Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Sure, it's Satan's holiday and all that, but try telling that to a sugar-craving grade schooler. Right. Not a fight you'd take on willingly. Just because you're willing to let their little teeth rot, that doesn't mean you have to let their eternal souls rot as well. Beliefnet has the rundown on this year's religiously-themed candy offerings.
Holy pixie sticks ("The sand art you can eat!") are available from biblecandy.com, who also have five, count 'em, five bible stories you can use with them. You'd think that Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt would be the go-to choice here, but no.
Testamints, available at christiandollarstore.com, are exactly what you'd expect, but they face competition from Scripture Candy Old Fashion Soft Mints and Sweet Messages Meltaways. There can be only one; expect this fight to turn ugly. Bible Bars are touted as the "perfect Abrahamic after-school snack," being modeled on a recipe from Deuteronomy, but after reading the ingredients (wheat, barley, raisins, honey, figs, pomegranates and olive oil), you can count on your house getting egged if you hand them out tonight.
More offerings are listed, including the predictable Noah's Ark Gummi Animals, but being the multicult liberal that I am, I'm drawn to the ecumenical varieties. The Star of David chocolate pops are touted as "the best-looking certified kosher candy," but the prize goes to Halal Crispy Treats.
For Muslim kids, the snack favorite made with halal gelatin. Some panelists found this treat to be "Islamalicious"; a few felt there was "something slightly off" in the flavoring and cited a faint aftertaste. "As a fan of kosher marshmallows, I'm happy to see that Muslims are embracing marshmallows as well," a Jewish taster noted.
Me too, Jewish taster. Me too.
Ol' Jack loved his whiskey, but nothing else. He was the meanest, weaseliest, two-faced scoundrel you ever did meet. And sharp, mind you; why, he tricked Satan himself not once, but twice. Devil'd been hoverin' over him for years, waiting to stoke his fires with this rotten soul. One autumn night, much like this one, in a tinker's tavern, the tentflap flew open and those sober enough to feel the steely chill on the back of their necks never missed Mass again. Ol' Jack was cornered. The damned asking Satan to at least pay his final tab, the Devil obliged and manifest himself as a silver coin. Being a tricksy bastard, Jack snatched the pence and tossed it in his bag of gold - stolen, no doubt - knowing the crosses on the other coins would trap ol' Lucipher and alllow Jack to run wild once more.
Left without paying his tab, too.
Jack - feeling mighty - made a deal to let the Devil go. "Promise to leave me be for ten years and I'll spill these coin in the sand right here." With not much in the way of options, the Devil agreed, but made sure to get one good scratch on the face when he bounded up from the ground after Jack spillled his bag. Satan's nails are long, sharp, and hot. The scar stayed with Jack all those ten years.
After a decade Jack's hair was getting a little grey, his back was getting a little weak, and his blade was getting a little slow. He still loved his whiskey, but the stories he'd pour out of that bottle were filled less with women and laughter and more with spectres and fear. Jack didn't know the day, but knew the season and the year. Satan waited until the first bitter cold night to remind Jack of the expiration of his reprieve. Never having been matched at wits before, Satan's interest in Jack was intense. He foolishly obliged again when Jack asked him to gather an apple from a nearby tree before heading toward Hell. Jack once again trapped the Devil, using speed with his knife he hadn't brought forth in years to plant four twig crosses in the ground around that apple tree. Satan was furious.
Before letting the Devil go, Jack made him agree to never, ever bother him again and keep him clear of Hell for eternity. Satan laughed, killing the apple tree instantly and turning all the fruit it yielded to stone, and agreed.
Jack never mended his ways. One night years later he crawled inside a bottle and died. When he arrived at the pearly gates there was much whispering. He was politely escorted away for his years of drunkenness and crime. With nowhere to go he visited the gates of Hell to inquire where he should be. Satan, always a man of his word, shunned the drunkard and ridiculed him. "You now want my fires? Never! For I am a man of my word and I delight in your fear. Be gone!" Jack pleaded that the way was dark and he needed a light. Satan cast him a coal from Hell's furnace, and Jack placed it in a gourd.
Jack will always wander between Heaven and Hell. On Hallow's eve, that one night every year when the plane of this world intersects with the fogs of the other, Jack will come to our streets, reminded of his living days. Put a fire in a gourd tonight and carve it a face to look like one of Satan's minions. If you don't, Jack may not be turned away. His fire - you can't see it - may light the way to your home. He has so sorely missed his earthly delights of rape and murder. And if any unknown creatures come and visit tonight, who may or may not be looking like that Jack, I advise you to oblige... with a bottle of whiskey.
"Happy" Hallow's eve.
Ouch.
ABC News / WaPo MOE 4% on 10/28-29/05 "Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"
Approve 39% Disapprove 58% Unsure 3%
"Embattled" starts at 49 or so. What is it called when you're tanking this badly?
These are some pretty amazing entries (and some funny ones here), but all the artistry in the world cannot dethrone what is self-evidently the greatest pumpkin carving ever.
Well, if you didn't follow the link from a few posts back to the Propaganda photo exhibit, a bunch of other folks certainly did. Gaijin Biker posted the pictures without commenting one way or the other. Michelle Malkin and LGF linked to that, and lo did GB's comment thread swell with indignation and grade A hatin' on some Europeans. I love when one 30-year-old guy nobody had ever heard of makes a person he's never met hate 750,000,000 people who hadn't heard of either of them. All at one time! The power Eolo Perfido holds in his hands is fearsome and mighty indeed. We can only hope he won't use it to destroy the sun.
The best and funniest examination I've seen of the exhibit is at Sense of Soot. Go on and read it.
Update: Hey, look! Eolo Perfido showed up at GB's.
I might write some about the indictments this weekend, but for now everybody else already is and I don't have anything to add, except that the most important words out of today's news were "the investigation will continue." This ain't nearly over. It could be just beginning.
Anyhow, over at Unfogged, Fontana Labs reminds us that the hiatusing Ogged predicted today's exact situation two years ago.
Also from the Because Everybody Else Is Doing It department. But see, I list fifteen instead of ten. So it's, like, different and cutting edge. And 50% more at no extra cost to you.
Hitting shuffle on the iTunes, here are the first fifteen songs.
Jurassic 5 - Acetate Prophets
Nick Lowe - So It Goes
Idaho - Only Maybe
Fuzzbubble - When It Stops Raining
The Beatles - If I Needed Someone
Hoover - Private
Old '97s - Dressing Room Walls
Superchunk - Drool Collection
Roddy Frame - For What It Was
Del tha Funkee Homosapien - X-Files
El-P - Dr. Hell No and the Mantis
Cranes - E.G. Shining
SYR 5 - What Do you Want?
Wu-Tang Clan - 7th Chamber, Part II
Mike Doughty - Shunned and Falsified
My blog is worth $105,004.44.
How much is your blog worth?
I'll sell it to you for just $10K. That's better than 90% savings! Act fast, though. This kind of bargain won't last long.
And that's one hell of a payday to miss.
A woman bought a winning lottery ticket worth $1 million with a stolen credit card and could wind up with nothing if convicted, police said. Christina Goodenow, 38, of White City in southern Oregon faced numerous theft-related charges, forgery and possession of methamphetamine, said authorities, who searched her home Thursday. The card belonged to a deceased relative, they said. If convicted of any of the charges, Goodenow will not be able to collect prize money from the winning ticket, said police Lt. Tim George.
Oops.
Is it lost on ditwits like these that Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the President of Iran, is tough-talking and taunting George Bush? Why? Because so far W's regional foreign policy has accomplished for Teheran's corrupt regime of religious fanatics in a couple of years what the Iranian army couldn't do in eight - namely unleash the rule of mullahs and thugs on the streets of Southeastern Iraq and dramatically weaken, probably permanently disable, the role of the central government in Baghdad.
I'd love to hear some tough talk about what kind of response Teheran would feel if it raises a hand against Israel. With sentiments as they are, some of it could play very well on the international stage. But right now I think the mullahs in Iran are just laughing at the President. Sad.
Eolo Perfido is a French-born photographer in Rome who does some fantastic portrait work. All the galleries are worth clicking through but the Propaganda series is the one you shouldn't miss. (via)
Meanwhile, Chris Jordan has been taking surprisingly beautiful photographs of enormous piles of junk for his exhibition, Intolerable Beauty — Portraits of American Mass Consumption.
"It's always the same thing," he told the psychologist, Michael P. Gamache, according to the report. "It's either the CIA or the FBI. They may be implanting my penis with tracking devices. ... They say I used to be in the KGB. ... It's all a big conspiracy, and they are trying to hide me away like the Bird Man of Alcatraz."
Marijuana does not appear to promote lung cancer.
"This wasn't just about a woman drinking a lot of beer. This was a powerful piece of art."
"A 40-year-old resident of Rovna was rushed to the hospital with critical wounds after he had himself shot by his friend in order to prove that a defensive projectile can do no harm to him."
USAToday now has the following correction at the top of this article from a week ago:
Editor's note: The photo of Condoleezza Rice that originally accompanied this story was altered in a manner that did not meet USA TODAY's editorial standards. The photo has been replaced by a properly adjusted copy. Photos published online are routinely cropped for size and adjusted for brightness and sharpness to optimize their appearance. In this case, after sharpening the photo for clarity, the editor brightened a portion of Rice's face, giving her eyes an unnatural appearance. This resulted in a distortion of the original not in keeping with our editorial standards.
I was curious, so I managed to dig up Google's cache of the original picture they used. Pretty funny.
Can't vouch for the credibility of the reporter, but if it's true then everything's about to get very interesting.
Although most press accounts emphasized that Fitzgerald was likely to concentrate on attempts by Libby Rove and others to cover-up wrongdoing by means of perjury before the grand jury, lying to federal officials, conspiring to obstruct justice, etc. But federal law enforcement officials told this reporter that Fitzgerald was likely to charge the people indicted with violating Joe Wilson's civil rights, smearing his name in an attempt to destroy his ability to earn a living in Washington as a consultant.
The civil rights charge is said to include "the conspiracy was committed using U.S. government offices, buildings, personnel and funds," one federal law enforcement official said. Other charges could include possible violations of U.S. espionage laws, including the mishandling of U.S. classified information, these sources said.
That Vice President Cheney is at the center of the controversy comes is no surprise. Last Friday, Fitzgerald investigators were talking to Cheney's attorneys, and detailed questionnaires, designed to pin down in meticulous sequence what Cheney knew, when he knew it, and what he told his aides, were delivered to the White House on Monday, these sources said.
The probe is far from being at an end. According to this reporter's sources, Fitzgerald approached the judge in charge of the case and asked that a new grand jury be empaneled. The old grand jury, which has been sitting for two years, will expire on October 28.
(via Gilliard)
Man, I never hear about these things in time. Bidding ended last Friday on fibreglassman's pet cat he found floating in his pool and had stuffed. He says he's getting rid of it because it scares his kids. I'm disappointed because the other stuffed cats on eBay really don't have the same panache.
The trusty lightbulb's days may be numbered.
The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork. An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. [...]
Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms. When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.
"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."
Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb. The new device gives off a warm, yellowish-white light that shines twice as bright and lasts 50 times longer than the standard 60 watt light bulb.
The real problem with the traditional lightbulb is its terrible inefficiency - all that heat is just lost energy, and in warm weather it's locked in a battle with your air conditioner.
LEDs produce twice as much light as a regular 60 watt bulb and burn for over 50,000 hours. The Department of Energy estimates LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025. LEDs don't emit much heat, so they're also more energy efficient. And they're much harder to break.
Other scientists have said they expect LEDs to eventually replace standard incandescent bulbs as well as fluorescent and sodium vapor lights. If the new process can be developed into commercial production, light won't come just from newfangled bulbs. Quantum dot mixtures could be painted on just about anything and electrically excited to produce a rainbow of colors, including white.
Sweet. Paint-on lighting. And big progress toward paint-on solar power as well.
Imagine being able to "paint" your roof with enough alternative energy to heat and cool your home. What if soldiers in the field could carry an energy source in a roll of plastic wrap in their backpacks?
Those ideas sound like science fiction -- particularly in the wake of the rising costs of fossil fuel. But both are on the way to becoming reality because of a breakthrough in solar research by a team of scientists from New Mexico State University and Wake Forest University. While traditional solar panels are made of silicon, which is expensive, brittle and shatters like glass, organic solar cells being developed by this team are made of plastic that is relatively inexpensive, flexible, can be wrapped around structures or even applied like paint.
As the world's oil supplies march steadily toward depletion, we'd be wise as a nation to throw some serious resources toward speeding these sorts of technologies.
The city of San Francisco, made out of Jello. Click through to picture six to reach the video and watch it wiggle. (via MoFi)
Three punches, to be precise.
Last seen in a Minneapolis public school classroom for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed students, 15-year-old Dolly Tate has been missing for over two weeks now. Chances are you haven't heard this name even once in the national media. Why? Well, unlike Natalee Holloway, Dolly isn't white.
Please help. My friend Jimmy is distraught.
Some guys have all the luck.
Sen. Judd Gregg [R-NH] is a multi-millionaire known for squeezing a nickel till it squeals. He is one of the least needy of the millions of Americans who had some skin in the game for Wednesday's record-breaking $340 million Powerball drawing. Yet Lady Luck chased him down anyway and, in a Washington, D.C., parking lot, handed him a Powerball ticket worth $853,000.
Gregg was one of 44 people who matched the first five numbers drawn. His good fortune came in the same week he voted against raising the minimum wage by $1.10 to a measly $6.25 and voted against appropriating more money to keep the poor from freezing this winter.
"At the tender age of 44 I developed a testicle. My husband made the diagnosis."
Via cruel.com, a news story containing the following public service announcement: "The Pennsylvania Game Commission asks anyone who has seen a deer with a pumpkin head to call 1-814-643-1831."
The article includes a picture, by the way.
...a million goth heads exploding in unison?
I should admit up front that I've never read any of Anne Rice's books nor seen any of the movie adaptations thereof, so I'm operating out of very nearly pure ignorance. All the same, I was pretty surprised to find out that she's found Jesus and will only be "writing for the Lord" now.
At least she's staying in the fantasy genre.
I had to chuckle about this headline: N.C. set to become Yankee dump.
Heck, drive through any parking lot in Cary or on Duke's campus and it will be obvious that we've been a Yankee dump for years already. Ba-dum-bum. Landfill usage is a serious concern, though, and a topic on which Froz can speak far more informedly than I can. I didn't realize that North Carolina is now a net exporter of trash, to the tune of a million tons per year. Durham will be sending its waste to Lawrenceville, VA until at least 2020. Then there's the kicker:
The largest of the four landfills would be the Black Bear Solid Waste Facility in the northeastern corner of the state. Near the town of South Mills in northern Camden County, Raleigh-based Waste Industries is seeking to bury more than 3 million tons of trash a year. That would be more than three times the volume handled by the state's largest existing landfill near Charlotte.
In a few decades, the Black Bear landfill would top out as a mountain of trash 270 feet high, visible for miles in a flat, swampy region where nothing is more than a few feet above sea level. By comparison, the Wachovia Capitol Center in downtown Raleigh is about 390 feet tall.
Black Bear's enormous capacity could theoretically take a third of all the garbage North Carolinians toss out each year. But much of the trash buried there would actually come from states such as New York and New Jersey.
I know garbage has to go somewhere, and god knows that part of the state could use the income, but building a 28-story mountain of megalopolis trash in the flat wetlands just seems unwise on so many levels.
Excerpts from one-star Amazon customer reviews of books from Time Magazine's list of 100 Greatest Novels.
Ain't they just the cutest little Nazis you ever did see?
Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans. They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.
Known as "Prussian Blue" — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.
"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."
Of course, they have a website (with a fashion section that includes leiderhosen). And from the neo-Nazi National Vanguard's site, here's an interview that includes this exchange:
What are some of your favorite groups, either current or past?
We really like Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Green Day, AC/DC, and Alison Krauss. For racial groups we like Final War, CutThroat, Saga, Max Resist, Youngland, Brutal Attack, and of course Skrewdriver. But our all-time favorite is Barney the purple dinosaur!
I don't think the girls quite absorbed Barney's message. I'm guessing that this unrelated British band also called Prussian Blue must be just thrilled.
Today has been a day full of messages back and forth between me and my hosting company's support desk. All is not well. Your ability to comment on posts here may or may not work at any given time. The same goes for my ability to post. I apologize in advance for any difficulties you may encounter. I'm currently discussing options with another hosting company, so we'll see what happens.
Turning our attention to Washington State, Steilacoom High School will suspend you just for being a dick but if a guy gets killed by a horse (the hard way) on the bestiality farm you're running, you will only get you charged with misdemeanor trespassing. Also, deputies in Spokane hope the waning of the full moon will mean answering fewer calls like these:
Also Monday, a woman driving on 29th east of Assembly became alarmed when she ran across a parked Ford Explorer that had a large sign reading "Sex Wanted." The man wanting the sex was walking around the SUV naked. The woman called 9-1-1 and Deputies Tom Edelbrock and Jack Rosenthal responded. The suspect apparently saw the approaching patrol cars and tried to drive away, but he was stopped before he could disappear. Edelbrock said 32-year-old Scott K. Gallagher, 3919 W. Longfellow, was still naked when the deputies contacted him at the driver's door. The sign, made out of a flattened cardboard appliance box, was inside the SUV as well. Also inside the Ford were a variety of body oils and a stack of magazines. The deputies arrested Gallagher and booked him into the Spokane County Jail on an Indecent Exposure charge.
Again on Monday, a resident in the 3500 block of Lynden Road reported that a burglar had picked the lock on his garage door and stolen electrical hand tools and his golf clubs. However, the thief didn't just take, he also left. A pile of feces, in the shape of male genitalia.
Meanwhile, the least scary chase ever went from Bellevue to Redmond:
The chase started at 9:45 p.m. in a neighborhood south of Crossroads in the 16200 block of Southeast Third Street, when Bellevue police went to investigate a possible case of vandalism in progress. They saw a 1998 Toyota Corolla leaving the area, and checking the plates revealed that it was stolen. But when police activated their emergency lights, the driver didn't pull over. Instead he fled the area ... very slowly. Speeds during the chase ranged from 20-25 miles per hour.
"It was really, really bizarre," Bellevue police spokesman Michael Chiu said. The driver was also behaving strangely, waving at passersby and otherwise moving around in the vehicle in an odd manner, Chiu said.
Does it even count as a chase if you never get out of second gear?
Or do you plan on sticking around a while?
Miss Nicole and Miss Renee were teachers. They were both very good ones. Renee was calm. She wore dark, happy colors. She spoke with soft, small words. While no more than 5 foot 2 her body could easily satisfy four children for story time.
Miss Nicole, on the other hand, lit up a room by walking past it six blocks away. Built out of 10-gauge wire and just as hot, she effortlessly intimidated the Daddies at the preschool. They could only find the wits to engage for 30 seconds before premature evacuation, scampering back to their station wagons.
Froz-the-smaller-but-not-necessarily-lesser, my elder son, spent four full days every week with these two lovely people for over a year, then every afternoon with one and regular evenings with the other, then the occasional babysitting gig, and now we’re out-of-touch.
This experience has impact on a young male. Non-kin females, in the prime of fertility, crash into their lives. They literally and figuratively sweep them off their feet. The days are filled: they play, cuddle, inspire, and above all, love. Then for reasons never adequately explained, they move on. Scholastic pursuits, professional opportunities, new cities, other men… raise your hand if this sounds familiar to anyone out there.
Son, if you’re reading this when you’re 30, by now you know exactly which girl I’m talking about.
I still have North Carolina plates on my car a year after moving out here. I’m legal and all to be on the road, mind you, I just keep getting the extension for my temporary tags in the hopes that, I mean planning for the uh, um… yeah.
Aaaanyway. It’s ironic that automobiles, those creations that have remade us, those characteristic features of modern, mobile American culture, have on the one hand made interstate boundaries so trivial yet on the other cause such administrative convulsions when we move from one state to another. Insurance, license, registration, inspection, all cumbersome and non-transferable compared to getting a house, a job, having mail forwarded, accessing your bank account, etc.
Thank goodness we only brought one car out here, that being the Jetta that my wife drove every day back in NC. We sold the car that I used, the… um… station wagon.
My luck finding awesome pads followed me out here and the new neighborhood – I go out to the farm on weekends – is lovely and way out of our league: renovated craftsman bungalows close to midtown Sacramento. Readers familiar with Durham, think Trinity Park with Palm trees. And the residents have greeted us with a kindly flavor of curiosity. Barefoot and beer-in-hand in the front yard; half naked children playing on the sidewalk; lawncare regimen suited for viewing from a distance (I call it drought resistant). All these things elicit more laugh and less fear now after a couple of months. I joked with my wife that we needed to get a tacky couch from the thrift store to put on the front porch. ‘No’, she said, ‘a removable back seat from a minivan.’ Hell, yeah, Baby; I married you for your sense of humor and your sense of decor. Metal frame, stains on the upholstery, put it on bricks to make it level. The Chrystler motif, I like it.
Maybe we’ll get some chickens, too. That’d add a nice touch: an obnoxious rooster wandering the neighborhood, waking everybody up at 4:30. These people don’t know exactly what to make of us yet.
Back east… Wait, I still find it odd to consider myself an “easterner” as opposed to a “southerner.” South of here implies something way more inaccurately descriptive of my cultural heritage than east does. I’m no Yankee, but I’d feel more at home in Boston than in Tijuana.
OK. Down south, people put stock in your place of origin. Out here it’s a novel question, of no more import than your hair color, which people can hide or reinvent every month. Everyone’s an immigrant here. Replying with the correct answer to “Where you from, Son?” landed me more than a couple of jobs and sure as shit got me past a Papa’s screen door more than once. But there is no “correct” answer to that question in California.
Perhaps the difference is ultimately due to the historical reality that conquering the South took time. The European technology of the early 18th century worked the land slowly and required that roots establish deeply while California was ethnically cleansed rather quickly and after the relatively recent boom of 1849, only decades were required to utterly reshape the landscape to the blank slate onto which people from all over the world poured. 200 prior years of Mexican influence, if not much colonization, are notwithstanding.
Perhaps it’s because the forest in the South is so tenacious. The almost tropical climate and biology means that land not cleared back and tended constantly becomes a 40-foot tall pine thicket of its own accord in a matter of just a few years. The vegetative cover out here is a bit more vulnerable and once altered takes a good while longer to recover.
Perhaps it’s just that when not facing inward (California is a bowl, surrounded by mountains) we’re facing east across the Pacific to Japan and China, those 2 ancient cultures most unconnected to the heritage of Pharaoh-Fertile Crescent-Hellenic-Caesar-Medieval-Renaissance-America.
From here you have to cross three mountain ranges, a desert, the largest cornfield in the world and a vast expanse of suburban blight before you reach the eastern American core. Head west on or over the water, on the other hand, and Tokyo is the next thing you hit. The Pacific distance is a lot greater, that can’t be ignored, but California, that country of immigrants, that country inandofitself, has the culture most contributed to from the far corners of the world and yet the most unforgiving of homesickness of any place this modest traveler has ever been.
We had to buy another vehicle for our family. Carpooling, aside from warblogging of course, is perhaps the most critical thing Americans can do to support the war on terrorism, I know. But the four of us every day was just too much. So we… uh… bought a minivan. I think you know where this is heading.
We draped it with a nice bed sheet, prettied it up with some purple cushions to match. It’s lovely.
The last place in NC that I lived was on the edge of a farm that had been in the same family since 1765. Granted, that isn’t the norm. But it’s not so rare that developers can’t find a few more to devour every year. California doesn’t find that tale as interesting as I do.
I guess the way to fit in around here isn’t to demonstrate how accustomed to the customs you are; it’s to embrace being an immigrant and contribute a touch of where you came from.
I like chickens, really.
This is one of the most impressive pictures yet from Cassini. Several more stunning images from the Dione flyby are up at ciclops. Don't miss the movie.
Two and a Half Minutes of Cool.
Isfahan, inspired by Persian architecture, is nifty as well.
Tip: Froz the smaller yet not necessarily lesser, who is home from school sick today. He apparently has a knack for googling. Both works are by Spaniard Cristobal Vila of Eterea Studio.
Compelling primate news from National Geographic:
Scientists say they have discovered the first evidence that chimpanzees speak to each other about objects in their environment. Chimps at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland use a crude language of grunts to talk to each other about their food, say primate experts at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The chimps utter high-pitched noises (hear the audio) or low-pitched grunts (hear the audio) to tell each other about the food they find in their pen, the researchers say.
The finding could lead to better understanding of the origins of human speech, the scientists say. Previous studies have found that monkeys, as opposed to apes, communicate with each other through sound about events in their environment and that great apes can use hand signals. The new chimp finding, however, may be the first evidence of great apes using vocal communication.
Experiments with recorded grunts seem to bear out the researchers' theories, with chimps looking in expected locations for the specific foods that mapped to the noises. Interestingly, the chimps don't make the vocalizations when eating alone. Eating is apparently as much of a social activity for them as for us.
Unless this is your first visit here, you're well aware that what I find funniest is often what other people find wildly offensive. For that very reason, few people in the comedy business make me laugh harder than Sarah Silverman. This article in The New Yorker does an excellent job of explaining why.
Ten years ago, when Silverman had recently moved to Los Angeles, she decided to try something conceptual in her standup routine. She took a pair of khaki pants, dabbed a tiny bit of red paint in the crotch, and wore them to a gig at a club called Largo. After telling jokes for five minutes, she started roaming around the stage, admonishing herself aloud for not using it to better advantage. She did a somersault, and heard a slight, mortified intake of breath. "I just thought it would be an experiment, interesting because the audience would think it was funny and also be dying for me," Silverman says. "Then I went back and did five more minutes of jokes, to see how it changed the room, how it was this elephant in the room." At the end of the set, she allowed herself to notice the stain, and said, wincing, "Did you guys—you, you must think that I have my period and you're probably dying for me. Of course you did. Why wouldn't you? No." She paused and said, as if to reassure, "I had anal sex for the first time tonight."
Read it all. And if you've somehow never seen the trailer for her movie Jesus Is Magic, that's worth your time as well.
From Becks: "I would donate to an organization that teaches kids how to smoke if it meant that people would bring real lighters to concerts again instead of holding up their fucking cell phones."
When I was in college, our fraternity had a very sturdy, homemade ping pong table in the back yard that was used primarily as a dancefloor and for the grand sport of BeerPong. For the uninitiated, BeerPong requires two circles painted near the endline of each side of the table, on which were placed, predictably, cups of beer. No score was kept in the game, as BeerPong was much more about beer than pong. If you hit an opponent's cup with the ball, they had to drink. Land it in the cup, they had to drain. Beyond that, the game had just three rules, of which I can only recall one: your paddle could not break the plane of your cups to stop them from being struck. This infraction was known as a Hinckley. Froz, do you remember the others?
Anyhow, I had grown up with a regulation ping pong table on my back porch and a father who was wickedly talented at the game, so I had a pretty decent advantage heading into the alcoholic version of the sport, being able to drop a ball into a cup as often as not. Nonetheless, beer consumption being the point, nobody complained about it.
I'm sure nearly everybody reading this has some similar memory, so why am I relating this mundane tale? Thanks to this story.
Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. said it will quit marketing a drinking game called "Bud Pong" after discovering that some people were imbibing beer during the game instead of water, as directions specified. The nation's biggest brewer rolled out "Bud Pong" in July, sending kits to beer wholesalers in 18 states. The bar game is played by bouncing ping pong balls into cups of liquid, with participants taking a drink if they lose a point. Anheuser-Busch suggested players fill the cups with water. A New York Times article Sunday described players using beer instead.
"It has come to our attention that despite our explicit guidelines, there may have been instances where this promotion was not carried out in the manner it was intended," Anheuser-Busch spokeswoman Francine I. Katz said in a statement Tuesday.
While it might seem odd for a brewery to market a water-drinking game, Katz said in an e-mail statement that Anheuser-Busch attached its name to "Bud Pong" in the same fashion the company sponsors NASCAR races or Major League Baseball games.
"The intent of this program was to provide adults who socialize in bars with a fun activity," Katz said in a statement. The company said it was pulling the promotion, and did not want perceptions of the "Bud Pong" game to conflict with a $500 million campaign to promote responsible drinking, Katz said.
Well, of course, when Anheuser-Busch markets a drinking game for folks to play in a bar, they expect folks to use water. Because drinking water is fun! Fun like this!
I've done a fair amount of driving in Florida, what with having family down that way. After a while you stop noticing the incessant splatter of that state's freakishly large insects on your windshield. You keep your windshield wiper fluid filled and hit the wipers every so often when the visibility starts getting tricky. Just part of the Sunshine State experience, you know? Still, seems to me that this would be hard to miss.
A 94-year-old motorist struck and killed a pedestrian Wednesday evening, then drove about 3 miles with the body lodged in the windshield until he was stopped at a Sunshine Skyway tollbooth. The driver told officers he thought the body had fallen from the sky, said St. Petersburg police Officer Mike Jockers.
"He had no idea he had been involved in an accident," Jockers said. "He doesn't totally understand what happened." [...]
The impact severed the pedestrian's lower right leg, which remained in the street. His head and arms went through the windshield, while the rest of his body flipped up onto the roof of the car.
"The driver continued southbound, as the eyewitness said, like nothing happened," Jockers said. As the car approached the toll plaza, the toll taker thought it was a prank, until he saw the blood. When the driver stopped, the body fell into the car, Jockers said. [...]
The driver, who lives in Pinellas Park, told police that he was headed home. Pinellas Park, however, is miles in the opposite direction.
"Obviously, he was confused," Jockers said. "Incredibly confused."
Wow.
Orange is a wonderful color on you, Mr. DeLay.
A Texas court issued a warrant Wednesday for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to appear for booking, where he is likely to face the fingerprinting and photo mug shot he had hoped to avoid.
I think I'm growing a little tired of my wallpaper. What to use.. what to use.. Oh! I know!
It's not science because it presupposes its own conclusion.
A veteran public debater of ID, biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who is also a practising Catholic, was the first witness called by the defence at a Pennsylvania (Froz: Dover, PA; the new 'scopes trial') court scrutinising the teaching of ID in a school [...]
ID is the hypothesis that some things in nature are simply too complex to have evolved by natural selection, and therefore must have been “intelligently” designed.
No. It's not science because it presupposes its own conclusion. I really, really don't see what is so unclear about that.
Did somebody say "frog marched?"...
Juggling appearances before a grand jury and conservative admirers didn't seem to make sense, so presidential adviser Karl Rove has canceled three such outings as he waits to hear whether he or anyone else will be indicted in the leak of a CIA officer's identity. Rove canceled plans to attend two Republican fund-raisers, the national party confirmed Tuesday. And he did not give his scheduled speech to the conservative Hudson Institute think tank on Oct. 11.
I'll repeat that: "Cancelled plans to attend two Republican fund raisers." Hmm.
"A synthetic chemical similar to the active ingredient in marijuana makes new cells grow in rat brains. What is more, in rats this cell growth appears to be linked with reducing anxiety and depression. The results suggest that marijuana, or its derivatives, could actually be good for the brain."
Asian bird flu has reached Europe.
"For the first time, scientists have identified an ant species that produces its own natural herbicide to poison unwanted plants. [...] 'Devil's gardens are large stands of trees in the Amazonian rainforest that consist almost entirely of a single species, Duroia hirsuta, and, according to local legend, are cultivated by an evil forest spirit," write Frederickson and her colleagues in Nature. "Here we show that the ant, Myrmelachista schumanni, which nests in D. hirsuta stems, creates devil's gardens by poisoning all plants except its hosts with formic acid. By killing other plants, M. schumanni provides its colonies with abundant nest sites--a long-lasting benefit, as colonies can live for 800 years.' "
"The fossil teeth and jawbones of two new species of tiny monkey-like creatures that lived 37 million years ago have been sifted from ancient sediments in the Egyptian desert."
"The springy molecule that gives fleas their amazing jumping ability has been mimicked in the laboratory. The material could one day be used in anything from bouncy balls to spinal implants, hope scientists."
The polar ice caps have reached record low amounts of ice. How low? This summer's ice is roughly half a million square miles less than the average summer amount, about twice the size of Texas. While many different processes may be at work, there can no longer be any doubt that burning fossil fuels is contributing to the loss. So what comes next? Drilling for new oil where the ice used to be, naturally.
First there was the Baby Ruth, then the Reggie Bar. And I thought, not being a WC homerun hitter for the Yankees, that there might never be a candy bar homage to me and that would be tragically unjust, given my not insubstantial, if admittedly non-baseball-related, contributions to modern American culture. So you can imagine both my surprise and satisfaction to find out that I was wrong.*
Now I just need to make sure they don't screw up the advertising slogan.
*I apologize.
I remarked a couple weeks ago that the whole pretty young teacher sleeps with high school boy thing had reached epidemic proportions. You see it so often in the news now that if you were a young teacher trying for your fifteen minutes of Robinsonian fame, you'd be really hard pressed to stand out from the ever-growing crowd. But one teacher figured out how to do just that.
A third-grade teacher accused of performing oral sex on a 9-year-old boy, allowing students to peek down her blouse and slashing her wrists with glass in front of her students pleaded not guilty to the 24 criminal charges she faces. Georgianne Harrell, 24, was indicted last month on 24 charges of child molestation and reckless conduct.
Yikes. Rural Georgia, in case you were wondering.
March 2003, Paul Wolfowitz testifying before the House Appropriations Committee:
There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people [...] and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. [...] We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
2½ years later:
Iraq's oil production has fallen below prewar levels to its lowest point in a decade, depriving the country's fledgling government of badly needed income and preventing the United States from achieving one of its main reconstruction goals. Iraq's oil wells — beset by equipment problems and saboteurs — are producing about 1.9 million barrels a day in net production, lower than the 2.6 million it was producing just before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES). [...] Production continues to slide despite a massive U.S.-funded effort to stabilize and boost output, repair critical parts of Iraq's oil infrastructure and develop a long-term plan for the Iraqi oil industry. The U.S. has spent $420 million fixing the oil network and allocated $1.7 billion to the sector.
—USAToday, "Pessimism surrounds falling oil production in Iraq"
Wolfowitz's keen financial planning skills are now being put to good use as President of the World Bank, of course, which should make developing countries everywhere heave heavy sighs of resignation.
More hobbit skeletons have been discovered in Indonesia, bolstering the theory that they represent a new species of humanoid, rather than a dwarf or microcephalic human.
French scientists have equipped red blood cells with artificial tails, allowing them to swim at about a tenth the speed of sperm.
Man tries to hijack train with a bow and arrow. Not surprisingly, the plan fails.
Hundertwasserhaus is a public housing building in Austria that contains almost no straight lines or flat surfaces. Swank.
Via MetaFilter, a haunting photo gallery of abandoned and decaying ships.
British scientists have struck a mighty blow in their battle to control malaria by creating mosquitos with glowing testicles.
You know how the Christian Coalition folks are always on about icky homosexuals because of the dire threat they pose to children? Ever wondered why that figures so prominently in their worldview?
After news broke that local law enforcement officials were investigating complaints that Louis Beres, longtime chairman of the Christian Coalition of Oregon, had molested three female family members when they were pre-teens, The Oregonian in Portland went out and interviewed Beres' family members. Two told reporters that Beres, indeed, had molested them. All three said they have been interviewed for several hours by detectives. [...] Beres is also former chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party.
Regular as rain.
