Fans of D&D artist Erol Otis may be interested in his animated .gif artwork for the computer game Star Control II.
Archive > March 2003
Speaking of the self-induced mental illness known as religion, we offer up House Resolution 153: Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under the threat of terrorism at home.
Ithaca HOURS are a local currency, a legal form of paper money which can only be used in the Ithaca area. This regional boundary helps keep local wealth recirculating within the community. Over 8,500 HOURS have been issued–that’s more than $85,000 worth! Each time they circulate, value is added to the local economy. Estimates are that transactions worth several million dollars have taken place since 1991. Want to start your own local currency? Sure you do.
Hi! My name is Amber Forever!
Virginia R. Smith is a Christian albino woman who has devoted sixteen years to ‘Johnny Five’ from the movie Short Ciruit – and she has a Web page!
Since the United States is going to hell and since other countries call the US ‘the great satan,’ of course now is the right time to ask the Church of Satan about the second Gulf War.
Alan Bisbort writes to the President of the United States of America (by way of the Smirking Chimp): “You are still the little impetuous and impulsive frat boy, still that D Student from the Skull and Bones Club, still the family Black Sheep, still the shakedown artist and flim-flam man, still the coke hound and party animal, let loose on the ultimate dance floor: worldwide Armageddon, at least as your feeble brain understands these theological matters.
“Just as your concept of a Creator bears no resemblance to mine (or to the Pope’s or to Tutu’s, Carter’s, Mandela’s, etc.), your fantasy of heaven — with “good” Americans like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott but not “bad” Americans like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X or Henry D. Thoreau sitting around shooting the breeze for eternity — is not one I would wish on my worst enemy. And your idea of a “just” and “holy” war has cost all humanity some precious part of their soul. It will, if it hasn’t done so already, poison forever America’s great tradition of democracy, America’s role as a beacon of hope in the world. To use an appropriately twisted metaphor, the virginity of American ideals have been brutally gang-raped by a cadre of unelected ideologues. This coupling will result, nine months hence, in a monstrous offspring that will slouch toward Bethlehem to be emitted from betwixt quivering gams, a black oozing thing that will drip its hate-filled goo for the next hundred years.
“So, as the Pope implied, God damns you, George W. Bush.”
If you would like to read a blog of someone living in Iraq, try Where’s Raed? for a look at what it looks like from over there. It sure doesn’t look pretty over here. In Portland Oregon there was a pretty lengthy and confrontational protest, for whatever that means.
This week pleasant has brought you Star Trek and pleasant has brought you human rights. Now pleasant brings you human rights in space and a comparison between the flag of the United Nations and the flag of the United Federation of Planets.
Human rights documents and materials. Currently more than 10,400 Documents. You apparently have rights.
Do you like robots? Do you live in Portland? Here is Portland Robotics.
“Fifty years ago, George Mansour was arrested for having sex with another man behind closed doors at a private party. What was it like to have your name smeared across the true-crime tabloids at age 19?” The Boston Phoenix asks and answers this question in an interview with today’s George Mansour.
I’m moving to Scotland!
‘The idea of animal rights is, on the surface, enormously seductive. It appeals to our desires for a less complex and more humane world. But dig behind that beautiful facade, and you find that the animal-rights philosophy is an ugly mixture of misanthropy, Luddism, and fear.’ Charles Oliver said so and I agree.
Mr. Fred Rodgers explains why corporate crime exists (RealAudio). Most of North America over and below a certain age will miss this good man for some time to come.
What is the Live Music Archive all about? etree.org is a network of mailing lists and FTP servers devoted to providing public access to high quality digital recordings of live music performances. All of the concerts provided through these FTP servers are performances by musicians and bands who permit non-commercial recording and/or distribution of their live concerts. Since space and bandwidth are often of concern to FTP site administrators, the digitized recordings are hosted on most servers for only a short time. After a digitized recording disappears from a server, the only means of obtaining are extraction from another media type (Digital Audio Tape, Minidisc, CD-R), a time-consuming process that can, in some cases, cause generational loss. The nature of the Internet Archive, a digital library with media of all types, provides a natural alliance with etreeorg. With the means to archive all of these digital recordings that circulate on etree FTP servers, and to so readily have the consent and support of the musicians and the trading community, provides a unique opportunity to ensure the high-quality longevity of thousands of live concerts from the 1960′s onward. Or so says archive.org, anyway.
The Sunday Herald Sun reports: The sparkle in the world’s oldest eye belongs to Shirley Gordon, who celebrates 50 years of second sight on Wednesday. As Australia’s first successful dual corneal transplant recipient, she will toast the donors whose rare gifts kept blindness at bay. Her left eye operation was carried out on March 5, 1953 by ophthalmologist Sir Thomas a’Beckett Travers in Melbourne’s St Ives Hospital. The donor was believed to be aged 80, making the graft 130 years old and still going strong. The second graft was carried out six months later, but was replaced 30 years ago in a bid to correct astigmatism. Mrs Gordon, 71, was born with the genetic condition keratoconus and was losing her sight as a teenager. “I would have been legally blind when the surgeon suggested the graft and he told me there were risks, but it could be beneficial,” she said. “I was 21 years old and thought I should go for it and ended up with the first two successful corneal grafts in Australia. I consider it the equivalent of the first heart transplant in its pioneering nature. It was a gamble, but my life would have been very different without it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, hats off to science! Makes you wonder how the competition manages to hold on all these years, having never accomplished anything similar. Ever. Even once.
The Times Online reports: Stupidity is a genetic disease that science should be striving to cure, one of the researchers who unravelled the structure of DNA has claimed on the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough. People of low intelligence who do not have a recognised mental disability are suffering from an inherited disorder as real as cystic fibrosis or haemophilia, according to James Watson, the biologist who won the Nobel prize for his role in the discovery. While most people blame learning difficulties on poverty or broken homes, the true cause of poor intelligence and achievement is more likely to be genetic, Dr Watson said. This could and should eventually be corrected, and molecular biologists have a duty to identify the genes that affect low intelligence and to develop gene therapies or pre-natal screening tests to prevent it. “If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease,” Dr Watson said. “The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent. It seems unfair that some people don’t get the same opportunity. Once you have a way in which you can improve our children, no one can stop it. It would be stupid not to use it because someone else will. Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world.” Genes that influence beauty could also be engineered. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”
How about them apples?
