A former professional casino cheat has published a book on his technique, and is using a new blog called American Roulette to promote it. Interesting reading. I'll be in Atlantic City if you need me.

UPDATE: You can find more of Packard Jennings' guerilla art here. Some pretty excellent stuff.
--
What would the holiday season be without a little anti-consumerist propaganda?



(via Boing Boing)

...contains 7-hour "God, these movies suck" commentary track.

The Wachowskis invited film critics to record a track that (rightly) trashes the sequels for sucking. Classy movie -- but it doesn't make them not suck.

They did find the one thing that could possibly get me to rent The Matrix: Revolutions, though, so kudos to them.

Where do you want to move today?

I have to say, this is a pretty clever idea for fraud. The victim receives a letter informing hin that he was caught by a traffic light camera speeding through an interesection.

Needless to say, it's all a lie.

Shrine to the films of Wes Anderson.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou isn't coming to Greensboro until December 25 (NY/LA December 10th). I hate my life.

Who's Who on Mt. Olympus.

The thing I like best about Greek myth is the belief that the position of the gods on Olympus is fragile, that Zeus will someday be overthrown just as the two previous generations of gods had been. It's neat. You don't see much of that in religion anymore.

A war in which technologically advanced humans are the ones who overthrow the Greek gods might make a pretty decent science fiction novel or movie, come to think of it.

Pretend I didn't just say that.

Birth control from yesteryear.

Pretty good resource for famous trials from Socrates to Galileo to Monkeytrial to OJ.

Also check out the author's beliefs page, which is interesting food for thought, even if he's wrong about a number of things and only right about a different number of things. (And we are so totally the culmination of the evolutionary process. Humans rock!)

OMFG will u r pwned.

The same guys did Romeo and Juliet earlier. You might want to watch this one first, actually, as it provides an introduction to L33T speak for those lucky enough to be uninitiated.

The sad part is, this is what the future will actually sound like.

(Though secretly I'm impressed with how closely they managed to adapt the plays using only gibberish and WTFs.)

Query Letters I Love: The blog that mocks bad movie proposals so you don't have to.

(Call me crazy, but this one actually sounds like a fairly decent idea, as these things go.)

A team of historians, engineers, and scientists in Toronto has built (and will soon test fly) Leonardo Da Vinci's ornithopter.



(via Gravity Lens)

In the vein of the "We Suck" Yale prank on Harvard linked to below, here's the entry on The Great Rose Bowl Hoax in the Museum of Hoaxes.

Oh baby. Fifty glorious extra minutes come out on December 14th.

Have you bought yours yet? I have.

1. Get your weapon. In my case, it's probably the heavy shovel I use in the basement to kill crickets. Don't worry if you don't have a gun; you'll get one later.

2. Find Jaimee. (Your answer may vary.)

3. Contact whoever you think won't have gotten the message. Tell them the dead have risen and to get the hell out of there. Let them know where you're going, if you want to. Otherwise, don't. While you're doing this, Jaimee or whoever should be packing whatever food, water, and supplies you can transport easily. Keep in mind, electricity will be useless, if it isn't already.

4. Find whoever you care about who you think won't be able to get out of town on their own, and let them go with you. (One or two people, max, please. You'll need the car space. By the way, if you don't have a car, steal one.)

5. Get the hell out of town. You'll want to be far away from any population centers. If you can, rob a grocery store and/or a gun store on the way. If they've already been nicely robbed, keep going; you'll find an unspoiled one eventually.

Don't be too obsessed with getting a gun, either. You don't know what will actually kill a zombie, assuming they can even really be killed at all. A sword would really be ideal, or failing that, a baseball bat.

6. I like the idea of heading to the coast and finding a nice off-shore island to wait out the zombie infestation, but of course the downside there is that if the zombies do manage to get to your island, you're screwed. Maybe an isthmus would be good. But the best position would probably just be a highly defensible mountain peak. Zombies aren't going to want to climb for food -- and even if they try, your mountain peak is highly defensible.

7. Steal liberally from the ruins of civilization. But always travel in pairs.

8. Be extremely untrusting. In the zombie-ridden apocalyptic world of the future, other humans can be just as evil as zombies, with the added advantage of not being brain-dead. Plus they may be carriers of zombieism who haven't turned yet. You don't want to be total loners, but you should always sleep with one eye open. After all, the apocalypse is other people.

Did I miss anything?

(Just answering this great post on Ask MetaFilter, where you can also find out "Is there a way to gently steer someone away from constant Simpsons or Monty Python quoting?" Answer: apparently not.

As far as I can tell, my group of friends has completely gotten over this affliction by a) never watching The Simpsons anymore and b) distilling all remaining useful Simpsons quotables into communal meme packets that ignore the source material completely. For instance, I still say "Smell you later" to everyone, but never explain why. Whether or not this makes me more or less unpleasant than a mere excessive-Simpsons-quoter is left as an exercise to the reader.

Oh, and I've never quoted from Monty Python. People who do are huge, huge nerds. That's all there is to it.)

There'a a van with a lot of bumper stickers that parks outside our house. Usually I don't pay it any mind. But today the van's sliding glass door has a sign that reads: DO NOT FOR ANY REASON THINK ABOUT TOUCHING THIS DOOR.

It's not like I was going to anyway. But man, I want to know what happens when you touch the door.

My friend Eric's probably watched every movie in here. And loved doing it, too.

The scientific basis of near-death experiences. From The Skeptical Inquirer.

Pretty impressive prank by Yale at the Harvard-Yale game this year. Click the picture for more.



I think most of us can agree that both Harvard and Yale suck, but still, this is funny.

Here. Hey, look, it's Chloe! Glad to see at least one non-Jack character from last season will be returning.

I know I'm ready for January. Nonetheless, "But for Jack Bauer, instinct never dies" is a pretty sorry tagline.

Because in the future present, everything you could possibly conceive of is already on the Internet.

Available here. I'm just glad to see The Hudsucker Proxy finally getting a little love -- although appearing on a list alongside That Thing You Do! isn't quite what it deserves.

At least when we got home Jaimee's new camera was waiting for us. It's out of the box now -- and it works. Here's the first picture; it's a photograph of the painting hanging over my desk that Jaimee made for me last February:



I'm not sure my first-time, amateur operation of the CoolPix did it justice. The real one is one of her best paintings.

Let's talk about terrible:

Greensboro to DC (300 miles): 4 hours. This is not terrible. This is, in fact, making nearly perfect time.

This is included by way of example.

DC to Randolph, NJ (240 miles): 9 hours. This is true. We left between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, had a hour-long lunch in Baltimore, and got to my dad's condo at 7 pm. Even disregarding the minor delays that were our fault, it's safe to say that traffic on Wednesday was AWFUL.

DC to Greensboro (300 miles): 8 1/2 hours. This happened just now. After a 20 mph crawl for three hours between DC and Richmond, we finally got moving -- until we got stuck in a bumper-to-bumper parking lot just inside the NC border for two straight hours. We never even found out what caused it.

Yeah, so next year, I'm flying.

From Tiny Mix Tapes :

A news snip from the always-on reviewers of tasty new PClem approved music.

Finally, us pseudo-indie rockin', zombie lovin' video game geeks have something to look forward to with the March 15th, 2005 release of Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel without a Pulse. Aspyr Media, makers of the video game, have petitioned such favorites as Death Cab for Cutie, The Flaming Lips, The Walkmen, and others, to cover 1950s standards for the Stubbs soundtrack, which is set in a futuristic city from 1959.

Stubbs' official site. TMT Link - includes full soundtrack song list.

From Grand text Auto :

A review of the book, Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels.

Gamers is probably best characterized as collection of personal essays, with a handful of rather impersonal ones thrown in to keep them company. The personal essay genre is not my favorite, and a video gaming theme doesn’t necessarily make the genre more palatable.

He does find this gem:

It is found in Aaron McCollough’s essay, about two-thirds of the way through the book:
“When I attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, playing Madden was one of the few things that helped me briefly forget about being a fraud.”

Where was my invite to submit?

From netdiver :

Vectorpark. A cool web portfolio of games to play. Quiet, pretty, and soothingly hard on the brain.

Back to infinite grading.

Slope was the first online poetry journal I'd ever seen, back in the day. I was introduced to it in issue 15 (sorry, link seems broken), which included my main man, Richard Jackson. Issue 16 has a ton of his Cesare Pavese translations. But the new issue, Slope 20 has a great special link to American Sign Language poetry, along with video performances.

Requires flash player. Word.

PS to Gerry - Whenever I start working on the web site update, Slope is always in the back of my head. This new issue blows old slope away though.

PS to our readers - I count no less than five current/forthcoming Backwards City Contributors in the people credited in Slope.

leviathan: a web comic. By Peter Blegvad.

(last one via Metafilter tonight, I swear it)

Our periodic national bouts of insane paranoia are funny in retrospect. This is a scanned pamphlet of anti-communist propaganda from it-looks-like-the-1950s. (via Boing Boing)

Those times when you hire two friends to murder your mother and then blog about it. It's apparently true.

(via Metafilter, which warns that the last couple comments on that post have been goatse'd, so don't scroll down too far on the comments or you'll be entirely grossed out)

I don't know whether to be happy or sad.

Here. You can even draw wordsets from Web pages of your choice.

Here. Pretty comprehensive -- it even includes such classics as Zack Attack.

On Blogspot, of all places.

Interesting site with a ton of little Buffy factoids and would-have-beens, including this interesting little lost plotline about Tara that I hadn't heard: [SPOILER, if it is in fact possible to spoil the never-attempted plotlines of a show that's been off-the-air for two sad, long years now] The original plan for season seven was to have the First Evil inhabit the form of Tara to torment the Scoobies over the first half of the season, culminating in a Buffy-is-granted-one-wish-and-uses-it-to-bring-Tara-back-to-life episode three from the bottom. Now, Season Seven of Buffy is wildly, famously incoherent, and the writers clearly changed directions a few times in mid-season and never really got their plotline going in the first place. So it's possible that this was actually the plan at one point -- and it would have been an emotionally satisfying ending for that storyline, if a little strangely happy for the Buffyverse -- but a big part of me thinks that Joss is only saying this now because Buffy's over and he wants to throw a bone to the fans who turned on the show after that one thing that happened in Season Six.

Another great MetaFilter post: Most Beautiful English Words. Tons of links, including this gem, a collection of beautiful and ugly words as chosen by various groups of people.

Here. (via Boing Boing)

Fascinating thread over at MetaFilter on Creationism vs. Evolution, prompted by this frightening poll alleging that 37% of Americans want creationism taught in schools instead of evolution (though it's worth noting that the poll appears to be bogus, in that it doesn't seem to offer an "evolution only" choice). Lots of good stuff hin here, including Pretty_Generic's ironclad definition of What Evolution Is:

The theory of evolution consists of two statements:
1) Things change
2) Things that are more likely to stick around are more likely to stick around.

Some highlights:

FAQs about Evolution (from PBS)

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense (from Scientific American)

Sherlock Holmes on why he doesn't care whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or vice versa

Why Bad Beliefs Won't Die

What the Enemy Thinks About All This (a RedState.org diary)

Good stuff.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 7:37 PM  |

A simple, open request:
Rank the following four art forms in order of importance,
the criteria of which is up to you.

Dance, Music, Visual Art, Writing.

Last night we got four people, and four answers.
Various things we considered: Immediacy. Primal Instincts. Refinement of Craft. Factors in Survival. Elitism and accessibility. What you like. How it touches you. The language of the making. If you get it and what you're schooled in. Etc. Etc.

24 possible combinations. Surely we could grid this up and sell it as an internet personality test? I bet we could net, like 50 euros. (That's almost 5000 american dollars at this point, right?)

Sure, it's not much compared to car crashes and heart attacks, but still, buyer beware.

Off to Washington, DC, and then Jersey for the holiday. Posting will probably be more rare, but nonzero. Peace.

The New Yorker covers one interesting case involving a play, a psychologist who covers serial killers, and itself.

Lewis began underlining line after line. She had worked at New York University School of Medicine. The psychiatrist in “Frozen” worked at New York School of Medicine. Lewis and Pincus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Gottmundsdottir and Nabkus did a study of brain injuries among fifteen death-row inmates. Once, while Lewis was examining the serial killer Joseph Franklin, he sniffed her, in a grotesque, sexual way. Gottmundsdottir is sniffed by the play’s serial killer, Ralph. Once, while Lewis was examining Ted Bundy, she kissed him on the cheek. Gottmundsdottir, in some productions of “Frozen,” kisses Ralph. “The whole thing was right there,” Lewis went on. “I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realized that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen—I don’t believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence.”

...for refusing to hand Game Boy over to principal. Yes, you read that correctly.

There's got to be more to this story, right?

Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century.

Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Built in a small Chicago laboratory, Boilerplate was originally designed as a prototype soldier for use in resolving the conflicts of nations. Although it was the only such prototype, Boilerplate was eventually able to exercise its proposed function by participating in several combat actions.

In the mid-1890s, Boilerplate embarked on a series of expeditions to demonstrate its abilities, the most ambitious being a voyage to Antarctica. In 1901, to celebrate the new century, Boilerplate circumnavigated the globe in what turned out to be a failed publicity attempt to garner interest in its industrial applications.

Boilerplate is one of history's great ironies, a technological milestone that remains largely unknown. Even in an age that gave birth to the automobile and aeroplane, a functioning mechanical man should have been accorded more significance.

You'd think we would have made more than one of these.

About ten tons of counterfeit Lego blocks were destroyed at the Kymeenlaakso waste processing plant in Anjalankoski on Thursday. The plastic will be mixed with other waste and burned at a district heating plant in Lahti.

Truly, the stuff should be burned.

(via Boing Boing)

Some scientists are expecting to find new planets (like Sedna, discovered earlier this year) lurking behind Pluto, including possibly even some objects as large as Mars.

Others are skeptical.

After the smashing success of their evolution warning sticker, Cobb County schools have decided to add a few more stickers to their textbooks, including this one:

This book discusses heliocentrism, that the Earth orbits around a centrally located Sun. Because astronomers still disagree over the details of the heliocentric model, this material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

It's for the children.

(via MetaFilter)

And how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours. At Slate.

And we're just finding this out now? Ostensibly, this is to track counterfeiters, but it gives me the willies all the same.

(via Boing Boing)

What a dumb name.

Very well done.

This one's for Jaimee:

Don't worry. Situationism & Rock is here to explain the philosophical underpinnings of Sex Pistols lyrics:

The situationists were anti-capitalist: they were against work and looked to play and spontaneity as the cornerstones necessary to modern life. As they saw it, modernity, limited work and relative abundance, city planning and the welfare state produced not happiness, but depression and boredom. Boredom to the situationists was a modern phenomenon, a modern form of control. With God missing (presumed dead), people felt their condition not exactly as a fact but simply as a fatalism, devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from each other

They sought to understand that moment when people gain insight into the alienated patterns of their everyday lives, prompting the question: ‘I’m not happy- what’s wrong with me?’
...
1976

‘Your God has gone away’
"No Feelings," Sex Pistols

When he sang "Pretty Vacant," Johnny Rotten claimed the right not to work, and the right to deny all the values that went with it - perseverance, ambition, piety, frugality, honesty and hope. The past that God had invented work to pay for, the future that work was meant to build- there was none.

(via LinkFilter)

Who among us can resist the siren song of the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator?

Zoom in / zoom out / repeat as desired.

Monkeyfilter, where I found this, is completely right: this site will destroy your mind.

But it doesn't run on precious, precious oil, so you can't drive it even if you want to.

Someone's going to feel pretty dumb once HTML coding gets replaced.

Sometime in the next ten years, the world will end in at least one of nineteen different ways. Or not.

JFK Reloaded puts you on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository at 12:30 pm on November 22, 1963 -- with a rifle. Your mission is to replicate as closely as possible the marksmanship of Lee Harvey Oswald. Your cash prize? $100,000.

(Via MetaFilter, which is suitably outraged)

No good can come of this:

In a makeshift morgue, handmade cedar boxes are stacked row upon row, each holding the ancient remains of the ancestors of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, all facing east toward the sunrise.

Ripped from what was to be their final resting place, the remains were put here for safekeeping until the tribe can find a place for their dead to rest once more.

The bones have been exhumed by contractors for the state Department of Transportation as it builds a marine facility needed for reconstruction of the Hood Canal Bridge.

The excavation inadvertently unearthed Tse-whit-zen, the largest prehistoric Indian village ever discovered in Washington, portions of which date back more than 1,700 years.

Note to self: Never drive on Hood Canal Bridge.

Astronomer Predicts Alien Contact By 2025.

From USA Today:

A federal jury Thursday awarded a woman $434,000 in damages after she sued an Internet matchmaking service that introduced her to her abusive husband.

Hard to say whether a result like this is justified. It depends a lot on the particulars of the case. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if this case or a case like this winds up being the "woman spills coffee on herself" case of the '00s -- even if, as in the coffee case, the suit at least arguably wasn't frivolous and the action at least arguably justified by negligence on the company's part.

I was trying to explain this to my composition class the other day: "Look," I said, after hearing for the millionth time someone talking about how trial lawyers were blah-blah-blahing, "the court system isn't a lottery for the stupid or the careless. The courts are the means by which the rights of ordinary people like us are protected from huge corporations. The people who are trying to discredit the court system through all this talk about frivolous lawsuits are the very people who stand to benefit economically from a discredited court system. And we all stand to lose." You're being had, I screamed, the Republicans are making fools out of you, and that's how I got fired.

At the London Telegraph. Jimi Hendrix gets the #1 nod for "All Along The Watchtower," as he clearly should. Even Dylan has said that when he plays "Watchtower" now, he feels like he's covering Hendrix.

Sid Vicious gets #3 for Sinatra's "My Way," but gets bonus points from me because it was used in a Buffy episode one time ("Lover's Walk," Season Three). It's hella good.

A lot of these, I totally had no idea were covers. "Respect"? "Tainted Love"? "Twist and Shout"? Weird.

Blog Discussion Question: Some have argued that for a cover to be truly great, it must supplant the original in the cultural consciousness. Do you agree with this remark? Why or why not?

Another article from the same guy who wrote the Monkeysphere piece, this one about the coming video game crash. I have to say, he makes a pretty persuasive case.

The Law of Monkey bills itself as 12 Steps To Total Enlightenment -- and believe it or not, it's right on the money. Here's a taste:

1. What do monkeys have to do with it?

Picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if you wish. We'll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. You'd be sad if Slappy died, wouldn't you?

Now, imagine you get five more monkeys. Tito, Bubbles, Fluffy, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is distant and quiet. And so on. They're all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Then a thousand.

How long until you can't tell them apart? Or remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? If you get enough monkeys, you'll eventually have enough that you no longer even care if one of them dies.

Now, each of these monkeys is every bit the monkey that Slappy was. It's just that you don't give a rat's ass any more.

The webpage does as good a job as any satirical webpage can of explaining why we're all such jerks to each other. It's just that we're each only supposed to know 150 people, max. We all know way too many monkeys. We're all way past the not-giving-a-rat's-ass horizon by now.

In the vein of Our Cancer Year comes Mom's Cancer, the story of an artist's dealing with his mother's diagnosis with incurable lung cancer through the healing magic of comics.

(via Metafilter)

In 1992, Guided By Voices released a limited edition vinyl LP called Propeller. Each of the album's 500 copies featured an individual, hand-made cover created by the band.

This webpage is seeking to catalogue them all (with images and owner/location where known). Dayton, OH is currently your Propeller hotspot, with 27 known albums.

One edition recently sold for $6,200.

Mysterious black triangles the size of football fields have been spotted flying over various American cities and highways. If it's on KLAS-TV, you know it's true.

A history of photomontage.

The Hero Machine: Make Your Own Hero. There goes your Saturday.

Pistols or swords? It's more complicated than you'd think.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

This is drawing number 2, created 85 minutes after the first dose and 20 minutes after the second. The surroundign text says:

The patient seems euphoric.

'I can see you clearly, so clearly. This... you... it's all ... I'm having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going.'

I don't know if it's real -- there's disappointingly little corroborating evidence --but it's interesting to watch the progression all the same. Given that I've never done acid, I don't know if it's believable or not, but I buy it.

(via Waving at Myself)

Scholar.google.com lets you limit your search just to scholarly or academic websites. I'm thinking this could be tremendously useful, and not just for joke searches either.

(via The Volokh Conspiracy, which remains the best of the righty/libertarian political blogs, though sadly this is the first time I've been able to bring myself to go there since the election)

The Big Lebowski and Buddhism. At Metaphilm, whose epic table of contents is your doorway to more review/essays.

Over at IGN, someone got a crack at the Knights of the Old Republic sequel for the X-Box. I must say, I am eagerly anticipating this game; I'm already plotting for a way to steal Ezra's X-Box without his knowing.

Nobody important. Just me. Here's the argument in a nutshell:

There's a hell of a lot of people out there that the Christian Coalition doesn't speak for.

The bad Christians just shout louder than the good ones.

Even if you ignore this link entirely, as you undoubtedly should, at least check out Supply Side Jesus, or BushCo's anti-Jesus political ad. They say what I say, better than I can.

Count the stars in the sky. Totally pointless, yet strangely compelling.

No explanation required.

It's just like the sci-fi action blockbuster. Except in haiku form.

Take the red pill, and
You will come with me. I can
Show you the Matrix.

The Christian Science Monitor, today:

Is there a subtle sociological statement embedded in "The Incredibles"?

"I can't help thinking of [philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche and his idea that some people are better and more deserving than others," says Mikita Brottman, professor of language and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

"The movie salutes Superman," Dr. Brottman adds. "Not the 'superman' in comic books but the one [despots] believe in. Its idea seems to be that even in a democracy some people are 'more equal' than others, and the rest of us shouldn't be so presumptuous as to get in their way."

Me, two weeks ago:

And, precisely as Nietzsche told us, the only weakness of the strong in The Incredibles comes from their decision to allow themselves to be hemmed in by the artificial constraints created by the weak. Superheroes in this world are ordered to blend in, to hide, to not stand out -- and the movie's message, again in line with Nietzsche, appears to be that this is unambiguously wrong. The strong, the movie suggests, should be allowed to thrive outside the false laws and values of the weak, acting according to their own superior, self-generated code.

Born a superhero? Be a superhero.
Not born a superhero? Get out of the way.

As usual, I'm precisely two weeks ahead of my time.

(Via DKos)

Tommy C and Jennifer W can attest that I have now literally bled for this magazine. While trying to extricate a particularly messy paper jam -- and this was truly unbelievable, we're talking about the mother of all paper jams here, and on a printer that does not give you good access to the mechanism -- I had to squeeze my hands into a space about 1/2 the size of my hands and ran the feeder over and over until I was able to pull the blockage out with the tips of my fingers.

Now my hands are all cut up and bloody.

But paper jam? Extricated. And printing? Accomplished.

I'll be putting in for my Purple Heart within the hour.

In 1960, James Kittinger survived an open-air parachute jump from 102,800 feet (basically the edge of outer space really high up. See Neil's bitching in the comments. My point was that he couldn't have survived much higher in the open air.). Hero or lunatic? Only the US Centennial of Flight Commission knows for sure.

I'd never heard of this before. You can go 25 or 40 miles. Website includes pictures and a map of the course (and a bunch of other stuff).

EBay's most expensive recent sales. Some people are rich.

In pictures. Pretty funny. And it's Irish to boot. Truly God's country.

(via Metafilter, which also has quotes from eyewitnesses)

Can be found here. This squares with the way pretty much everybody I've met who wasn't from Randolph does it.

In Randolph we did it a little differently. Because the group of debaters I hung out with shared at most one brain -- and because we always stayed too long at places anyway-- "It's time to leave wherever we are" was generally declared by one person's suddenly calling shotgun.

If it was truly time to leave, the rest of the group agreed by acclimation*, shotgun was awarded, and everyone began getting ready to go. [EDIT: For brevity's sake, I left out a step. See comments.]

If it was not yet time to leave, that was agreed upon by acclimation too, the false shotgun-caller was mocked, and everyone stayed where they were.

It was a good system and it worked well. And I've never really adapted to the "Shotgun must be called outside while in view of the car" rules that operate throughout the rest of the planet. Luckily, as I've gotten older, I'm always either the driver or the driver has a significant other, a state of being which has rendered the technicalities of the shotgun contest largely moot.

I guess this is growing up.

Also via Gravity Lens, A Clockwork Orange glossary. Pony, my droogies?

Playing off the Mordor post earlier, check out maps of:

Oz (with more from Wikipedia)
Narnia
Wonderland
Discworld
and, just for Ezra, Hyboria, The Land of Conan.



(via Gravity Lens. Cool site.)

Kind of freaky, and very well done. Click the picture for the answer.

David Livingston Smith, author of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, knows. And in this interview with The Conference Board, he'll tell you.

You say that the forces of evolution have molded us into natural-born liars. Are people who are better liars more evolved than those who are more honest?

No, because when we speak of evolution, we are talking about a whole species, not individuals. But if we rephrase the question to ask, "Is it advantageous to be a good liar?" I'd say without a doubt, yes. People who deceive effectively get ahead in life. If I can cheat you to my advantage without you catching on, I've gotten ahead. Conscious lying is a very special talent, an aptitude. And most of us are very bad at it. Most people are also very bad at noticing lies. Only perhaps one in a thousand is extraordinarily skillful at detecting lies. In one study, for example, psychologists asked experienced law-enforcement officers, rookie cops, and college students to determine whether various individuals were lying or telling the truth. Not only were there no significant differences in the accuracy of the judgments of the three groups-all three guessed right at a frequency only minimally better than chance. They might as well have just flipped a coin.

(Via where else? MetaFilter, which of course has more.)

Someone's a devoted fanboy.

Neil Howard Farbman, summa cum laude, points us to the nominees in AFI's top movie quotes of all time poll.

#31, Doc Brown's famous "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads" line gets the nostalgia vote from me -- and #281 from Inigo Montoya runs a close second -- but the right answer is probably #68: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." That's a pretty damn good line.

Although #94, "Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!", also has a certain charm.

A lot of good nominees, and a whole lot of bad nominees. We'll see who wins. (Actually, I'm fairly certain that I'll never know who wins this. Such is life.)

Full list of all 400 nominees.

That's what the scientists are saying.

Truly, I have seen the future.

Go Dylan. It's your birthday*.

1. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
2. Rolling Stones - Satisfaction
3. John Lennon - Imagine
4. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
5. Aretha Franklin - Respect

I need the Gaye in a bad way, but I'm still surprised to see him get so high -- and for something other than "Let's Get It On," at that.

The Beatles clock in at #7 with "Hey Jude," while Nirvana of all people hit #9 with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (the only song from the last twenty years to break the top ten).

Also, no Springsteen? I call bullshit on that.

There'll be another one of these Top X Greatest Songs Of All Time polls in about a month, so start thinking now about the incredible masterpiece you can't believe they're going to leave off again.

--
* Actually, it's Howard Dean's birthday.

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum have been talking about this recently, but since I've been reading a ton of undergraduate writing lately I feel uniquely qualified to comment on this topic.

Somebody needs to do an empirical study of these types of homophone and phonetic errors, and then provide elementary school teachers with a list of commonly misused words whose correct spelling and usage they shall beat into their students' minds. The only reason I don't make these types of errors all the time is because the teachers at Ironia Elementary School were merciless in their pursuit of homophones -- and as far as I can tell, aggressive vaccination is the only thing that works.

Here is a list of My Current Top Annoyances to get that intrepid psychologist started:

loose / lose
definitely / defiantly
suppose / supposed
site / sight
write / right
principal / principle
clicks / cliques
affect / effect
weather / whether
to / too / two

And, of course, there's the Possessive Wonder Quadruplets:

it's / its
they're / their / there
you're / your
who's / whose

Did I miss any? When we're done with the homophones, then we'll get started in on some other stuff in the English language I don't like, like exclamation points. We've got a long road ahead.

[/grammar nazi]

Interesting* page detailing an argument Kurt Gödel (creator of the astonishingly brilliant Incompleteness Theorem) made "proving" the existence of God.

In its particulars, it's an ontological argument, so you know it's good. But it's worth looking at* all the same.

--
*Possibly not actually interesting.

*Probably not actually worth looking at.

Here.

The word "Puzzle" is on that list, which strikes me as odd, because it actually wouldn't be that bad a name for a baby. No Jealousy, either. Or Spine.

It's not for me. I'm asking for a friend.

(via Geekpress)

Yes, that's the actual headline. Ah, Texas.

Because I'm totally out of touch with popular culture, I completely missed DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, an unauthorized remixing of The Beatles' The White Album and Jay-Zee's The Black Album. As day must follow night, the bootleg release of The Grey Album on the Internet led immediately to the threat of lawsuit against any domain hosting "The Grey Album" MP3 files -- which in turn to led to the massively successful Grey Tuesday protest.

Like I said, I completely missed all this. But I get one hell of a kick out of it. I think the whole idea, from start to protest, is brilliant. And now there's The Grey Video, which you can watch to share in my delight.

Longtime BCR fiction contributer Cory Doctorow describes it thusly:

Now someone has made a video for one of the Grey Album tracks, "Encore," in which black and white Beatles footage (I'm guessing "A Hard Day's Night") and desaturated footage from a Jay-Zee performance are artfully combined with new footage and CGI (Ringo scratching! John breakdancing!) to make one of the funniest, coolest, and most illegal music videos I've ever seen. Go download it now before the lawsuits start.

Seconded.

I finally had the time to do the major blog revamp I've been planning since, oh, June. What do you think? I think it looks one hundred or possibly one thousand times better.

Don't burst my bubble. After all, somewhere in the world, it's still my birthday.

UPDATE: Oh, and look for a big redesign and relaunch of our main web page in the very near future.

UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention this last night, but in the interest of obviousness I should say that Jaimee helped me with the colors.

If you can get to Adobe Bookstore in San Francisco by Nov. 22, you can see that there is nothing wrong in this whole wide world. That's where Chris Cobb is running an art installation of that title -- nearly the store's entire stock has been reorganized by color.

Pictures here.





It's pretty excellent.

(Via Metafilter.)

Just saw this on Daily Kos: Eminem's incredible new protest song, "Mosh," now has fifty seconds of new animation at the end.

Instead of ending with a semi-anticlimatic call to vote, it now ends [SPOILER] with the Hoodie Brigade storming the State of the Union address with protest signs. Still a fairly peaceful and responsible ending, given the extremely angry words that come before -- but this is decidedly less responsible, peaceful, calm and non-threatening than the original ending. It's not the storming of the Bastille, but we're getting closer.

I mean, someday we're actually just going to up and storm the barricades, right? Right?

America says "Booooooooooooo."

In the future, anti-cockroach robots will rid us of cockroaches? That's what The London Times is reporting:

It behaves like a cockroach. It smells like a cockroach. It is accepted by other cockroaches.

But it is not a cockroach. It is a robot and scientists say its invention is a breakthrough in mankind's struggle to control the animal kingdom.

The robot, InsBot, developed by researchers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, is capable of infiltrating a group of cockroaches, influencing them and altering their behaviour.

Within a decade, its inventors believe, it will be leading the unwanted pests out of dark kitchen corners, to where they can be eliminated.

Sorry, not interested. I think we all know how this movie ends.

(via Slashdot)

David Lee Roth once knew how to rock. Now he works as an EMT in NYC.

Read all about it here. At first glance, I was pretty certain that the case was completely ludicrous, but ChasFile makes a fairly decent case in the Metafilter thread on the subject that NCSoft might really be profiting illegitimately from Marvel's copyrights.

So let's grant that Marvel's case is not completely ludicrous.

I still tend to err on the side of free speech and fair use though. If people can't create their own avatars of Marvel characters totally independently of the game's creators, what sort of superhero game (or any non-Marvel superhero work, for that matter) would ever be legal?

I also think Cory D is right when he says that this is transparent corporate thuggery. This is about a step and a half away from accusing City of Heroes of thoughtcrime.

Marvel owns the Hulk and Spiderman; but it doesn't and shouldn't own people's imaginations. This one should be thrown out.

An Exquisite Corpse party game variant that looks like it might actually be fun.

You are an ant karate master with a big stick, battling another ant karate master with a big stick on a tightrope.

Witness my failure to achieve my goals.

Via Neil, via Metafilter, comes this thread on The Allspark Forums dealing with classically bad Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen covers. Be sure to check out the later pages as well. There's more, including some old Batman covers as well.



It was a simpler time.

Where Does Each State Go? This version is slightly humbling, but not that bad. Then there's the Advanced Program.

And when you're done with that, try doing it with Africa.

Jeff Jarvis has the FOIA request to prove it.

Puritanism is the new black.

(via Boing Boing)

A Flash book report on the classic novel. Pirates and Ninjas aplenty , of course.

The Nikon Coolpix 3200.

Neil, you may leave your inevitable pooh-poohing in the comments.

This time between Cyprus and Syria. We can only hope this Atlantis is the one where Aquaman lives.

Via one of Tom's students comes, in all seriousness, the greatest computer application of all time. From outer space, zoom in to street level on any address in America (as well as some other select locations worldwide, like Rome, Tokyo, and Paris). Then fly over the Earth to your next desired location.

My house in NJ? It's in there.
My old apartment in Cleveland? It's in there.
My house now? It's in there.
The Washington Mall? It's in there.
The Statue of Liberty? It's in there.
My favorite restaurant in all the world, Tommy's, on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights? Oh, it's in there.
Etc, etc.

This is seriously, unbelievably addicting. My one complaint is that the digital imagery doesn't include the relative heights of things, so you can't tilt the display to horizontal and look up at them. (I'm sure that will implemented be in Keyhole 3 or 4.)

It's a free download and you get a 7-day free trial. Get to it.

I'm basically at the point where I don't think graffiti should be outlawed anymore. This stuff is fun and cool. It makes our cities better. Or, at least, it doesn't make them any worse.

Who among us can resist the call of science?

I don't know, because I haven't read it yet, but here's the cover description for Battle Royale by Japan's Koushun Takami:

Kousun Takami's notorious high-octane thriller is based on a irresistible premise: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill one another until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan -- where it then proceeded to become a runaway bestseller -- Battle Royale is a Lord of the Flies for the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world.

Oh yes.

GameSpot's "The Final Hours of Half-Life 2" details how the famously prolonged sequel to the game that kept me from studying for finals my freshman year of college was finally put together. Pretty interesting, if you're into that sort of thing.

Based upon James Ensor's similarly ironic mural, Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1899.

Cast of Characters.

Painting History.

Some Stuff About American Fundamentalism from the Painter, Joel Pelletier.

Buy The Poster.

(via Metafilter, which has still more)

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:19 AM  |

Via Little Fluffy Industries, this. Truly awful.

We live in a fallen world.

Learn to play the Zelda theme on a keyboard.

Flash Chess. Do you want to play a game?

So I'm hearing good things about this movie Primer. It won the Grand Jury and Alfred P. Sloan (whoever that is) award at Sundance this year, and the buzz is that it's pretty awesome. Some reviewers found it opaque, but opaque is right up my freaking alley.

And it was made for $7000. I hope it gets some kind of general release.

Trailer.

Very cool optical illusion at Grand Illusions. The dragon's head appears to follow us as we move around the room, but the reality of the situation is is very different from what we think we see.

Link to video.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Via my new favorite webpage, SlickDeals.net, comes a slick deal: a 128MB USB Memory Key for $6 (after mail-in rebate). Free shipping, too.

I have to say, that's a pretty great deal. I got one.

For the first time ever, a forwarded email was actually interesting. I tried like hell and I couldn't keep my foot turning clockwise.

LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN TRICK

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.

UPDATE: Ike in the comments comes up with a pretty nice solution to this: "Draw the 6 in the air in reverse -- start in the middle and spiral clockwise outward instead of starting at the top and spiraling counter-clockwise inward." He's right, that does it.

What happens when you tell a text adventure to go f*ck itself. Roughly 40% of my memories of playing Zork at Ryan Kaye's house involve telling Zork to do various offensive things.

In the complicated world of the future, these are things we will all have to know. (Warning: Not Safe For Work? There are no dirty pictures, but the word "penis" is often used, as well as the phrase "relativistic flaming semen" -- though purely in a clinical sense.)

Also recommended: "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," by Larry Niven.

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. Ezra Plemons, your career is calling.

Tomorrow's News Today.

Also check out the first chapter of the-novel-based-on-the-website, but be sure to sign the End User License Agreement first.

(via Boing Boing)

Playing off the junk science post from earlier, here's another post about junk science, this one dealing specifically with Intelligent Design theory.

Who owns the +3 sword your EverQuest Paladin uses? Turns out it's an interesting* question.

--
*Some people may not think so.

The metric stylings of Jaimee Elizabeth Hills, Esq., rock Greensboro HARD on Friday, April 15th at 8 pm.

Wild. Not that anything he says will convince anyone who isn't already on board, but still -- at least I'll enjoy it.

At Adbusters, Czeslaw Milosz's "Song on the End of the World" set to flash.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Text of poem, as well as a RealAudio file of Milosz reading it aloud.

How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality.

The town I grew up in is one of Money Magazine's Best Places to Live. As far as I can tell from looking at these stats, we're mostly cruising on the fact that we don't have any Superfund sites.

UPDATE: Jaimee's home town is on the list too. But it doesn't have a "Money Magazine: Hot Town" icon next to it. No sir, that's an honor reserved for Randolph, NJ alone.

Greensboro's in the database too. No icon there, either. Go Rams!

It's official: Nature's just plain out to get us.

Man, I love this company. So if you want to use Outlook for your GMail, now you can.

By the way, does anyone out there still need a GMail invite? I have tons.

So I went out today and made the controversial decision to repurchase Metroid Prime in anticipation of the release of its sequel (Metroid Prime: Echoes) next week. (Note: It only cost me ten dollars; doesn't exactly break the bank.) I've started replaying it, and it's still one of the best games ever. Only the three most recent Zelda games (Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind-Waker) and Knights of the Old Republic are really in the same league -- though I hear the new Grand Theft Auto is out of control amazing as well. I haven't played it yet.

The Metroid franchise and I go way back. The original Metroid was the first non-Mario/non-Duck Hunt/non-Power Pad Olympics video game I got way back in 1988, when my family first got our Nintendo. Metroid Prime and Zelda: Wind-Waker were the reasons I foolishly bought a GameCube two years ago, and their respective sequels are the reason I foolishly repurchased a GameCube this summer.

Obviously, I don't have time to devote myself to video games full-time, as I'd like, but every so often, it's good to go old school.

They call it "cosmetic neurology," but let's call it what it is: Extreme Brain Makeover.

Now we know who we look down upon.

The experience of Just Letters is exactly like you and 70 other people playing with a standard set of magnet letter on a refrigerator simultaneously. Frustration is involved.

Super Scrabble, a new version of the classic game with more spaces and a quadruple word score.

The fact of the matter is that I invented this at least three years ago. But sadly, I don't own the rights to Scrabble (or anything else, for that matter).

By way of example, check out FucktheSouth.com.

Best Buy is working on ways to keep its "devil" customers from messing with its profits.

Best Buy's angels are customers who boost profits at the consumer-electronics giant by snapping up high-definition televisions, portable electronics, and newly released DVDs without waiting for markdowns or rebates.

The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on "loss leaders," severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. "They can wreak enormous economic havoc," says Mr. Anderson.

Is this a great company or what?

Can you believe the thing is still alive? Apparently it's favorite saying is "Fuck the Nazis." Does that parrot know how to party or what?

UPDATE: Leave it to Winston Churchill's daughter to pour water on a rocking good time.

It's an allegedly true story from the Salt Lake City Weekly.

Interpol recruited Bannon at age 19 while he was serving time in a Korean prison for smuggling peanut butter and Jack Daniels. He’d been serving as a Christian missionary when his quest for American munchies got him tangled with a smuggling operation that, on one end, traded in harmless Yankee foodstuffs and, on the other, trafficked in children and child pornography. While Bannon believes a number of his traits led Interpol to approach him, the fact that he spoke fluent Korean–and was a third-degree black belt in the martial art of hapkido–didn’t hurt.

Hired first as an undercover “snitch,” he was eventually recruited into Archangel, a covert team within Interpol that worked to hunt down and punish those who raped, tortured and killed children for profit. Interpol is the largest intelligence and law-enforcement organization in the world and is second in size only to the United Nations. Funded by member nations, it functions with virtual immunity around the globe, including in the United States.

Out of control bizarre.

(Via Metafilter. No, I have no idea if this is for real.)

Anthropologists have got it all figured out, in The Times Online.

Some more interesting maps of the country's political division--by county, by population, by intensity of support for one party, or (my favorite) by all of the above.

Tell me this: When in my life am I going to be able to see the damn Northern Lights? I slept through them the one time they made it down to Ohio, and now that they're as far south as Virginia...I'm further south than that.

Xeni Jardin has a great post up over at Boing Boing with links to a lot of pictures.

The Lights can't run forever. Someday I'll see them. Someday.

UPDATE: More pictures here. Man, this is so cool.

Some days, I really get a kick out of McSweeney's.

Hi-Res Aerial Photo of Disneyland

"University of Chicago researchers have determined the size of men's testicles has evolved based on the infidelity of women."

The article doesn't really going into it, but I'm assuming men don't match up well against the gorilla fidelity standard, either.

A joke email circulating in Chile depicts Kermit rolling a joint.

The Wizard of Odds proves it.

100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time. Pretty neat, although the current obsession with Ariel Sharon is a little weird. It reloads every hour, though, so maybe in an hour somebody else will be 10 X 10's obsession. And the glorious orb continues to turn.

Save 40%. It just makes sense.

As reviewed by our intrepid fiction editor, Captain PClem.

Part 1
Part 2

Who should play Dubya in the movie? Don't answer Will Ferrell; it's not him. Think about it. Think. And then click here.

All the "fun" of Jenga, none of the messy cleanup.

Stapler Poetry.

Seriously, Pixar is the greatest company on the planet. I got back from seeing The Incredibles tonight, and while I wouldn't go as far as Ezra Klein does in calling it "far and away the funnest film I've ever seen" -- I'd say Finding Nemo and possibly even Monsters Inc and Toy Story 2 probably edge it out just in the Pixarimation category alone -- it is a tremendously fun movie, and may even grow on me upon subsequent viewings.

The movie itself is a ton of fun, and absolutely worth seeing if you enjoy either superhero stories, nostalgia for superhero stories, or Pixar animation. My only real complaint is that I don't feel like it surprised me as much as it might have, but that may just be my over-familiarity with the genre.

The movie does come to some interesting philosophical conclusions, not least among them the way it advocates full-on Nietzschean ethics. The "Supers" -- literal Ubermensch -- are the strong, endowed with special gifts that place them beyond the range of normal men. The Supers also possess unimpeachably noble spirits, just as Nietzsche described. While competing amongst themselves to be the finest hero, they devote themselves and their gifts entirely to protecting the weak from themselves.

The weak, in contrast, are weak because they deserve to be, as they are inferior not just physically but also ethically and spiritually to the Supers. The weak steal. The weak hurt themselves and others. The weak are jealous and spiteful, resenting the Supers for the gifts, using the courts to punish them under false pretenses. The weak even ultimately create laws to constrain the Supers, forcing them to keep their superpowers in check and hide, unhappily, among the normals -- shades of the Genealogy of Morals, of ressentiment. (Incidentally, this is also rock-solid evidence that somebody somewhere in the writing process behind this movie read The Watchmen.)

Not unsurprisingly, no Super is a villain. Every villain we see in the movie is a "normal" person attempting, wrongly, to compete with his moral betters (the Supers) through the use of either technological or legalistic restraints.

The movie's primary villain, himself a typically jealous weakling overreaching beyond his proper station, near the end of the movie describes his vision of the future: a world where the Supers have been eliminated and the abilities of the Ubermensch have been granted to the weak via technology -- a world where everyone is special, and therefore no one is.

And, precisely as Nietzsche told us, the only weakness of the strong in The Incredibles comes from their decision to allow themselves to be hemmed in by the artificial constraints created by the weak. Superheroes in this world are ordered to blend in, to hide, to not stand out -- and the movie's message, again in line with Nietzsche, appears to be that this is unambiguously wrong. The strong, the movie suggests, should be allowed to thrive outside the false laws and values of the weak, acting according to their own superior, self-generated code.

Born a superhero? Be a superhero.
Not born a superhero? Get out of the way.

They should have given F.N. a co-writing credit.

Star Wars III teaser trailer.

(via Metafilter)

Optical Illusions for these confusing times.

Check out Frontline's piece "The Persuaders tonight, "an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives."

Tiny clocks made from found objects. From the Czech Republic.

The New Criterion isn't happy with this year's Nobel Prize Laureate.

Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), marks a new low. It is likely that you hadn’t heard of Jelinek before—or, if you had, it was probably only because her sadomasochistic fantasy The Piano Teacher (1983) was made into a movie with Isabelle Huppert in 2001. Other titles by Jelinek have been translated into English—Lust (1989), for example, an unrelieved carnival of sexual and physical brutality culminating in a woman’s murder of her son. Jelinek is a radical left-wing fantasist. She was a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991—a period when, as Stephen Schwartz pointed out in The Weekly Standard, the organization “was little more than a KGB network.” With the fall of the Soviet Empire, support for its satellites dried up, so Jelinek left the party. But she didn’t abandon her left-wing animus. Her most recent work is Bambiland (2003), a stream-of-consciousness anti-American effusion masquerading as a play. Most of her work is a species of arty pornography. The Nobel judges rhapsodized about Jelinek’s “musical flow of voices and counter-voices … that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” But what the reader actually finds is not the revelation of but a shameless wallowing in clichés. The Swedish Academy has made plenty of mistakes. In choosing to honor Elfriede Jelinek it has made itself a laughingstock.

One gets the sense that these people are very rarely happy.

An idea whose time has come.

A little birdie dropped this guide to expatriating in my mailbox. Oh, Canada...

The New Yorker's cover story on Democracy in Pictures last week truly was spectacular. Click the red link on the side to open the slideshow.

The last picture of Barack Obama is the among the most hopeful, but it's this one I really want to share, without further comment. I think it speaks for itself.


Russ Irwin Porter, director, Harvard School of Public Health, and Christian Schlesinger Porter, elementary-school teacher, who were married on May 17th, with their daughter, Nina. Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

(via a comment on Atrios)

The official homepage of my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle universe rabbit samuari, Usagi Yojimbo. Seriously, in the world of 1980s action figures, the Usagi Yojimbo TMNT figure stands far above the fray.

Salon has the audio of a short story from Jonathan Lethem's new collection, Men and Cartoons. I'm kind of excited about this. Ezra, what do you say we steal it?

Link. Salon Ultramercial for The Life Aquatic at no additional charge.

If you guys can get Vermont to secede, I think I'd move there.

I just remembered that I bet Brian Crocker fifty bucks last spring that Bush would lose. Goddamnit. The final insult.

US Political Party hegemony by state, in living color. Interesting map.



(Via Boing Boing)

Just when you thought there was nothing that could unite the warring factions of Caseytonia and DonEzraCruzistan, in walked the one, the only, Super Mario Bros. quilt.

Now we get it.

Man, things just gets worse and worse. In the mail today I got nailed for jury dury on 12/06.

I'll explore the possibility of using jury nullification to overturn the results of last night's election...but I'm not making any promises.

I put a long post up concerning my emotional reaction to last night's decision at Three Guys, which you can read if you so choose. It starts like this: "I feel like I am in grief -- if not for America, then for an ideal of America, one which last night I believed and which now I have lost," and it ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?

As a nation, we lost so much last night. What I feel now is not the righteous anger I expected to feel if Bush won -- instead, it's grief and hurt, it's loss and deep despair.

I'm in disbelief.

Things are looking VERY good over at Three Guys.

What do soldiers serving in Iraq carry for luck?

Right now, terrorists are plotting to overthrow a presidential election.
My country is in danger.
And people I work with may be involved in both.

I'm Federal Agent Gerry Canavan, and today is the longest day of my life.

...as conceived by H. P. Lovecraft.

It's a rare condition.

Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world known to have congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA -- a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.

Cobra Commander says he can do better. Right on taxes. Right on defense. Vote Cobra Commander for President.

(via Boing Boing)

Owly is the world of Andy Runton's continuing graphic novel, a wordless narrative about the intertwined nature of friendship and loss. I've never read it, but it looks awesome.



An interview with Andy Runton can be found here.

(Via Metafilter, where more Owly links abound)

Try it out. Print out the image and cut the figure into three parts along the lines provided. Now position the sheets so that it looks like each jockey is riding a donkey. (No folding!)

(Via Metafilter)

UPDATE: Here's a flash version.

UPDATE 2: Wow. I didn't get it, but it really does have an elegant solution.