Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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I always have mixed feelings when The Poor Man takes a little posting hiatus. Mixed because I miss reading him, but then when he comes back, he generally returns with guns blazing. Booyah.
The rockinest insane screaming hillbilly one-man band you probably never heard of died on Tuesday. I came across Hasil Adkins' brilliantly wacked-out music when I was a dj at UNC's student station, WXYC, way back in the early '90s and got to see him perform at a long-ago Sleazefest. Allmusic.com's overview says:
A crazed rockabilly one-man band, Adkins has been recording in a tarpaper shack in the hills of West Virginia since the mid-'50s. The absolutely crudest and wildest of all rock & rollers, Hasil's lyrics stray as far from the standard '50s clichés as you can get. Songs about eating peanut butter on the moon, chopping girls' heads off and mounting them on his wall, and doing something called the "hunch" are typical lyrical fare for Adkins. Combining a three-octave voice that can go from sub-glottal Elvis moans to blood-curdling screams with an over-amplified guitar that sounds like a gigantic rubber band, there is nothing in pop music that sounds like Hasil Adkins, a true rock & roll primitive.
Here is an interview with Adkins from Maximum Rock n Roll magazine and, in case you are unfamiliar, an mp3 of his hit, "She Said."
Oh, and it's pronounced like hassle, not hazel.
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who makes large, wind-propelled, skeletal beasts that roam beaches. As the front page of his website explains:
Since about ten years Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.
Click on the 'film' link on the front page there to see how the yellow-tubed beasts have evolved over the years. The more legs it has, the weirder it looks when it moves. However, the monster of the family is the Animaris Rhinoceros Transport, which must be seen to be believed. It's designed for crossing the tundra, and the video at the 'film' link doesn't really do it justice, so make sure you see the one available at this page instead.
The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighes 2 tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.
Thanks for the tip, Will.
Via GoodieBagTV: "Whether you're looking to impress your fellow rednecks or stick 'em in the fucking guts, this belt buckle is for you."
(warning: link is to a 24MB mpeg video - streaming RealMedia is here and the main web site is here, bearing the slogan: "How fast can you whip yours out?")
Via Agenda Bender, I came across bubble tea, a mixture of sweetened iced tea, milk, "and possibly other flavors," with big black gummy balls of tapioca at the bottom. From the wiki:
The pearls are much larger than those found in tapioca pudding, with a diameter of at least 7 millimeters. They are sucked through a wide straw along with the drink, providing something to chew on between sips. Smaller tapioca balls can be used, but they are not as good for chewing. Some adolescents like to blow the tapioca balls out from the straw to shoot at targets or at each other, to the annoyance of adults and bystanders. [...]
Another alternative to traditional bubble tea is to substitute tapioca pearls with coconut jelly, which is a lighter option. Coconut jelly is served in small lego-like pieces and have a sweet, crunchy consistency. They add a new dimension to bubble tea and are often ordered "half and half" meaning half pearls, half coconut jelly.
The tea often accompanies fried chicken steak (雞排; jī pái), also a popular snack in Taiwan.
Crazy. Iced-tea-flavored Orbitz. I know some of you guys are over in Asia and I'm curious: can anybody tell me whether fried chicken steak bears any resemblance to chicken fried steak?
...is no longer in service. Please hang up, check your Number of the Beast, and try again.
Oxyrhynchus, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of modern-day Cairo, rose to prominence under Egypt's Greek and Roman rulers. The town's papyrus-rich garbage heaps were excavated in the late 1890s by two Oxford University fellows, B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt. Researchers have been painstakingly piecing together the Oxyrhynchus papyri fragments ever since.
So far 65 volumes of transcripts and translations have been published by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which owns the collection. The latest volume includes details of fragments showing third- and fourth-century versions of the Book of Revelations. Intriguingly, the number assigned to "the Beast" of Revelations isn't the usual 666, but 616.
Credit to Fantastic Planet for the catch. They've just figured out how to read the long-faded writing on these using a technique called multi-spectral imaging, and there is a whopping lot of stuff to examine, including lost works by Sophocles, Euripedes, and Hesiod.
Oxyrhynchus, situated on a tributary of the Nile 100 miles south of Cairo, was a prosperous regional capital and the third city of Egypt, with 35,000 people. It was populated mainly by Greek immigrants, who left behind tons of papyri upon which slaves trained in Greek had documented the community's arts and goings-on.
Oxford's researchers started salvaging 100,000 fragments of papyri from the town's rubbish dump in 1897 and shipped some 800 containers back to Britain. About 2,000 pieces of the papyri have been published and mounted in glass, but the rest has remained in boxes. According to the current research team, "the mass of unedited material represents the random waste-paper of seven centuries of Greco-Egyptian life."
Some 10 percent of it is literary, the fragmentary remains of ancient books, with the rest documents of public and private life, such as census returns, tax assessments, court records, wills, horoscopes and private letters.
Fascinating. The project's website is here.
Update: In the comments, JPW links to an article by somebody working on the texts in question who says that the hype around this is mostly, well, hype.
...where the buffalo roam.
Police spent about two hours this morning corralling a herd of buffalo that somehow got loose and wandered around an upscale residential community in suburban Baltimore, disrupting traffic and alarming homeowners. Baltimore County police used 13 police cars, members of their tactical unit and a police helicopter to herd the nine animals onto the tennis court of a townhouse complex, police spokesman Shawn Vinson said. Vinson said officers had to master the art of buffalo herding on the job.
More pictures and video at the link.
You're not fat, you're big boned.
A group [...] on Monday launched an advertising campaign aimed at dismissing as hype concerns about the large number of obese Americans. The full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers were inspired by new government data questioning government assertions that obesity causes nearly as many deaths as smoking, according to the Center for Consumer Freedom, which paid for the ads. The group, based in Washington, does not disclose names of its donors, though spokesman Mike Burita said casual dining restaurant chains "are predominant sources of funding for us."
Red Lobster: Better than lung cancer!
"[Maryland] First lady Kendel Ehrlich, in a fiery speech to Republican supporters on the lower Eastern Shore, joined her husband's public fight against newspapers, saying they 'lie' and 'need to be punished'."
She then banged her scepter on the floor, adjusted her crown, and stormed out screaming, "Off with their heads!"
By the dawn's early light, Caroline Marcil finally finished on national TV what she started at a hockey game — a flawless rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Montreal singer was to perform the national anthems of two countries before the United States' 5-4 exhibition victory over Canada on Friday in Quebec City.
Despite two tries, she forgot the words to the U.S. anthem and then left to get the lyrics. When she returned to the rink, she slipped on the carpet covering the ice and plopped on her back before a Quebec Coliseum crowd of 7,166. After lying motionless for a few seconds, the 24-year-old Canadian left on her own and the game began without either anthem sung.
Marcil regrouped over the weekend, when she was invited to appear on ABC's "Good Morning America," where she sang the entire U.S. anthem without a hitch. Marcil said the pressure before the game got to her.
"A mysterious epidemic of organ 'leprosy' is sweeping Europe, corroding pipes and threatening to silence some of the continent's most renowned instruments."
"City officials are perplexed over the discovery of mysterious chunks of flesh that have been clogging up city water lines. A month ago, city officials sent a hunk of meaty-fatty tissue to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources for identification."
"A mysterious new breed of sea squirt found recently in waters in New England and the Pacific Northwest has spread unabated along those coasts and in a vital offshore fishing ground."
"A DNA investigation has solved the mysterious origin of Gibraltar's Barbary macaques, the only free-ranging monkeys in Europe, according to a report on Monday."
"Someone paid $450 to get the recipe for the 'Mystery Sandwich' that has been a staple of Chiodo's menu."
"Sedna, the mysterious minor planet orbiting the Sun beyond the far edge of the Kuiper Belt, is gradually yielding its secrets to planetary scientists."
Mysterious grave baffles cemetery caretakers: "It appeared one day, as if out of thin air. In a cemetery in a rural area of southern Columbia County, something is buried among the marked graves, but no one seems to know what it is."
England's Mysterious Patron Saint: "If there really was a St George, the most likely candidate appears to be George of Cappadocia who sold bacon to the Roman army in third-century Turkey. [...] The bacon business was replaced by heavenly myths and miracles."
Broadway.com: "The Penis Monologues: Men Speak will end its off-Broadway run earlier than expected..."
Pourin' out a 40 of communion wine for my dead homey in Rome, yo.
(thanks, KJ)
Workload this week indicates light posting. For now, enjoy the freakshow.
"You see the toads crawling along the ground, swelling and getting bigger as they go until they are like little tennis balls, and then they suddenly explode."
Pimp my pizza cutter.
17th century death clock: "During the same time, one of the serpents slowly sinks into one of the eye-sockets, while the other slowly comes out of the other eye, just before retracting suddenly as the first serpent springs out from its own eye-socket."
I'll bet Bad Boy Records paid a pretty penny for this ugly-ass cake.
"On our ten year anniversary we're going to take off the next joint, and then the whole finger on our twentieth." And they want children.
"Anatoly Marchevsky, director of the Yekaterinburg circus, said he had first wanted leopards to be the Nazis but that it was easier to design and fit costumes for monkeys."
And the question of the day: what was male-prostitute-turned-White-House-reporter James "Bulldog" Guckert doing on those days he's recorded as showing up to the White House when there were no press conferences?
Get the feeling Earth is not amused?
President Bush's plans to celebrate Earth Day in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were undone by nature on Friday, as stormy weather in the area forced him to cancel and instead speak about the environment from inside a hangar here at the McGhee Tyson Airport. [...] "In the park, had I been there, I would have reminded people today is Earth Day, a day in which we recommit ourselves to being good stewards of the land," he said. "We didn't create this Earth, but we have an obligation to protect it."
Then the ground opened up and swallowed the hangar whole.
I read this somewhere on the internet this morning and now I've no idea where so if I'm denying you the proper credit, I apologize.
What do vegan zombies eat?
GRAAAAAINS!
A Ukrainian team of cavers have gone deeper into the Earth than any human had ever been by caving down 2080 meters (about 1.3 miles) into Krubera, the world's deepest known cave. That's about as far down as the highest mountain east of the Mississippi River (Mt. Mitchell, NC) goes up. This was the first time anybody had passed the 2K meter mark. National Geographic, which helped fund the expedition, will have a full story and photographs in the print version of the magazine, but here are a couple of teasers in the meantime.
At two years after the fall of Saddam and three months after the Iraqi elections, Iraq still has no government. Turns out blowing stuff up is a whole lot easier than putting it back together again. Luckily for the administration, Iraq has mostly been driven off of the front page of the papers. I say luckily because the evidence so far suggests not that we are losing the war there, but that we have already lost it. Today's recommended reading:
And, of course, we are now at $300 billion and counting. But no expressing doubts about the wisdom of the mission, or else the Powerline clowns will come tumbling out of their Volkswagen to brand you a traitor instead of just a hate-filled sicko.
I don't know, but we haven't hit bottom yet. A reader called me to point out this sickening display on Cafe Press.
American political history is often not pretty. But I don't think we have ever experienced anything remotely approaching the current descent of liberals into hate. Not only hate, but weird hate. And it will continue until voters definitively reject the Democratic Party.
UPDATE: Another reader points out this one. There is no depth to which the American left will not sink.
That's right, a webpage of snarky t-shirts made by, um, by, uh, by somebody somewhere shows that we have never experienced anything remotely so hateful in this country's history as modern liberalism. Never ever ever ever. For accuracy's sake, Mr. Hinderaker, you really ought to have ended the post at the word "think."
Good primer on this problem including root technical causes, debris orbit patterns, and mitigation recommendations from ESA.
Via Science Daily.
...[heart] the one you're with. A dustup is breaking out at a Minnesota high school over the word vagina.
Because after Carrie Rethlefsen attended a performance of the play "The Vagina Monologues" last month, she and Emily Nixon wore buttons to school that read: "I [heart] My Vagina." School leaders said that the pin is inappropriate and that the discomfort it causes trumps the girls' right to free speech. The girls disagree. And despite repeated threats of suspension and expulsion, Rethlefsen has continued to wear her button.
The girls have won support from other students and community members. More than 100 students have ordered T-shirts bearing "I [heart] My Vagina" for girls and "I Support Your Vagina" for boys.
As you might expect, the ACLU is on the case. I happen to be a big fan of the ACLU and I think the school is being ridiculous and turning this into a much bigger deal than it would have been had they just ignored it, but this quote from the executive director of Minnesota's chapter gives me pause: "It's political speech."
Again, I support the young ladies' vaginas right to wear the buttons, but I'm having trouble finding the politics in "I [heart] my vagina." As to the boys' shirts, be careful young fellows: enough [heart]ing of a vagina can indeed result in having to support it.
NASA's Deep Impact probe is scheduled to smack into Comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July, allowing astronomers to analyze the inside of a comet for the first time. Unless...
In a lawsuit she filed last month with the Presnensky district court in Moscow, [Russian astrologist Marina] Bai is demanding that NASA call off its $311 million operation, with the spacecraft already in its cruise phase. She also wants 8.7 billion rubles (the ruble equivalent of the entire cost of the mission) in compensation for moral damages.
"The actions of NASA infringe upon my system of spiritual and life values, in particular on the values of every element of creation, upon the unacceptability of barbarically interfering with the natural life of the universe, and the violation of the natural balance of the Universe," Bai said in her claim.
Her suit was denied by the first court that heard it but, of course, Mercury was in retrograde then, so her attorney is expecting better results from the Moscow City Court next month.
They aren't army ants, but the Amazonian species Allomerus decemarticulatus still launch ambushes from foxholes dug into fake tree branches they construct out of plant fibers, regurgitated goo, and a binding fungus that the ants farm. Great pictures of the bizarre behavior at the link.
Tangentially, wingless ants that fly and gay fungus!
If you own a television, you're well-acquainted with McDonald's first-ever global marketing campaign: "I'm lovin' it." Aaron McGruder already noted McDonald's first unsuccessful variation on the slogan, which makes me wonder whether the Golden Arches got punked by a disgruntled advertising agency employee. More recently, Steve from The Sneeze had his lunch receipt affixed to his McDonald's bag with an "I'm lovin' it" sticker, but wasn't convinced that he was actually lovin' it. So he's designed some alternate stickers to convey the complicated range of emotions that may be evoked by the dining experience at Chez Ronald.
Ladies, if you're going to try to hide a stolen cellular phone in your vagina, turn off the ringer.
"Mi nuh wan' dat deh phone fi use again, mi would dash it weh."
I'm not sure how a fellow is supposed to maintain his sense of decency and propriety with so many temptations crammed into a single web page. Bacon, basketball, and high school girls all in one stop? Be still my beating heart.
Dave's not here, man.*
A group of drunk monkeys rampaged through an Indian village after stealing a specially fermented drink. The primates stole the liquor made from marijuana leaves which residents were preparing for a religious festival. Stunned Baralapokhari villagers struck back at the inebriated monkeys with sticks and other weapons and drove them away. Three residents sustained injuries requiring hospital treatment, reports The Times of India.
The intoxicating 'pana' drink had been prepared from marijuana leaves as part of an offering to Hindu gods for the Oriya new year. The villagers had kept it in pots outside their huts, an official said. Monkeys that passed out have since been returned to the forest.
The others retired to the trees to look at their hands and laugh.
How much would you pay for Gary Busey's poop? What about Norman Mailer's urine? Skin cells from Michael Stipe?
Also, for those keeping score at home, Sammy Hagar's urine is $15 while David Lee Roth's fecal matter is $33, but Roth's bacteria is worth a dollar more than Hagar's.
Nurse, could I get a light on this artery here? HEY, NOT THAT KIND!
Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003. The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument. The patient died after the surgery but that was due to heart failure and not the fire, said Dr. Robert Caplan, medical quality director of Virginia Mason.
Presumably being set aflame didn't help the heart condition, though. ("Holy shit, I'm on fire!" beeeeeeeeeeeeep) In related news, Flaming Dr. Peppers may be a bad idea, but the comic potential is enormous.
Physicists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory announced today that they have created what appears to be a new state of matter out of the building blocks of atomic nuclei, quarks and gluons. The researchers unveiled their findings--which could provide new insight into composition of the universe just moments after the big bang--today in Florida at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
There are four collaborations, dubbed BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS and STAR, working at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). All of them study what happens when two interacting beams of gold ions smash into one another at great velocities, resulting in thousands of subatomic collisions every second. When the researchers analyzed the patterns of the atoms' trajectories after these collisions, they found that the particles produced in the collisions tended to move collectively, much like a school of fish does. Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for high energy and nuclear physics, Sam Aronson, remarks that "the degree of collective interaction, rapid thermalization and extremely low viscosity of the matter being formed at RHIC make this the most nearly perfect liquid ever observed."
Some of the observations of the characteristics of the nearly perfect liquid match those predicted for a type of matter called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which is theorized to have existed just microseconds after the big bang. One large discrepancy, however, is that QGP was predicted to behave like a gas. "The current findings don't rule out the possibility that this new state of matter is in fact a form of the quark-gluon plasma," Aronson says, "[it is] just different from what had been theorized."
That's an awful lot of work they have gone to for a "nearly perfect" liquid. Why settle for nearly?
I know I hardly need to point this out to anybody who reads here, but just in case you wanted the numbers at your fingers:
Ninety-four of the 162 active judges now on the U.S. Court of Appeals were chosen by Republican presidents. On 10 of the 13 circuit courts, Republican appointees have a clear majority. And, since 1976, at least seven of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court have been filled by Republican appointees.
Even if Bush wins approval for the dozen disputed nominees who have been blocked by Senate Democrats, only one circuit would change its ideological balance — hardly a seismic shift. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, now evenly divided, would become 10-6 Republican.
So when Alan Keyes starts droning on about the judiciary being "the focus of evil in the modern world," and Bill Frist hoots about "reining in our out-of-control courts," keep those numbers in mind. The religious right is not interested in a conservative judiciary; what they desire is no judiciary, or at least, not one that has the power to rule against them, ever.
And while we're looking at numbers, Andrew Tobias notes:
The Dow is now about 5% lower than it was five-plus years ago when President Bush was selected and we went to more or less total right-wing Republican control. (This is not to tar all Congressional Republicans as rightwing; but you will not find moderate Republicans in the leadership.) In that same time, we have also lost the good will of much of the world and added 35% to our national debt.
But at least we got Bin-Laden.
As far as that goodwill of the world goes, I second Jim Henley: if this is how we treat our closest allies, we are going to have none left in short order.
Suh-weet. You gotta click through 'em all. And, you know, visualize. Don't stop there, though. These guys have lots and lots of visualizations for you. Some of them move, some have sound, and some even get a full chorus.
I found this via The Biomes Blog, and while I always love this sort of thing, the odd Church of the Subgenius vibe (except without all the irony and humor and, in fact, quite earnest instead) made me wonder just who these folks were. Turns out it's a group called The Summit Lighthouse, and I can't believe none of you people have ever told me about them previously. What kind of friends are you, anyhow?
The fortuitously named Mark L. Prophet founded TSL in 1958 after the Ascended Master El Morya contacted him from beyond to take some dictation. For the next 15 years, "Mark L. Prophet gave more than 1,000 dictations from various Ascended Masters, archangels and other advanced spiritual beings," until he stroked out in 1973, at which point his wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, took over and renamed it the Church Universal and Triumphant. Where Mark Prophet was all special on El Morya, Elizabeth Clare seems a little more Saint Germain-oriented. Who's Saint Germain? Glad you asked.
Saint Germain is Chohan of the Seventh Ray, the violet ray, of freedom, alchemy, justice, mercy and transmutation. He is the sponsor of the United States of America and the hierarch of the age of Aquarius, who comes bearing the gift of the violet flame for world change. He tutors and initiates souls in mastery of the seat-of-the-soul chakra, preparing them to receive the Holy Spirit's gifts of prophecy and the working of miracles.
Two of his well-known embodiments were Christopher Columbus and Merlin the magician, a spiritual adept who has unfortunately been mythologized. In a series of recent embodiments from the prophet Samuel to Francis Bacon, Saint Germain was the all-pervasive mind, laying the empirical foundation for an age of enlightenment, pushing back the barriers of limitation in the physical and spiritual sciences. As Roger Bacon he directed and inspired devotees of the sacred science, then in his embodiment as Saint Germain, the Wonderman of Europe, he outpictured the quintessence of the alchemists' dream for all to see.
Excuse me? There are six other Chohans besides and if you click the 'More' link for each, you can see some of the historical figures they have inhabited over the years. Saint Germain, for example, was High Priest of the Violet Flame Temple on the mainland of Atlantis thirteen thousand years ago. Having been not just Francis Bacon, but also Roger Bacon, one presumes he's probably now Kevin Bacon, though they leave that tantalizingly unsaid.
The Summit Lighthouse folks also own the domain name teenage-pregnancy.org, a site encouraging teenagers not to have abortions because of reincarnation. Really.
Throughout the entire nine months of gestation, the soul may go back and forth from her body in the womb to the higher planes of existence in the heaven-world. Each time the soul enters her body she anchors more of her soul substance in that body. As gestation progresses, the spirit, or the essence of the soul becomes a part of the blood and the cells—a part of the brain, the heart and all of the organs. [...] If a soul is aborted, it could be a very long time before it is able to reincarnate (be born again) and connect with the specific people it needs to in order to fulfill its personal mission. We all need to be born at the right time and in the right place, even though it may not seem to be the "right time" to a lot of people.
Odd, odd stuff and you should click the little video links of her speaking on the main site there to get a feel for her strange, affectless delivery about angels and whatnot. It isn't clear when these were recorded because Elizabeth Clare Prophet retired in 1999, citing Alzheimer's. The group's money and rosters had been dwindling since 1990, when Prophet's biggest prophecy failed to materialize:
Primarily due to its doomsday predictions and attempts to establish a self-sufficient community on its 32,000 acre ranch in Montana, the Church Universal and Triumphant has come into considerable conflict with local residents and federal officials alike. The church was propelled into the national spotlight when Prophet predicted a massive Soviet missile strike on the United States for April 23, 1990. She now states that this date did not mean nuclear holocaust, but rather marked the beginning of a 12 year cycle of negative karma for the organization. [I can see how a person might mix up the two -'r] Nevertheless, members from around the world streamed to the group's ranch, paying up to $12,000 each for space in one of the underground bomb shelters built by staff members [and completely bad karma-resistant -'r]. The state of Montana has since banned the church from ever using the shelters again.
While the prediction came and went, the problems remained. On the same day the world was to be rocked by nuclear war, federal officials ordered the excavation of 35 underground fuel tanks which had leaked upwards of 20,000 gallons of petroleum. Eventually, the church removed over 650,000 gallons of fuel from its ranch. Federal authorities again fostered opposition after they tried to revoke the group's tax exempt status and obtain $2.6 million in back taxes. This stemmed from the government's claims that the church had been stockpiling weapons. Sworn statements show that weapons were being purchased as early as 1973, but culminated in 1989 when Prophet's fourth husband, the Vice President of the Church Universal and Triumphant, was arrested and served prison time for assuming the identity of a dead AIDS patient and, under that name, purchased military style equipment for the group. While the church agreed to dispense of its weapons in return for tax exempt status, [what a bargain! -'r] it still allows weapons purchased by individual members to be brought onto the property. A myriad of other claims have also been leveled against the church, ranging from interfering with bison migration patterns to harboring illegal aliens.
Deeply weird. And I still can't believe I'd never heard of them before now.
Scientists Reconstruct Extinct 6-Foot Bug
Mesa police want to add monkey to SWAT team
Pat Robertson's Age-Defying Protein Pancake!
Stacks and stacks and stacks of coins.
Eek.
Gaijin Biker, our in-house reasonable conservative commentator (not to be confused with Big Ben, whose blog is called Gaijin Biker and is our in-house ends-sentences-with-prepositions-on-principle commentator), sent me a link to a page that combines two of my very favorite subjects: monkeys and Engrish. The site is a web page for a nature park in Japan that is home to snow monkeys. Some nice image galleries there above the "Plofiles," but the real fun-with-Engrish page is subtitled The Advent of Spring:
The snow which covered mountains become thaw, and the winter season will be done then we welcome early spring. Its wait impatiently season for the wild monkey.
The excrements of the monkey on the snow are figured a spit dumpling, which like adulterate sawdust and fiber, because of the monkey eats some kinds of rind and bud mainly. When the sunlight is getting much, the river become muddy of melting snow, and the ground gets extent from the foot of a mountain, the excrements of the monkey soon become like people.
Needless to say, it is smaller though. The smell become like the excrement of the horse, and the color is getting green. Because the wild monkey start eating young sprouts, young leaves, young weeds as the trees are beginning to bud. Spring has come for the excrements of the monkey.
We have a winner.
From today's Boston Globe:
In the four years after Michael Schiavo won the right to remove his wife's feeding tube, the state's social welfare agency methodically investigated 89 complaints of abuse, but never found that he or anybody else harmed Terri Schiavo, records released late yesterday indicate.
To the contrary, the state Department of Children & Families, or DCF, repeatedly concluded that Michael Schiavo ensured that his wife's physical and medical needs were met, provided proper therapy for her, and had no control over her money. They also found no evidence he beat or strangled her, as his critics have charged.
I tell you this much: Michael Schiavo is a much bigger person than I am, because I'd be flinging libel suits left, right, and center. Randall Terry's lawyers would never have had so many billable hours in all their lives. Meanwhile, Howard Dean says you're goddamn skippy you'll be hearing Terry Schiavo's name in upcoming elections.
"This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it's going to be an issue in 2008," Dean told about 200 people at a gay rights group's breakfast in West Hollywood, "because we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?' "
Dean, a practicing physician until he became governor of Vermont in 1991, added: "The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?"
This is exactly right. I've watched twenty-five years of Republicans saying Democrats are traitors, anti-Christian, yadda yadda yadda. Now it's our turn. The GOP is the party of religious fanatics that want to allow Pat Robertson and James Dobson to control your life. This argument also carries the advantage of being functionally true. They have made it clear that they will dance like monkeys on strings for those modern-day Cotton Mathers, and even some folks on the right have started to notice it.
While the Schiavo case was winding down to its inevitable resolution, I read ridiculous op-eds like this stunningly crappy analysis from Richard Cohen, suggesting that the Democrats were the big losers in the entire affair. Not a chance. Democrats decided this was in no way a matter for the federal government and, in a maneuver that clearly sailed way the hell over Cohen's head, stayed out of it. Imagine that. There's a word for that: principled. There's also a strategy there, commonly known as don't get in your opponent's way when they are busy cutting their own wrists.
Frist's cozying up to our homegrown Savanarolas is going to be a big, stinky albatross around his neck when he pursues the presidency in 2008. The record since 2000 shows that the GOP talk on smaller government is just that: talk. "In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually [...] No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon." Now they have revealed that the rhetoric about personal freedom is nothing more than rhetoric. And that leaves what for honest Republicans? Habitual distaste for the Democratic Party, I suppose, which is certainly a powerful enough force, but probably not enough to maintain their 2% advantage shown in 2004.
What's that you say? Robertson/Falwell/Dobson don't represent the whole GOP? Oh, gee, I think I've heard that argument dismissed somewhere else previously. Except I never saw the fricking Senate Minority Leader appearing on television with Ward Churchill. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas, people. These aren't peripheral people who occasionally vote for your party. This is your base that you have carefully cultivated and shamelessly pandered to for decades. They aren't yours, they are you. Too late to disavow them now.
Well now, this just doesn't seem fair.
A child whose grandmother smoked while pregnant may have doubled the risk of developing asthma compared to a child whose grandmother did not smoke, according to researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Published in the April issue of the journal Chest, the study suggests that tobacco's harmful effects on the lungs can be passed down through generations, from grandmother to grandchild, even when the child's mother appears unaffected. [...] They hypothesize that smoke can affect the [in utero] child in two ways: First, if the child is a girl, her eggs may be affected, which will in turn put her future children at risk; and second, the fetus' mitochondria may be damaged through subtle changes in which genes are turned on or off – changes that may be transmitted through the maternal line as well.
Cigarette damage may be inheritable? Yikes.
My monthly allotment of bandwidth is 95% gone here on the 15th, meaning I have to go purchase some a la carte gigabytes. Looking through my server logs, I see that a fair chunk of the excess traffic is due to images hosted here being hotlinked elsewhere. I've been pretty sanguine about this up 'til now, but with a new baby, one household salary still on maternity leave, and all the rest, I can't afford profligacy. Also, when the #1 site sucking down the bandwidth like a sailor on shore leave is Free Republic, well, it was fun replacing the unflattering images of Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry they were hotlinking with tubgirl and goatse (if you don't know, google will tell you but believe me, you don't want to know), but that doesn't really solve the bandwidth expense problem, y'know?
This is all to say that I have disabled hotlinking of images. I really didn't mind it with smaller sites but so it goes. One more example of the right-wingers ruining it for everybody. The other upshot is that if you usually read this site through a livejournal friends page, the images won't show up there either. Probably missing from the RSS feed as well, but I'm not sure about that. I guess you'll just have to click the link for the full visuals.
What's taters, precious? What's taters, eh?
The aye-aye is a creature thought so ugly that in its native jungle superstitious villagers beat it to death - but it has become the pride and joy of Bristol Zoo. At first keepers wanted to call this baby Gollum, after its striking resemblance to the anti-hero of The Lord of Rings, but instead decided on Kintana, which means star in Madagascar, where the aye-aye originates.
These extraordinary nocturnal creatures are so rarely seen that they were once thought to have become extinct. Numbers are uncertain and they are listed in the international "red book" of endangered species. Bristol is only one of two zoos in the world which have bred aye-ayes successfully and hopes the lessons learned will help to ensure the species' survival.
(thanks, Tara)
I've been taken to task previously for declaring the GOP the party of theocrats. Well, guess what? It's getting hard to see them in any other light, given stunts like this. First it was questioning their opponents' patriotism, now it's questioning their opponents' Christianity (though this really isn't a new game). Just when you think the national Republicans can't sink any lower, they bust right through the floor.
Now, having actually read and thought about the Bible, I'm aware that it is not my place to judge, but I have a suspicion that if these folks do get to meet their maker in the end, they're going to be very, very surprised at the way their God views this sort of antic.
What happens when a certain freewayblogger manages to grab a surprisingly available domain name? Hilarity ensues, that's what.
The Bible states it plainly in Leviticus: "Man shall not lie with man as he does with woman." So there you have it: Standard Missionary is right out. For the gals: you're off the hook. Anything goes. As far as the Lord's concerned, it's Beaver Season all year 'round.
Go thither, monkeys.
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the auctioning of the naming rights a newly discovered species of Bolivian titi monkey, hoping that one of you dear readers would pony up the cash to name it after me. Surprisingly, none of you cheapskates came through. Obviously, you just don't love me that much, since the winning bid was just a measly $650,000. I ended that post by musing that the monkey would "probably end up being called Microsoft Monkey XP."
I wasn't far off the mark.
A statement from [online casino] GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe suggested the company was looking for a publicity-generating investment more enduring than an item it paid $28,000 for in another online auction last year: a 10-year-old, partly eaten cheese sandwich thought to contain the image of the Virgin Mary.
"This species will bear our name for as long as it exists," Rowe said. "Hundreds, even thousands of years from now, the GoldenPalace.com Monkey will live to carry our name through the ages."
The GoldenPalace.com monkey, one of about 30 species of titi monkeys found in South America, has a golden crown and a white-tipped tail. Its formal name will be Callicebus aureipalatii — Latin for "golden palace."
Don't be surprised in a few years when Notre Dame and Michigan State are playing in the GoldenPalace.com Monkey Bowl.
PZ Myers: "When a developmental biologist starts getting all enthusiastic about vulvas, you know he's thinking about nematodes."
ThinkProgress has launched dropthehammer.org, a site designed to pressure corporations to stop contributing to Tom DeLay's legal defense trust. This is a worthy cause, and predictably, they get letters.
Hey ass hole [sic]. Tom Delay happens to be my congresman [sic] and I am happy with the job he does for me and my district. Why don’t you get the F@&* out of our district and leave us alone. Better yet, come speak to me personally and I will show you what I think of you.
Kevin Cole
Pealrand [sic], TX
[Cell Phone # Redacted]
As Judd points out, Mr. Cole is both a City Councilman in Pearland and a Baptist deacon, though at some point in the last 30 minutes, his picture and bio magically disappeared from the Pearland city government website (the google cache is here), leaving pages for only four of the five City Council slots. Hmm. Nobody should be surprised that he admires Tom DeLay, though, since they both seem to have trouble staying clear of ethics violations.
ScienceBlog: U.S. President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not all get a library, airport or highway named after them. But each has a slime-mold beetle named in his honor. Two former Cornell University entomologists who recently had the job of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles named three species that are new to science in the genus Agathidium for members of the U.S. administration. They are A. bushi Miller and Wheeler, A. cheneyi Miller and Wheeler and A. rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler.
Slate has printed a couple of excerpts from Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by economists Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Monday's excerpt was on the economic effects of having a distinctively black name.
Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black,
