Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Based in Guang Zhou, China, the main business of Hua Zheng Silicone Manufacture Factory appears to be silicone-filled enhancement bras, though they offer a wide array of other products as well. And while I'm sure they make fine products, they could use another employee or two in the translation department. I love this stream-of-consciousness keyboard cover.
The gum keyboard environmental protection, the usage import upscale cure to use the silicon gum material, not poisonous, tasteless and harmless. All seal completely the design, watertightness, dust palliative, defend the oil, defend the sour alkali, can in any bad environment usage, and can carry on disinfect and clean in the water. Can at will the curl fills in to wrap the inside, taking the convenience, economical space, mute, pound without the voice, can make the complete mute, not afraid influence family sleeping. Return to flexibility goodly, touch soft comfort, the hand feeling benignity, protect the finger to be free from the injury. Diverse sex of color, the character is fresh and clear, special surface processing, make the key writing shed off never, don't fade in color. After passing to join to give out light the material, can usage in night and other have no the environment of light blackness. Special design and produce the craft, make the keyboard structure simplify, have no the metals to nail, the function credibility stability. The key life span can amount to 15,000,000 times, use to have the USB and PS/2s to connect a people's conversion. Can adapt- difference in temperature
The Silicone keyboard can roll soft, have waterproof dustproof can wash , disinfect , be antibiotic , defend static , use noise of havinging, protect the finger , improve the speed of typing , is suitable for various kinds of IT products , have many kinds of colors and languages, well received by vast computer fans, the products find a good sale in all parts of the world , is favored deeply by the masses of consumers.
Use noise of havinging. Diverse sex of color. The hand feeling benignity. Wow.
In the "Personal Nurses" section, the Silicone Beauty Brush can "exfoliate redundant horniness," and "wash face with the brush can save face cleaning milk." Meanwhile, Hua Zheng's Silicone Breast Cups (I assume the listed product name is a typo, because silicon breast cups would be heavy and painful) will "get rid of the vexation brought by the flat bosom and show off the grace curve of woman." Also, they "won’t fall off even with big action."
...again and again and again. And Belle Waring says it well.
Don't you sometimes wonder what I was thinking way back when when I thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq? I sure do. My apologia from September 2004: Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq. I ain't feeling a whole lot righter, I'll tell you that. It still seems to me, even now, that war supporters on the left, even those who now basically agree that the whole thing was a bad idea, still cling to some weird sense of moral superiority [cough, Euston manifesto, cough]. Like, "at least I wasn't some big hippie who didn't seriously grapple with the issues." The thing is, those people, hippies or not, were completely right, and many of them were right because they had seriously considered the issue and decided (correctly, mind you) that it was a bad idea. [...]
Still, there seems to be some sense floating around the pundit class that those on the left who were wrong about invading Iraq were wrong in an interesting, morally meaningful way; wrong in the manner of a wrong Winston Churchill, or something. But one who turned out to be totally wrong, as I may have mentioned. That's just total bullshit and any of these people who is now going on to advocate war with Iran should be roundly ignored. No, they should be laughed at, and then ignored. And then maybe someone should pistol-whip them a little.
Amen, sister. Few things make me see red more quickly than people who should know better even considering signing on to another stupid military adventure because it make them feel somehow more "serious" than the anti-war crowd. Look, it isn't difficult to be more serious than the people carrying giant puppets at a protest. All it takes is not carrying a giant puppet and that's not an accomplishment, no matter how vigorously you pat yourself on the back over it. In the meantime, for all your self-congratulatory seriousness, you were seriously fucking wrong, with serious consequences, and your credibility when it comes to recommending military action is seriously non-existent now. You got suckered last time and you're getting suckered again, so just be quiet while the adults are talking. Seriously.
(cross-posted at Unfogged, because I want to be sure everybody has the chance to feel as giddily hopeful as I do)
Can I just take a moment to say how much I love TPM Muckraker?
Ken Silverstein reports at Harper's blog on the spreading Cunningham-Wade-Wilkes prostitute scandal. He says more lawmakers, past and present, are being investigated. Sounds like he thinks House Intel Chair-turned-CIA Director Porter Goss is one of them:
I've learned from a highly-connected source that those under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence comittees -- including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post. [emphasis added]
Yowzah.
My goodness. The Silverstein piece suggests that prosecutors are in the process of procuring photographs of the parties. Oh God, please please please let this be true. Also from the Department of Hmmm, the limo company used to ferry folks to and from the parties at the Watergate (I know! It just keeps getting better!) is also a Homeland Security contractor, owned by a guy with a 62-page rap sheet. And Karl Rove appears headed for Indictment Beach.
And a pony.
Update: Billmon weighs in.
Late last year we noted a possible sex scandal could be linked to the bribery scandal that brought down former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA). Now, the Wall Street Journal confirms federal prosecutors are investigating whether two contractors supplied Cunningham "with prostitutes and free use of a limousine and hotel suites, pursuing evidence that could broaden their long-running inquiry."
The sudden hush you hear on Capitol Hill is because "investigators are focusing on whether any other members of Congress, or their staffs, may also have used the same free services... Agents have fanned out across Washington, interviewing women from escort services, potential witnesses and others who may have been involved in the arrangement."
Well, well, well. Bring on the investigations annd let the pants fall where they may.
Ezra links to an excellent refutation of the oft-repeated canard that doing what every other first-world nation does and extending health care to all of our citizens would result in waiting lists. Also, the eternal objection that, thanks to their own system's shortcomings, Canadians are streaming across the border to get health care in the US? Total bullshit.
In terms of hospitals along the border offering advanced treatments or special diagnostic technology (i.e. CT scans and MRIs), about 640 Canadians were seen, along with 270 for procedures like cataract surgery. They compare this to about 375,000 and 44,000 similar procedures in the region of Quebec alone during the same period. If you divide the total number of Canadians seeking those treatments in the US, divided by the number in Quebec alone that's about 0.09%. Not even a tenth of a percent.
But the most striking stats come from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS). From the article:
Only 90 of 18,000 respondents to the 1996 Canadian NPHS indicated that they had received care in the United States during the previous twelve months, and only twenty had indicated that they had gone to the United States expressly for the purpose of getting that care.
Only 20 of 18,000 sought care in the United States. I can't believe how many people are coming over here! Their system [must] be truly awful.
I haven't the faintest idea what they're saying, but Rip Slyme is pretty awesome.
Headline of the Day: "Woman Sues Over Spankings At Work; Company Claims They Spanked Both Sexes Equally"
I love Onishi Yakuaki's grid art. (via)
Strategery: "Records indicate the group used Northrim Bank accounts to deposit large sums of cash that at times smelled of marijuana, and then the very same day, they would draw cashiers checks from the accounts made out to the business."
A hangar full of scrubbing bubbles. Thanks, Adam.
An amateur archeologist believes his team has just discovered Europe's first pyramid in Bosnia. It had been grown over and was thought just to be a hill. They are currently exploring a tunnel under the structure that they believe may lead to two similarly shaped hills nearby.
Update: Or maybe not.
Responding to TV ads aired last week calling Democratic Congressional candidate Francine Busby a "dangerous liberal" for having "praised a teacher reported to have child porn," a spokesman for Busby's GOP opponent, Brian Bilbray, admitted the ad was "a little over the top." The ads were not paid for by Bilbray but by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
This isn't just some Congressional candidate doing this, it's the very top of the GOP apparatus in DC. Here's some more background on the Republican slime machine that's cranking up in desperation. Expect 2006 to be the ugliest campaign you've ever seen.
Take it away, Michael Thelemann:
''I'm just somebody who is getting up there in years, and I'm looking for a born-again, God-fearing virgin between the ages of 12 and 24 who can bear me children,'' said Thelemann. ''What's the problem? I just think I have some wicked neighbors."
After removing his sign offering (a whopping) $1000 for a virgin bride between 12 and 24, he's put up another - sans the age restrictions - that further clarifies that "pig-worshipping, heathen, white-supremacists" need not apply.
You have to be clear about these things.
Kiki and Herb performing "Take Your Mama Out" in New York City.
Click the picture for the video. (via Uffish)
This one is even better. You want more? I know you do. Four more songs are available at their MySpace fan page, including "Hit Me Baby One More Time" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart." I think I'm in love.
It's starting to look like Karl Rove is in deep legal trouble. I'd be willing to forego the formal frogmarch, so long as his arrest involves tasers.
We wear our Sunday best on Easter 'cause Jesus died for you and was raised again to save you from sin and salvation for your sins and that's what why has to do with the bunny and the colored eggs. Got nothin' to do with 'fertility'.
I'll see your resurrection story and raise you one Lord Iron Penis.
The effects of eating ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as certain mullet, goatfish, tangs, damsels and rabbitfish, are believed to be similar to LSD, and may include vivid and terrifying auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes of "dream fish". [...]
One of the men, a 40-year old, was admitted to hospital suffering from a digestive problem and frightening visual and auditory hallucinations, which took 36 hours to disappear. The second man, a 90-year old, suffered from auditory hallucinations a couple of hours after eating the same species of fish, followed by a series of nightmares over the next two nights. The poisoning can start to cause vivid hallucinations within minutes of eating a poisonous fish and may last for days, often with no other effects. There is no antidote. [...]
Indoles, with similar chemical effects to LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) are believed to be responsible and may be consumed when the fish eat algae or phytoplankton containing the chemicals. All of the species effected by ichthyoallyeinotoxism are algal grazers. Others have claimed that different species of ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes, such as Kyphosus fuseus, contain much more potent hallucinogens, such as dimethyltryptamine or DMT, which is considered to be one of the world's most mind-bending hallucinogenic chemicals.
(via BoingBoing)
Today would be Joan Miró's 113th birthday, if he had successfully made the transition to brain-in-a-jar before shuffling off this mortal coil in 1983. Google gave him sly props, I noticed.
The last artwork in the sidebar on the left there is by Miró, though you'll need to click it to see it in any detail. More to be found here, here, and here.
The missus and I went to Italy back in the spring of '04, and during the taxi ride from the airport, I saw banners all over Rome for some gigantic Miró retrospective at some museum or other. I made a mental note to locate it, since he has long been one of my favorite artists. The first afternoon there, purely by chance, we walked right up on the very museum and got to see a very impressive collection of his work, up close and personal. As with most artists, pictures don't really do his paintings justice.
Update: In the comments, [libcat] notices that the artist's family, through the Artists Rights Society, claimed copyright violation and asked Google to remove the image, which they did. This is a replay of a 2002 dispute Google had with the estate of Salvador Dali and ARS. The Spanish surrealists are cranky, I guess.
...pretty soon you're talking real money.
For Josephine Crawford, 84, the golden years just got a lot more golden. After a night playing the slot machines, the retired waitress was about to call it quits Tuesday when she hit a $10 million jackpot — the biggest in the history of casino gambling in Atlantic City. Crawford, who gambles here twice a week, had never won more than $1,000 before she came into the big money at the nickel slots at Harrah's Atlantic City.
That's the biggest jackpot in Atlantic City history and the biggest nickel slots payout in American history. I was puzzled by this fact reported in Yahoo News, though: "She still hadn't decided Wednesday whether to take the money in a 25-year annuity or in a lump-sum payment of more than $5.5 million."
Lady, you're 84 years old. I'm thinking the 25-year annuity ain't your best option here.
Umm, maybe. You know the old joke: a redneck's last words are usually, "Hey ya'll, watch this!" At least, I thought it was a joke.
A Georgia man was hospitalized after jumping from the side of Alabama's DeSoto Falls and plunging 150 feet before hitting the water. The leap wasn't a suicide attempt since several witnesses reported that prior to the plunge, the man yelled, "Watch this." [...] Whitehead said Carter landed in an area of water that's ten feet deep or less. He said Carter told rescuers that he hit something underwater. Carter managed to swim out, but couldn't make it any further.
Way to help undercut that stereotype, hoss. Nevertheless, he still comes away looking less ridiculous than the women who fell for this.
The 76-year-old Florida man was arrested this morning and charged with sexual battery after he posed as a doctor and went door-to-door--black doctor's bag in hand--offering women free breast exams. According to a Broward County Sheriff's Office report, two women--ages 33 and 36--fell for the scam. [...] Police are now investigating whether other women may have been tricked into impromptu examinations.
"Door-to-door free breast exams? Well, you do have a doctor's bag. Come on in!" The arrest report and mugshot are available at the link there. From what I can tell, he'd have gotten away with it, too, if he hadn't stuck his hand down their pants as part of the breast exam.
The oldest snake fossil yet was just found in Argentina. And it has legs.
I thought I might go years without seeing a headline that could approach the sublime wonderfulness of this one. However, I'm pleased to report that I was mistaken.
(h/t: GB)
Dermatology websites are the new porn.
Meet Freaky the Hen, who just became a cock.
The world's oldest known chimp just turned 74, and 50 orangutans smuggled into Thailand to perform kickboxing matches will be returned to Malaysia and Indonesia.
Soon, law enforcement will be able to trace pictures to individual cameras the same way they can tie fired bullets to specific guns.
Chalk up another one for the Bush administration's unbesmirched record of incompetence in Iraq.
Finches provide the answer to an evolutionary riddle.
The world's second face transplant operation has been performed in China, following a bear attack.
And finally, for the record, if while sitting at your computer in your boxers, your scrotum gets stuck between the slats of your chair and you post a plea for advice online, most of the suggestions you'll get won't be very helpful. But they might be funny enough to distract you from the pain until the EMTs arrive. In case you think this is a hoax, the unfortunate fellow posted an actual cellphone picture of the, uh, situation. While technically NSFW, anybody walking by would be hard pressed to identify what it was without prior knowledge.
Deep-Sea News is celebrating the site's 50,000th hit. They cover a fascinating field that's young enough to be constantly discovering something new, so it's worth bookmarking or dropping the RSS feed into your reader. For example, the story of the underwater volcano that has created an eel paradise surrounded by a "moat of death" showed up at National Geographic News late last week, but was covered at DSN last June.
That old-time religion, now with extra profanity. I'm still trying to decide whether I love the camera work or the hairdo more.
I didn't know people still caught this.
Nebraska's mumps outbreak is growing, an expert said on Monday morning, and many of the cases have struck people who were immunized. The state health department now reports 109 possible cases in 18 counties and 32 confirmed cases. Most of them are in southeastern Nebraska, and most of the patients are either between ages 10 and 18 or 35 and 45 years old. Epidemiologists said the outbreak doesn't show any signs of slowing down. [...]
There are 600 suspected mumps cases in Iowa. Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois are also experiencing widespread outbreaks. The mumps epidemic is the nation's first in 20 years.
Hitting previously immunized adults? I don't like the sound of that.
So it lacks the obvious punchline of Miss Deaf Texas getting hit by a train, but this is still pretty sweet.
The metal gods were smiling on Jesse Maggrah. The 20-year-old man was walking beside railway tracks on Sunday, the Norwegian heavy metal band Gorgoroth cranked on his portable CD player, when he was hit by a freight train. Maggrah said he did hear the blast of the train horn just before he was hit.
"I tried to jump out of the way, but I guess not in time," he said yesterday from his bed at Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre. "It was just instant. I was just walking and then I was on the ground. I wasn't sure what happened. Then I saw the train stopping up ahead. I thought, 'Holy crap, dude, you just got hit by a train.' "
Yeah, holy crap, dude. The best part is the closing quote, though.
"Maybe the metal gods above were smiling on me and they didn't want one of their true warriors to die on them. Otherwise, I'd be up there in the kingdom of steel."
Party on, Garth. Somehow, the fact that he was listening to Gorgoroth makes the story doubly funny, to a degree because of pictures like these, but much more because of pictures like this.
I have a special affection for John Ashbery, who is still putting out great, confounding work as he closes in on eighty. Though deciphering his often obliquely impressionistic poems sometimes leaves me scratching my head, they are just so damn beautiful that it hardly matters. Three Quarks Daily noticed today that the Paris Review has just published four new poems by him; unfortunately, only one is available online.
On Seeing an Old Copy of Vogue on a Chair
For all I know I was meant to be one of those marchers
into a microtonal near-future whose pile has worn away—
the others, whose drab histrionics provoke unease to this day,
so fair, so calm, a gift from cartoon characters I loved.
Alas, the happy ending and the tragic are alike doomed;
better to enter where the door is held open for you
with scarcely a soupçon of complaint, like salt in stew
or polite booing at a concert he took you to.No longer shall the grasses weave quilts for our revenge
of lying down on, or a faint breeze stir milady's bangs.
What is attested is attested to. To flirt with other thangs,
peacockish, would scare the road away.Frogs give notice when the swamp backs up, and butterflies
aren't obliged to stay longer than they do.
Look, they're already gone!
And somewhere, somebody's breakfast is on exhibit.
See what I mean? Meghan O'Rourke had a good piece in Slate last month about how to read Ashbery, including this excerpt:
This can make for strange reading. Ashbery becomes a kind of radio transistor through which many different voices, genres, and curious archaeological remains of language filter, so that the poems are like the sound you would hear if you spun through the FM/AM dial without stopping to tune into any one program for long. Sometimes (as you can imagine) this is infuriating. But in the best of Ashbery, the excess verbiage helps make the moments of lyric focus all the more propulsive and startling, like coming across a lost tune as you spin the dial—the sort of thing that briefly brings promise of "a movement out of the dream into its codification." Endings, in particular, are a forte of Ashbery's. Take the beautiful passage that concludes his famous long poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror":
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
Many more resources on reading Ashbery can be found here and here, and a decent selection of his poems are available at Bard College's Ashbery Resource Center. Totally worth the time and effort.
Superstar architect Frank Gehry has teamed with Tiffany's to produce a line of jewelry.
More pictures can be found at the Dexigner forums. Tiffany's promo page for the line is here, and while no actual naughty bits are shown, it's still probably best not viewed at work. Random Gehry trivia: he has been awarded 12 honorary doctorates, including four in 2000 from Harvard, Yale, Southern Cal, and Edinburgh.
(picture via Sensory Impact)
Carl Bernstein makes the case for a full Congressional investigation of the Bush administration. Read it.
Gaijin Biker sent me a link to some of John Isaacs' confrontational art. Be sure to click around and see more.
Cannibalistic child-killers loves them some Norbizness.
How the octopus forms an elbow.
Would it be irresponsible to speculate whether Aleister Crowley is George W. Bush's grandfather?
"Skeletons of a huge, meat-eating dinosaur that overshadows Tyrannosaurus rex have been discovered in Argentina. The newly revealed species is one of the biggest carnivores ever to have walked the Earth, dinosaur experts say."
And finally, from the It Has to Be Florida files, this one needs fuller quoting:
Some young children who saw the Easter Bunny this weekend at Edison Mall no longer see him as the lovable cuddly rabbit that delivers eggs and candy. This 6-foot-2-inch, 280-pound bunny — also known as Fort Myers resident Arthur J. McClure, 22 — is facing battery charges after he allegedly punched a woman in the back of the neck and head during a fight near a photography set. In boxing circles, that’s considered a rabbit punch.
McClure denied he punched the woman when he was contacted by a reporter from news-press.com Monday. He said he was trying to split up two women who were fighting, including his wife, exhibit manager Crystal Frechette. There was no way, McClure said, to satisfy the long line of people who wanted their children’s picture taken as the exhibit was preparing close. McClure said he was hot and couldn’t stand being in the bunny costume any longer.
“My shirt was soaked with sweat,” McClure said. “I almost threw up.” [...]
When the exhibit closed about 10 minutes early, some of the customers in line, including Johansson, got upset and questioned Frechette, 25, police said. The two women got into an argument before Frechette allegedly punched Johansson in the right side of her face, according to police reports. Before the punch, Johansson said she told Frechette it wasn’t 8 p.m. yet, but she and McClure started walking away with people still in line.
“At that point she sucker punched me in the jaw,” Johansson said. “She had the worst attitude, and I don’t think she wanted to be confronted.” After the punch, Frechette pulled Johansson’s hair, and they both fell to the ground, according to arrest reports. That’s when McClure, who was still in the Easter Bunny costume, came to his wife’s aid. McClure took off the head part of the costume and then punched Johansson in the back of the head, police said.
Dozens of people watched the brawl, including about 15 children who were still in line, witnesses said. Johansson said many children had the look of “shock” on their faces. She said she doesn’t know how to explain what happened with the Easter Bunny to her 3-year-old niece.
Could be worse, lady.
As Bush followers gear up for another election year campaign to start a war, they are using exactly the same rhetorical tactics and are revealing precisely the same mindset to which we were subjected during the 2002 campaign for the Iraq War. What is starkly apparent from this repetition is that their awareness of history and knowledge of the world is sadly confined to one singular event, which is all they know and which, rather bizarrely, they have a need to live over and over and over again.
To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don't like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.
From this it follows that every warmonger is the glorious reincarnation of the brave and resolute Winston Churchill. And one who opposes or even questions any proposed war becomes the lowly and cowardly appeaser, Neville Chamberlain. For any and every conflict that arises, the U.S. is in the identical position of France and England in 1937 – faced with an aggressive and militaristic Nazi Germany, will we shrink from our grand fighting duties in appeasement and fear, or will we stand tall and strong and wage glorious war?
Sigh. I'll leave the dissection of the psycho-social factors underlying this peculiar monomania to those with some actual psychological or sociological training. In the meantime, however, I'd like to reiterate a plea from the earliest days of this blog.
I'm still this side of 35, and in the years since high school I have heard Hussein, bin Laden, Milosevic, Ceaucescu, Noriega, Qaddafi, and a handful of others likened to Hitler by US officials. Bad guys all, yes, but Hitler? They wish. If I got a vote, and by god I ought to have two, every time a new dictator is chosen to represent the ForcesOfDarkness®, the nominating committee would need to be a little more descriptive. Explain to me why he's this generation's Idi Amin. This generation's Enver Hoxha. Pol Pot. Vlad the Impaler. Joan Crawford. Whatever. Just stop with the Hitler already. It's played.
I'm no longer that side of 35, obviously, but my entreaty remains the same. Please vary up your analogous villains a bit, people. You're boring me.
From GhanaWeb: "For the Ga tribe in coastal Ghana, funerals are a time of mourning, but also of celebration. The Ga people believe that when their loved ones die, they move on into another life -- and the Ga make sure they do so in style. They honor their dead with brightly colored coffins that celebrate the way they lived. The coffins are designed to represent an aspect of the dead person's life -- such as a car if they were a driver, a fish if their livelihood was the sea -- or a sewing machine for a seamstress. They might also symbolize a vice -- such as a bottle of beer or a cigarette."
More pictures at the link, courtesy of Cynical-C.
Update: In the comments, the almost mysterious M/tch M/lls (nice try, Match Malls, but we know who you are) links to several more designs that you can purchase. Sweeeet.
You're probably familiar with turducken, the chicken in a duck in a turkey artery-clogger popularized by John Madden. I've had it and it isn't bad, but it's pretty season-specific. Not the sort of thing you'd fix now that the mercury is climbing into the "yardwork is teh suck" range. Happily, the end-of-Lent variation has arrived! Behold: a chocolate rabbit, stuffed with peeps, stuffed with Cadbury eggs.
Instructions at the link, of course. (via Metafilter)
Update: Hmm. I thought I had pasted in the following text from the instructions, but I guess I didn't.
Voilà, the loathsome hollow bunny is transformed into several thousand calories, as God intended. Many children wonder around Easter how it is that bunnies lay eggs. As a side benefit, Easter turducken illustrates clearly that this “theory” is wrong. Obviously bunnies lay chickens, which then lay the eggs. Mystery solved.
Now fully prepared, the Easter turducken can be eaten. There is probably some kind of psychological test about what part of the bunny you eat first. I always go for the neck. Since it is held together only by a cheap-ass hollow bunny, once you start eating your turducken, it will collapse rapidly. Be prepared for a mess.
I didn't realize "damn" and "hell" were even considered profanity any longer.
A 14-year-old Reno student can recite a poem containing the words "hell" and "damn" at the state high school poetry finals, a federal judge in Reno ruled Thursday. The Coral Academy of Science, a charter school of the Washoe County School District, wanted to bar freshman Jacob Behymer-Smith from reciting the poem because the school does not allow students to use profanity. Judge Brian Sandoval, the former Nevada attorney general, ruled the words were neither profane nor disruptive when used by poet W.H. Auden in "The More Loving One." [...] Behymer-Smith had selected the poem from a pre-approved list from the National Endowments for the Arts, a co-sponsor of the Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest, according to court documents.
"Defendants (Coral Academy) apparently consider the poem inappropriate because it contains language that conflicts with the school's policies against students general use of profanity," Sandoval wrote. "However, when spoken in the context of a poem at a school-authorized, off-campus competition and written by a nationally recognized poet, the court finds that the language sought to be censured cannot even remotely cause a disruption of the educational mission."
W.H. Auden is only one of greatest poets in the history of the English language. You'd think he'd get a pass based on that alone. However, "The More Loving One", while short and sing-songy enough to memorize easily, is really not one of his better works. Bit of a throwaway, really. C'mon Jacob, stretch your wings a little.
Folks on both sides of the aisle are trying to divine Al Gore's political ambitions from the tea leaves of this film. I've got no idea, but of all the Democrats with a realistic chance of winning the nomination, I like Gore best. If you haven't read Ezra's New Prospect piece on the New (Old) Gore, it's worth your time. If Hillary Clinton is really running, Gore is likely the only person who could compete in the money sweepstakes, which is, of course, the name of the game.
Mike Davis has written a good, concise history of the car bomb (Part 1, Part 2) over at TomDispatch. Want to guess who was absolutely key in spreading the technology through the Middle East? As with so much else, Reagan's CIA. Anyhow, it's a very interesting read, watching how the tactic steadily ratcheted up in impeccable multicultural fashion, from 1920s anarchists in New York, to back-and-forth Zionist and Arab bombings in 1940s Palestine, to Vietnam and Algeria, to Italy's Mafia wars, to the IRA, to Lebanon, to Sendero Luminoso in Peru, to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and so forth until we reach the mother of all car bomb arenas, Iraq. Also, this unsettling revelation:
After the 1983 Beirut bombings, the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico began an intensive investigation into the physics of truck bombs. Researchers were shocked by what they discovered. In addition to the deadly air blast, truck bombs also produced unexpectedly huge ground waves.
"The lateral accelerations propagated through the ground from a truck bomb far exceed those produced during the peak magnitude of an earthquake." Indeed, the scientists of Sandia came to the conclusion that even an offsite detonation near a nuclear power plant might "cause enough damage to lead to a deadly release of radiation or even a meltdown." [...]
Experts were amazed at the radius of destruction [following the Oklahoma City bombing]: "Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building up to a half-mile away." Distant seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.
And that one was dwarfed by the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia the following year. The grim effectiveness and difficulty of detecting vehicle bombs is why Davis entitles Part 2 "The Poor Man's Air Force." I found this by way of Juan Cole, who also notes that the number of internal refugees in Iraq displaced by ethnic violence is reaching crisis proportions.
That Britney Spears birthing sculpture that was all over the news a couple weeks ago? Total rip-off.
Unfogged is back up! Mostly. Still some odd behaviors here and there, but I'm assured they, too, are getting ironed out. Big props to Becks for spearheading the charge.
Onward!
The eel catfish can wriggle out of the water to hunt for prey on land, where it uses a completely different feeding technique than it does underwater. Video at the link and at Pharyngula, where PZ goes into more detail.
While that's not so strange—other "walking" fish have been studied previously—nobody had even seen this behavior in animals previously.
The doting mom of a wormlike amphibian found in Africa lets her babies devour her own flesh, scientists have found. The tropical creature transforms its skin into a nourishing, fat-rich meal for its newborns to eat, researchers say. [...] The female's skin doubles in thickness during this period, the researchers found.
"You've got several layers of skin, and the outer layer is what they eat," Wilkinson said. "When that's peeled off, the layer below matures into the next meal."
The offspring were found to have special infant teeth, which they lose in adulthood, for gripping and stripping their mother's flesh. "Some teeth are spoon-shaped, so they look good for scraping, while those with spiked points look good for perhaps piercing the outer skin layer," Wilkinson said. Other teeth, he says, resemble grappling hooks.[...]
Caecilian moms were found to lose about 14 percent of their body weight while raising their young this way. Yet they don't appear to be harmed.
Adds a new twist on the "your mama is so fat" joke genre, eh?
Marxist rebels in Colombia have forced a nearly-extinct, indigenous tribe out of the jungles.
Naked and armed only with blowpipes, members of Colombia's last nomadic indigenous tribe emerged from the Amazonian jungle and gathered in the central plaza of a remote town, saying that Marxist guerrillas had threatened to wipe them out.
"The guerrillas told us they did not want to see us ever again," said one of the few Indians that spoke any Spanish, as the members of the Nukak Maku tribe walked into the town of San Jose de Guaviare, situated deep in the southern jungles. The tribal group, 76 in total, of whom 27 are children, had been fleeing guerrillas for two months, moving through the dense jungle on foot, surviving as they have done for centuries on what the Amazonian forest provides. [...]
The group had 14 monkeys with them carried by several of the children. The monkeys are not just companions but also help feed the tribe. The top halves of faces of the adult Indians are dyed red.
"With this arrival, almost half of the Nukak population has moved into civilisation," said Humberto Ruiz, an anthropologist who has studied the tribe for 14 years.
The Nukak do not intend to return to the jungle until they can do so safely (no telling when that might be), and the townspeople don't quite know what to do with them. The tribe's first contact with modern civilization came in 1988, when they first emerged from the jungle, similarly fleeing political violence. They have no concept of private property or money, and are (or, perhaps, were) unaware of the ongoing war between the government and the rebels.
Niels Van Iperen has put up a fantastic photo essay of previously-displaced Nakuk in refugee camps, and the accompanying text is fascinating, if terribly sad.
Now that the administration is floating trial balloons about moving into the next era of nuclear warfare, Tristero describes the process for making a tactical nuclear weapon:
1. Take one nuclear weapon with the destructive power of as many Hiroshima bombs as you like.
2. Add the word "tactical" to the description.
Keep that in mind as we discuss our "options."
I'll bet next year he goes as a pirate.
At the University of Georgia, sophomore Jeremiah Ransom attended a “ninjas vs. pirates” party, which sounds about 4,000 times more fun than any party we ever went to in college. As he jogged back to a campus building, he was jumped by officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for being “acting in a somewhat suspicious manner.” That’s right: They “detained” — that’s an agent’s knee “detaining” the student’s head there in that picture — a guy who was dressed as a ninja.
After being held in investigative detention, he was found to have violated no criminal laws and was not arrested. “It was surreal,” Ransom said. “I was jogging from Wesley to Snelling when I heard someone yell ‘freeze.’”
We hope the ATF agent actually was a part of a secret Ninja Force, taking down ninjas one ninja at a time.
...thong. Okay, who can translate? Because I really must know.
Emailed to me by (who else?) Ogged.
In the comments to the dead kitty teatime post, my good buddy McManlyPants says, "Goddamn, apostropher, that is about the grossest thing I have seen on here in a long time." No way, dude. Creepy, maybe, but gross? Gross is more like an anaconda regurgitating a whole fucking hippopotamus. Woo-hoo, hinged jaws!
There is a very good reason why you never, ever, ever appease the Christian Right on anything, no matter how innocuous it seems. Because they won't ever be satisfied.
Apparently some pharmacists are now refusing not only to fill women's prescriptions for emergency contraception and other methods of birth control, but also for antibiotics or vitamins. I want to say something like, "tell me this is about life now" or point out that the hypotheticals we used to propose about pharmacists refusing to dispense medication for cholesterol drugs and the like are no longer hypothetical, or that in fact, that parallel is deeply flawed because apparently some pharmacists' moral beliefs only mean not dispensing medications to women. But really, I can't say anything because my jaw is sitting on the floor.
This is nuts. These pharmacists should be handed their walking papers. Period. They clearly aren't interested in performing their jobs. If it's against your religion to come in contact with blood, you don't become a surgeon. Same logic holds here. Go find another profession. Ezra suggests an excellent thought experiment.
Since we've now got pharmacists expanding their conscientious objector status to non-contraceptive prescriptions written at clinics that perform abortions, here's a question: scientologists, who are recognized, for tax purposes, as a religious sect, do not believe in antidepressants. They believe in vitamins. How do you think society would react if a significant number of scientologi
