Right at the beginning of the show the author is heckled and he pukes all over his shirt. You can’t really see this but just when things seemed to be going really well the author is heckled again and he wets himself. The pants are hung out to dry and the show goes on. Somehow, magically, the heckler appears on the screen as a DON’T. He is enraged and confronts the author who then s***s his pants. (warning: all links include movies and are possibly NSFW...no nudity, just language) (This is what new book readings are like for the magazine whose next Canadian publisher is supposed to know about "eating a***s on Adderall".)

Curious George: Property Rights This post (and more particularly the follow up here) have me thinking about where the line between an individual's rights and the community's rights should be. more inside

This made me feel sad, a bit of the natural world taken from the city. I first heard of Pale Male on a PBS broadcast, and the story made me feel good, now the hawks have been evicted. more inside

The Online Gallery of Van Gogh's work. I was inpsired by this post on mefi to post an online gallery of another great artist. I'm sure all of you are familiar with his paintings, but for me Van Gogh's most exciting work is his drawings (the gallery has an unbelievable catalog of over 1000 of his drawings). more inside

Puppet Porn The previously deleted hot puppet-on-puppet sex scene from "Team America: World Police" has surfaced. NSFW in a puppet kind of way, but pretty much not in any other way.

Christmas is coming and everybody needs one of these. more inside

Nineteenth Century Images of Albinism

Curious George: Supermarket poppies. For a couple of years now I've been reading about the U.S.'s efforts to throw $750 million at shutting down Afghanistani poppy fields. But thousands of tons of poppy seeds are found nationwide in supermarkets and bagel shops. Where do they come from? And why aren't they being cultivated for narcotics? Is McCormick behind the overthrow of Afghanistan?

And the angel Gabriel Kylie said unto Mary Posh: My goodness, but this is the tackiest Nativity Scene I've ever come across. Madame Tussauds dress the Beckhams as Mary and Joseph in their Christmas display, which, according to the Vatican, may well be blasphemous. more inside

H-wing Carfighter. This truly takes Star Wars Geekery to a new level. Though it is a really bad ride. What I didn't know was that this was a pretty common thing. Road Squadron Form Up!! Road Squadron Form Up!!

The gorilla wake. Primates fascinate me. more inside

She says she's sorry. Rachel Buchman, radio reporter, decided to fight back when she got tired of receiving spam mail to her hotmail account. Only...when she left her voice mail message to the spammer, she left her name and phone number. Did she deserve to lose her job? The MP3 file of her message is online at laptoplobbyist.com.

Weegee the Famous

Your friends may be unpaid marketing shills. (NY Times link; couldn't get the blog version, sorry) I thought this link would be interesting given how many Curious, George posts there are. It raised a number of questions for me: more inside

The Mood Cross. Remember mood rings? Now, on this pendant, "the image of Jesus will slowly appear, symbolizing that Jesus is with us when we keep him close to our hearts." Makes an "excellent Christian gift," available in gold or silver.

Thanks a lot guys. Part of me is upset I didn't think of it first. Part of me is upset because most of the world uses American to represent both USAians and Canadians. (Why not Mexicans too?) But is this taking it too far?

Have you moshed enough this year?

Monkeys visualizing led to language Researchers at Bethesda NIMH found that monkeys react to screams and calls by "lighting up" the part of the brain associated with image and action. The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (needs costly subscription), abstract here, and it is speculated that this might explain the appearance of language in humans, or, as these scientists say, "neural substrate for representing object concepts." So, alarm calls are precursors for language. Nifty.

The Opening Chord to "A Hard Day's Night" Revealed! "The opening chord to “A Hard Day’s Night” is one of the most memorable in rock history. . . But what exactly was that mysterious chord? . . . A type of mathematics called Fourier Transforms can be used to reconstruct the original frequencies from a list of numbers . . " Ya know, I never would have guessed that particular arrangement. Warning: Beatle geekery inside! more inside

Notes from the road. Travel - great pictures, great writing.