I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:

While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.

• Start with the title: “Man thru history”. That’s actually accurate, in a sense. It’s an illustration of a particular man’s perception of history.
• While most of the figures are just standing, men are either committing violence, having violence done to them, or having sex. The only active women are having sex.
• There’s an awful lot of pink. Should it have been titled “White Man Thru History”?
• Everyone is conventionally attractive: slender, curvy women and muscular, athletic men. They’re also all clean and youthful. Where’s the variation in body type and age and race?
• It’s actually not very representative. There should be more people suffering from disease, more women the target of violence, and lots of dead babies.

Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”

OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it’s an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you’re going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It’s like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too.

Behold: His Holy Space. It’s like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look of MySpace and drape it with Kincade paintings and animated doves and angels, and you’ve got His Holy Space. Why, I don’t know. Some things are just mysteries.

(via The Friendly Atheist)

Baby-faced Burt Humburg passed along the word-of-the-day to me:

pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun

The growing of a beard.

[From Greek pogon (beard) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).]

Pogonology is the study of beards and pogonotomy is a fancy word for
shaving.

Now this sounds like news for Man Beard Blog (who will no doubt be pleased with the Greek etymology), but what is this? Have I got some reputation for facial hirsuteness (a word that is etymologically related to “horror”)? Is it a hint that I need to shave, errm, I mean pogonotomize myself?

More likely, it’s acute envy.

Besides, I’m proud to be indirectly affiliated with the Pogonophora, the bearded worms of the deep sea.

Nooooooo!! The proliferation of special purpose wiki encyclopedias has gone too far!

Today is the vernal equinox, Bérubé has returned to the blogosphere, and the WAAGNFNP has manifested itself. I don’t know what it all means, unless perhaps that all the snow and ice is going to be melted by a giant nuclear fireball, ending the hockey season.

Little girls can be cruel.

Here, you can have nightmares too. I could hardly believe this topic that came up in the comments: gospel mimes. I thought it had to be some cynical joke, that no one would combine those two things…but it’s real. There are plenty of examples on YouTube, and jpf dug up a list:

• K&K Mime Ministries
• Praises In Motion Mime Ministry
• The Mime Ministry of De’Ju
• The Mime Boyz
• Yielded Vessel
• Silent Praise Mime Ministry
• Ms. Tawanda: Gospel Mime Soldier For Christ

I know. My jaw hit the floor, just like yours. If Koran Bratz exist, to name two random and normally unlinked horrors, please don’t tell me.