Sally Cruikshank I saw at her 1982 presentation of Quasi at MoMA in NYC. She was always the BEST, but when she actually walked through the exhibit of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion models, I fained interest in THAT body of work for some reason...

The US senate has voted to audit the Fed - a previously impenetrable, secretive and unnaturally powerful pseudo governmental corpus. When the winding cloth lies stripped from its shrouded balance sheet, what kind of hell storm shall rise from the abyss? After all, it was Chairman Bernanke who indicated that his machinations require secrecy. more inside

Fragrance cannons will be deployed to overpower the stink of Beijing's so-called Seventh Ring - a vast circle of garbage dumps and overflowing landfills. more inside

Curious George: has anyone experienced sleep paralysis? The other night, I dreamed a child was running into traffic with a hood over her head. With an immense effort, and several tries, a horrible croak awoke my mate, and so dissipated the wisps of nightmare. It was what it was, but I'm hoping others will share less pedestrian examples...

Immortality! I gap like a rube on the tube at the possibility that relatively young mummified humans may yet cavort with the already predicted cloned furry mammoths in the not too distant future... more inside

Cat-like yoga By the grace of cats there is yoga. Or so it would seem. We have much to learn from our feline pets... more inside

What kind of a death? An interactive actuarial game, if you will. See how one is likely to die as predicted by race, gender, age, country of residence. It's kind of fun, as well as sobering. Oh. Well, let's assume that being sober or not has been rolled into the other parameters... more inside

This bug has been snug for seventeen years rolled up into the Windows kernel. Another example of Microsoft incompetence? All hell could break loose, but they claim a password would still be needed to make this an exploit.

Now The Museum of Death wants Willem Dafoe Just a funny story, really. For compulsive fans of the wierd..."We’ll get Willem Dafoe in here, he’d be amazing."

English sewer grates excite police action at the mere thought that they might actually be photographed. What is it about these orifices that excite such fear and awe? Canadian examples are so beautiful that some have been enshrined in a museum. Japanese manhole covers are graced with colorful reliefs and traditional motifs. more inside

Can reefs grow beneath Venice? A TED lecture in which Rachel Armstrong explains the process that uses proto cells to grab carbon dioxide from the air and encrust the old wooden pylons on which this charming Italian city is based. Eventually it is thought that a reef can be built to support the architecture, not only spatially from the bottom up, but procedurally, since no top down construction processes are required, but just the seeding of the old with the new technology. more inside

The Indus Vallley Civilization may have been a Golden Age. The skilled artisans at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro erected no monuments to glorify an upper class. Although the cities were fortified, there were no depictions of warfare or conquered enemies. Power and status was indicated through the use of seals and fine jewelry, while the biggest extravagance was lavished on *water luxury* baths, whether or not some ritual was involved in their use. more inside

Is the whole economy a pyramid scheme? So it would seem in Collapse, a movie that may crash our dogmatic slumbers... or not:(

Endangered languages that link to other worldviews to be preserved , as is especially worthy for Native American languages on the brink. I've linked to one of these native speaker/thinkers before, because from Moonhawk's perspective, so much remains to be learned, appreciated and preserved.

Running dog proxies launch attack! Information Warfare Monitor reports People's Republic of China 60th Anniversary Celebration besmirched by new zero-date malware embedded pdf documents sent to journalists by running dog hackers, thinly veiled by proxys located on school computers in Taiwan (sic) R.O.C. That is all.

The Fox was a folk hero who made a positive environmentalist impact while causing fear in the halls of corporate polluters. Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Royko, syndicated columnist for The Chicago Daily News, was one of many who denied that The Fox was an eco-terrorist. Royko's FBI file was 86 pages long, so not everyone agreed. more inside

Female Power.

When they cut the sacred groves, the Mayans doomed their civilization. They were practicing good forestry management. “They were not allowed to cut down what we’re calling the ‘sacred groves. Then that changed," according to paleoethnobotanist David Lentz's new study."With no trees, you lose water retention in the soil or aquifers so the ground dries up and then there is less transpiration, so therefore less rainfall as well." Agriculture failed. Strangely, we seem to be on the same path today... Can no one stop rampant over-development? more inside

God's sick little joke, she said... Surgery is a serious step (and well I know it). What would happen if Universal Health Care was as *good* as that for which military wives can elect? Magnified by millions? Yet the horror stories on the OTHER side might be even worse. Bleeding livers that go untreated, etc. Anybody got a solution to this mess? Or might they like to share some other cautionary horror stories?

A new use for old CDs George W. Hart, formerly artist in residence at MIT, explains the math behind his bizarre constructions. Many of them use traditional methods of fabrication, but the ones called Gonads of the Rich exemplify the hyperexpensive methods of stereolithography (like $13,000 for an 8" long object made that way, I was once told). Cheaper are the virtual objects like these AVI animations of George's structures growing forth... more inside