Things not about the State of the Union

School shootings since Sandy Hook.

What did Congress just do to the IRS?

More crude spilled  in 2013 Than Previous Four Decades Combined... or oil spill?  What oil spill?

Exploding neighborhood novas

Petition to keep China from processing our chickens.  (via Steve Bates)

Free art books from the Getty Museum.  In fact, free education!

Here is a cat playing a theremin.

From Books to Art

Book lover problems.  Mine is that I've run out of bookshelves....

Legos and gender identity.

I didn't know Daily Kos was keeping track of weekly accidental gun shootings.  We are a clumsy bunch, aren't we?

Plastics cause diabetes and obesity?  How about wood?

I do believe that being bored actually does not give you the right to shoot people.

Glasses that help people with red-green color blindness.

Sperm and eggs made from skin cells.

Make good art.

Art to Mars to ruined library

Master forger comes clean about tricks that fooled art world for four decades

Mars crater image beamed back by Nasa rover Opportunity

Nasa scientists say crater, formed by an impact billions of years ago, is the largest yet encountered

Dads Reveal How Having Daughters Has Changed Their View Of Women

Sales of plug-in cars

Finding beauty in neglect.

Eclipsing intelligence...

The solar eclipse in pictures.

France bans Monsanto corn.

Street art.

The man who wishes the Google would ignore...

Congress is getting dumber, if you couldn't tell by now.  Especially in their dealings with them wimmen folk.

From lemons to lemonade: Reaction uses carbon dioxide to make carbon-based semiconductor:

(Phys.org) -- A materials scientist at Michigan Technological University has discovered a chemical reaction that not only eats up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, it also creates something useful. And, by the way, it releases energy.

Ok, I'm ready! Let me go pick some lemons in my backyard... oh.  Rats.

An excellent author and artist

Maurice Sendak.  Thank you, sir, for all your wonderful imaginings.  And  for your refusal to change in the face of all the attempts to censor or change your stories and paintings.  No child was ever harmed by your fancies and many were given the invitation to dance with your monsters and explore with Little Bear.

Life goes on...

Veterans Day.

Remnants of the Big Bang.

Under attack from Rove, Elizabeth Warren doubles down. More of her kind, please.

I hadn't thought of it, but the Personhood Amendment would have changed everybody's birthdays and horoscopes! This explains why they never get it right!

Nightsticks are useful when there are no cameras.

James Murdoch's serfs forgot to pretend to not inform the boss what they were doing that he told them to do... or something.

Pictures of the Great War, as the landscape is today.

A discovered Leonardo.

Tracking Japan's Fukishima radiation:

It's the story of how a group of hackers and internet folks are working with Japanese volunteers to harness DIY technology to record and share data about radiation hotspots.

Women come forward with their on the job sexual harassment stories.

Wells Fargo involved with our 'illegal immigration' concentration camps.

Landmines.

Man paraglides with his hawk: Edit: his YouTube has been removed. Anyway. Man paragliding around with treats in his gloved hand and hawk flies in and lands on his arm.

Blog sprinkles

A reminder why the Gulf of Mexico will not be the same for decades and decades. And BP's happy story about oil eating bacteria? Gulf bacteria digests gas, not oil.

Monkeyfister notes that a Florida man's blood was tested and was off the charts with the chemicals that BP uses: Florida man gets tested: Six of nine VOCs in blood — Hexane “off the charts”

The tree of crazy and why we need a chainsaw.

Californians better watch who's doing what to our water supply.

And speaking of water.... it can be turned into a blade and defuse bombs!

A watery blade is saving the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Known as the Stingray, the device uses conventional military explosives to craft a blade of water sharp enough to slice through a metal bomb and scramble its innards.

Developed by the Sandia National Laboratories, thousands of units of this technology have already been shipped to Afghanistan to help diffuse the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that are so deadly to U.S. soldiers.

High fructose corn syrup producers want to change its name but not its potency.... basically hiding the ingredient in the product. Be careful what you eat.

The Art of Drew Struzan

Digby quoting Michael O'Hare about those super rich whining about the ending of the Bush tax cuts:

"A truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity"

Why riding a motorcycle can be effing dangerous.

The glory of an egret in flight.

Phila of Bouphonia is back with another Friday Hope blog!

Zina Saunders

I'm glad this artist is on our side.



Because she's devastatingly good!

Something beautiful

h/t Hecate.

What's wrong with these stories?

Seattle bank teller chases robber, loses job

US Marshals seize sanitizer for bacteria problems

Obviously what will win the 'war on terror' is bigger bombs.... which is what we've said ever since we dropped the A bomb on Hiroshima:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is seeking to speed deployment of an ultra-large "bunker-buster" bomb on the most advanced U.S. bomber as soon as July 2010, the Air Force said on Sunday, amid concerns over perceived nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.

The non-nuclear, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, which is still being tested, is designed to destroy deeply buried bunkers beyond the reach of existing bombs.

If Congress agrees to shift enough funds to the program, Northrop Grumman Corp's radar-evading B-2 bomber "would be capable of carrying the bomb by July 2010," said Andy Bourland, an Air Force spokesman.

Crazy Landlord Fights Heat Wave With Air Conditioning Ban

An Oregon landlord refuses to let his tenants install air conditioners because he thinks they "look tacky." Tenants of the Arbor Creek complex in Aloha who choose to sacrifice aesthetics for comfort have ten days to correct their mistake before facing eviction. One tenant's kid already landed in the hospital thanks to heat stroke.

China wants perfect astronauts:

Would-be astronauts competing for China's next space programme must comply with 100 rules - excluding those with bad breath or a runny nose.

The list, intended to recruit "super human beings", also prohibits those with body odours, tooth cavities or scars which may "burst open" in space.

Dammit! Americans have ruined the British class system by making people not buy fish forks!!

Cute: Why one should not draw faces in public.

I guess the question should be: Are people actually still evolving? Or are we now going backwards, sinking into primordial stupidity?

Don't answer that!

This will really make freeway driving more interesting!

Invisible cars!

Mapaghimagsik hits the big time!

Crooks and Liars has your comic!

Had to play with this

The Obamicon site:





It has potential....

One pill to make you small

Very small.

Blog sprinkles

Electric cars


Painter Bob Ross


Lol Bush from the Guardian:




The unraveling of the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins.


Coal emissions and profits are up.


Fill in the blank, you trollop! (More) (and even more with pictures)


McCain's mother sued his first wife.


DistributorCap NY has an excellent ongoing discussion about our broken Constitution.


Proof that eggplant kills.


Newt's bloated head needs a tire gauge.

Why don't we get graffiti like this?

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Obviously mammoths are coming out with a book or a movie

Why else would their publicists be making them hit the headlines right now?

In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it's still intact.

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years."

(photo from article)

And in Siberia:

A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.

The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.

The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.

Maybe this is the reason (from the same article):

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth lineage.

Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning.

"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.

Ohhhkaaay... Have we thought about what it would mean to bring back wooly mammoths? Into zoos? For fun? For scientific purposes? Because we can?

Sheesh! Didn't anybody watch Jurassic Park?

Update 7/17: Cloning mammoths will not happen:

SPIEGEL: Researchers are falling all over themselves to examine the intact baby mammoth found in the permafrost of Siberia. Will scientists be able to clone it?

Hofreiter: Cloning a mammoth isn't possible: Anyone who says otherwise shouldn't be taken seriously. For a successful cloning, you would need intact cells complete with organelles and DNA in chromosome form. What we have is the genome in millions of pieces -- they are just fragmentary. At the most, one could replace single genes, as is done with mice. But to transform an Asian elephant into a mammoth would require millions of substitutions.

Women in refrigerators

Reader mapaghimagsik gave me a link to Women In Refrigerators, a view of women in comics. The question is why women superheroes seem to end up tragically horribly brutalized, raped, murdered, crushed. Are they more 'depowered' than male superheroes?

The writer Gail Simone interviewed a clutch of comic book writers and got some very intriguing answers. Most boil down to the statement that bosomy women sell comics to young adolescent boys, and the reason the women get the tar beaten out of them is the fear these young men have towards dominant and strong women. Yet there are some female writers (one that sticks out is Devin Grayson) who add a new perspective to the art of comic book writing.

Having read and collected hundreds of comics in my teens (back when they had very few ads and a lot more pages, a lot more plot!) I wondered about this. Did I just ignore the women being misused and abused? No. I think I recognized plot devices even then. I remember laughing about Spiderman's Aunt May who must have had superhuman strength to endure the multitudes of heart attacks that were thrown in whenever the plot grew stale.

The art has become truly more graphic now, and the sex and the brutality more raw; but is it any different from what people would get from tv or the net? I don't know. All women in comics seem to have very little in the way of clothes and extremely inflated breasts filled with helium. Must be written into the female super hero contract. Is it a put down of women? No, the men are covered with more muscles than can ever be achieved by the gym. They are the iconic male, female figures. Never ugly unless evil, never less than perfect in muscle and curves.
The difficulties must come from the mind or outside of the body.

Does it matter? Yes, the view that women are prey is hard wired into our society and the sooner we recognize it and begin to root it out the better. Can we get rid of it all? No.

But in the end, I think the writing will always be the make or break of the comic. If it is well-written, the reader will put up with much. If it is poorly written, the reader will go elsewhere, even if the art work is stunning.

Update: Slightly OT, but via Unrepentant Hippie, Yes but No but Yes offers the Top 15 Unintentionally Funny Comic Book Panels:

Fun site

Seeds of Doubt: Progressive protest art, cartoons and commentary