God bless This Modern World. And God bless Tom the Dancing Bug.

I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now have with my poetry and also with my banner. If you are a fan of Pablo Neruda's poetry, as you should be, you will want to read his Nobel Lecture, delivered December 13, 1971. It is long but it is beautiful.

Informative article about relativity and quantum theory in this Scientific American article. Physicist Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara may have found a way to connect the two theories. The goal being to explain the nature of space and time. Science is so much bolder than faith, sometimes.

I'm sure all of you need a reference source for your Grateful Dead setlists, from 1972-1995. When I was getting into the Dead in high school I wondered at the incredible detail deadheads went into to record each and every note of each and every show. Then I finally went to a few shows myself and quickly realized why recording the music and events became so important. 'Cause if you remembered it, you weren't there.

Inversions are words drawn so they read the same backward as they do forward. (once again, metafilter)

Like snowflakes? Check out this interesting site on Wilson Bentley, The Snowflake Man. "Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated., When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."

Apparently black and Latino males have been "showing up in droves" with symptoms of what popsychologists are calling "post-traumatic slavery disorder," where they claim to have been traumatized by things that happened to their ancestors. This left me stuttering with disbelief, until I read this piece, which alerted me to the fact that I have "Post-traumatic birth disorder," which has symptoms that include life and everything in it. Just my luck to come down with such a debilitating ailment, and one that just won't go away! Luckily Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of days; it'll be a good time to sunpoena my parents and relatives. Another article here. (via metafilter)

The BOXPLORER takes any website you choose and interprets it a colorful series of boxes, much like a Mondrian painting. No content, no controversy. (via metafilter)

Anyone want to move to Charlotte, the possible new Whitewater capital of the east coast?

Thou puking shag-eared minimus! Thou haughty eye-offending haggard! Thou wenching ill-composed whey-face! Thou cockered eye-offending bum-bailey!
Feeling like issuing forth an Elizabethan insult unto the heat-oppressed brow of your friends? The curse generator will aid you in your endeavor, you surly shrill-gorged remnant.

Well, we've all heard the word antidisestablishmentarianism used in a sentence, but what about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a miners' lung disease caused by inhaling silica? The Straight Dope has taken a peek into the small world of extremely large words, including one that is 1,913 letters long. Enrich your vocabulary, baffle your colleagues and friends.

Well, the EPA has done it again. On Friday they adopted a series of changes that challenge the legitimacy of the Clean Air Act, by easing restrictions on companies that continue to use old-as-hell equipment that was grandfathered in under older environmental standards. The new rules let facilities continue to use and repair old equipment without being subject to newer regulations. In other words, as long as the companies can justify that their facilities haven't "been upgraded," they can continue to pollute at older, greater levels. How does this provide a company incentive to clean up its act? It doesn't. Boston Globe has full story here.

Well, Debbie earned the title of Badass Angler this weekend, while I, on the other hand, earned only the lowly nickname Smells like Cow Patty.
We went down to Letohatchee Friday night after attending my cousin Henry Haskell’s wedding. The wedding went off without (or rather, with) a hitch, except that afterwards I walked up to Henry and accidentally called him Sam as I was congratulating him. My own cousin, and I call him by his brother’s name. Sheesh. I was immediately embarrassed of course, but my embarassment subsided once he corrected me and then... seemed... to... have... well, forgotten my name as well. I don’t see Henry a lot so it's not very surprising, plus the man had just gotten married, for chrissakes. He’s too worried about his future to be bothered with petty details from the past.
Anyway, so we forewent the reception in favor of heading out to the country side, which we did under a 3/4 moon and a clear, cloudless night sky. We got to the farm around 11:00 and drove down the dirt road past dozens of cows staring at us, not sure whether they should run away, attack us or stand there and stare dumbly into our lights. Luckily, they chose the latter. As I got out of the car to open up the gate I could hear cows bellowing in chorus out across the fields. I think they were all mating.
Anyway, the cows kept up their amorous trumpeting throughout the evening while we cooked up dinner and built a roaring fire in the fireplace. Being a clear night, it was cold, the stars like cold pinpoints of in the dark waters of the sky. The moon lit the ground like blue sunshine, bright enough to read by. A wonderful night.
So we got up the next morning and cooked breakfast, cleaned house, and loaded up the four-wheeler to do some fishing. We drove around the other side of the pond so we could set up shop on the dam, at which point the pond is very deep and tends to house large fish. Willows used to grow there, and the catfish would pool in the cool water beneath their branches. The beavers took those trees away years ago, though. The fish are still there, just deeper.
We went through probably eight cattle gates and finally got to the fishing spot, and Debbie started tossing out her “green worm with sparklies” while I went and chatted with my cousin-in-law, who was fishing on the dock. As I came back, Debbie started hollering that she’d caught one, and I smiled. I figured she’d caught a nice bass, maybe even a small catfish. But what came out of the water wiped my smug smirk from my face — it was HUGE, the biggest bass I’ve seen come out of that place in years.
She wrestled in up to shore and we couldn’t believe it. Though we thought it a ten-pounder at first ( I told Mark C. is was 12), it turned out to be almost 7 pounds, and 21 inches long. Not a mounter, but still a fine fish. Big Bertha finally met her match, indeed.
By the time we took it back and put it in the freezer, got the four-wheeler fixed and made it back out to the pond, the sun was sinking low in the large blue-into-orange sky. We only caught a few more small bass before day ended. And as we walked on up to the house in the dusk, our clothes and shoes becrapped, our hands ripe with bass slime, we laughed and titles were bestowed.
Debbie is officially a badass fisherwoman. Let all sing her praises.

29 Quotes Taken From Actual Medical Records (thanx Ph8) 1. By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart had stopped, and he was feeling better. 2. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year. 3. On the second day the knee was better and on the third day it had completely disappeared. 4. She has had no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night. 5. The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 1983 6. Patient was released to outpatient department without dressing. 7. I have suggested that he loosen his pants before standing, and then, when he stands with the help of his wife, they should fall to the floor. 8. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed. 9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission. 10. The patient will need disposition, and therefore we will get Dr. Blank to dispose of him. 11. Healthy appearing decrepit 69 year-old male, mentally alert but forgetful. 12. The patient refused an autopsy. 13. The patient has no past history of suicides. 14. The patient expired on the floor uneventfully. 15. Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital. 16. The patient's past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days. 17. She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate directions in early December. 18. The patient experienced sudden onset of severe shortness of breath with a picture of acute pulmonary edema at home while having sex which gradually deteriorated in the emergency room. 19. The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. 20. Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant. 21. The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane ran out of gas and crashed. 22. Since she can't get pregnant with her husband, I thought you would like to work her up. 23. She is numb from her toes down. 24. While in the ER, she was examined, X-rated and sent home. 25. The skin was moist and dry. 26. Occasional, constant, infrequent headaches. 27. Coming from Detroit, this man has no children. 28. Patient was alert and unresponsive. 29. When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.

Sure, we've all laughed at rocks shaped like the male anatomy, but snicker no more. This stuff's real art, folks. The human ability to sexualize the landscape now elevated to the aesthetic plane. James Joyce once wrote that any piece of art that aroused you was not art but pornography. Is this porn? Surely this isn't!

Has anyone been to Burning Man? I want to go. Having been to only one Rainbow Gathering, and a rather tame regional one at that, I'm ready for a large dose of weirdness (no pun there). Where else can you go and find naked blue men riding bicycles shaped like fornicating fish? The cool thing about Burning Man is that everyone participates. Six days of craziness in the desert. I took part in some of the nuttiness at the Rainbow Gathering I went to: the drum circles, a sweatlodge, the council meetings, etc, but I definitely felt like an observer. (Except for that one time when I volunteered to go get some light beams for the soup. I walked out into the forest and wrapped my arms around a beam of sunlight and brought it back to the group kitchen and proceeded to chop it up into the pot of chili. I can't remember what impelled me to do that.. Well that sort of half-ass obligatory participation is not allowed at Burning Man. You have to BE something or DO something. What a gas. What's even more amazing is that it becomes a self-sufficient city in the middle of an arid desert playa. Anyone wanna go?

Sometimes I love working at the newspaper, I must say. Like today, Robin, the features writer, gave me the new "Blue Wild Angel - Jimi Hendrix Live at the Isle of Wight" DVD, which also came with a CD. It's rocking stuff, especially the "In From the Storm" finale. What's really cool on the DVD is that you can watch the concert through multiple simultaneous camera angles through a picture-in-picture feature. This is great! As a huge fan of sixties music I'm an avowed sucker for new releases like this. Give me a few new features and I'll buy Electric Ladyland all over again. Anyway, over the past months, Robin has given me (or I've scored from her CD stack without her knowing) all sorts of sweet tunes: Gran Torino, Ulu, Parlaiment, Robert Randolph, Sublime, Chambergrass, Old and in the Grey, DJ Dara, and others. It's a shame that the promotional companies don't know that we don't do many CD reviews.. Anyway, I also want to tell everybody to go out and burn/buy Robert Randolph and the Family Band Live at the Wetlands. Soul rock gospel blues at its finest. I've been boogyin' all afternoon. To quote my grandmother, "Nobody dances like they used to. All they do is wiggle around."

How Lord of the Rings and Star Wars stack up. Apparently Star Wars is a ripoff. Or is it just part of the grand human mythological structure?

The Antichrist...Have You Seen This Man? A site on possible antichrists through history. FDR? Kennedy? I knew Sam Donaldson was, but Prince Charles? C'mon..

Ha! This guy rigged up a camera to a van that he had modified to backfire very loudly. When people were near, he'd rev it up, causing a huge BANG and then he'd snap the reactions. Pretty funny pictures.

Coooooooooooll. Buildings blowing up. Where demolition comes alive.

Did Edgar Allan Poe actually formulate the Big Bang Theory years before scientists? In Poe’s words, the Universe started from a single and unique primordial particle, which originally consisted of the whole of the substance, and later, on the Creator’s will, instantly split into innumerable, but finite, aggregate of elements. After the splitting, atoms started spreading in all directions, and they filled empty spaces and created a sphere; the above-mentioned primordial particles were to become the center of the sphere. Based on this hypothesis, Edgar Poe solved the famous Olbers’ paradox. Indeed, if the Universe was infinite and the number of stars in it was also infinite, we would have seen then a night sky as bright as the Sun itself!

This is how you talk good and stuff. If I see one more "We sell hot dog's" I'm gonna scream. Poor grammar is rampant and if we relax our vigil it will take over. Ain't that right.

Get it?

Get your theory trading cards today! Comes free with a pack of new Cultural Hegemony Bubble Gum!

Wow, the guys at Black People Love Us get along with black people so well! Gosh, it's just amazing, isn't it?!

"The idea of (children) loosely running around and chasing each other is not safe," Long Hill Elementary School Superintendent Arthur DiBenedetto told The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. What a load of crap. How else are children going to learn what a cruel, vicious world it can be?

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Announcing Buy Nothing Day! In response to the massive consumer orgy known as Christmas in America, pundits and groups are speaking out, asking consumers ("consumers" !?) everywhere to reject the rampant materialism of the season and buy less. Is this good for the economy? Do we want an economy that demands public spending sprees? Interesting links to other arguments against Christmas Chaos here too.

Oh my god. Look at Michael Jackson now.