It's Like They Filmed My Inner Dialogue

Definitely NSFW.

I [Heart] Courtney Love

The best song from her solo album:

Album Review: Nobody's Daughter

I'm a huge fan of Courtney Love's solo album. So I was excited that she was recording again, presumably sober.

Her new album with Hole is disappointing. It sounds like some great musicians are holding up a great junkie punk rocker has-been to get out an album. Even the good songs are sad compared to Love's solo album. But you do get her crazy, unhinged, angry voice for a few songs. And her fans, including me, can hope that it does well enough to get her out of her funk.

The gays are rooting for you sister!

I Want To Go Back To Chicago

Lollapalooza 2010 in Grant Park will feature Green Day, Lady Gaga, and my winner for best album of 2009: Arcade Fire! All in Frank Gehry's brilliant Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

I gotta get out of here...

Ed. note: Lollapalooza is in Grant Park, not Millennium Park. Still, to watch those bands in that architecturally significant surrounding...

Heavy Torpedoes

Heavy torpedoes don't hit ships: they explode beneath their centerline and crack the hull.

The Cheonan is a corvette: a smaller local frigate. She was sunk by a a heavy torpedo launched by a North Korean sub. Or by a North Korean suicide sub.

North Korea apparently wants a lot of attention right now. They just asked South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the US to send dozens of warships into Chinese shipping lanes.

We, and South Korea, are not responding as they like. And the Chinese are pissed. The son of a god just provoked South Korea's allies to send an armada, or at least an intimidating number of warships, into the waters that China uses to get oil.

"Someron ees vry ronry, so vry ronry." But who is going to absorb the countless benighted, starving wretches of North Korea when this state falls?

This attack is a sad, murderous ploy to get China to send North Korea more money and supplies. But is the horrible humanitarian disaster of North Korea one that we--including the Chinese--even want to deal with?

Ru Paul, You Are A Stupid Bitch Judge

I would travel miles to see her lip-sync punk rock tunes: 2nd place Raven

For the second season in a row, Ru Paul has not chosen an interesting drag queen over one who is either fun (season 1) or who is only vapidly pretty (season 2).

For the record: I can't stand drag shows. I avoid gay bars when they have them. But Raven should have won this round. I couldn't be dragged by Jude Law promising a blow job to see the winner of this season perform "One Way Or Another"; but if Raven were performing any Blondie song anywhere near here, I would clear my schedule for a road trip.

Raven is more eloquent, more defined, more punk rock, and demonstrably more interesting than any of her competitors. Fuck you Ru Paul!

Still "Our Nation's Most Treasured Jew"

Funniest. The Daily Show. Ever.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bernie Goldberg Fires Back
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Walter Is Not Alone

Science at ‘the end of the beginning of the renaissance’ of psychedelic research

Our Latest Friend

Jones is the latest addition to the Menagerie
(not counting the king snake & chorus frog who visited today)
She's earning her keep.

49th By The Grace Of...

I always say that Alabama's state motto is "49th by the grace of Mississippi." But now, we're 48th by the grace of Arizona. Seriously, this law is so sick that--should all the world be turned into a radioactive waste heap save Arizona--I will die of fire and cancer and starvation before I go there.

I'm sure police in Arizona don't have anything better to do than randomly search brown people for evidence of citizenship.

"Papers please, and sieg heil y'all!" What a bunch of fascist ass hats.

Reading Material

Saki & Ned are exhausted from doing their
reading in preparation for next season.

Still Funny, Sadly Still Relevant

I [heart] Tom Lehrer:

Andrew Sullivan On The Teabaggers

I tend to agree with Andrew Sullivan more than I care to, as in this great analysis:

And this is why, despite my own deep suspicion of big government, I remain unmoved by the tea-partiers. Their partisanship and cultural hostility to Obama are far more intense, it seems to me, than their genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. And this is largely because they have no genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. They seem very protective of Medicare and Social Security - and their older age bracket underlines this. They also seem primed for maximal neo-imperial reach, backing the nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, favoring war against Iran, etc. Only Ron Paul, peace be upon him, extends his big government critique to the military-industrial-ideological complex.

I can't speak for Mr. Sullivan, but here is my own brusque protestation of the Teabaggers: I won't be a tool of corporate-funded, superstitious imbeciles who casually use the words of my ideology to herd benighted mooncalves towards an anti-individual, Christian corporatist autocracy.

Food for The Eagle

Harvard Secular Society conferred lifetime achievement awards on MythBusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman this weekend. Adam's acceptance speech is posted at BoingBoing.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences.

Now charlatans will know to beware the geeks

Brit geeks rallied in defense of a writer who was sued by chiropractors for calling them out. Good on them:

Unnerved by their determination, I said to Ben Goldacre, demolisher of pseudo-science in all its fraudulent forms: "The nerds are on the march. I wouldn't like to be the one standing in their way." An uncharacteristically mystical look passed over the great debunker's face. "Yes," he said. "Strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Guardian column.

No, We Aren't The Only Ones Who Like Black Leather, Black Leather Smash Smash Smash

A review of These Are The Damned by Joe Dante:

Not That Bad Really

So we aren't going back to the moon--which is disappointing--but we are now shooting for something much more difficult and way more scientifically interesting: an asteroid. And Mars is still a national priority.

I like Obama's program for NASA for 4 reasons:

1. It's fiscally doable, as necessity can be defended via planetary security. Bush the Younger proposed a moon mission, then poorly funded the endeavor so that the next administration could take the hit for cancelling it. Thanks Bin Laden....This mission transcends Chinese bombastics and national apathy: we Americans will provide the world with the data necessary to defend our planet from asteroids.
   
2. It, through an outer-terrestrial manned mission, sets up the engineering and national excitement for the longer, more exciting Mars mission.
3. It focuses on heavy lifting, which will be required for all of our serious robotic explorations (the overdue replacement for the Hubble, a Europa probe, etc).
4. It, through out-sourcing near-earth orbit duties to civilian and international space agencies, allows the NASA budget to be spent mostly on what it should: science.

I know that many in these parts are unhappy with the cancellation of the moon missions. But think about the international implications of our new goal:

"Go ahead and land your people on the moon China...we went there decades ago. And try not to choke on our fumes as we land people on an asteroid and collect data that could save humankind."

How much you want to bet that as we get closer to landing Americans on an asteroid, the Chinese become less interested in landing their people on the moon?

Buckaroo Banzai In The Fringe Dimension

If tonight's episode of Fringe doesn't get a Hugo nod, I quit. Peter Weller getting all sick-out Cronenberg and traveling through time...

It hurt my brain; my brain loved it so.

Olbermann At His Best...

...interviewing our heroes: the MST3K/Cinematic Titanic geniuses.

"That Woman Is An Idiot."

Sometimes, you just have to say it out loud.

Before Lady GaGa

Lady GaGa is only a modern Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Another Link Found

Marvel at your ancestor, and at the genetic and natural processes that work on we the living

Of course, The Discovery Institute provides many superstition-based excuses for embracing their obscurantisms.

Fancies and excuses are the weapons of the deluded and simple. They call their cosmic conceits "family values." To reject them is your primate, individual right. And reject them you should...

Here here

Philip Pullman: "No One Has the Right to Spend Their Life Without Being Offended."

You know who is awesome? Philip Pullman. He's the author of the marvelous His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), a kind of anti-Christian un-Narnia series for kids who would rather have their fantasy reading unadulterated by Christianity. Excellent starter books for the tot too young for Nietzsche or Rand.

Road trip, anyone?

Cocktails Cops Can't Resist
Bartenders revive classic cocktails. The law responds by reviving classic crackdowns.

On Monday, Virginia bartender Todd Thrasher helped Team USA win the Cocktail World Cup in New Zealand. (His winning cocktail involved artichoke aperitif, lime thyme syrup, and apple bitters. Suddenly those great mojitos you make don't seem so impressive, do they?) But when the sultan of swizzle sticks returns victorious to our shores, he won't find an entirely welcoming climate for his craft in the country that invented the word cocktail.

No!!!

Godzilla remade?
I mourn and scorn Hollywood
Godzilla cries too

Clone Wars Season 2 Finale

Clone Wars has been awesome this season, and the 3-part season finale looks like a lot of fun.

If only

The Onion: U.S. Government To Save Billions By Cutting Wasteful Senator Program

For When You Get Bored Looking At Walcreatues

Teabonics

Born In Alabama

Lesbian by birth.

From her interviews, she and John Noble are great friends and have a lot of fun filming the best show on TV now.

It shows, doesn't it?