Woo-hoo! The big 2-7!

Party forthcoming, just as soon as our house has chairs. :-)

Congrats, man! Another year of successfully breaking things for fun and profit while not blowing yourself (or anyone else???) up!

-janelane, the ball-and-chain that cares

The pain is love, Billy, the pain is love ;)

Happy Birthday, Acidus!

DEUTSCH: That isn't what I said, but you said I should not -- we should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians, then, or --

COULTER: Yeah.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Well, it's a lot easier. It's kind of a fast track.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Yeah. You have to obey.

DEUTSCH: You can't possibly believe that.

COULTER: Yes.

DEUTSCH: You can't possibly -- you're too educated, you can't -- you're like my friend in --

COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion, but you have to obey.

DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean --

COULTER: We have the fast-track program.

More absurdity from hateful, bigoted bitch A number 1. How the FUCK can this society continue to let a lunatic like this be a public figure. It's astonishing and demoralizing.

Ann Coulter on CNBC Show: Jews Need 'Perfecting'

For their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

Props.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press.

Praise for the book:

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

I have this book... it's astonishing.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Have you re-watched this movie lately? I just did, and honestly, I'm astonished that it came out in 1998.

The damn thing is creepy to watch now, with all the shit we're finding out.

Enemy of the State (1998)

You know, we’ve hit a new low in our political discourse when it’s possible to read other people making apologies and excuses for torture and not find yourself feeling much in the way of outrage over it. A little bit of disgust, sure, but no real outrage. It’s like when you flood the engine on your car and the sparkplugs won’t spark - there is just so much on a daily basis to be outraged over that it’s hard to muster more than a weak sputter anymore. I’m not even sure what it would take to put enough oxygen back into this mix to bring the outrage back, and that just depresses me even more. How about you? What would it take for you to feel genuine outrage again?

Sadly, No! » That Just Proves My Point

people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

Um. Rare, brain eating amoeba FTL. Jesus, that's scary.

6 die from brain-eating amoeba in lakes - Yahoo! News

WTFingF! Um, yeah, that's a slightly tarded version of Johnny 5. A lot.

I Watch Stuff - AM Poster Post - 'Wall-E' Teaser Poster

According to the philosopher [Habermas], religions can fully and rightfully participate in the democratic process on three conditions: renouncing the monopoly of truth, accepting the authority of science and the public primacy of lay/secular law.

This isn't really a representative quote, but it's one I found compelling... this article gets at least a silver star.

Also, it's worth reading the other articles in this series, collected here.

Reset - Dialogues on Civilizations | East-West-Democracy

Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it. So does Panasonic, BASF, Bayer, American Airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, BellSouth, Hapag-Lloyd and any number of other firms that use it for their logos and as their house font.

...

I'm fascinated by typefaces and wish I had more reason to explore them...

And the Pi room sounds great... I might need one in my house someday.

Douglas Coupland: I Luv Helvetica