New Last Supper Theory
A new theory that Leonardo’s “Last Supper” might hide within it a depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine has triggered so much interest that Web sites connected to the picture have crashed.
The Presence of Greatness
It reminded me about the benefits of being in the presence of greatness. Whether it’s listening to a lecture from a great professor or speaker or reading a great book or watching a great athlete or sitting on a great chair having a great dinner on a great table with great friends, you always leave just a little greater yourself. Where else can just being there be so good for you?
Form Functions
Form functions, so as you’re trying to maximize the performance, sometimes the form is the most important thing to achieve that. Historically, there has been form versus function. Either form follows function or it’s function be damned. We think it’s kind of bunk, a false dialectic. There are moments when a project’s single most important functional issue is its form.
Panda Poop Souvenirs
Nothing says “I love you” like a photo frame made from panda poop.
The End of Pigeon Poop
“We think we’ve got a good solution to a bad situation,” said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. “The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer.”
When Digital Re-Touching Goes Too Far
rat fuck!
A New York Times article cites several other studies that involve how a healthy brain processes swearing. For example, the brains of people who pride themselves on being educated respond to slang and “illiterate” phrases the same way they do to swearwords. In addition, in studies in which people must identify the color a word is written in (instead of the word itself), swearwords distract the participants from color recognition. You can also remember swearwords about four times better than other words.
Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89
Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89.
World’s Worst Poet
McGonagall himself was confident of his genius, believing his poetry to be second only to that of Shakespeare.
“The Other” Revisited, Part 2
“So, at the heart of normalcy, lies a form of erotic desire that is inflamed by the prospect of interspecies pleasures.”
Read more in Part 2 at Stereotype & Society
Reading W.G. Sebald
Some of you may recall the “reader’s hand” photo I posted a few months ago: myself with Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in my lap and my hand atop it. This is my treatment, in acrylics, of a variant of that photo.
Second Life Salvation
Catholic missionaries have always trekked to dangerous parts of the Earth to spread the word of God — now they are being encouraged to go into the virtual realm of Second Life to save virtual souls.
UNESCO Inventory of Caravanserais
The UNESCO website on caravanserais aims to be a forum for exchange and discussion and a gateway to free information about these fascinating monuments, which are dotted over a large part of the world stretching from Central Asia over the Middle East to North Africa.
Go Away!
Go away!
Do you migrate?
Please don’t tell me I must wait for winter.
Please don’t tell me that was you who did that on my windshield either.
I don’t want to get a cat.
I hate cats.
BBC Team Make US Spanish Journey
BBC correspondent Jose Baig writes: “This Saturday [28 July 2007], I am setting off on a two-week long trip across the United States with a simple goal in mind: to only speak Spanish during the journey.
. . .
“I’ll be writing a daily blog as well as reporting on BBC Mundo Hoy, the BBC’s flagship radio programme in Spanish.”
(Link)
Glenn Beck, CNN
“[Y[ou know, Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.
“You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming….
“Then you get the scientists — eugenics. You get the scientists — global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists that say, ‘That’s not right.’ And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did.”
taxonomy
It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore.
For example, “Darwin’s Black Box”, the famous psuedo-science book by the non-evolutionary non-scientist Michael Behe, should not be in the “Evolutionary Biology” section, but something more appropriate, such as “New Age”, “Religion”, “Christianity”, or even “Fiction”. You get the idea.
politicizing medicine
A “senior official” told him, “You don’t get it…. This will be a political document, or it will not be released.”
the shirt
Old Photo From College
A friend from college put this on her Myspace page. It’s a photo our group of friends took while in college in 1990.
gypsies
the gypsies came and parked their truck residences, set up workshop to sell their baskets. The police passed by and told them to bugger off, so they acted like they would, waited for them to leave and resumed their stuff, seems like a stand off was established because they were still there yesterday evening; 3 days after the police told them to leave. Its nice to see them in situ again, because the instances of this happening these days is pretty infrequent, 15 years ago there was many of them at this time of year providing everything from hay to galvanizing copper pots. there’s a few more shots on bhuddametrics
Home Base
VP Cheney Receives New Pacemaker, No Sign of Heart
Doctors at George Washington University Hospital successfully replaced the batteries in Vice President Dick Cheney’s combination pacemaker/defibrillator Saturday, in what a hospital spokesman described as a “routine procedure”. Mr. Cheney was released after a brief recovery, even though during the operation his physicians were shocked to discover that he has apparently been functioning more or less normally without a heart.
Hey Rick,
I spent too much for a shirt last night, but I love it.
your face, our balls
At its simplest level Faceball involves two people hitting beachballs at each other’s faces. At a deeper level it’s a vehicle for the release of personal animosity, and the Shaming of the Weak.
