Hip-hop

Sage Francis:
'God's not a woman, he's a big white guy in the sky and the deserts are reflections of his eyes. He doesn't cry for us, butwhen he does it's 'cause he's drunk. God's not a woman. He's a bitch.'

The same man responsible for Makeshift Patriot, the only hip hop song I've ever loved.

Useful Phrases

If you ever wondered how to say, "You can drink milk with a cup, but you can't cut wood with a cat," in Romanian, this is the webpage for you.

Spam

Selected spam subjects from an email address I've had since high school and use anytime some random site requires a valid address.
Variations on a theme:
1. yo Dude, your schlong is really small
2. Why so small weenie man?
3. Never thought so small prick exists.
4. [re:] Size of John Holmes of Rocco Sifredi in a few days
5. why your sausage is so small?? ;-)
6. why so small meat man?
7. yo sir, your member is really small
8. [re:] size of your sausage!
9. Girls prefer real things, not toothpicks

You-neek You-nork

Ever wondered if other people have your name? This website will check, at least within the United States. It claims there is 1 of me, 67 and 108 of my roommates, 0 of my boyfriend, and 0 of a number of my friends who have unlikely or more recently imported last names, each of which generates 1,000-500,000 results with Google. My own last name gets 10,800 google results...

~~~Special ED~~~

It's one of the people I went to high school with that I liked: ~~~Special ED~~~

Magical Realism

Some discussion on what defines magical realism.

The Tree That Ate Roger Williams

Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island (eighth grade social studies, woot!), was buried near an apple tree. When a few of his descendents exhumed his grave, with a mind to put his remains somewhere more prominent, they found no bones. Instead, they found a portion of the apple tree's root, which followed where Roger's spine had been, and split in two for his legs.

Kyoto Emissions

It's the official UN data for greenhouse gas.

Chinese Cave Dwellings

70 million Chinese live in caves.

Redheaded Runaway

Here's another friend of mine.

Steller's Jay

They're the cheeky blue birdies you've seen around, the ones who make raucous screeches, and steal your food.

Mother Earth News

The original guide to living wisely.

I only found it because I was looking up buttermilk.

Marine Conservation

"The world would be a poorer place if we lost the way of life that fishing and the ocean have provided us and our coastal communities. Whether it is in a remote Eskimo or Aleut village in Alaska, the working waterfront of towns like Kodiak or Sitka, or the fishing ports in New England, there is a richness to our history and culture that cannot be replaced."

David Benton, head of the Marine Conservation Alliance, interview with Grist

Another Green Link

It's the Institue for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment! And with a scientific analysis, they recommend plastic over paper bags.

Solar Kismet

Here's an interesting blog, if I become the sort to reads blogs of people I don't know.

Go green, young man

It's the New American Dream, with a few simple steps you can take to turn the tide and help save the planet. Plus, here's a more exhaustive list.

Alaskans sure it's getting warmer

It's an Anchorage Daily News story on a statewide survey about opinions of global warming. A much higher percentage of Alaskans than the natural average believe it's true, most likely because the effects are more obvious. Still, there's a somewhat unique approach to it: "On the bright side, 73 percent think temperatures will be more comfortable, and 60 percent expect tourism to grow because of warmer weather."

Names

Here's a another way to waste time -- www.placesnamed.com. If you want to know all the zip codes in Seattle, for instance, or more importantly where there are towns named Tiger, this is your place.

It is also, strangely, full of census data on name frequency. My last name is the 43,063rd most popular last name (surname) in the United States, my first name the 88th most popular female first name. For fun, try and guess the most popular male and female first names. It's much more staid and English than you'd think. Give up? XX & XY.

Wooden Boats

There's nice ones, and less nice ones...

Angel's Landing

I climbed this crazy crazy trail in Zion National Park, in Utah.

Global Voices

The World is speaking, for instance, in Ukraine. Are you listening?

counterpoint

And from Akvarium, another side of the same argument Gazmanov is making

politics of pop

Oleg Gazmanov seems more and more interesting, kind of like Zhirinovsky...
Gazmanov - Novaya Zarya

Turns out that youtube is acquiring a slavic element

You can also see Diskoteka Avaria, who are bigger fans of american culture
Ostrie Ataki
HHHiRNR

or some more realistically (?) portrayed youth


or if you don't mind their language, some interesting recombinations of Leningrad
Karlsson na Dacha
Anime??

and it turns out the guy in Brat is the poslednii geroi Kino had in mind...

and there's a bit of uploaded Kino footage

Green Theme Zine

To go with green drinks, let me also give a shout out for Grist Magazine. I know a girl who works there, but stupidly never looked up the publication for the first, oh, ten months of our acquaintance. Now that I've seen it, it turns out to be super awesome.

Grist - "it's gloom and doom with a sense of humor. So laugh now -- or the planet gets it."

Green drinks

On Tuesday night I went to a get together event for the green-minded, a schmooze and booze for sustainable environmentalist types. It didn't get me a job, but it got me some free wine, and some quality time at the Aquarium.

ferocious beasties

In New Jersey, a cat chased a black bear up a tree. There's a picture, so you know it's true.

Butter sculptures

Apparently, as part of the Minnesota State Fair, they choose a Dairy Princess -- called Princess Kay of the Milky Way.

And then they carve her likeness out of a block of butter. My friend was there.

toons

If you're looking to see a digest of recent political cartoons, it's a quick way to see what the biggest news stories are lately...

Nikki Giovanni

Poetry by the insightful Ms. Giovanni

STP Pix

All the pictures you could ever need of the event.

Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone

Too much biking could make your knees unhappy, especially if your bike is not well adjusted, or if you perhaps have six gears and go over big hills anyway. So, what type of pain is it? Did you fall? Should you readjust your bike? Learn how to ride better? I'm going with the last option, because I'm not getting more gears any time soon.

more Marmots

As it turns out, they eat marmots in Mongolia and China, and the marmots carry bubonic plague (Black Plague, anyone?), so they have to be careful which ones they eat. And then there's lots of other marmot lore.

Marmots

Marmots live in the mountains, and eat flowers. And they whistle. How great a life is that?

Os Mutantes

In three weeks, some crazy Brazilians are coming to play in Seattle. Beatles-and-LSD-influenced-only-reunion-since-1973 crazy.

Handlebar tape

If you, like me, start out clueless, here's how to re-wrap your handlebars. If you're super ambitious, do it harlequin style!


(and this is how not to get saddle sores)

Baaba Maal

Last night I saw a show by Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. It was a pretty amazing show. Amazing music. Amazing dancing. Standoffs between the drummers and the dancers. Basically, Baaba Maal is amazing.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

It was 1959 at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Dr. Milton Rokeach had three patients, who all thought they were Christ. So he started them on a regimen of group therapy together, and eventually wrote a book about it. The book has been reviewed, excerpted, required as reading for psychologists, and taken as a parable for current world politics; the Ypsilanti State Hospital has apparently been turned over to be a research facility for Toyota.

Blogging on Russian pop music

Google blogsearching for 'Russian "pop music"' turns up the following random general, webness; some of it more relevant to the Ukraine.

Hapag-Lloyd

I see container ships saying Hapag-Lloyd at work all the time, so I looked them up. It's a big German company, originally Hapag and Lloyd, which merged and have successively taken over various other companies, most recently Canada Pacific. And they also run a cruise line and an airline in Germany.

WHO on Chernobyl

Twenty years later, if you didn't get thyroid cancer and aren't suffering long-term from the mental trauma of evacuations, you'll probably be okay. That's what WHO says, anyway.

I have no idea what you're talking about...

...so here's a bunny with a pancake on its head.

Oh, Those Rascally Russians

and their complete and utter lack of regard for Western copyright laws

middle-aged Mother Earth

"In order to put geologic time in a framework we can understand, let us divide the earth's age by 100 million. Then we can consider that Mother Earth is forty-six year old, a middle-aged lady in whose past we have a strong and intimate interest."
pg. 26, Fundamentals of Oceanography, 2nd Ed., 1996, Duxbury & Duxbury, Wm. C. Brown Publishers, Dubuque, IA

Fridtjof Nansen rocks

No, really he does. He had an awesome life, and he won a nobel prize. Plus he came up with the Nansen bottle. He's a hero's hero.

Introduction to Physical Oceanography

Hmm... lecture notes from Marine Sciences 1 at the Flinders University of South Australia in Adelaide. "Not a substitue for a proper textbook," but probably interesting all the same.

Timur-lane

So there was this fourteenth century Asiatic-nomadic-turkic conqueror fellow called Timur, which means 'iron,' and he was lame, which coagulates into Tamerlane. His father, Taraghai, was the first of their tribe to convert to Islam. He joined a monastery and advised his son that "the world is a beautiful vase filled with scorpions." Timur took this to heart, and set out to conquer and crush Central Asia from Russia to India to the Ottoman Empire, and was going after China when, at the ripe old age of 69, he took ill and died.

More photos

This set was interesting too. Mostly ad concepts, looks like. Some were oddly disturbing, some just odd. And the question here: are they soft, or hard plastic?
...I have to stop now

Photolicious

So I found some photos at fishki.net. I found this one strangely compelling. Apparently some people collect random photos. And this is pretty, even if it is just a photo of stained glass created by someone else.
I guess it makes perfect sense that the web contains an enormous proliferation of photoblogs. Myself, I'm scared. I take so few pictures that each and every decent one is precious to me.

Jellyfish are super awesome

Faster than the blink of an eye, or a speeding bullet... it's the sting of a jellyfish. NPR science correspondent Joe Palca reports on new research that reveals how fast jellyfish stingers move on their targets.

Bacon Pie

My boyfriend told me to make him a bacon pie. This is a variation on the 'go bake me a pie'/'what am I going to make this pie out of?' conversation that we have every week.

Hawaii Five-O

So occasionally, when kayaking, guests make some comment about Hawaii Five-O. I was raised without television and the last season aired two years before I was born, so I don't get it, but I took the time to look it up and it must have something to do with the closing credits, 'cause Wikipedia says 'The closing credits repeated the theme music over a short film of either some outrigger canoeists battling the surf or the top of a motorcycle unit...'

From the GDR, with Love

Anika, a founding member of PiPiPi, is in Germany. At least for a little while longer. And she found someone's really cool photo project.

Lactic Acid

According to the New York Times, Professor George A. Brooks at UC Berkeley is redefining the way exercise physiologists think about lactic acid.

Contra-ception

Just in case you were interested in a brief history of IUDs, or of birth control in general, or the long-haul well-written option from Planned Parenthood. IUDs may have been ispired by Arabs inserting various things into she-camels to keep them from getting pregnant on long caravans: stones, apricot pits, bits of copper... The Planned Parenthood article claims it's just a legend, and there certainly don't seem to be any hard sources.

And, also with no listed sources, four percent of American women own no undergarments.

Scrabble Score

Now I wish I had an X or a Z in my name, which is obviously made up of very common letters, and would get me nowhere in a cut-throat game of Scrabble.

Ah, Russian house!

State Park

No one should piss this freely, but I do.
O bunting egg, O Lord.
Thank you keeping the grasses evil and smooth.
The park ranger is female.
She wears a stiff green ranger outfit over her leotard of soft yeti hair.
She gave me a formal warning.
She gave me Bob Kaufman by the fire.
In twilight tasks preceeding new arrivals, she gave me this site dilated
by force.
A site thinking for itself, all by itself.
O deep in the hurry penultimate screw.

Peter Richards

Seattle History

If you wanted to know about Seattle's history, www.historylink.org has lots of articles on things like, say, Alki.

Gergely Kiss

His name is not pronounced how you think, because he's from Hungary. Even though I missed it (the logistics of travel between Seattle and Connecticut having defeated me), his senior recital looks like it was awesome.

SIMoN says

Sweet! A whole website about the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, with a photodatabase of cool things like invertebrates. I found it looking for info on Stylasterias forreri, the fish-eating star. Sadly no photos of the actual eating. But this is a sea star with extra long and pointy pedicellariae, used for snagging the unwary. After that I suppose they do the usual eversion of the stomach.

Doomsday Clock

Ever wondered how close atomic scientists think we are to blowing ourselves into little bits? Check the Doomsday Clock.

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off...
and we will all be blown away!

Bovine Fistulation

As per wikipedia, a fistula is an abnormal connection or passageway between organs or vessels that normally do not connect.
Apparently agricultural research to determine digestion rates of different types of feed is performed on cows with "windows." Insert your own (w)hole milk/hol(e)y cow jokes here.
The other question is, would you do the same to your head?

Turkmenbashi

Everyone loves Turkmenbashi. My boyfriend aspires to be a 'bashi when he grows up. It's all about the hair. Or maybe it's his spiritual guidance that provokes people to make him giant shoes...

The Crazy House

It isn't exactly a yellow house, but I do live with Rebecca and Kelly, who has been known to walk around in her underwear and ballet shoes.

Exploding Dog

Surely you know explodingdog.com, but this one is my favorite.

Coxswain

Certain people will always be able to direct my movements with great precision. Dana is one of them. (The other two are both named Amy.)

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema

There's a new journal starting up in the UK. Maybe they'd want to publish my thesis.

Wilderness First Responder

When will I have time to take a course here, or here, or here? How about here or here or even here?

Emergency contraception

Sometimes I worry, and the internet doesn't make me feel better.

MUD

I used to play online all the time.

Cheburashka

Cheburashka is going to be a feature film in Japan. Soyuzmultfilm, soon to reach Disneyesque proportions?

Making friends and influencing people

I've had effects I didn't even realize at the time...

WA State Flower

In 1892 the women of Washington State chose... the rhododendron!