Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970s, and it was exactly as the Dead Alewives portray it, right down to the guy always cruising for munchies.
(via Dr Bushwell)
Worried that global warming will submerge your real estate? Here’s the solution the town of Galveston hit upon after they were devastated by a hurricane in 1900: the entire town was hoisted up on stilts, and new fill placed underneath. The photographs are amazing—it was an impressive engineering project, and it was all done with manual labor.
It’s also a little bit familiar. In my old home town, you could date the houses by their construction: the older ones were all built up on foundations that raised the floor a couple of feet off the ground, because the town was on a flood plain—my parents had photos of people canoeing down the streets when the Green River rose above its banks. There the solution was to build a dam on the river and control it that way, and that’s when the newer houses could have these peculiar things called basements.
Damming the ocean is a rather bigger problem.
Laura Sessions Stepp is wondering what it means to be manly, and of course she has to resort to the cultural phenomenon of the last 30 minutes, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and has invented an overwrought story that modern men are all confused by this swishy style personified by Captain Jack Sparrow — the fey sway, the frilly shirt, the lace on the wrist — and that all this business of empowering women is so stressful to young men.
I’m sorry, it’s too ridiculous for words. The only people who could possibly pull off that pirate style are Johnny Depp and Prince.* And I think it’s quite reasonable that women should be assertive and laugh away any fellow thinks the right pastels and properly gilded accessories will cause them to swoon into his arms.
Besides, I saw the movie, and know who the real masculine role models are. Grubby fellows who only occasionally shave and who have extraordinarily poor dental hygiene and a tendency to belch and wipe the excess rum off their faces with their sleeves. I swear, the fashionistas ought to be looking at these guys for fashion trends. This is where it’s at, bros.
It’s what I settle for, anyway.
At least until a few more years pass and biotechnology progresses so I can aspire to the full tentacle look, that is.
(via Grammar.police and Zeno)
*OK, not entirely true. Connlann can pull it off—but then, he inherited his looks from his mom and his attitude from his dad.
In an exercise that will tempt photoshoppers world wide, but makes alteration superfluous, an Italian magazine has run a photogallery of the Pope in various strange costumes. I rather liked
cowboy Ratzi and the
grim leprechaun, but my favorite has to be
When I get to be old and sunken-eyed, I promise…I will dress comfortably and tastefully, put away the frilled shirts and the puffy pantaloons, and avoid wearing garish velvet. It’s a good suggestion for both pirates and popes.
Hey, maybe we’re making more progress than we ever imagined, if this poll from Christianity Today is any measure:
As a somewhat cynical realist, though, I’m more inclined to believe in badly designed polls and cunning rascals with a script than I am that subscribers to a Christian magazine suddenly became wise.
(via Sandwalk)
As the buggy summer looms, I have to confess to a sadistic enjoyment of this splatter film.
I think the insects are real animals filmed with high speed cameras, but the actual impacts are faked with CGI — the physics weren’t quite right, and the flying insects should have bounced out of the camera field more. It just makes it funnier that no arthropods were actually harmed in the making of this movie.
(via Byzantium’s Shores)
That Holbo fella puts up a post about octopuses — it’s got a winged cephalopod, and one driving a car — and he wasn’t inspired to wax holbonically upon it? I’m disappointed.
A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That’s his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it’s a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There’s a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.
The description in the book of this image is like so:
Subtlety was not one of [William Jennings] Bryan’s strong suits. His campaign poster from that same election [1900] depicted, among other things, a sort of Lady Liberty archetype attacking a giant octopus with an axe.
This is clearly an incorrect interpretation. The octopus is central and beautiful, and if that were actually Lady Liberty, she ought to be half-naked. I think it’s Bryan advocating an uprising of the servile classes to destroy loyal invertebrate-Americans, the treacherous dog. I’m glad he lost the election.
No, date rape isn’t funny, but neither is the drug war. Here’s an odd little story about a fellow busted for possession of a the date rape drug, GHB. It was in a bottle of soap. The police tested the soap with a portable kit, and it tested positive for GHB — as the video shows, a whole class of soaps test positive for GHB with this particular kit.
Amusingly, the company that made the soap turned it into a commercial for their brand. The drug kit isn’t a test for GHB, it’s a test for good soap!
