A busier village than mine.

This June in Photos gallery at the Village Voice goes from brutal to weird to glam, then all over the map by way of not safe for work. Makes for an interesting wander, though.

Children are natural scientists.

I've said before that you should never tell your small children anything you wouldn't be willing to shout in a mall, because eventually your precious little one will announce to everybody in McDonald's that "my daddy has diarrhea!" But then sometimes, they don't even need your prompting.

For hands-down humiliation, however, I haven't yet been able to top my neighbor's misery, when his three year old daughter interrupted his poker game by running naked into the room and screaming with a joyous voice of discovery, "DADDY! DID YOU KNOW? I COME WITH MY OWN POCKET! AND IT CAN HOLD A PEN! LOOK!"

And while he was knocking his chair over to get across the room to put a stop to her performance, she showed all his friends where the pocket was and how well you could put in and take out all kinds of things.

This is a man who's going to show up at his daughter's high school graduation drunk and shirtless, with her name painted across his chest and gut, randomly shouting "WOOO!!!" during her valedictory speech and making devil horns with his upraised hands. And she will have totally earned it.

There's a rousing game of CanYouTopThis going on in the comments to that post.

Crowd porn.

Intriguing set of photos of the crowd at Coachella waiting for the Red Hot Chili Peppers to come on stage.

A horse is a horse...

...unless it's a zorse.

They Both Start With 'I'

I'm really having a hard time imagining anything dumber than this. And I've got quite an imagination.

Sokushinbutsu

The self-mummified monks of Japan.

Much Better

I knew not shit from a photoshop 2 hours ago.

Using datasets pointed out by apostropher.

Mailbox edition.

Sorry if you've emailed me and not gotten a reply. Things are busy, y'know, and I've been remiss. From the inbox...

First watch the original ad. Then watch the overdub. Too funny.

Mo's Bacon Chocolate Bar. With only the finest ingredients. Apparently Vosges makes all kinds of crazy-ass chocolate bars, but wouldn't you know it, the bacon ones are out of stock.

And bacon placemats.

"There's no need for me to describe why it was necessary to build a boombox out of plywood and car parts. It's obvious that we all need such a thing."

And finally, that's a whoppin' lot of concrete

It's written all over your face.

Who could have predicted this guy would cause problems?

Why I Love YouTube: Big Dumb Rock Edition

Ram Jam - Black Betty
Black Oak Arkansas - Hot Rod
Black Oak Arkansas - Hot and Nasty
Thin Lizzy - Bad Reputation
Ted Nugent - Stranglehold
Accept - Balls to the Wall
Sweet - Ballroom Blitz
New York Dolls - Personality Crisis
Motorhead - Iron Fist
Alice Cooper - Cold Ethyl
Edgar Winter - Frankenstein

States By States By GDP

Found here, via here, via here.

Rankings below the fold, via the third link, of course.

California, it is often said, would be the world’s sixth- or seventh-largest economy if it was a separate country. Actually, that would be the eighth, according to this map, as France (with a GDP of $2,15 trillion) is #8 on the aforementioned list.
Texas’ economy is significantly smaller, exactly half of California’s, as its GDP compares to that of Canada (#10, $1,08 trillion).
Florida also does well, with its GDP comparable to Asian tiger South Korea’s (#13 at $786 billion).
Illinois – Mexico (GDP #14 at $741 billion)
New Jersey – Russia (GDP #15 at $733 billion)
Ohio – Australia (GDP #16 at $645 billion)
New York – Brazil (GDP #17 at $621 billion)
Pennsylvania – Netherlands (GDP #18 at $613 billion)
Georgia – Switzerland (GDP #19 at $387 billion)
North Carolina – Sweden (GDP #20 at $371 billion)
Massachusetts – Belgium (GDP #21 at $368 billion)
Washington – Turkey (GDP #22 at $358 billion)
Virginia – Austria (GDP #24 at $309 billion)
Tennessee – Saudi Arabia (GDP #25 at $286 billion)
Missouri – Poland (GDP #26 at $265 billion)
Louisiana – Indonesia (GDP #27 at $264 billion)
Minnesota – Norway (GDP #28 at $262 billion)
Indiana – Denmark (GDP #29 at $256 billion)
Connecticut – Greece (GDP #30 at $222 billion)
Michigan – Argentina (GDP #31 at $210 billion)
Nevada – Ireland (GDP #32 at $203 billion)
Wisconsin – South Africa (GDP #33 at $200 billion)
Arizona – Thailand (GDP #34 at $197 billion)
Colorado – Finland (GDP #35 at $196 billion)
Alabama – Iran (GDP #36 at $195 billion)
Maryland – Hong Kong (#37 at $187 billion GDP)
Kentucky – Portugal (GDP #38 at $177 billion)
Iowa – Venezuela (GDP #39 at $148 billion)
Kansas – Malaysia (GDP #40 at $132 billion)
Arkansas – Pakistan (GDP #41 at $124 billion)
Oregon – Israel (GDP #42 at $122 billion)
South Carolina – Singapore (GDP #43 at $121 billion)
Nebraska – Czech Republic (GDP #44 at $119 billion)
New Mexico – Hungary (GDP #45 at $113 billion)
Mississippi – Chile (GDP #48 at $100 billion)
DC – New Zealand (#49 at $99 billion GDP)
Oklahoma – Philippines (GDP #50 at $98 billion)
West Virginia – Algeria (GDP #51 at $92 billion)
Hawaii – Nigeria (GDP #53 at $83 billion)
Idaho – Ukraine (GDP #54 at $81 billion)
Delaware – Romania (#55 at $79 billion GDP)
Utah – Peru (GDP #56 at $76 billion)
New Hampshire – Bangladesh (GDP #57 at $69 billion)
Maine – Morocco (GDP #59 at $57 billion)
Rhode Island – Vietnam (GDP #61 at $48 billion)
South Dakota – Croatia (GDP #66 at $37 billion)
Montana – Tunisia (GDP #69 at $33 billion)
North Dakota – Ecuador (GDP #70 at $32 billion)
Alaska – Belarus (GDP #73 at $29 billion)
Vermont – Dominican Republic (GDP #81 at $20 billion)
Wyoming – Uzbekistan (GDP #101 at $11 billion)

Quick hits.

Bendito Machine is about eight different kinds of awesome.

Might be time to rethink black holes.

My son and I absolutely love the freefall rides, but not when it severs your feet. Christ almighty.

What not to name your child.

Shaye Saint John is on the internet 24/7 signing autographs. But that sort of thing eventually leads to nerve fiber surgery. And there's a whopping lot of her website to explore.

Swear Jar

Bleeping awesome.

So long, big fella.

The most impressive feature in our yard is a roughly 150-foot tall tulip poplar on the edge of our lot, by the road. If it isn't the biggest tree in the neighborhood, it's definitely one of the top five. A truly majestic tree that kept the house shaded and dominated the end of our cul-de-sac. Unfortunately, I also noticed recently that there are places at the bottom of the trunk where you could see clear through it. Big damn hollow in it, and the bark looks kinda unhealthy around the base. Also, it's on the edge of a creek bank so that one side of the root system is exposed, and it's begun to lean ever so slightly...toward our house. Our house which wouldn't even slow the tree's fall if it came down, that is.

We had several tree services come out and look at it. They all agreed that, while the tree still looks perfectly healthy up top, we really wanted to bring it down before the next hurricane did, since it would only get more unstable at the bottom as time passed. So, this morning, a small army of guys came out and made short work of our mighty poplar. And honestly, I feel sadder about losing that tree than I would if both of our cats died.

Sigh.

Credentials

I've been baffled at how the national media keeps assigning Rudy Giuliani foreign policy experience when he has precisely zero foreign policy experience. I'm not saying that being mayor of New York isn't a big job, just that it doesn't have jackshit to do with national foreign policy. Now, however, it turns out that not only does Giuliani not have any foreign policy experience, he doesn't seem to even want any.

Rudolph Giuliani's membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel's top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited "previous time commitments" in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why -- the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani's lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

Nice. But remember, John Edwards got a fancy haircut and Al Gore uses electricity.

Returning soon.

I promise. And I put the picture of Paris Hilton behind a cut, because it was paining me to see it at the top of the site, day after day. Anyhow, stuff is settling down into something resembling a routine, so I'll be back shortly.

In the meantime, who knew there was such a thing as toenail porn?

A Pulitzer doesn't keep the lights on.

Paris Hilton really isn't my field of interest, so I can't work up much concern one way or the other over her legal status. But you know what is really interesting? You've seen this picture about two million times by now, right?

The guy who took that picture has another one you might have seen before.

Everybody's gotta eat, of course, but still. Damn. Props to Acephalous for the spot.

Gender roles.

I got an email from Froz the other day catching me up on the west coast happenings and remarking that our new baby girl is gorgeous. I replied that yes, she certainly is beautiful, but that I didn't intend to treat her any differently than either of my boys becau--OMGZ YOU CAN PUT HER IN TINY LITTLE DRESSES!!!11!! CAN'T STOP KISSING SEND HELP NOW.

Can you hear me now?

See? Cell phones are dangerous, people.

When you care enough to hit send.

some ecards

Great moments in quackery.

Though to be fair, he did put his money where his mouth was. And, given the knowledge at the time, I guess you couldn't dismiss it as nuts until somebody ran the experiments.

Voronoff's hypothesis was this: hormones, like testosterone produced by the testes, would reverse aging by a process he called "rejuvenation." One of his first experiments used himself as a test subject. He injected ground up dog and guinea pig testicles under his own skin, but was disappointed when this did not result in any verifiable effect. He reasoned that living grafts of testicular tissue, rather than injections, would have a more dramatic and lasting rejuvenation effect.

This lead to cross-species glandular transplantation surgeries. His early experiments involved transplanting thyroid tissue into humans with a thyroid deficiency. He also began transplanting the testicles of executed criminals into rich old guys (as a treatment for senility and schizophrenia), but had to stop when the demand for the procedure far exceeding the supply of criminal testicles. At this point, Voronoff began using monkey testicles instead, and his first "monkey gland" to human transplant took place in June of 1920. [...]

A thin slice of testicle would be inserted into the recipient's scrotum, with the hope that it would fuse with the endogenous tissue. This...er...innovative approach was applauded by hundreds of the worlds leading surgeons at the International Congress of Surgeons in London in 1923. His work also delved into the transplantation of monkey ovaries into human women. [...] By the Great Depression over 500 men had received Voronoff's therapy, the demand becoming so high that he had to set up his own monkey farm to keep up.

As you might expect, Voronoff's work came up empty and he died in obscurity. Though there is a theory out there that his transplant studies were the vector through which HIV entered the human population.

Light posting ahead.

I'm kinda busy at the moment, as you might imagine. But if you're looking for pictures of the baby, I'll throw them up sporadically at my Flickr page.

Pretty amazing.

The chair! Give him the chair!

Best news I've read all day: "Soloway could face several decades in jail. He remains in federal custody pending a Monday hearing."