paddle moves only about a femtometer, roughly the diameter of an atom's nucleus, the antenna moves over a distance of one-tenth of a picometer, a tiny distance that still translates to a 100-fold increase in amplitude. [...]
The group carries out the experiments under extremely cold conditions, at a temperature of 110 millikelvin, which is only a tenth of a degree above the absolute zero. When cooled to such a low temperature, the nanomechanical oscillator starts to jump between two discrete positions without occupying the physical space in between, a telltale sign of quantum behavior.
I'm amazed that we can even observe and measure things on that scale.
Laughing at a complete stranger's possibly serious injury is ignoble and cruel, betrays a pitiable lack of empathy, and is probably inadvisable on a karmic level. But sometimes it's funny (14.5MB video).
I saw something remarkably similar to this once before, and the dog went straight to the vet.
Two NASA researchers say they have found strong evidence of currently existing subterranean life on Mars.
(related)
Why are the pretty ones always insane?
Some Jenna Elfman fans were startled by what the star had to say in a recent issue of Scientology's magazine Celebrity. The former star of "Dharma and Greg" is a devotee of the controversial religion, whose members also include Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
"I intend to make Scientology as accessible to as many people as I can. And that is my goal," Elfman said. To do this, she says, it is my "duty to clear the planet." By "clearing" she means to rid the world of "body thetans" - aliens who Scientologists believe inhabit the earth from a nuclear explosion 75 million years ago.
Funny when you first read it, but decidedly creepy once you dig a little deeper.
The guys at Unfogged have added an author, and the newest blogger there is the only one of the five to be packin' ovaries. You might think that addition would raise the level of decorum there, but you'd be wrong, and thankfully so. Anyhow, the true import of the expansion isn't that they picked up a woman, but that they picked up a native Southerner. Now, maybe you think that doesn't matter so much in the vast anonymous world of the internets, but once again, you'd be wrong, and thankfully so. Because really, who else but one of us crackers would have stories like this?
I wasn't actually there that time Lonnie asked my step-mom to help put flea spray on their cat "Lucky." If I had been, maybe I'd have been the one to notice it was a spray bottle of "Easy-Off" oven cleaner, and saved everybody a lot of trouble, but to be honest, I probably wouldn't have.
You will, of course, need to read the entire post to get the full effect, but for now let's just say the cat wasn't called Lucky any more after that.
You've all probably read about this already, and I'm sure most of you have spent more than a little time trying to pin down the story behind the story, which I am certain is deliciously byzantine. But just in case you have been on an island or something and somehow missed all the excitement:
His Highness Sayyid Asa’ad bin Tariq Al Said, president of the Oman Equestrian and Camel Federation (OECF), has appointed Sheikha Najia bint Khalaf bin Mubarak Al Ma’awali, as his deputy for equestrian affairs. Sayyid Asa’ad issued the decision on Sheikha Najia’s appointment yesterday.
He also issued other decisions appointing Sheikh Said bin Abdullah Al Roshdi as OECF secretary-general and supervisor of camel affairs, Farouq bin Saleh Al Adawi as OECF technical expert, Nasir bin Mohammed Al Wahaibi as director of administrative and financial affairs, Khalid bin Mohammed Al Saifi as acting director of equestrian affairs, Hamad bin Ali Al Saadi, as acting director of camel activities affairs, Adil bin Isa Al Balushi as acting director of technical affairs and Najma bint Said Al Sariri as acting director of information and public relations. (via)
I know, I know - the supervisor of camel affairs and the director of camel activities affairs are going to be all up in each other's face, 'cause you know how those two guys are. Grab the popcorn and the beers and pull up a chair. This is going to be a show. I'll bet all the equestrian guys are so relieved not to be in that snakepit, especially this far into the racing season.
The niyabat of Al Sinainah in the wilayat of Al Buraimi will host on February 16 and 17 the ninth leg of the annual private camel race festival which is organised by the Royal Camel at the Royal Court Affairs. The race will be held under the auspices of Dr Khalifa bin Hamad Al Sa’adi, wali of Al Buraimi. He will give away prizes to the winners. On February 16, there will be 12 races and on February 17, there will be five races.
The wilayat of Hima in the Wusta region will host the 10th leg of the festival on February 23 and 24, while the wilayat of Al Mudhaibi will host the 11th leg on March 2 and 3 and Al Faleej camel race track in the wilayat of Barka will host the concluding stage of the festival on March 22, 23 and 24. The camel race festival in which Omani pure Arabian thorough-bred camels took part began in the wilayat of Thumrait on September 22, 2004, and continued in the wilayats of Al Masana’a, Al Qabil, Ibri, Mahut, Manah, Saham and Ga’lan Bani Bu Ali
That's a lot of camel racing, you know. But don't think that's all that's going down in Muscat these days. Not by a long shot. The tearooms are all a-twitter with anticipation and that can only mean one thing. You guessed it: Crazy Mohan's coming to town!
Take a big amount of imagination, add huge measures of talent and a wee bit of story, stir in extra-large doses of clean humour and what you have is an uproarious comedy that is a sure-fire winner — the kind that Crazy Mohan whips up with unfailing regularity much to the delight of his hordes of fans who do not seem to have enough of his rib-ticklers. Now this czar of comedy is all set to take the Tamil audience in the Sultanate on a non-stop voyage of laughter on February 18 with two of his hugely popular plays, Marriage Made In Saloon and Jurassic Baby.
Crazy Mohan, whose very name spells the ultimate in stage humour, can be credited with redefining the concept of comedy on Tamil stage. He ushered in a fresh era in Tamil theatre with his very first full-length play, Crazy Thieves in Palavakkam, that he scripted in 1976. Such was the tumultuous reception for this play that ‘Crazy’ came to be permanently prefixed to his name. Since then this qualified engineer has come to be known as one of the most versatile and gifted creators.
Dude. Crazy Mohan. It almost doesn't seem fair.
I am so utterly amazed that I'm at a loss for words, but that's okay because The Poor Man already said it. I've not written a word about the Jeff Gannon story except for one mention, on January 28th. I listed him as a possible fourth point in an emerging straight line that included Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Michael McManus, a line that was clearly composed of journalists who were de facto employees of the White House. Now, this was about a day after David Brock first posted anything about Jeff Gannon. We didn't even know he was really James Guckert yet. All most of us knew about him was that he was a baldheaded guy who asked questions like, "Youguysrockyouguysrockyouguysrock, do you have a comment?"
I called that post "Whores".
You cannot imagine how badly my sides hurt right now. Nor can you imagine how badly I wish I had written this post. I didn't, but godamighty:
CORRECTION: Hacktacular White House reporter Jeff Gannon is not, in fact, a man-pimp, as we had previously reported. He is actually a self-pimping e-he-whore. (Link not safe for work, or dinner.) The Editors apologize to Mr. Gannon for the error.
Everyone is still missing the point of the story. The story is not, as nitwits like Howie Kurtz maintain, that people are being mean to someone just because he's conservative. The story is not that Gannon is a hypocrite for promoting an anti-gay agenda. The story is not even that the White House gave such access to a reporter for a dummy news service operating under an assumed name, and may have used him to expose Valerie Plame. This is not the story.
The story is that God exists.
Think about it: what are the chances that a media whore like Gannon would turn out to be an actual whore? It's impossible. It boggles the mind how infinitely unlikely this is. It's like if you found someone pirating CDs, and it turns out he actually had a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and sailed around the Caribbean saying "arrrrrr!" and plundering booty. You wouldn't believe it. But there it is: impossible, but true. Impossible truths are miracles, and only God can work miracles. Ergo, God exists. Q.E.D.
I feel like a minor prophet. Thank God (yes, You) that I've been hedging my bets and calling myself agnostic for lo these many years. If you follow the links up there, you will find yourself in naked man porno land. To be specific, you will find yourself in hire you a naked man porno land, and to be more specific still, hire you a naked James Guckert porno land. I'll tell you now, even as a straight man: James Guckert was hot back in the day. I'd look twice.
Now the websites? Hell, I don't give a good godda--, uh, I mean, I don't care at all that the internet - WHICH IS FOREVER - has all these archives of his websites back when he was, uh, open for business as a "part-time Marine." I have friends with pictures like that on the internet. Sometimes they're football players in the pictures. Whatever. I have friends that have been prostitutes. Not my scene exactly, and it isn't like they're proud of it, but we're all still friends and it just isn't my place to judge, so I don't. 'Course they ain't working for the folks what rode homos-is-icky to federal incumbenthood and are appointing, you know, judges. So, apples and oranges.
All the same, if I had written this as a short story, the tale would have been dismissed by any critic worth his pen as pedantic, overwrought, and too improbably perfect to be even remotely believable. You'd have thought it; I'd have thought it. And yet, and yet, oh my dear sweet Jesus, and yet it happened. Just a closer walk with thee. Was blind, but now I see. Praise the Lord.
Scientists at UCLA are using HIV to hunt down melanoma.
The UCLA team employed a two-step approach to transform HIV into a cancer-seeking machine. First, the scientists used a version of HIV from which the viral pieces that cause AIDS had been removed. This allowed the virus to infect cells and spread throughout the body without provoking disease. [...] Second, the scientists stripped off HIV's viral coat and redressed it in the outer suit of the Sindbis virus, which normally infects insects and birds. By altering the Sindbis coat, they reprogrammed the AIDS virus, which ordinarily infects T-cells, to hunt down and attach to P-glycoproteins -- molecules located on the surface of many cancer cells.
"P-glycoproteins cause big problems by making the cell resistant to chemotherapy," said Chen. "They act like soccer goalies and punt therapeutic drugs out of the cancer cell. This prevents the drug from taking effect and allows the tumor to continue growing unchecked."
In order to track the carrier's journey, the scientists added luciferase – the protein that makes fireflies glow – to the AIDS virus. [...] When the researchers held the mouse under the camera, the luciferase illuminated the cancer cells, which glowed through the animal's bones, muscles and fur.
And an international team led by the Mayo Clinic has figured out how to transform the measles virus into a virus that eats only cancer cells.
Using bioengineering techniques, the team reprogrammed the measles virus to seek a cancer cell to bind to instead of its natural binding partner. Then they invented a "molecular tag" that they attached to structures on the outside of the cancer-seeking measles virus. This tag is the key innovation of their work and central to the success of the team's investigation. It enables researchers to grow retargeted measles virus on special "universal substrate cells" -- while at the same time conserving the viral component for targeting and destroying tumors. Mass production of a retargeted virus was not possible before this specific innovation of the molecular tag -- and research in this area was at an impasse. Not any more.
Next up, using bromidrosis to cure social anxiety disorder.
Okay, I'll admit it: when I scoffed at Bush's claim to be "a uniter, not a divider," that was nothing more than smug liberal condescension and I've been given my one up on that count. So far, he's managed to make allies of: France, Germany, and Russia, then Iraqi Ba'athists and Islamicists, and now, perhaps most unlikely of all, Iran and Iraq.
When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick handover to handpicked allies in a secular government that would be the antithesis of Iran's theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's regional ambitions. But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts say.
And, of course, all that non-stop uniting abroad is having a trickle-down effect here at home as well, as all of us Hollywood-morality-having, religion-hating, fetus-killing, gay-agenda-enacting liberals have found common cause with Islamic extremists bent on re-establishing the caliphate. I wouldn't have believed it myself if Glenn Reynolds hadn't wistfully informed me that it was true.
Ooh my little burqa'd one, burqa'd one.
When you gonna give me some time, Sharia?
Spacetramp links to some very cool 3-D images captured by the British Royal Navy's HMS Scott of the ocean floor at the spot of the earthquake that triggered the massive, deadly tsunami.
At depths of up to 5,000 metres, Scott found evidence of massive disruption, with faults many kilometers long and several hundred metres high associated with landslides as the Burma and Indian tectonic plates collided, causing a huge release of energy which was transferred by the ocean itself to the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, with Indonesia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka being particularly hard-hit.
Cracks six miles wide at some spots. That's one hell of a collision. This slashdot thread contains links to the entire PowerPoint presentation delivered by the ship's captain, but it's a 38MB behemoth. You have been warned.
Then, of course, there is this, found via The Poor Man via Big Picnic via Abu Aardvark via Matt McIrvin via Mr. Wright.
Over at Unfogged, Silent Bob breaks his silence and links to what is perhaps the greatest blog post ever.
An Oregon man who recently moved from Northern California has been arrested on suspicion of soliciting women and children on the Internet for a Valentine's Day mass suicide on the lawn of his parents' home. [...] So far, sheriff's investigators have identified several individuals who planned to travel to Klamath Falls for the mass suicide. Krein solicited as many as 32 people for the event, authorities said. Investigators at the sheriff's department have subpoenaed chat room conversations and user names from Yahoo and say they are racing the clock to identify as many people as possible before Monday.
He must be awfully pissed off at his parents.
If you really loved me, you'd pony up the bucks for Callicebus apostromonkey.
The animal, a variety of titi monkey of the genus Callicebus, was first spotted in 2000 in Madidi National Park in Bolivia. Observations made since then convinced the discoverers - Dr. Robert Wallace of the conservation society; Humberto Gomez, a Bolivian biologist; and two Conservation Society volunteers, Annika and Adam Felton - that the monkey was a new species. Their paper describing the animal has been accepted by taxonomic authorities.
Ordinarily, the person who discovers a species has the right to name it, and species have often been named for people who supported research or financed an expedition. In this case, Dr. Wallace said in a telephone interview from Bolivia, the discoverers decided to seek a benefactor after the fact, in an online auction that would both raise interest in Madidi park and funds to help manage it.
"We have no idea how much money this can generate," he said of the auction, which begins Feb. 24 at www.charityfolks.com. "We're looking for someone who wants to make a lasting contribution to one of the most important protected areas of the world."
Yeah, well maybe that's what they are looking for, but I'm looking for somebody who will name a monkey after me. Come on, I don't put ads on this blog or anything. Buy me a monkey. Unfortunately, I suspect that when all is said and done, it will probably end up being called Microsoft Monkey XP.
In Fairbanks, the Alaskan Alpine Club has constructed a 111-foot (and still growing) ice sculpture using essentially a pimped-out sprinkler system.
Check out the photos of the process. Here's the one they built last year.
Wow. And to think I get all excited when we get a whole inch of snow here.
Arthur Miller has died at the age of 89.
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
This makes my skin crawl. The only difference is that Riefenstahl was much, much better at the artistry.
(via fantastic planet)
A wild turkey who lived life in the fast lane near this eastern Iowa town has died doing what he did best - chasing cars. The turkey, called Chuck by some and Jake by others, showed up more than a year ago and starting harassing drivers by standing in the road with his feathers ruffled. Neighbors say the turkey was run over Jan. 31 by a car flying through town that no one recognized. They buried him.
Apparently, he would stand aside for tractors, but would stand his ground against cars and semis. Go figure. Strange animals, turkeys. They are one of the fastest flying game birds on Earth, 'til you domesticate them and breed all their brains into their chests. The website for Wild Turkey Bourbon has a page of sound files of turkey vocalizations, if you're into that sort of thing.
Update: In the comments, Ru has the fitting eulogy: "Aww. Bye Chuck, you poor confused menace. Sorry, everyone was too entertained to relocate you."
Given that its golden age was four to five decades ago, the steady drumbeat of obituaries for legendary jazzmen is hardly surprising, and the ones leaving now are doing so after long, full lives, but it still makes me sad. Jimmy Smith was the Hammond Organ. Few performers have ever so thoroughly defined their specific instrument and he changed the sound of jazz and rock as much as anybody in the profession.
This has already been linked far and wide, but in case you somehow missed it, get thee hence now and read My Little Golden Book About Zogg.
1. Why were there no female teachers looking for hot teen boy action when I was one?
2. When did they start looking like this (or this)? Holy moly!
I know, I know, abuse of authority, yadda yadda yadda, but tell me that kid's friends don't consider him a hero.
Spray me harder, baby. Harder! Yes, yes, yes!
Young women with low libido had good sex more often after using a testosterone spray, Australian researchers said on Thursday. The spray, designed by Australian group Acrux Ltd. and being developed by U.S.-based Vivus Inc., has previously worked on women who have passed menopause, who typically have low testosterone. However, investigators said the company may be able to win approval for its product more easily by targeting young women, where the spray would take testosterone back to normal levels.
"This is a very different ball game," [...] said head investigator Susan Davis.
Good news for the women who need it, though the article is unclear on how the spray improves upon the over-the-counter liquid formulation.
Was Popeye smoking the wacky weed? It's a fair question, and the circumstantial evidence seems pretty strong. I don't really know what to make of this, though:
So in this context, the use of phrase, "I yam what I yam," can be seen as a reference to Popeye's use of the burning cannabis bush, which creates his higher awareness of the self-reflective nature of the Godhead.
Ummmm, okaaay. Also, Olive Oyl's first fiancé was named Ham Gravy.
I came across a page of "Bible Recipes" via blort and felt I should share. Oh, there's a few serious ones in there - Bulgar Rolls with Raisins and Onions, Unleavened Bread, et cetera, but then things take an unexpected turn. Most of the entries are not so much recipes as parables via dessert. Sort of. You've got your basics like Obey Donuts and Popcorn Praises:
Tell the children (or Youth and even Adults!) that we must obey God's Commandments and God's rules. The donut represents the letter "O" in obey. Let them know every time they have a donut, they are reminded to OBEY!
[...]
Show the children the unpopped popcorn and tell them that the kernels are like children who haven't found Jesus. [because you can't bite through them 'til the fires of Hell make them explode? -'r] Without the warmth of God's love they haven't burst to life.
Pop the popcorn.
When God's love warms our hearts we burst with happiness, and praises to Jesus burst out of us. We can't help but tell others how much we love Him and how great we think He is.
Eat the popcorn.
And you've got your more fanciful ones like Jesus Walks on Water (Sour Patch kids on top of cups of blue Jello) and Moses Parts the Red Sea Snack (red Jello, natch, and "Gold Fish snack crackers or gummy fish as the crackers get soggy"). Pretty straightforward so far, but then it gets... odd.
Throughout the recipes, Jesus is represented by a marshmallow a disturbingly large number of times (usually because they disappear when cooked - the crescent roll tomb is empty!), and I really have to question Sister Miranda feeding kids pieces of paper and magnets. I think that would make baby Jesus cry. I hope she was following the one-magnet rule. But I'm getting sidetracked here.
Old Scripture Cake is equal parts recipe and puzzle, and at the end you drizzle with it Burnt Jeremiah Syrup, which makes it worth the price of admission all by itself for me. My absolute favorite, though, would have to be the Easter Story Cookies. They're crucifilicious, and include instructions like:
Place pecans in zipper baggie and let children beat them with the wooden spoon to break into small pieces. Explain that after Jesus was arrested, He was Beaten by the Roman soldiers. [Take that, Jesus! Pow! Pow! Pow! -'r] Read John 19:1-3.
Sprinkle a little salt into each child's hand. Let them taste it and brush the rest into the bowl. Explain that this represents the salty tears shed by Jesus' followers, and the bitterness of our own sin. Read Luke 23:27.
Mo-o-o-o-m, Timmy got to scourge the eggs last time. It's my turn! Very Calvinist cookies, those. If that's a little dark for you, like maybe you're Church of Christ or something, the Resurrection Cake is a little more upbeat and provides considerably more room for artistic license. Here are the last two instructions in the recipe:
Cut a hole on one side of the cake and put ding dong on one side of the hole.
Color the coconut green and place as grass on and around cake and or smash some shred wheat for weeds or anything else you would like to use direct with maybe some pre made icing flowers you could use white icing and or write on top of cake or on ding dong "HE IS NOT HERE". Or anything else you can think of.
My inner Beavis won't let me get through that first sentence without laughing and I find that the last bit is best read aloud after a pot or so of coffee. Kum ba yah and bon appetit, y'all.
Oh yeah, missionary dating, too.
Ogged thinks Unfogged could hang with Apostropher in the "most cock jokes per blog" department. Pshaw. The truth is, we're both pikers compared to Wonkette, but then she's female and as we all remember from the 6th grade, girls only have to do push-ups on their knees instead of their toes. So, apples and oranges. Anyhow, just to drive the point home, two Deep Throat news stories in one day!
First, from the Washington Post, John Dean reports that the Watergate source known as Deep Throat is ill and one of the most closely guarded secrets in Washington may yet be brought to light. Then, Catherine MacKinnon informs a roomful of gay men that deep throating is impossible without the aid of hypnosis and hilarity ensues.
While we're at it:
Johnson just happy to be in the mix - "Make no mistake, I'm not just here for the ride," he said. "I've come here and I mean business."
Johnson Outdoors is all wet - "Johnson Outdoors has also been distracted throughout the last year by its 'going private' deal."
Sven: I could not ignore Johnson - "Johnson has a steely determination to make an impression."
Johnson has right shoes for big night out - "I'm not expecting to play and I'm just going to enjoy the experience."
Timberwolves sign John Thomas - "He was cut in training camp."
Dick points west for 2005 - "Westpoint has revitalised, rejuvenated and revved up Dick Johnson Racing." I kid you not.
Update: Iain Stables Says "Balls" To Dick Hubbard - "Sadly, in a show of reckless disregard, the Auckland City Council snapped the pole off this morning at 8:15am, right in the middle of a game."
Rod on a rise with golden damper - "The horse reminded him of the one he used to have and he hated to think it may be abused in its old age."
Penis Hammered Off Baggage Handler Statue - "A plate was installed over the genitalia, then was removed because it drew attention to the groin area and looked silly."
Parts missing from River Princess: Willy - "Dr de Sousa said that he has already instructed the police not to allow any rave party in the beach areas."
The Vatican will soon announce that all instances of the word "Pope" appearing in the media shall be preceded by the word ailing.
Pope John Paul II, recovering from flu in hospital, has missed Ash Wednesday services at the Vatican for the first time in his 26 years as pontiff. US Cardinal James Stafford presided at services on the Pope's behalf.
The Pope has spent the last nine days at Rome's Gemelli hospital - making just one appearance on Sunday to give his regular blessing to pilgrims. But a Vatican spokesman has raised hopes that the 84-year-old pontiff will soon be able to leave hospital.
You know, at this point, I'm starting to believe that God's just playing with him, like a cat with a wounded mouse. Let this poor fellow retire, already. It really isn't funny any more.
AllChristianMortgage.com picked the right guy's inbox to spam, because I'm gonna goose your googlejuice, brothers. If I'm using unfamiliar terminology, don't worry: the googlejuice-goosing prohibition in Leviticus got totally overruled in Acts 'long about the same time as the shrimp one. The whole usury thing, though...
Hmm. That's a tough one. I think you're stuck there. But here's the bigger question: could you get a big enough all-Christian loan to buy an island and set up your own Christian micronation, so that this guy could quit getting hassled by the fuzz for auto-crucifying? That would be cool. And you know all these guys would feel obligated to come visit, so it isn't like you'd never get to throw a party.
Great moments in communication: first this, then this, then this.
Stunning, ain't it? I'd feel better if I thought he was some kind of evil genius affecting a hokey exterior. But he so clearly isn't. He really is, let the evidence show, just a garden variety idiot whose hokey exterior is exactly as deep as he gets, ever. Still evil, but all the same, it's so disillusioning. We can't even elect a really competent villain, and my standards are low, baby. I'm not asking for Nixon-level, hell, not even Ed Meese. I'll start the bidding at a firm grasp of subject-verb agreement and maybe you could even haggle me down. I can't tell you how completely disappointed I am in America. A nation full of C- students got together and elected one of themselves principal. They'll get exactly the school they deserve.
European scientists believe that the sudden and steep decline in the incidence of leprosy during the 14th and 15th centuries may have been a result of the rise of tuberculosis, though not in the way we'd previously thought. The traditional belief was that TB provided some sort of protection against leprosy, as both are caused by related bacteria and a TB vaccine was sometimes effective at blocking leprosy as well. However, a new forensic study of remains has led them to reformulate that theory. Leprosy is only passed on through extended, close contact and the new thinking is that the more virulent TB simply killed off already weakened leprosy sufferers before they could pass the disease along. 8.2 million new cases of TB were diagnosed in 2000, while only 515,000 cases of leprosy were diagnosed in 2003, mostly in SE Asia.
On an extremely loosely related tangent (because that's the kind in which I traffic), the early reviews for the video-game adaptation, Alone in the Dark, are cementing its spot as one of the worst movies ever filmed. How did I get there from an epidemiology post? Among the slings:
"Saying Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark is better than his 2003 American debut House of the Dead is akin to praising syphilis for not being HIV."
Other winners:
"As video game adaptations go, even Pong: The Movie would have a lot more personality."
"The three stars have seen better days, but I'd like to think they could still do something classier and more dignified than this. Like gay porn."
"Terrible beyond belief, like the worst 1940s serial ever made. As for Slater and Dorff...well, they've been in worse movies--wait a minute, no they haven't."
"When the giant, intelligent bees of the future sift through the ashes of our civilization, they will find Alone in the Dark, and they will understand. It's so bad it's postmodern."
Science has found the secret, guys. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to lactate.
Tonya Harding, then and now.
She says she makes "a small living" from boxing. According to published reports, she makes up to $25,000 per professional fight. The "Bad Girl" label doesn't bother her, either. "Everybody always knows me as the bad girl," she says. "So it's like, everybody else has made money, why shouldn't I?"
[...] Harding has set up a website for her fans -- therealtonya.com -- in part because she was irritated that another so-called "official website" features pornographic fantasies about her. "I have nothing to do with it and I've been trying to have it shut down for the last five years," she says. "Somebody's made over $5 million from my name to go to pornography sites and put my head on morphed bodies. I mean, do you think I'd be a boxer if I had boobs the size of those things?"
[...] Truth be told, Harding would rather not get in the ring. She's already had her nose broken, and there's a hint of sadness as she speaks candidly, one on one. This boxing show has an uncomfortable traveling-circus feel to it.
"Well, you know what? I've got to earn a living," says Harding. "I've got to pay bills, and at least I'm doing it and I'm not in debt. I'm not borrowing money. I'm working hard. I'm not selling my body. I'm not posing for anything. I'm doing something respectable. [...] Being the butt of jokes, she says, no longer bothers her. "Who cares?" she says. "I've heard them all."
Criminy, wouldja look at the arms on her?
(via boingboing)
Do check out Kevin Hayden's long-in-the-making States Writes directory, where you can find your local progressive bloggers. Unless you're either of those lonely fellows in Wyoming or Nebraska.
In a world only he can see, that is.
Speaking of doctors, physician-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a new member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was at last week's meeting on a bill restricting class-action suits. "You know," he said, "I immediately thought about silicone breast implants and the legal wrangling and the class-action suits off that. And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier."
Breast implants make you healthier! Oklahomans, where the hell did you find this guy?
Pakistan: "Seventeen people, including four children, were killed and more than 600 injured during the annual kite-flying festival of Basant in Lahore on Sunday."
A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales beating England at rugby, the Daily Mirror reported Tuesday. Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win Saturday's match he told fellow drinkers at a social club, "If Wales win I'll cut my balls off," the paper said.
Friends at the club in Caerphilly, south Wales, thought he was joking. But after the game Huish went home, severed his testicles with a knife, and walked 200 yards back to the bar with the testicles to show the shocked drinkers what he had done. Huish was taken to hospital where he remained in serious condition, the paper said.
Sounds like a job for Neuticles.
Bush says his proposed budget would cut the deficit in half in five years, but only if you use completely imaginary numbers. First, you start with the existing deficit of $521 billion dollars, which was the amount of the deficit on, ummm, never. That figure was an inflated initial "guess" the administration put out last year, then claimed to have already reduced the deficit when the actual figure came in lower. See, I actually lost a hundred pounds last year because I said I'd weigh three hundred by now. And I did it all by eating fistfuls of bacon and surfing the web! I'm available, Congressional Budget Office. Call me.
It gets better, though. Guess what costs aren't included in the budget projection? For starters, military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those have only run about $300 billion dollars so far. Let's see, what else? Oh! The costs of his proposed Social Security reform.
As for Social Security, Bush's team has put out a number for transition costs - $754 billion over 10 years - but says they announced that number after the budget books went to the printers, too late to include it.
Convenient, that. Helps that deficit number to just leave that out. Senator Kent Conrad (ND), the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee called the budget proposal a "hoax," which is putting it about as politely as possible. Sadly, this hoax is typical. Remember when the Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint? No, I don't either. Then of course, there's this.
The budget released this week cheerily shows deficits dropping from a peak of 3.6% of GDP in 2004 to 3.0% next year and just 1.5% in 2009. But even assuming everything goes well for Mr Bush, several things will make this nigh-impossible. AMT reform will have to begin well before 2009 if a middle-class revolt is to be avoided, and is not included in the administration's calculations. Nor are future supplemental costs for Iraq and Afghanistan.
And after 2009 is when it gets really hard again. That is when Mr Bush’s tax cuts, if made permanent, start to get very expensive, costing over $1 trillion between 2011 and 2016. It is also when the transition costs of Social Security reform would kick in. None of this shows up in Mr Bush’s deficit projections because they look ahead only five years, not the traditional ten. Perhaps he does not dare peek ahead beyond 2010. Or, since he is leaving office in 2009, perhaps he does not care.
Bingo.
You have nothing to lose but your pants. Here's a story you don't see every day.
Dare to struggle, dare to win ... as married gays. After raiding a few Army camps, two communist guerrillas hid in a forest gorge and fell in love. Deeply.
That was three years ago. On Friday, under a romantic drizzle in a muddy clearing in Compostela Valley province in Mindanao, Ka Andres and Ka Jose exchanged vows in a heavily guarded ceremony before local villagers, friends from the city and their comrades in arms. They are considered the first homosexual couple in the New People's Army who were wed by the Communist Party of the Philippines.
It's actually a pretty charming story. (via MoFi)
Bob Park looks at the numbers.
It's widely expected that on Monday the President's asking budget will only include funds to dump Hubble in the Ocean. What madness compels this act? Hubble, Joe Taylor testified, "is still in the prime of its scientific life." Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Institute, said it's the nation's "most productive science facility." It was designed to be serviced by the shuttle. The James Webb Space Telescope won't go on line before 2011. Even more powerful, we will no doubt come to view JWST with the kind of affection we now feel for Hubble. But long before that happens Hubble is posed to explore dark energy and extrasolar planetary systems. The official explanation for cutting the service mission to Hubble is that, at more than $1B, it's too expensive. Whoa! Lou Lanzerotti testified that it would cost no more than a flight to the ISS, and the nation is committed to 25-30 shuttle flights to the ISS. Would someone tell us what the ISS is doing? And how is NASA paying for 25-30 flights at $1-2B each? Is Ken Lay doing NASA's books?
I was under the impression that the issue was safety rather than cost, but sending humans into space - even in near orbit - is inherently both costly and risky. That's why only the very best and brightest get the job. I can't see any calculation that makes a service mission not worth both the risk and the cost. Either way, it will be terribly sad if the Hubble goes prematurely.
(via Quark Soup)
Good thing they managed to figure this out.
A new study suggests that typical non-smokers' net worth is roughly 50 percent higher than that of light smokers and about twice the level of that of heavy smokers. And that wealth gap grows by about $410, or 4 percent, each year that a person continues to smoke, said Jay Zagorsky, author of the study and a research scientist at Ohio State University's Center for Human Resource Research. Federal statistics on cigarette spending suggest that the wealth reductions are roughly equal to how much smokers spend on their habit.
So they got their grant money, set up the study, crunched the numbers, and figured out that smokers are poorer than non-smokers by roughly the amount that they spend on cigarettes. Who'd have thunk it?
Incidentally, the last pack of cigarettes I bought was in mid-December.
John Edwards has accepted a faculty position at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, as director of the new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. This, of course, was his main rhetorical focus during his presidential campaign and I believe it is where the Democrats should compete for the morals vote, both for electoral and moral reasons. And he showed back up for the first time since his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in, of all places, New Hampshire. Hmm.
He resisted looking back at the reasons he and Sen. John F. Kerry lost the election but quibbled with those who have said the Democrats face a values deficit or that Democrats cannot compete in the South and in rural areas. "We didn't run a campaign in the South," he said. "In the future, it's important for us to compete everywhere in the country."
Democrats, he said, do not need to change their positions to become competitive again. "I just think that trying to figure out how to change our position a little bit on this and a little bit on that is dead wrong," he said. "We ought to stand up for what we believe in, we ought to make clear the country knows what we believe in and what it is we want to do, from Day One."
That theme dominated his speech Saturday evening. "All the political experts since the election have been talking about what the Democrats believe in. Some of them have been saying we don't stand for anything," he said, adding, "We believe in hope over despair, we believe in possibilities over problems, we believe in optimism over cynicism. We believe in doing what's right even when others say it can't be done. And we believe in fighting desperately for those who have no voice in America."
Exactly right, though he deflected any questions about his plans for 2008 (oh, and he had that distracting mole on his lip removed on his doctor's advice). I'm not willing to cede one inch of morality ground to the right. In fact, I think it's time to get in their faces about it.
My newly expanded clan visited my mother, a public high school teacher, this weekend and she was talking about a young, male, very conservative teacher with whom she works that asked her how she could possibly be a Democrat. I think the answer she gave was just about perfect: "Because I started out as a Christian, and when Jesus talked about 'the least of these,' he didn't qualify it with 'the least of these who are worthy'."
Don't mess with the Apostromom. She'll nail your ass to the wall rhetorically without ever losing her disarming smile and calm reasonableness. Other famous rejoinders:
Setup: If you voted your wallet, you'd vote Republican.
Response: I don't vote my wallet, I vote my conscience. You should try it.
Setup: But what did Jesus have to say about homosexuality?
Response: Jesus didn't have anything to say about it; Paul had some thoughts. But you know what? I've talked to God about this and he told me it's okay to believe what I believe.
Take notes, folks. That's how it's done. Remember: the righteous were wrong in Jesus' time, too.
Originally slated for mission lives of about 90 days, both Mars Rovers are still chugging along over a year after bouncing to a landing on the surface of the Red Planet. Huzzah, NASA! So what are the persistent little buggers doing?
Spirit is examining a rock dubbed "Peace," but what's more interesting for armchair astronauts is the 360° panoramic picture it stopped to snap a few weeks ago. The QTVR animation takes a little while to get all the data loaded, but once it's there, you can pivot in a full circle and zoom in and out. Pretty cool.
Opportunity is examining a trench that it dug earlier, and snapped a fantastic picture of discarded heat shield and the nine-foot wide, three-inch deep crater it left on impact.
The Chinese Year of the Rooster begins on Wednesday, ushering the Year of the Monkey into mothballs for another dozen years, but I can't get exercised about roosters unless they're wearing boxing gloves and sensor vests, so I'm sticking with the monkeys. And where better to start than my favorite specialty blog, Monkeys in the News, which has a story of four people being arrested in Britain for the theft of three endangered Cotton-Top Tamarin monkeys. However, it isn't interesting so much for the story as for the accompanying picture.
Do those things look like Photoshop fakes or what? I had to know more because, well, I'm like that about monkeys. The tiny monkeys (seven to twelve inches tall at adulthood, with an extra 12-17 inches of tail) hail by the odd Latin name Saguinas Oedipus and are one of the most endangered primates in the world. Only two to three thousand remain in the wild, and deforestation has shrunk their range to just the northwest corner of Colombia. They generally form monogamous pairs and usually give birth to twins. Family groups of about a dozen members are common and child-rearing is shared among parents and siblings.
Oddly enough, Cotton-Top Tamarins are the only primate other than humans that spontaneously develops colon cancer, making them valuable for research into the disease. They have over thirty vocalizations (mp3 file), and each individual has his or her own unique hairdo. I like monkeys.
I mean really look at them?
Preposterous Universe has the most interesting post I've read in some time. In the 20s and 30s, Heinrich Kluever established four basic classes of hallucinations: spirals, spokes, honeycombs, and cobwebs. If your college years resembled mine, those should ring a bell. We are now discovering that these patterns occur for a specific reason, and expressed mathematically, that reason is roughly:
da(x,φ,t)/dt = -a(x,φ,t) + I(x,φ,t) + ∫ dx' dφ' f(x-x',φ-φ')a(x',φ',t)
Got that? The technical details are likely to make your eyes glaze over and possibly induce a few spirals or spokes, but here's the short version.
Okay, the previous paragraph may or may not have made any sense to you. But here is the punchline: patterns of hallucinations reflect normal modes of the neurons in the visual cortex. By "normal modes" we mean the characteristic patterns of vibration, just as for a violin string or the head of a drum. The idea is that a drug such as LSD can alter the ground state of the visual cortex, so that it becomes excited even in the absence of stimuli. In particular, certain oscillating patterns can appear spontaneously. Generally these would take the form of different configurations of straight lines in the cortex itself; however, due to the distortion in the map from our visual field to the brain, these appear to us as spirals, tunnels, and so on. Indeed, Cowan and collaborators have shown that these normal modes can successfully account for all of the basic forms of hallucination classified by Kluever decades ago.
So, the next time you have a near-death experience, and see a tunnel stretching before you leading to a beckoning light, it's not Jesus calling you into the afterlife. It's just some characteristic jiggling of the neurons in your weakened brain. Which, to my mind, is much more interesting.
(via the new-look Poor Man)
Juan Cole rips Jonah Goldberg a new one.
Jonah Goldberg attacked yours truly in a column recently.
I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.
Read it all. Goldberg has apparently declined to meet and debate Cole on the subject about which the good professor has spent his entire adult life. That's an excellent decision on Goldberg's part, though it is certainly depriving the rest of us the opportunity to see that smarmy doughboy get the intellectual caning he deserves.
One of the truly great purveyors of unintentional comedy, BushCountry.org, is shutting its doors. BushCountry had in its stable some of the most bonkered wingnut conservatives that ever typed an incoherent letter to the editor. We at Apostropher.com shall miss you and the internet will be a saner, less entertaining place in your absence. I'd like to close this eulogy with a quote from one of the last columns by my all-time favorite BushCountry.org columnist, the Reverend Joseph Grant Swank.
Even to the eve of the Iraqi elections weekend, the blinded Massachusetts Senator waved his arms, creased his forehead, clinched his fist, and manipulated a mouth contortion that unspeakably put forth his crazed lack of faith in the Iraqi populous.
Godspeed ye wackjob brigands, godspeed.
Say hello to the star nose mole, a subterranean forager that lives only in swamps and marshlands, and is the fastest eater in the animal kingdom. So fast, in fact, that the human eye can't see it. By constantly tapping its surroundings with the odd-looking, super-sensitive appendages that ring its mouth, the star nose can find 14 times as much small prey as the regular eastern mole in a given time period.
Because they live in darkness, the moles have very poor eyesight. So they continually survey their environment by repeatedly touching the objects around them with their star appendages. Timing the moles' actions, the researchers found that after touching a small piece of food they took an average of 230 milliseconds to identify it as edible and eat it.
The researchers discovered that their subject is not just a super-fast forager, but that it is moving about as fast as its brain and nervous system will allow. They calculate that when a mole touches a new object, its brain has about eight milliseconds to determine whether it is edible. Given the split millisecond timing involved, it is not surprising that the moles frequently make mistakes. In a series of trials where the researchers set out worm sushi, they found that the moles started to move in the wrong direction and had to suddenly reverse themselves one out of three times.
This inefficient behavior suggests that the moles are operating at, or near, the limit set by the speed which the mole's nervous system can process touch information, the researchers conclude.
Unlike other moles, they also have undersized, tweezer-shaped incisors for very precise grasping of small prey, such as insect larvae. All very cool, but still: creepshow.
(via Boing Boing)
Sports Illustrated: North Carolina freshman Marvin Williams made 3-pointers, drove to the basket and did everything in between. He punctuated his coming-out party with a spectacular dunk, where he posed in the air with his left hand behind his head. And it all came after he spent a good portion of the day in bed recovering from the flu.
"He's a freak," teammate Rashad McCants said. Williams had a season-high 20 points, McCants scored 18 and Sean May had another double-double, helping the second-ranked Tar Heels beat North Carolina State 95-71 on Thursday night.
[...]
Later, with walk-ons and other little-used players finishing out the blowout, several teammates were mimicking Williams' move on the bench.
"He is awesome," [NCSU coach Herb] Sendek said. "I don't think there is anything he can't do."
The social conservatives love to impose their abstinence-only sex ed programs and Bush has made them a central part of his proposed education package, so it's only fair to examine just how effective such programs are, right? And the best place to start looking would obviously be in his home state of Texas. So the Texas Department of Public Health decided to check the numbers and, uh, and, uhhh, hmmm.
Houston, we have a problem.
Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President George W. Bush’s education plan, have had no impact on teenagers' behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study. Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University. [...] The study showed about 23 percent of ninth-grade girls, typically 13 to 14 years old, had sex before receiving abstinence education. After taking the course, 29 percent of the girls in the same group said they had had sex. Boys in the tenth grade, about 14 to 15 years old, showed a more marked increase, from 24 percent to 39 percent, after receiving abstinence education.
Catch that, folks? No impact whatsoever on their sexual behavior, except that they don't have the information at hand that might help them keep from getting knocked up or infected. This reminds me of something, but I can't quite put my finger on-- oh, I remember now: those DARE programs that don't do diddly in reducing drug use in schools. Yet, the amount of your tax money being thrown at these types of demonstrably useless feel-good programs continues its unabated upward trend. Why?
"These programs seem to be much more concerned about politics than kids, and we need to get over that," he said.
Yes, that would be the reason.
(via Robust McManlyPants)
Interesting NY Times article about the godfather of psychedelics, Alexander Shulgin, who is nearing 80.
How many countries must a fellow invade before he qualifies for one of these things?
So I pose a question. What are the chances that President Bush will receive the Nobel Peace Prize before he leaves office? I think the chances are very much in his favor. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that unless an unseen catastrophe happens in the region, he will receive the Prize.
Fair enough, but what I want to know is: when is Mr. T going to get that Oscar for Lifetime Achievement?
The LA Times reports that cable provider Adelphia will begin piping XXX-rated movies to customers in Southern California via video-on-demand. Adelphia caused a stir a few years back when they dropped the soft-core Spice Channel from newly acquired networks because the founder of the company, John Rigas, considered such fare immoral. As a better indicator of his personal morality, "Rigas and one of his sons are facing prison terms after being convicted last summer for looting the company and engaging in fraudulent accounting." Predictable. Similarly unsurprising, he donated exclusively to Republican candidates. Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP.
Of course, living all the way across the country from California, the story doesn't have any real effect on me personally, though I did learn a couple things from the article. First, I didn't realize that X, XX, and XXX are actual distinct categories based on what is shown in the film. You can click the link for the specifics on that, if you care. Also, this amusing tidbit:
Playboy is gearing up to supply a variety of programs on demand that will keep subscribers running up the bill. One goal: to increase the seven-minute viewing time historically clocked by the average person who orders an adult pay-per-view movie.
Heh.
I don't even know where to begin with this one.
City health officials are investigating the death of a baby boy who was one of three infants to contract herpes after a rabbi circumcised them. Ten days after Rabbi Yitzhok Fischer performed religious circumcisions on twins last October, one died of herpes and the other tested positive for the virus, according to complaint filed by the health department in Manhattan Supreme Court.
The complaint, reported in Wednesday's edition of the New York Daily News, also said health officials later found a third baby who had contracted herpes after being circumcised by Fischer in late 2003. Under Jewish law, a mohel -- someone who performs circumcisions -- draws blood from the circumcision wound. Most mohels do it by hand, but Fischer uses a rare practice where he uses his mouth.
Go ahead. Try to tell me that our president isn't a complete moron.
President George W. Bush met with the Congressional Black Caucus Wednesday for the first time as a group in nearly four years, but what CBC members said stood out the most was the president's declaration that he was "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in the history of the United States.
At the conclusion of yesterday's 40-minute meeting, Bush - who attended along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - was asked by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-2nd) whether he would support the re-authorization of a portion of the Voting Rights Act that must be approved every 25 years (It will come up for consideration next year).
"I don't know anything about the 1965 Voting Rights Act," Jackson recalled the president saying in an interview with the Chicago Defender.
He said that a hurried Bush went on to say that "when the legislation comes before me, I'll take a look at it, but I don't know about it to comment any more than that, but we will look at it when it comes to us."
[...]As for Rice, Rush said the new secretary of state said "absolutely nothing. She was just there. For what reason, I'm not sure."
C'mon Bobby, we all know why she was there. As for the President of the United States of America being "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act, that is beyond embarrassing. If you voted for this halfwit, you shouldn't be allowed to use a fork without adult supervision; you're going to bleed to death from all those gashes in your forehead.
(via BitchPhD)
Just a quick note for those out there who care. I had two absolutely stellar bottles of wine this past week and if you see them in a shop, you can pick them up knowing they come with the Apostrophic Seal of Approval™.
L'Aventure Optimus Paso Robles 2001 - 47% Cabernet Sauvignon, 45% Syrah, 5% Zinfandel, 3% Petit Verdot. It's about a $50 bottle, but worth every penny. One of the best California Cab blends I've ever tasted, and by gum, I've tasted my share.
Annie's Lane Clare Valley Copper Trail 2000 - 57% Shiraz, 32% Grenache, 11% Mourvèdre. An incredibly polished and subtle blend from Australia that will run you about $20. Probably at the peak of its aging right now and a hell of a bargain at this price.
Winners, boyee, winners. Grab 'em if you see 'em.
I know, I know, some folks simply aren't good spellers and no particular shame should attach to that condition. However. One particularly persistent misspelling is making me break out in hives from its overwhelming presence online. Please, please, please, I beg of you: if you must write in public, or even if you just do it for fun, take a look at the two following words.
They don't rhyme, see? You know what would rhyme with racism? Facism. Unfortunately, facism is not a real word, no matter how many times it is typed. Fascism contains more than one ess, and yes, I will be a fascist about that. Cripes. If you're going to wield such a loaded word, for god's sake, use the real word.
[long exhale, pop a Valium]
Sorry. I just had to get that out. On a barely related tangent, I learned a new word while making sure that facism wasn't another obscure word. Favism: "An acute hereditary condition in which the ingestion of certain species of beans, or the inhalation of the pollen of their flowers, causes fever, headache, abdominal pain, severe anemia, prostration, and coma."
Have no fear, Queer Beer is here!
A trio of Swiss businessmen have launched a new drink for gay people called Queer Beer. Michael Hutmacher, 32, came up with the idea with two friends and has now founded a company, Lemonhead, to market it.
Here's a niche that needed to be filled, because as best as Google and I can figure, the makers of Q Brew, San Francisco's Queer Brewing Company, are no more. On the other hand, the Jesus-hates-you crowd apparently believes that Anheuser-Busch is the official maker of gay beers. Sounds silly to me, but Bud does look kinda cute in that leather get-up at their site.
War Nerd: Super War Preview
Everybody's asking me what'll happen if we attack Iran. To get a quick preview, just do what this guy in my eighth-grade class did: put a firecracker in your mouth, hold it between your front teeth, and light the fuse.
Your friends won't believe you'll go through with it. So when it blows up in your face, you'll expect them to be impressed. And you'll be surprised, just like this guy in junior high was surprised, when all you get is a perforated eardrum and a reputation as the biggest dumbass in the school.
That's the opening laugh line, but the article is meaty and fantastic. A must read.
(via Jim Henley)
If you pay any attention to the NBA, you know that it was the addition of former UNC standout Rasheed Wallace that put the Pistons over the top and brought an NBA title back to Detroit last season. The team visited the White House on Monday and while coach Larry Brown (another Tarheel hoops alum) was gracious, Wallace was, as always, brutally honest.
Asked on Sunday what he would say to President Bush when they met, the Pistons forward told the Free Press: "I don't have shit to say to him. I didn't vote for him. It's just something we have to do."
Heh heh. Same old Rasheed...
