This is cool:
The basic process for developing fingers and toes in land animals may have existed for more than 500 million years in shark genes, according to a new study.
Of course, it makes the uplift easier, and, in this case, much more frightening.
Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s clobberin’ time!!! collects works by various artists interpreting their favorite literary figures/authors/characters. Mildly cool.
(above: Bruce Timm / H.P. Lovecraft)
How UPS got William Gibson’s Spook Country to me:
West Sacramento, CA -> Mather, CA -> Louisville, KY -> Poughkeepsie, NY -> Newark, NJ -> Philadelphia, PA -> Stratford, CT -> Windsor Locks, CT -> Watertown, MA -> Arlington, MA
(this took three days, instead of Amazon Prime’s promised two)
WTF, UPS? Time to lay off the sauce, [...]
…when you’ve got your own animation studio!
(Neal Adams was an extremely accomplished cartoonist and comic artist in the 60s and 70s, and he is, apparently, not at all fooled by your “plate tectonics” nonsense)
Are all supermarkets awash in 70s prog rock, or just the one near me?
I’d kind of hoped we’d be leaving all that behind us - far behind.
From my favorite photo-blogger, 12 months (or more) in the middle kingdom:
That iconic beverage that you either love or hate is as much a part of life in China as it is in any other country - These bottles although small 250mls are very cheap for the size they cost around 1 Yuan (plus another [...]
Last night I caught some of Dusk ’til Dawn 3 on the Scifi channel. It featured gone-missing-in-Mexico Ambrose Bierce as a character:
Bierce is known to have accompanied Villa’s army as far as Chihuahua, Chihuahua. After a last letter to a close friend, sent from there December 26, 1913, he vanished without a trace, becoming one [...]
At Instapundit:
IT’S NATIONAL RASPBERRY CREAM PIE DAY: “You can probably thank the National Raspberry Council for that one. It certainly goes over better than National Raspberry Colonic Month, last practiced in 1924.”
You don’t even need to roll your cursor over the link to confirm that James Lileks wrote that. You just know.
Thundarr the Barbarian:
Comic book writer-artist Jack Kirby worked on the production design for the show. While many people believe that Kirby was the primary designer of the show (mainly due to his similarly themed Kamandi: The Last Boy On Earth), the main characters were in fact designed by fellow comic book writer-artist Alex Toth, who [...]
I haven’t got around to buying Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book yet, but this is a nice article. Since the AEI’s site seems to be down, I thought I’d scoop it up from Google’s cache and temporarily reproduce it here:
Coming to America
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Posted: Thursday, July 26, 2007
SPEECHES
AEI World Forum (Beaver Creek, Colorado)
Publication Date: [...]
Instapundit:
IT’S BAD TO BRING A KNIFE TO A GUNFIGHT. It’s worse to bring a soda can:
An elderly man beaten unconscious by an assailant wielding a soda can awoke and shot the man during an attempted robbery, police said.
Willie Lee Hill, 93, told police he saw the robber while in his bedroom Wednesday night. Hill confronted [...]
From some filter-defeating prose in a piece of spam:
They’d hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show.
Cops in Trouble!
Which reminds me - Spook Country should be out in a week or two.
Do they only come in black? I mean, how’s an Israeli teen supposed to accessorize?
(subject line - beep beep!)
Thoughts on Ward Churchill’s firing, from the former president of FIRE:
An under-qualified, arguably fake Native American with a long history of not just plagiarism and other forms of academic fraud, but also a disturbing tendency to threaten and intimidate his critics, it turned out that Churchill was the kind of person who could only exist [...]
The Third Battle of Ypres:
Never seen before, these astonishing photographs, lovingly hand-touched in colour to bring to life the nightmare of Passchendaele, were released this week to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle that, between July and November 1917, claimed a staggering 2,121 lives a day and in total some quarter of a million [...]
I recently read Mike Carey’s first novel - I thought it was pretty good, despite being a bit difficult to slog though for having been more richly imagined and described than anything I’ve ever read, and I’m thinking I’ll snag his next one from Amazon UK rather than wait for it to be released here. [...]
Cincinatti has seven miles of unfinished subway, abandoned in the 1920s. Man, that’s even weirder than Soviet sub bases and Swiss bunkers. Too many more architectural oddities and I’m going to have to make a new category.
The GF, overheard talking to the TV:
Pull up your pants, you fucking douchebag!
C’mon all you Kids These Days™ - stop pissing her off.
(subject line hat tip)
Those clever Iranians are on to us:
According to IRNA, the official Islamic Republic news agency, the national Police chief has implicitly verified the news about the confiscation of a number of squirrels, equipped with eavesdropping devices, on the Iranian borders. He has declined to give any more details, but, reportedly, when asked about the confiscation [...]