If that last link didn’t creep you out immensely, there’s also this and this.
Now, when I was a kid, I had G.I. Joes. I had a bunch of ‘em, and they were big fun. They weren’t fighting a war, they were going on safaris and setting up base camps. They were driving their big orange tracked vehicle through the swamp, because it was cool to drive a big orange tracked vehicle through the swamp.
They had lifelike buzzcuts, eagle eyes and kung-fu grip. They weren’t dressed like ‘peace keepers.’
I remember one time I saved up my lawn care money and got a new G.I. Joe. He was tall and strong and buzz-cutty and kung-fu-y, but didn’t have the eagle eyes. And he was black.
I only remember at the time that the black cashier asked me a few extra times if I had really, really found what I was looking for. “Are you sure this is what you want?”
I took him home and he hung out with my other two white G.I. Goes. Pun not intended. Thus, I can say that as a child, I had a multicultural paramilitary experience.
Quite the contrast to the creepy fascism of Desert Storm toys.
Month: September 2002
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Fun thing: Game Neverending
It’s the alpha stage version of a nice graphical version of MUSH, if you know what that is.
Sign up. It’s fun and easy.
I just wanted to update this to include this warning: If you play Game Neverending, you’ll waste a LOT of time. Like, a WHOLE LOT.
I started last night at around 11pm, played for a while, and then it was 4am.
Beware.
The game itself is fun, though. You wander around and gather things and make them into other things to sell or give away for karma points.
As an example, if you go to the web design place, you can buy Check Boxes, Submit Buttons, and Scroll Bars. You then make a Web Page, which you sell. Currently, I’m buying flour, sugar, and salt to make donuts to sell to cops. Fun. -
A few weeks ago I was reading a magazine called Wild Earth. The issue was dealing with the concept of ‘deep time,’ which attempts to understand the current biological experience in terms of ancient, ancient, ancient pre-history.
One of the articles was about the various species of mammals that have occupied North America and gone extinct, or migrated off to other continents. One of the survivors on this continent: Pronghorns. We have on this continent an elk-like animal that evolved the ability to out-run its predator, a cheetah.
Yes, the Cheetos mascot isn’t the only North American cheetah. The theory is that both the pronghorn and the cheetah co-evolved in North America in a prey/predator relationship.
The ice age of ~13,000 years ago wiped out the cheetah (not before the genus migrated to Africa), but left the pronghorn behind, still possessing its ability to run wicked fast. An ability it possesses to this day, even though it’s been able to out-run all it’s predators for 13,000 years.
With that in mind, here’s a news story I found today on blogdex:
Tough Earth bug may be from Mars
A hardy microbe that can withstand huge doses of radiation could have evolved this ability on Mars.
That is the conclusion of Russian scientists who say it would take far longer than life has existed here for the bug to evolve that ability in Earth’s clement conditions. They suggest the harsher environment of Mars makes it a more likely birthplace.
The hardy bugs could have travelled to Earth on pieces of rock that were blasted into space by an impacting asteroid and fell to Earth as meteorites.
Essentially, there’s no way this microbe could have evolved its ability to withstand radiation on Earth. It came here from somewhere else, much like the African cheetah.
There’s another article linked from the Mars microbe one, which says that the mysterious red color of Jupiter’s moon Europa is, essentially, red tide. It’s a bacterial bloom. -
And speaking of mocking our President…
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As I sit here waiting for fink to compile, a few things occur to me.
The first is that whimsy is missing from this nation. Sure, we have comedians, but they’re on the clock. They’re working really hard to be funny. I want whimsy! I want a populace that knows when to laugh at itself.
I mean, what else could be sillier than our current staring contest with Iraq? We’re like the young upstart who walks into the saloon just to try and shoot Clint Eastwood. Dangerous but laughable.
Or NewsMax.com. It’s like the Onion, only serious. Lighten up, guys! I suppose, though, that they can’t be blamed for cashing in on the huge crop of people with not a drop of whimsy in their body.
I refer, of course, to neoconservatives, and their partners in non-play, the radicals. Those folks are leading us over the edge of a cliff, because it would be so completely not fun to go there. Have a picnic on top of the cliff, enjoying the view? No, too fun! Let’s jump off, to prove how serious we are about all this!
(The compiler says:
Compiling apt-get.cc to /sw/src/apt-0.5.4-5/apt-0.5.4/obj/cmdline/apt-get.o
Still some time to go.)
I think the final solution to the problems of our day revolve around one thing that we could all do to make life better: Rectal massage.
When you go for a massage, you feel relaxed afterwards, right? But there’s one set of muscles that seldom get massaged in such a situation, and I think you know what I’m talking about and why they don’t get massaged.
As someone who has had a rectal massage, let me tell you that it’s the most relaxed I felt… ever. There was an initial sort of shame and embarrassment (so to speak), but after that passed, it was pure bliss.
Walking around with an un-tensed ass is quite the liberating experience. You smile at people. They wonder what kind of drugs you’re on. And most importantly, you can engage in whimsy.
Ah. The compile is done. Not a moment too soon.
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lookie
Update: Aw, well. They took the picture down. It was George W. Bush watching a little girl read from a book at the front of a classroom. He’s holding the same book, only upside-down. It’s a very good photo edit. -
Interesting set of articles on being a lefty under surveillance. Lots of good computer security info.
