yep

I want to go here.

pick the eighth

The 7 wonders of the world.

deadeye

Nice video of an Archerfish catching his prey.

my new favorite comic

Introducing The Perry Bible Fellowship. From the author:

"I believe it's necessary for comedic pieces to bend our conception of life into loops and kinks; that laughter is a cough-like defense that occurs when a reader's cognitive facilities experience a sudden overflow of information--often in the form of a paradox, silly face, or boobie."

i love this

found here.

whew

It's refreshing to know that Birmingham, Alabama is #6 on the top 25 most dangerous places to live in the U.S.

find yourself a city to live in

Interesting visualization of where we live in America.

oh snap

Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong created this intriguingly controversial chess set:

wow

The best brawl in hockey history. Now I can see why this sport is so appealing.

Best skateboard graphic

Bandeck-side, originally uploaded by thinkmo.

i love these

Found here and here.

R.I.P. Shane Hulsey

I would like to pause a moment and remember Shane Hulsey, a fellow kayaker from Birmingham who died this weekend in Little River Canyon. He went doing what he loved. I wasn't real close to Shane, but I hung out with him many times on the river and off during my three years in Birmingham and he was always a nice, affable fellow. He was one of the good ones. I admired the work he did for the Cahaba River Society, too--Birmingham has indeed lost a fan. I grieve for his wife, and I grieve for his family, for they are friends of mine. Sierra, Ashley--my thoughts are with you.

Shane, you'll be missed, buddy.

Here's the new story.

they all inhaled

You have to admire Barack Obama's honesty here. "I inhaled — that was the point."

oh rly

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America took a look at 324 legislative votes in the last five years which affected American troops and veterans. Legislative proposals included veterans' benefits, healthcare, and medical research dedicated towards injured soldiers (head injuries, etc.) Based on these votes, IAVA calculated which senators and congressmen had a history of supporting the troops, and which didn't, and graded them on a curve.

Amazing news story

Best Monty Python skit ever

domiciled

Folks, Mary Pat and I are no longer itinerant vagabonds. We done bought us a house. We move in about the middle of November, so be ready for a housewarming party sometime thereabouts. Here's the house:

by Joel A. Friesen

WHY YOU SHOULD CONTINUE TO DATE ME; A SERIES OF CHARTS AND GRAPHS.

Quote of the day

"We’ve never been stay the course, George."

--George Bush, in response to George Stephanopoulos's query about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is between 'stay the course' and 'cut and run.'

Terms of endearment

I'm probably going to hell for posting this without Mr. Keillor's permission, but as usual I like what he has to say and this time he has something to say about one of the many paradoxes of the South.

I was misunderstood growing up and have often been misunderstood since, but then so is everyone else. People are busy, and you can't expect them to drop everything and try to understand you. If you want to be understood, practice kindness and mercy. Kindness is seldom mistaken for anything else. Small kindnesses reverberate a long time in people's hearts.

A woman checking I.D.s at the airport saw me coming the other day and said, "Good morning, sunshine." She didn't know me from Adam. She glanced at my driver's license and said, "Have a good flight, darling." This was in the South, of course -- in Austin, Texas, to be exact. Northern women would no sooner address a strange man as "sunshine" than they would ask if you wanted to see their underwear. But that woman's "sunshine" shone on me for the rest of the day, and a week later I still remember it. Like I remember old waitresses in diners who addressed everyone as "love." "Care for more coffee, love?" Yes, dear. And you left a quarter tip instead of a dime. Fifteen cents for a little endearment.

On the flight from Austin, I sat next to a black woman my age from Alabama who was in a chatty mood. I said, "You've seen a lot of history in Alabama." She said, "And it isn't over yet." We got to talking about Dr. King and his family, and she blurted out, "I just cannot forgive those children of his for never giving their mother a grandbaby. Four healthy children. I don't know their sexual orientation, but you would think that one of them could've produced one baby for Mrs. King to hold. She died without ever getting those babies to hold in her arms. Do you have grandbabies?" I said I have two. "I've got two," she said, "and every time I look at them, that's me. They're the continuation of me." She patted my hand. "I am going to pray for your grandchildren. Tell me their names." So I did. When the plane pulled up to the gate in Chicago, she touched my knee and said, "It was good talking with you, darling."

Up here in the north, a man wouldn't touch a stranger on the knee or address her as "darling," lest he be reported to the Attitude Police, but once in Nashville, Tenn., a lady said to me, "Sweeten up to me now," meaning "Give me a squeeze," so I did, of course. She smelled of lavender and talcum and lemons. Everyone craves a little sweetening now and then, but in Minnesota we don't squeeze easily or address each other as "darling."

I went to a big dinner of diehard liberals in Texas and was darlinged left and right and sweetied and even occasionally precioused, but if you were among Democrats in Minnesota, you might think you were at a meeting of Mormon actuaries. We offer a cold handshake and a thin smile, and that's all you get from us. We are wary of the big grin and the shoulder squeeze, the trademarks of the con man, and we resist being drawn into friendly banter with strangers for fear we'll end up with a truckload of aluminum siding or a set of encyclopedias.

We're burdened by the need to be cool. When I was in college, I read Kafka and Camus and tried to write like them, in flat, non-American English, as if writing under the influence of a migraine, until it slowly dawned on me that I was missing the basic experiences that had formed them. Enduring high school is not the same as growing up Jewish in Prague or fighting in the French resistance. I had no solid basis for being cool in that existential motorcycle James Dean absurdist chain-smoking hero sort of way, so I gave up being cool and settled for being pleasant. And now I see teenagers locked up in iPods, looking sour and sleepy and hostile, and I hate to see them reliving that part of my life.

If we can't talk to strangers, if there is no public life in America, then it's no wonder politics is so out of whack. And yet in the South, which has produced the most regressive politicians this side of Sudan, who are proud of bad government and lousy wars, in which a disproportionate number of young Southern men die, you keep running into the friendliest people on earth. Explain that to me, sunshine. Sweeten up here and tell me why these good people keep electing those dreadful idiots.

by Garrison Keillor, Oct. 18, 2006

I am become Death, shatterer of worlds..

make my day

The best (and worst) lines in the history of film.
Two of my favorites:

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

-Dr Strangelove (1964)

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

-They Live (1988)

secret wall tattos

I love it: Bringing time released anarchy art to your brain for over a week er two.

i miss Bloom County

impressive

Lords of the Logistic.

hahahaha

Incredible

Picture of the Day: "The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn recently drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other..."

No only is this an amazing photo, but it offers a unique perspective of Earth as what Carl Sagan referred to as a "Pale Blue Dot" in his 1994 book of the same name. Look inside the ring to the left. See that small point? That's us:

Here is what Sagan had to say when confronted with this rather humbling vision of our astonishing planet:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

heh

Another reason I like Bill Murray.

Welcome to Muang Kulay Pan Hotel..

Where we advertise realistically.

U.S. Army sniper nails record 3/4 mile shot

"I believe it is the longest confirmed kill in Iraq with a 7.62mm rifle," said Sgt. Gilliland, 28, who hunted squirrels in Double Springs, Ala.

Our dumbest Congressmen

I was just glad to see none from Alabama made the list.

ouch

When insults had class:

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."

--Thomas Brackett Reed

rockin'

I want a whole room filled with these. (The stones, not annoyingly smug hippie teens).

favorite site of the day

The Nietzsche Family Circus

shoot

The Most Popular Myths in Science. Apparently the five-second rule is bunk, folks.

for the guys

The Top 10 Movie Car Chases.

hmm

Good questions:
1. Why is spider silk so strong?
2. Why doesn’t a spider get stuck on its own web?

so this is beauty

Incredible: from model to billboard in 60 seconds.

extreme kayaking

you go, jimmy

Jimmy Carter weighs in on the North Korean situation.

"What must be avoided is to leave a beleaguered nuclear nation convinced that it is permanently excluded from the international community, its existence threatened, its people suffering horrible deprivation and its hard-liners in total control of military and political policy."

mymiles

The dollar has been superseded. Not by the euro, nor by the yen or yuan, but by another increasingly popular global currency: frequent-flyer miles.

Here are some ways to earn 'em.

how I feel right now

very, very cool

blue screens here we come

Try a pre-release version of Windows Vista here.

whoops

Folks my cell phone number has changed AGAIN--this time will be the last, I promise. The new and permanent number is 334-324-8012.

thanks.

best ad ever

the best home page evar

Dotso

I'll take one

The world needs more people like this guy.

um

For the pampered pet.

wow

Bruce Potts teaches public speaking at the University of New Mexico.

love

i want it

This bus rules (plus it has gull-wing doors).

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena

A Pale Blue Dot

Five terrible fake scripts from a notional fourth season of Gilligan’s Island

1. Ginger gets badly hooked on coconut-based diet pills
2. Gilligan quietly begins surreptitious relationship with Mary Ann’s cut-offs
3. Mr. Howell acquires Skipper in stock-only buy-out
4. Intact Coast Guard ship lands in lagoon; Professor disassembles parts to construct ersatz wooden "rescue telephone"
5. Cousin Oliver arrives, reviving the tired franchise with his inspired island mayhem

From 5ives

The horror..the horror

DSC_1492, originally uploaded by mcdowell.

For those of you who had trouble imagining how intense our rafting trip on the Tenorio River (class III-IV) in Costa Rica was, I offer this embarrasing photo. It's hard to believe I even own a kayak.

these people are paying attention

Top 15 Movie Mistakes.

quote of the day

"The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible."

--Donald Rumsfeld, in Bob Woodward's book State of Denial

hahaha

stop walking under those sticks

Pope Benedict XVI has officially abolished the concept of limbo.

"Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis," the Pope once said.

thank goodness

Finally they've invented something I can really use. Check out The DVD rewinder:

useful

another tiny spell checker for Windows.

mm--ch--mmm--ch

German DJs and their living rooms

oh the irony

Some kid's dad is fired up because his school uses the book "Fahrenheit 451" as classroom reading material.

incredible structure

The wind pavillion

i want one

Nice bike:

good question

10 Things I Learned from My 4-Year-Old

A few weeks ago our cat was dying. So I explained death to my son and told him our cat was going to heaven. I was amazed that he grasped the permanence of death. Like the other members of my family he was very sad for several days. Then he asked, “Dad, how do you get to heaven?” I said,”Well everyone goes there when they die.” He said, “No I mean, how do you get there? Do go out the door and get in the car? Do you take a rocket?”

Today's word of the day is Lacuna.

Best. Picture. Ever.

Ticla took this photo at the wedding. Woohooo!

roundaround

These are spirals.