fun

What do you do with an abandoned water park in Atlanta? Skate it.

rotobobbler

Eating corn can be so much fun.

I almost wish I needed one

What a cool idea:

spare change

The estimated land value of New York's Central Park is $528,783,552,000. That's billion with a B.

how i feel

attention paid

Mother Jones presents the Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 6/21/03), lie by lie.

wow

Filmmaker James Cameron is about to unleash a documentary that alleges the burial cave of Jesus and his family has been found, along with enough DNA evidence to establish that Jesus wasn’t resurrected and that he sired a son with Mary Magdelene. The tomb was found in 1980 and contained burial boxes that bear the names:

Yeshua [Jesus] bar Yosef [son of Joseph]; Maria [the Latin version of Miriam, which is the English Mary]; Matia [the Hebrew equivalent of Matthew, a name common in the lineage of both Mary and Joseph]; Yose [the Gospel of Mark refers to Yose as a brother of Jesus]; Yehuda bar Yeshua, or Judah, son of Jesus; and in Greek, Mariamne e mara, meaning ‘Mariamne, known as the master.’ According to Harvard professor François Bovon, interviewed in the film, Mariamne was Mary Magdalene’s real name.

Here's an interesting article on the expected response from the religious community.

Obama in Alabama

Folks, on Sunday Barack Obama will be at the historic Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma to commemorate the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March. He'll be speaking at the 11 a.m. service. The word is that around 30,000 people may show up!
If you would like to volunteer and help pass out stickers, signs, and whatnot you can ride with Joe Hubbard and myself. Everyone needs to be in Selma at 6:00am.
The press release is here.

The Living Symphony

The Living Symphony
Originally uploaded by | HD |.

i'm with ya

opens March 9

Frank Miller's new movie 300 tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (wikipedia link here), in which a small band of Spartans held off an enormous Persian Army in 480 BC in central Greece. It looks like it's gonna be good.

You can view a trailer of the film here or watch five minutes of the film here.

fyi

NYT: A look at what the presidential candidates have said thus far on Iraq.

beautiful

Pictures from the sky.

just wondering

So, what's the deal with this whole existence thing anyway?

that explains it

This guy is convinced that the food described as "manna" in the Bible was probably a type of psychedelic mushroom. "If manna is indeed the psilocybin mushroom," he concludes, "then this means that the Koran, Bible, and Torah were all inspired by psychedelically induced visions." Hmm. The following is from the Book of Exodus:

Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will vain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or no (16:4). And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground (16: 14). And when the children of Israel saw if, they said one to another It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.

not sure i understand this

backdrop

This guy was one of the people chosen by Microsoft to take photos for the new Vista wallpapers. Only two photos in this set were chosen--be sure and check out the rest.

old foes

NPR has a great 5-part series on the history and status of the Sunni-Shiite conflict: The Partisans of Ali.
These cartoons sort of sum up the situation too:

idea market

Interesting animation of the spread of religions across Afro-Eurasia over centuries.

born to run

good point

"Making fun of the president is not ideological. Not making fun of the president, on the other hand, is."

on debunking the latest Obama fallacy

I know Barak Obama is relatively inexperienced as a politician, but lately I've come to think that there's such a thing as too much political experience. Which is why the more I read about Obama the more I like him. I hear people squawking about how he's a junior senator, 88th in seniority, a neophyte. And I hear people drawing from this fact the view that "The world is too complex and dangerous for this likeable, charismatic, African American neophyte to practice on-the-job training." (quoted in The St. Petersburg Times in Florida.) On its rhetorical face I agree with this, but I don't think that, should he win, Obama could ever really be considered a political noobie anymore. Wouldn't being elected president itself be evidence of his mastery of the American political system? But it's also naive to portray the president as solely responsible for the decisions he makes. As if Obama, like some awkward teen on his first date, is going to blurt out at a press conference "Oh shit, let's nuke Iran!" Every president surrounds himself with scores of experienced politicians who guide him, for better or worse, through the labyrinth. So I think it's misguided to criticize Obama for mere lack of experience. I'm not even convinced that political experience really distinguishes good presidents from poor ones. After all, the current president had plenty of it and look where we are now.
During his announcement speech, Obama told the crowd that "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change." Other reform-minded candidates have said as much in past elections, but to me it sounds pretty convincing coming from an outsider like Barak.
At any rate, the real issue now should not be how seasoned he is but how he proposes doing the job. And so far I'm on board.

quote of the day

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

-- Charles Darwin

the triumph of logic

no thank you

not again

Although Alabama is my home state and I'll always have a fondness for her southern soul, at times I am downright flabbergasted. I can put up with the popular media version of Alabama, mostly wrong, of the gap-toothed NASCAR rednecks in trailer parks, etc. I can tolerate the (possibly) worst commercial ever, the hijinx and the hoopla, but what I cannot tolerate is actual bona fide official stupidity. Boing Boing has drawn my attention to the recent 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing a ban on the sale of sex toys in the case Sherri Williams v. Attorney General of Alabama (pdf). The court stated with approval that "Alabama's Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act prohibits, among other things, the commercial distribution of 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.'" Not that I'm a big user of sex toys or anything; what gets me is the pointlessly puritan nature of the law. After all, if people want to use sex toys, let 'em. How can their private use hurt society? What really gets me though is that the court upholds the law based on the fact that the state has the power to "restrict the sale of sex." How on earth does a ban on the sale of french ticklers restrict the sale of sex? Isn't sex an act, not a product? But the legal aspects aside, the law is just another obvious attempt to impose a strict moral code on the citizens using the state's police power, which never works. Ban prostitution and child porn, fine. But it's backwards to legislate the private, ultimately harmless decisions of normal everyday folks just because they like to use vibrators. Sheesh. Meanwhile, Alabama lawmakers are against extending the assault weapons ban? Ah, good ol' moral hypocrisy, served up southern style.

wow

I've got to have one of these

Dutchtub

alarming

Get your Afghanistan war carpets here

ways to go

Wikipedia has a very interesting list of unusual deaths here. Some of my favorites, so to speak:

212 BC: Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, was said to have been doing a math problem in the sand of his town, Syracuse, Sicily, when an army invaded. A soldier interrupted Archimedes who just replied, "Do not disturb my circles". The soldier then killed him.

1960: Baritone Leonard Warren collapsed on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera of a major stroke during a performance of La forza del destino. The last line he sang was "Morir? Tremenda cosa." ("To die? A tremendous thing.")

1971: Jerome Irving Rodale, an American pioneer of organic farming, died of a heart attack while being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show. When he appeared to fall asleep, Cavett quipped "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?".[23] The show was never broadcast.

1975: On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn literally died laughing whilst watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing whilst watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of Bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic Black Pudding in a demonstration of the Scottish martial art of "Hoots-Toot-ochaye." After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.

Also see a list of inventors killed by their own inventions and the Darwin Awards.

I'll take one, thanks

for Mary Pat

from "To Be Read in 500 Years" by Albert Goldbarth

To think of today ... and the ages continued henceforward.
  — Walt Whitman

She bring me love love love love, crazy love.
  — Van Morrison

...she lift me up, she bring me the dominions of the morning
and the thrones of the moon, they've never once experienced this
impossible night of her wanting him down to the vitamins
and the pepsin and the aura and the spit, and how she bring him
the molasses and the escrow and the skidmarks and the holy church,
the rock and the water, the star and the stain, together we heard
the otherworld hosannas of wind in the alders, not to mention
karaoke screech, the Gregorian chant and the triple-x rebel yowl,
it requires a certain coddled recipe of history and maybe economics
for this psychic condition, this giddiyap of the hormones
and the industry they generate, the castles and the sly decolletage,
I wanted to read her the works of Montaigne and Cervantes
and Emerson
and I wanted to slip her some tongue, I was enrolled, I stayed
the course from my first day in Agony 101 to my post-doc,
they will never
be burned by this ice, they will die without knowing the thirst
in this river, she bring me the spackle, she give me the flying tackle,
he build her up, he tug her plug and she drains, she becomes
a puddle of ouch, she hit me with the hoodoo, with the magic spell
and the candle, they will never know this candle, yeah
she lead me up the towpath got a diamond in my nose, she dress
in ermine and sable, she barefoot in the grass, I tossed,
I thought of words like chivalrous and serenity, I spied on her,
I wanted to kill for her, she bring me the cherry wine, the toxic waste,
the whole wheat and the half-shell, they will never eat of this fruit
and suffer its consequences, never beg for its juice, its family root,
she be my guide, she interlocutor, my Beatrice-and-Virgil
(and me behind
in my Dante sandals following her shake-that-thing on the stony path),
my rash, my silty unguent, she rob him, she rock and throb him,
she greet him in his guise as the charioteer of the sun in its vast
celestial passage, in the centuries forthcoming they will never know
this honeycomb of confusion and its confected delight, it happens
in the jazz bar, at the casbah, in the synagogue, under the sheets,
she lift me higher, she be my desire, she build me, she give me,
in the sand dunes, hot hot summer, on the roof, yes here, now here,
a little lower, she feed me, she give me, she lift me, she need me,
the sound of the continents as they first tore apart and the surge of
the oceans,
the music of that, the songs especially but also the poems, she take me,
the rosins of craving, the tables of lust in its periodicity, they cannot
and cannot and cannot partake of this feast and the terrible emptiness
that follows, she make me, she lift me, I freely give her one grand
opera rose
and hiphop dove, she under my skin, she knife in my mind,
this thing,
oh this millennial and hallucinatory and radiant thing, she bring me,
she lift me, she take me, she bring me love
love love love crazy love.

A thousand words.

title this

WWII Tank
Originally uploaded by Anong.

free program of the day

sTablauncher is a small, highly useful little app that allows easy access to any number of programs and links on your desktop. It sits out of the way in little transparent tabs, freeing up your toolbar and start menu. Hey, why not.

Does anyone remember reading White Noise by Don DeLillo?

KCMO Chemical Plant Fire 1753b
Originally uploaded by Quadrofonic Wingnut.

Yes, this is the Kansas City Chemical fire.

Jesus Camp

I really want to see this movie.

lovely

Pimp my john.

sounds fun

This is quite interesting. The following is the mission statement for Camp Quest, a summer camp for kids:

Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp in the history of the United States for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view.

...

Camp Quest is a not-for-profit educational organization created in 1996. Its purpose is to provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

i will never complain about my life again

This is an amazing video of Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins who live very normal lives in Minnesota.

Separation of church and state abolished in Massachusets

All ye New England atheists beware. This is the entire text of Massachusets General Law Chapter 272, Section 36: Blasphemy

"Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior."

how true

Concerning the ridiculous Boston terrorist freakout:

I love it:
At a news conference after the hearing, [in which the two artists pled not guilty to intentionally creating terrorist panic], Stevens and Berdovsky stepped to the microphones and said they were taking questions only about 1970s hairstyles.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, "We're taking it very seriously." Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, "That's not a hair question. I'm sorry."

And by the way, refuse to be terrorized.

More bad ideas from cycling history

Introducing the Cynosphere

oh dear