I wish I lived in Bahrain.

I didn't have a ticket—I stayed at work. Then we went to get coffee & I saw the motorcades arrive.

Oh, boy. That was exciting.

Well, 60% of them, anyway. Of those that can still travel. Those five, I mean. Which equals 3, I think.

Pictures at the Mall at Steamtoen from 2-4 this weekend, and they'll also be at the free showing of The Wizard of Oz at the Marquee Cinema, 10am Sunday. First come, first serve.

I've got a tent and a sleeping bag ready for when I get out of work, today.

From (of course) BoingBoing.

Image from Toonopedia's HOWARD THE DUCK entry

Gerber's original comics are priceless gems of wonderment. The movie that was eventually made (NOT from his script) is a paste-gem in a cardboard crown.

Here is a nice gallery of cover art.

Next year, in Jerusalem!!!

Errrr, or something like that...

That her story concludes in such a painfully boring anticlimax ought to be the very point, and in the final few pages she still has time for a constructive moral, the clear lesson being not the potentials of global terror, but the dangers of our own preconceptions and imagination. Instead, she pulls a vile U-turn and chooses to bait us with racist innuendo and fearmongering. Nothing happened, but something might have happened, and so it serves us to remain frightened and draconian at all costs, furthering our nation's pathetic embrace of maximum paranoia.

Jacobsen's kicker: "So the question is ... Do I think these men were musicians? I'll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?"

Excuse me? She concludes, as did the radio host Tuesday morning, by insinuating that the men were terrorists, despite every shred of evidence, not to mention common sense, arguing to the contrary. And with that her article, and her credibility with it, plummets from merely sensationalist to inexcusably offensive.

Have you heard the one about the 14 Muslim musicians on an airplane? Annie Jacobsen thinks they are dangerous and shouldn't be allowed to make her hyperventilate.

Snopes also has some facts to add to her diminishing tall tale. I'm indebted to BoingBoing for the links.

The most recent list of loan words to have crept into the Japanese language:

1. Akauntabiritii (accountability)
2. Inishiachibu (initiative)
3. Kauntaapaato (counterpart)
4. Gabanansu (governance)
5. Konfarensu (conference)
6. Konpuraiansu (compliance)
7. Sapurai saido (supply side)
8. Sukiru (skill)
9. Sutansu (stance)
10. Sutereotaipu (stereotype)
11. Seefugaado (safeguard)
12. Settobakku (setback)
13. Soryuushon (solution)
14. Tsuuru (tool)
15. Dejitaru debaido (digital divide)
16. Deforuto (default)
17. Dokutorin (doctrine)
18. Domesutikku baiorensu (domestic violence)
19. Hazaado mappu (hazard map)
20. Paburikku inborubumento (public involvement)
21. Paburikku komento (public comment)
22. Puraioritii (priority)
23. Bureekusuruu (breakthrough)
24. Purezenzu (presence)
25. Furontia (frontier)
26. Pootoforio (portfolio)
27. Botorunekku (bottle neck)
28. Manpawaa (man power)
29. Misshonn (mission)
30. Mobiritii (mobility)
31. Yunibaasaru dezain (universal design)
32. Riterashii (literacy)
33. Roodo puraishingu (road pricing)

I am and have been on (since 3:15 am, Saturday last) vacation. Posts are few. The planned trip to Iowa to see my grandfather happened, but changed somewhat as he is now in a hospital. It was an interesting impromptu family reunion. Am now (Wednesday) in Wisconsin with my sister and her cats (achoo). We pick her husband up at an airport, tomorrow.

It looks as though The House on the Rock is not on the Agenda

:::sigh:::

the majority of you can ignore this. It's a 1.8Mb .tif file at 300 dpi

this one is a 161kb .jpg at 72 dpi. same ignorance rules apply.

carry on.

Wherein the Artist Discovers the Peril of having an Remotely-triggered Flash Attachment.

ascii-mation of "classic" "Rock" videos with the sound replaced by MIDI-files.

Via News of the Dead.

Paragraph three.

But a small part of Songs About Nuclear War from the Eighties.

Bela Lugosi's dead.

Just—you know—a reminder.

View by date, for a horror-scope effect.

I've always been inspired by Bacon's attitude towards studio-upkeep.

watch what you shoot.

so to speak.

new work at or around Abstract Dynamics' art blog.

I have no idea what is going on, here.

But there is some real nice digital artifacting, if you listen closely.

Which is difficult.

If you need more, get the Halloween 2002 mask from Forbes. Delightful!

Everything that Rises Must Converge Upon Mediocrity.

Via Scrubbles.

188 pages of FBI goodness on that damn Commie.

Via J-Walk.

I am so ashamed. I had the gall to ask Eli the Bearded to update his long-ago-reference to this blog that you're reading right now, and I haven't even mentioned his site here.

Eli looks at things. He catalogs them. He doesn't say much. Then he moves on.

The things he looks at are worth looking at.

Cory Arcangel is "best" known for his Super Mario Clouds hack of—follow me here: Super Mario Bros.— wherein nothing appears but clouds. Ahhh. At the other end of the specturm—from both a time-commitment and visual impact— are his ADD Data Diary Movies. Quicktime, as Cory discovered, can be fooled into playing any old datafile as though it were a movie. The results don't look like movies—they look like Mondrian on MDMA* with an autistic Stockhausen providing the soundtrack. The above link will lead you, after a few clicks, to 31 movies (you can watch them in color or B&W, but I prefer the color). As Cory points out, though "[t]he first few minutes of each video is System memory, so that is why every day looks the same for the first minute or so."

*A better description might be "they look like what Philip K. Dick's pink laser beamed into his head while they were programming Mondrian," but that's a bit wordy.

Since the Barbie(R) and Ken(R) February break-up, Barbie(R) has been cruising in her Chevy SSR, soaking up sun, and hanging out at the Surf and Skate Shop with her best pals. With summer just around the corner, Barbie(R) is ready to date again and has looked to her friends from around the globe to help her choose a new crush. Over the past few weeks, more than two million girls worldwide logged on to Barbie.com to help Barbie(R) choose a new beau, and Blaine(TM) doll is the undisputed winner.

"Since the break-up, Barbie(R) and Ken(R) have remained friends and are looking forward to the release of their latest film, `Barbie(TM) as Princess and the Pauper,' coming out this fall," said Julia Jensen, publicist, Barbie(R). "So spending the summer roaming the beach with her best friends and Blaine(TM) is the perfect antidote for the upcoming busy fall press junket."

Blaine, you scab.

Via the AbstractDynamics linkflow.

Christian dinosaur hunters dig for signs of Biblical dragons
By Marcus Warren in Keldron, South Dakota
(Filed: 19/06/2004)

Countless dinosaur bones lie buried in the rocks of South Dakota but the Christians excavating one remote cliff-face were digging not just for reptilian vertebrae but for the hand of God.

With screwdrivers, hammers and shaving brushes for tools, the group was seeking and, as far as it was concerned, unearthed proof that the animals perished not millions of years ago but in Noah's Flood circa 2300 BC.

To these believers in the Bible's literal truth, they are not dinosaurs but "missionary lizards", which are powerful weapons in the battle for young American hearts and minds.

Those certain that God made all living things, dinosaurs included, on Day Six of the Creation, are deploying ever more imaginative tactics in their struggle against schools and universities teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

Boldest of all is a trend for believers, young and old, to dig for fossils and dinosaur remains as witness to God's handiwork.

Lecturing to a rapt audience of 20 like-minded Christians after a hard day in the field, Russ McGlenn, a self-styled amateur archaeologist and palaeontologist and head of Adventure Safaris, said: "Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event. We thank You for the time to study Your creation. Heavenly Father, we thank You for the evidence of a catastrophic flood event."

Mr McGlenn was admittedly preaching to the converted but his success at strengthening their beliefs and faith was undeniable.

"It's just dumb to believe that everything came from one kind of bang or fish or something," said Katy Carlson, 13, one of the youngest on the dig.

Her companions included a 74-year-old Californian woman who spends two weeks digging for dinosaurs every year, the mother of three teenagers who brought them there "as a Christmas present" and a group of Christian children from Wisconsin.

Camping outdoors, riding and simply marvelling at the emptiness of "Big Sky country" are all part of the fun but the main draw is the chance to get down on hands and knees and quarry for dinosaur remains.

South Dakota is one big open-air dinosaur cemetery. "Sue", the world's best preserved tyrannosaurus rex skeleton was discovered in the area and, in some locations, bones are easily spotted, poking through the soil. Just as evident, depending on who is looking, is "proof" that the creatures died in a flood. Evidence is seen in geological strata and the animals' sudden deaths.

The afternoon's work yielded a rich crop of bones, from a group of Edmontosauruses known to be buried in the hillside. The remains join similar exhibits, including a triceratops skull, at a museum opened by the land's owner to spread the word that Darwin was wrong.

"Dinosaur fossils are not proof of evolution but rather extinction," a poster tells visitors to the museum. The war between Darwinian science and Christian fundamentalists has raged for decades but the battleground has lately shifted from courtrooms and lecture halls to small-scale museums, churches and even a Creationist theme park called "Dinosaur Adventure Land".

According to the most recent poll, nearly half of all Americans, 48 per cent, believe in the Book of Genesis's version of our origins. The Creationists fervently hope that number may even be rising.

Evolution is "the dumbest and most dangerous idea in the history of humanity", said Kent Hovind, a vocal enthusiast for the cause who also runs the theme park in Florida. Explaining his Creationist creed, he said: "We think dinosaurs were part of the normal Creation and were just big lizards. Noah took some of them on the Ark, probably babies, when the floods came.

"Throughout history, there are stories of people killing the animals that survived but they called them dragons."

Passions aroused by the debate occasionally spill over into politics, usually into the charged sphere of education, sometimes involving national figures such as the former president Jimmy Carter and President George W Bush.

Sometimes, I am so proud of South Dakota.