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.
