Lordosis

A comment or two on the highly sexualized pose used by most female comic book characters and especially when coupled with the phrase "strong female".

"Our own TNH and I used to have a plot in which the worst offenders of this sort of female costuming/posing would be paraded onto a stage at Comic Con, forced to wear five inch heels, posed in those butt-and-tits-out lordosis poses, and left there for an hour...just to see long they would last, and how many of them could walk afterward.

"I suppose that was mean of us." - Madeleine Robins

Goldman Sachs fires US employees to move 1000 jobs to Singapore.

"I Will Survive, my Precious"

To amuse during work: During an interview with Neil Gaiman, Adam "Mythbusters" Savage breaks into "I Will Survive" as performed by Gollum of Lord of the Rings.

We Are In the Science Fiction Future

ISS crew mans escape pods as debris comes at the satellite.

"Fun With Ropes"

Onion's AVClub interviews Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos.

"I discovered I was pervy as a teenager, and for a long time, I was very ashamed of it and held it in. In fact, the only public evidence of that is that song, because I thought I was a freak. Then at some point in the ’90s, I met some people that were outwardly kinky, and totally proud to be it, and I discovered the whole world of the fetish lifestyle, and I was like, “Oh, so I don’t have to be in the closet about being kinky.” So I’ve been an outward kinkster for a while now. But yeah, definitely, “Fun With Ropes” is all about bondage, and a super-funny song that was still loved. Belinda still loves to sing that song, which I adore about her."

Thyme for a Beer

Article in Smithsonian about beer archaelogist Patrick McGovern, a man who has reverse engineered ancient beer recipes that includes beer with carrots and thyme.

They Hate Us for Our Freedom

95 year old woman, in the terminal stages of leukemia and flying to be with her family during her final days, was asked told to get out of her wheelchair and remove her adult diaper for TSA screening.

Yes, bin Laden is dead. He still won.

Mayan Tombs

A video camera was dropped into the Mayan tomb in Palenque in south-eastern Mexico. The tomb dates between 431AD and 550AD and is believed to be the final resting place of K'uk Bahlam I, the city's first ruler or Ix Yohl Ik'nal, an early female ruler. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History has only been aware of the tomb for a decade.

But He'll Have Health Care For That Year, Eh?

US citizen faces one year in prison in Canada for having manga on his laptop. The CBLDF is putting together a coalition to handle the case.

Fingering Trigger Warnings

I've been rather annoyed (to put it mildly) on people placing trigger warnings all over so as not to set anybody off I'm usually polite about this unless the person who claims to need it (or is worried about others) is an asshole.  Caitlín R. Kiernan, a woman who by her own admission has had multiple issues of PTSD, has taken the practitioners of trigger warnings to task. "I will not be a member of the congregation of the Church of Protect Me From That Which Might Make Me Cry."

Gender Neutral Society?

The dream of the 90's may be alive in Portland (as they say on IFC's Portlandia), but is the dream of Warhol's Factory in the 70's, that of a gender neutral society, starting?

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows Department

Ron Paul and Barney Frank collaborate on a bill to end pot prohibition. It will permit states to legalize, legislate, and tax marijuana.

Swing Heil, Baby!

HBGary had plans underway to spy on everyone for corporate interests and to attack those that believed that government should be responsive to the people.

"Good news, everyone."

Georgia's anti-immigration bill worked. Because of this, crops are now going unharvested. So who wants to tell farmers that they won't be able to make ends meet because either they won't have product to sell or, if the do, they'll sell at a loss for having to pay a minimum wage to the laborers?

Reality is What You Can Get Away With*

Quantum version of a conjurer's trick shows that reality really is what you make it.


*I really need to get my Robert Anton Wilson books out of storage.

Summer Solstice Hymn

To Steve Jobs,

Fuck off!

007, James Bond

Agnostic's Prayer

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen. - Roger Zelazny

Really?!

Why drugs often list headaches under possible side-effects.

Two More From the BBC

32,000 year old fossils discovered in the Ukraine, possibly the oldest evidence of modern humans.

James May explains the science behind hangovers.

Heavier Geekery Than the Flash Gordon Wedding March

A Millennium Falcon wedding cake.

The Damned Human Race

70 year old man in Pennsylvania stoned to death because he was gay and the neighbor "knew" that the Bible named that punishment for "faggotry".

Hey, kid! You ever masturbated? Because that same book in the Bible names stoning as the punishment for those that "cast their seed upon the ground". Of course, you could've followed the lesson of he whom your religion is named for, Yeshua ben Yosef called Christ, who once said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".

Fucking human race. It's time for the next team to take over.

GENIUS!

After letting big business damage weather patterns, Congress is using the excuse of a destroyed economy (caused by financial institutions gievn the go ahead by Congress) to shut down weather satellites.

Mwah hah ha!

Cthulhu lollypops!

I know what I'm giving out next Valentines Day.

RIP Clarence Clemons

We Call That a Dilithium Necklace

From Discovery magazine: How science fiction can aid us to ask more questions about gender and sexuality. 

Evidence: Ruby Rhod

And here's Voltaire making the Star Trek argument:

If It's Not Scottish, Your Modern Stone Age Family is Crap!

Prehistoric settlement discovered on Scottish island.

Astronomic Two From the B, the B, the C

Astronomers watch a star get eaten by a black hole.

The Spitzer space telescope has snapped a false color image of the RCW 120 nebula, 4300 light years thataway in the constellation Scorpius.

More Surprised Than I Should Be

After his resignation this morning, Anthony Weiner is given a job offer by Larry Flynt.

Cats & Dogs Living Together

It looks like same sex marriage will pass in New York. Good. Call me an old reactionary, but I'm opposed to Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman living in sin. They should be legally married in their home state.

New York Archibishop Timothy Dolan says that same sex marriage will open the door to communism. I thought anyone old enough to believe that was dead, or close enough.

Likewise, ex-New York Giants receiver claims same sex marriage will lead to anarchy. Funny, I'd think that same sex couples flouting the law and being married illegally would more lead to anarchy. Shows what I know.

Seperation of Church & State Myth Myth

But this argument ignores a historical fact. It's not Jefferson's metaphor. Even in 1802, separation was already deeply rooted in American religious history.  In 1644, the American theologian Roger Williams, founder of the first Baptist congregation in the British New World, coined the phrase to signify the protection that the church needed in order to prevent misuse and corruption by political leaders: "The church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the church of the Christians under the New Testament in the antitype were both separate from the world; and when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made his garden a wilderness."

And you thought roofies were bad

Burundanga: a mind controlling drug supposedly in the hands of the Latin America underworld.

Cue Muse

Nearby galaxy has two supermassive black holes at it's heart, instead of the usual (believed) one.

Feel Like a Sexist Pig, or, Leaving For Europe

...and...

Beauty, brains, and wit. I suspect I'm on the wrong continent. I know I'm in the wrong state.

One More Fat Bastard

$6b in Iraq reconstruction money is missing, believed stolen.

I Know Starbucks is Not a Homophobic Company But...

I want to say something like "unbelievable", but this is sadly all too believable. This or something like it happens in the workplace every single day.

Man appears to be fired from Starbucks because of his sexual orientation.

Cool Exec With a Heart of Steel

Man in Shanghai freaks out his office but showing up in Iron Man armor.

New Baskets

Habitable planets may be found near white dwarf stars or dark matter.

Take that, Paris!

Proto French had a taste for beer.

Cuban Coffee Like Cuban Cigars?

Either it's a four cup morning or the cafe has switched to decaf on me. Maybe some cuban coffee would help.

Buckle on the Asteroid Belt

Vesta comes into view. NASA satellite will spend 12 months at Vesta before going on to Ceres.

Dress comfortable for success!

New dresscode for salarymen in Nippon: Hawaiian shirts.

Dan Savage on why Xtians that follow Christ's teachings should be more vocal to other Xtians.

For those of you playing the home game, my employer has decided to short my check and lie about it.

Mr Bubbles, Turn on the Bubble Machine

At the edge of the solar system, the Voyager probes has encountered magnetic bubbles.

Ringling College Commencement Address

Commencement address to the creative: Think carefully about how you spend your time, because your work isn’t like other people’s work. There isn’t a hard line between uptime and downtime. Your brain is always working, and what you experience in your downtime influences the quality of what you do when you’re on task. Be mindful of what you’re getting out of the time that you spend. Does your downtime refresh and recharge you? Or does it narcotize you? Does it spark new ideas? Or do you find yourself thinking, “well, there’s three hours of my life I’m never getting back.”

The other is not your enemy

Sikh is suckerpunched on a train, called Osama and Taliban.

Homelessness & Security

For a time I worked in downtown Dallas at Urban Market, a little grocery store designed to cater to those that were expected to move downtown for all the advantages of an urban lifestyle. The housing market dropped out before construction had finished retrofitting the buildings for residences. As such, a sizable percentage of our customer base was transient, both downtown employees (mainly AT&T and the Public Library) and the homeless. One man I met started in one category and ended in another.

I'm not sure how he knew I read science fiction. One day he passed through my checkout line and said, "I know of a book of fiction that defies categorization." I responded with, "Beyond post-singularity steampunk space opera, bildungsroman revenge fantasy, set inside a Big Dumb Object?*"

He blinked twice before saying, "Oh. I see you've read it."

Afterwards, he and I would chat, mainly about science fiction and occasionally banter over politics. I learned he was working part time doing some kind of semi-physical labor, after having spent a the last twenty years or so working in the financial sector. I wasn't surprised to learn that he counted himself politically as conservative and, before his recent employment and financial misadventures, distrusted the assorted safety nets backed by progressives and attacked by conservatives. He was beginning to analyze those programs closer, this time as someone on the inside, and said he now understood why we had them. He now believed that the cost to modern society would be greater, both financial and esthetically, if we didn't have something in place.

He only came through UM for a year, and up until recently I wondered what had happened to him. Back in March I ceased wondering. He was riding the same DART bus passing through old East Dallas. his appearance was disheveled and seemed to have some form of OCD, maybe. His hand shot up in the air as if in a wave every other street the bus passed by. I began talking to him, just to determine that it was the same man. He seemed startled to see me, or maybe embarrassed or surprised that I recognized him, but, yeah, it was the same man. And we talked, both then and the next couple of times I saw him on that bus, and I will share with you the knowledge I craved after seeing him after a year or so and seeing the changes with him. What caused his fall, I wondered. Not, how he became poor and homeless, after living a nice upper middleclass life, but, how he fell to looking as if he couldn't take care of himself. The answer falls thus...

He believed the definition and the truisms. He believed that becoming poor was a punishment, not by God, but by the Invisible Hand of the Market, and that he made the mistake that led to his fall and he couldn't be redeemed. He also believed that there would always be work, a job, something he could do to keep a roof over his head, to keep body and soul together, and since he couldn't find the job, that he fell into homeless and poverty, either the system failed or he failed, and he believed in the US, capitalism, and free enterprise. All of these equaled SECURITY!

"There is no security in this world, and only damned fools and mice think so."

Most people I know at least give lip service to those ideas. They are a modern Texas cultural shibboleth and taboo. It's how we tell members of our tribe from those who aren't, how we know who we can trust. But "poor", "rich", "USA", "capitalism", "security" all depend on the definitions given to them. Whoever controls the definitions that everyone agrees to controls how we think about them. If you invest too much of your self worth, your value, in modern day game society rules and definitions, you as well could easily fall victim to them.

There is no security, no guarantee of the value of the US dollar (or, indeed, any nation's currency), none of that. no guarantee of a "job" by the modern definition of same. Sometimes to make a little money (object of value used in trade for goods, services, or other objects of value), you have to make your own, you have to have the wit to see the opportunity, or the gift of gab to create the opportunity. But our schools do not teach any of this, instead focusing on the party line of creating cogs for the machine and that machine will not last forever.

All too often I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness for saying this, and concerned that I appear to be Loughner style insane to most of you.


*Karl Schoeder's Sun of Suns. Good book. Read it.

More on Tuesday's massive solar flare.

It's dead, Jim

The PC is dead?

Not really, but most of what your average consumer uses a computer for can be done on their game system and phone.

Mac Tonnies File: Entry One

Mac Tonnies was a conspiracy theory blogger, mainly covering alien abductions, sightings, that kind of thing. I doubt he took any of it too seriously but as I didn't know him personally and he died a couple of years ago, I'll never know. His blog was always a source of amusement and if he was alive today, I'm certain he'd have linked to "Bio Station Alpha on Mars".

From now on, I think I'll tag any Mars or alien cryptozoology stuff with Mac Tonnies File.

(facepalm)

First, Anthony Weiner lied about it. Whether he should have been sexting at all is between him, his wife, and the woman that received his advances, but when caught, he fucking lied about it. Tony, Tony, Tony, didn't you learn anything from the GOP, Spitzer, Jack, Bob, and Teddy Kennedy, and your own wife's boss' husband (aka Slick Willie Clinton)?

So far he's not a hypocrite, though if it's discovered that he backed anti-sexting legislation his name will be mud with everyone.

And while Weiner was owning up to his, Congress passed the forcible rape abortion bill. Nice distraction, Dick.

And now Nancy Pelosi weighs in.

So we have troops dying in the Middle East, the weather patterns are deranged, Congress wants to defund schools, the job market has stalled completely, prices rise while wages fall, and Nancy Pelosi wants to investigate whether taxpayers paid for Anthony Weiner's Twitter and Yfrog account!

Hey, Pelosi, I'll save you the cost of an investigation. Twitter and Yfrog are free services. Censure the man, sure, that makes sense, let his constituents boot him out, which, no doubt they will unless he's the next Ted Kennedy, but geez, you don't know the world we live in do you?

Fear Mongering, Money Lusting Twit

Governor Scott of Florida defended recent legislation that will require potential welfare recipients to pass a drug test and pay for it out of their own pocket. Governor Scott owns shares in a company that owns clinics that provides drug screenings. Must be nice to not have to work for a living and instead to legislate that people give you their money.

Oddly Proud of the Fed. Weird

Richmond's Federal Reserve Bank flies the rainbow flag at the request of PRISM for LGBT Month, in defiance of Robert G Marshall, who tells them that gays are undermining the US economy.

George Lucas Strikes Back

Explains quite a bit, yes?

Only 12% of the US are Immigrants

70% of scholastic science awards are won by 12% of the population.