Still fighting with blur
My continued fight with the Hasselblad Flexbody
this just in
My Cleveland Brown accent is getting pretty good.
Dye-job donkeys wow Gaza children
A zoo in Gaza has found a novel way to get around Israeli restrictions on the
importation of animals by partly dyeing two donkeys so they resemble zebras.
“The children don’t know, so they call them zebras and they are happy
to see something new”
Mohammed Bargouthi owner, Marah Land Zoo
This type of place will break you down, man.
Yap
The land of stone money.
levi’s gran fondo | king ridge, 1
As the slight incline turned we saw the guys, dressed in matching Kaiser Thrive jerseys, that had been with our passenger at the rest stop. I don’t know if it was the climb or her friends that got her going, but the ballerina danced by us as we pulled even with the Kaiser crew. One of the men said something like, “she must be the only one out here on a single speed.” My chin hit my top tube.
“Carrie’s going to stomp some bitches today.”
“With us being the bitches.”
“Yes, particularly compliant bitches as it turns out.”
This was followed by laughter and wheezing.
Genuflecting on Derrida’s Archive from Bangkok
Next stop, Tokyo.
Have You Noticed
that scientists often seem to gesture with the backs of their hands? Do you think this is because they are so often holding chalk?
Miss Plastic Hungary beauty pageant
The attempt to poison them with slug pellets was the final straw.
Jason got to this first, but it was too good to pass up.
A gay man tried to poison his lesbian neighbours by putting slug pellets into their curry after he was accused of kidnapping their three-legged cat.
One Nation Under God
Artist Jon McNaughton of Utah has created a painting inspired by a vision he received during the 2008 elections. The painting — titled “One Nation Under God” — depicts Jesus surrounded by characters from American history plus Satan. Some of the characters are actual people (Ronald Reagan, James Madison ) and some are archetypes (handicapped child, liberal news reporter). The “liberal news reporter,” along with the professor clutching Darwin’s Origin Of Species and the judge weeping over Roe vs. Wade are huddled in the lower right hand corner of the painting, next to Satan. (The pregnant woman is also in Satan’s corner.)
the conservative bible project
The guys at Conservapedia (aka, “the trustworthy encyclopedia”) have decided to retranslate the Bible in what they’re calling the Conservative Bible Project, because “liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations.”
zing!
Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.
Big Bend National Park
From an article on the world’s quietest places.
Big Bend is a kind of acoustic greatest hits record. Because the park, located in southwest Texas, has such a diverse landscape — mountains, deserts, river, with more species of birds, bats, and cactus than any other park in the country — only a few minute’s change in location can dramatically change what you hear. And one of the best things about Big Bend? It’s not on very many airplane flight routes. In fact, the sound of planes is still very rare here. And that makes it one of the most unusual, noise-free environments anywhere in the world.
And, for Renner, the island of Yap.
Yap’s entire culture is built on adherence to social peace, so that, according to resident Richard Flow, even playing your car radio too loud when you drive simply isn’t done. “Do it,” he says, “and you’ll come back the next day to find your windshield broken.”
from the celebrity
Teen star Miley Cyrus used a rap video on Friday to tell a curious world just why she had abruptly deleted her popular Twitter account.
“The rumors are true, I deleted my Twitter,” she sang, saying she had started “tweeting about pimples”, had stopped “living for moments” and instead had “started living for people.”
Society researchers dug up evidence that both Damon and Affleck are descended from William Knowlton Jr. He was a bricklayer who came to the U.S. from England in the 1630s and settled in Ipswich.
levi’s gran fondo | miles 26 – 34
After the rest stop the road was flat, if not just slightly up hill. Sam and I passed a few riders, taking turns in the wind. As I pulled, Sam tucked in behind, taking full advantage of my slipstream, a line of riders in matching jerseys overtook us and I hitched on to the back wheel, happy to sit there as the wind blew in our faces.
We stayed with them around a right hand turn but as they moved to the left to pace a slower moving pace line the rider directly in front of me started to fade, a gap opened and we were dropped. Sam took on the work and we started picking up riders. One at a time they latched on to our wheels. We alternated shifts in the wind and pulled the group along road. It felt good. At one point we had 10 or 11 riders in our group. We churned out a manageable pace and they relied on us. It wasn’t part of our plan, but it felt good.
Marge Simpson poses for Playboy
The beauty of taxidermy!
For Cindy.
Look at that animal doing that thing!
…and yet it never gets old.
TV Commercials might be getting quieter.
It’s been so long since I have watched TV on the TV that I forgot about this:
The fight against excessive commercial volume has two fronts, legislative and technological. The first line of defense on the legal side is the Federal Communications Commission, which mandates that commercials can be no louder than the loudest parts of the programming they accompany.
But this approach has serious limitations. An action show that climaxes in a burst of gunfire is one thing; a commercial that’s as loud as a gun going off from start to finish is another — especially if the lead-in to the commercial is relatively quiet. And in addition to making their commercials as loud as the FCC lets them, marketers also use various technological tricks to make them sound even louder than they are, like packing more sound energy into midrange frequencies, the ones that the human ear is most sensitive to.
To close this loophole, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives last year, the Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation Act. CALM would charge the FCC to enact regulations prohibiting commercials from being “excessively noisy or strident.” The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing to consider amendments on the bill Thursday.
How the language “excessively noisy or strident” closes the loophole, however, remains to be seen.
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters
An archive of letters to and from Vincent van Gogh with parallel translation in English. (via Austin Kleon)
Responses to Obama’s Nobel Prize
I think I’ll update this throughout the day. Flockers, feel free to update the list as well. Or people can email me or put quotes in comments.
You can see the clusterflock comments here.
This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration.
“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”
For all the recognition of George W. Bush’s unpopularity, it’s easy to overlook the ways in which the international community was truly mortified by the U.S. leadership during the Bush era. The irreplaceable leading nation could no longer be trusted to do the right thing — on use of force, torture, rule of law, international cooperation, democratic norms, even climate change. We’d reached a point at which much of the world was poised to simply give up on America’s role as a global leader.
And, love him or hate him, President Obama changed this. I doubt anyone on the Nobel committee would admit it, but the Peace Prize is, to a certain extent, an implicit “thank you” to the United States for reclaiming its rightful place on the global stage.
I’ve had some coffee now. Reading through all the reactions, compiled by Chris and Patrick, there are two obvious points: this is premature and this is thoroughly deserved.
Both are right. I don’t think Americans fully absorbed the depths to which this country’s reputation had sunk under the Cheney era. That’s understandable. And so they also haven’t fully absorbed the turn-around in the world’s view of America that Obama and the American people have accomplished. Of course, this has yet to bear real fruit. But you can begin to see how it could; and I hope more see both the peaceful intentions and the steely resolve of this man to persevere.
“This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama,” Limbaugh told POLITICO in an e-mail. “And with this ‘award’ the elites of the world are urging Obama, THE MAN OF PEACE, to not do the surge in Afghanistan, not take action against Iran and its nuclear program and to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States.”
Limbaugh continued: “They love a weakened, neutered U.S, and this is their way of promoting that concept. I think God has a great sense of humor, too.”
I’m not all for Americans winning international prizes, especially the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, I’m vigorously against it. The transnational progressives who pass out these accolades believe America is the problem in the world, the main threat to peace, the impediment to “progress,” etc. The award is a symbolic statement of opposition to American exceptionalism, American might, American capitalism, American self-determinism, and American pursuit of America’s interests in the world. That is why Obama could win it based on only ten days in office — merely by capturing the White House and the levers of power, he stands to do more for the Left’s “knock America off its pedestal” program than any figure in history.
After a number of years, the NFL renamed its Super Bowl trophy after its most fitting recipient — it’s now called the Vince Lombardi Trophy. I’d like to see the Nobel Foundation follow suit. If today’s headlines said, “Barack Obama Wins Yasser Arafat Prize,” that would be perfect.
“Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.
After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, ‘Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday.’
And then Sasha added, ‘Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.’
So it’s — it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.”
I congratulate President Obama on receiving this prestigious award. I join my fellow Americans in expressing pride in our President on this occasion.
&
I think part of their decision-making was expectations. And I’m sure the president understands that he now has even more to live up to. But as Americans, we’re proud when our president receives an award of that prestigious category.
I don’t even think we’ll need to comment. We could point out that peace hasn’t broken out anywhere yet during President Obama’s tenure, or that even his various peace efforts haven’t yet begun to make much progress. We could note that, if the
SwedesNorwegians wanted to give the Nobel Peace Prize to an American, it would have been been better to give it to Sen. John McCain for having the guts to push through the surge in Iraq, which has brought relative peace to that country. But that would be overkill. The choice is so self-evidently Not a Parody that no explanation is required or possible.
A source tells TPMDC that “needless to say,” President George W. Bush isn’t going to issue anything about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win today.
We hope that this gives him the incentive to walk in the path of bringing justice to the world order.
We are not upset and we hope that by receiving this prize he will start taking practical steps to remove injustice in the world.
I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce. He’s done nothing to deserve the prize. Sure, he’s given some lovely speeches and launched some initiatives—on Iran, Israeli-Palestinian peace, climate change and nuclear disarmament—that might, if he’s really lucky and really good, make the world a more safe, more just, more peaceful world. But there’s absolutely no way to know if he’ll succeed, and by giving him the Nobel Prize as a kind of “atta boy,” the Nobel Committee is actually just highlighting the gap that conservatives have long highlighted: between Obamamania as global hype and Obama’s actual accomplishments
Through no fault of his own, Obama presides over a massive war-making state that spends on its military close to what the rest of the world spends combined. The U.S. accounts for almost 70% of worldwide arms sales. We’re currently occupying and waging wars in two separate Muslim countries and making clear we reserve the “right” to attack a third. Someone who made meaningful changes to those realities would truly be a man of peace. It’s unreasonable to expect that Obama would magically transform all of this in nine months, and he certainly hasn’t. Instead, he presides over it and is continuing much of it. One can reasonably debate how much blame he merits for all of that, but there are simply no meaningful “peace” accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there’s plenty of the opposite. That’s what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous.
Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee cited “some really nice things Barack Obama has said” as the basis for the reward.
In what is no doubt a slightly racist train of thought, I’m reminded of what Chris Rock said about how a certain subset of black people brags about things they’re supposed to be doing, as in “I take care of my kids.” Fortunately, Barack Obama isn’t outright bragging “We make diplomatic overtures to other countries,” but that’s really what he’s being rewarded for.
Of all things, the Nobel Peace Prize should be turned down by Barack Obama and given — you ready for this, oh this one’s going to make headlines — should be give to the Tea Party goers and the 9-12 Project. … Because of the arrogance of the progressives that thought no one would stand in their way. That he would be able to accomplish everything. Two weeks into his presidency, they nominated him for it and said, “oh this is going to be a slam dunk.” Because of the Tea Party goers and the 9-12 Project people that stood in his way and stopped him from accomplishing the things that he thought, “please, I’m the Messiah, I’ll be able to accomplish that.”
Well, I think what the committee believes is they’d like to live in a world in which America is not dominant. And I think if you look at the language of the citation, you can see that they talk about, you know, President Obama ruling in a way that makes sense to the majority of the people of the world. You know, Americans don’t elect a president to do that. We elect a president to defend our national interests. And so I think that, you know, they may believe that President Obama also doesn’t agree with American dominance, and they may have been trying to affirm that belief with the prize. I think, unfortunately, they may be right, and I think it’s a concern.
dog bites man
Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso thinks a rabies outbreak in Hungary in the 1720s led to stories of vampires.
The virus attacks the central nervous system, altering the moods and behaviors of those infected. Sufferers become agitated and demented, and, much like vampires, their moods can turn violent.
Rabies has several more vampire-like symptoms. It can cause insomnia, which explains the nocturnal portion of the legend. People with rabies also suffer from muscular spasms, which can lead them to spit up blood. What’s stunning is the fact that these spasms are triggered by bright lights, water, mirrors, and strong smells, such as the scent of garlic.
Modular bathroom
It’s my poop in a box.
(via Ainsley Drew at kottke)
free bibles lead to drug use
According to the ACLU, students at Vines High School in Plano were given so many Bibles that they threw them at one another, sold them, tore them up and used the pages to roll a marijuana joint.
Plus bonus antisemitism.
