Sunday Funnies

Take a look at my funny finds from the past week...Blackadder
Blackadder
Bits and Pieces
Doghouse Diaries
Hacked IRL
The Onion, via Bits and Pieces
EpicPonyz
Criggo
Friends of Irony
Let There Be Blogs
Let There Be Blogs
Alphaville
The Daily What
Comic JK, with the hover text, "Unfortunately, there's some kind of conspiracy: dream-drinks are ineffective."

see more Epic Fails
Acting Like Animals

see more Engrish
Bits and Pieces
Inside-Out Spaghetti & Meatballs: A giant meatball stuffed with spaghetti, marinara sauce and ricotta cheese. This is Why You're Fat
EpicPonyz
Cannot be unseen, from Epic Ponyz.

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Abstruse Goose
Skull Swap
Criggo
God Hates Protesters
Skull Swap
My First Dictionary
EpicPonyz
(The difficult-to-read note says "You're a jerk, toilet seat!) M Thru F
Oddly Specific
The Daily What
Oddly Specific
Deavers live in Bogs. Bits and Pieces
Princess Sparkle Pony

see more Work Fails & Job LOLs - Monday Through Friday

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Probably Bad News

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Stephen Hawking is badass. Epic Win
Auto Zone's aggressive campaign for new customers... That Will Buff Out

Lilith’s astrology column for the week starting March 6 was wrongly published last weekend. We are republishing it today. The Herald apologises for any sense of deja vu readers experience this week.

Regret the Error

Bizarro, via Library Grape, who points out that this particular sin was still persecuted in our lifetimes. It probably still is, in some places.
Cyanide and Happiness
Sober in a Nightclub
Bits and Pieces

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see more Engrish

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M Thru F

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Blackadder
The Daily What

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Non Sequitur

Heads Up!

This was posted yesterday at Dave's Landslide blog, along with a newspaper article. Pretty amazing, but I'm glad I wasn't there; that whole hillside looks pretty mashed up and unstable.
Rock slide on Hwy 96 in Northern California near the Humboldt/Siskiyou County line. from Paul Hailey on Vimeo.

I've been down this route some distance on a couple of field trips, coming in from I-5, but I don't think I've been as far as this spot. The geology along this road is mind-boggling. A geologic overview and road trip can be found here (3.31 Mb PDF), however, it was published 30 years ago. A lot can change in 30 years. I have found old field guides very useful, but it can take some experience and patience to get the most out of them. What was described as a "good roadcut" may be now completely overgrown with brambles, or hidden behind a clump of alders. It may even have completely disappeared, as the cut in the video clip above has.

Tsunami

Despite my background in geology, like many others I used to picture tsunamis as large versions of standard waves- you know, with the curl and break and so on. It was the swarm of videos that came out in the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia that really clarified what happened. It seems more accurate to me to describe them as temporary changes in sea level with an amplitude on the order of meters to tens of meters, and a duration of minutes or longer. They are waves, of course, but the effect is that the sea level just comes up and up. And up.

The NYT has just published a video clip of the recent tsunami in Chile that illustrates this well. This was stressful for me to watch; that poor yapping dog trying to balance on the fence from the beginning of the clip is still clinging to the fence at the end... so I'm guessing it survived. I was also relieved to not see any human victims, though of course in reality there are hundreds dead as the result of this tsunami.

Saturd80's

The Stranglers, Skin Deep:

X, Johnny Hit and Run Pauline:

The Cramps, Goo Goo Muck:

Epic Concert

Julia Segal at Skull Swap posted this with the comment, "I need a fucking time machine." Indeed. I think there are two bands on there that I don't recognize, at least by name: The Stooges and Mashmakhan. Fleetwood Mac was in its blues incarnation at that time, not the soft pop rock that they did in the 70's. So they would have been a better fit with this line-up than one might think if not familiar with their older stuff.

And pretty much everyone on there is frakking legendary.

Followup: OK, I think I been pwned... The Coachella Music and Arts Festival, according to Wikipedia, debuted in 1993. The "band management had chosen this untested and under-developed site as part of the boycott of Ticketmaster and the Southern California auditoriums it controlled." And I don't think a lineup like that would have gone unremarked in music history. Also too, I hadn't realized The Stooges was Iggy Pop's Band. I suppose I should Google Mashmakhan... yes they were a band of that era, but I didn't recognize their "top hit," As Years Go By."

Caturday

Badtux, that snarkiest of penguins, found this, and I had to repost.... it's one of those clips that makes you "aw" with sympathy, even as you laugh hysterically.

I may or may not work up the gumption to deal with some meaty topics today; I'm just not feeling the motivation. If you want meat, check out Badtux's economy posts.

Vladurday

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Plotting

to deal with the world as I find it, rather than as I'd like it to be. (Bits and Pieces)

Why Big Macs Are Cheaper than A Salad

From PCRM,

The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.

This post is from fall, 2007, but I doubt much has changed.

The Moon's in the Sky, Like a Big Pizza Pie

Amore!Wouldn't want to carry the joke too far, though; someone might think I'm saying they have eruptions all over their face. (Io labeled, from The Planetary Society Weblog; click over for more information, and two higher-resolution versions)

Followup: They also have an interesting article on recent science from the Mars rovers.

Hopeful Horse Pies

I just opened my afternoon update email from The NYT, and this is the lead story:

Jobless Rate Holds Steady, Raising Hopes of Recovery
By PETER S. GOODMAN and JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
The economy in February shed 36,000 nonfarm jobs, fewer
than forecast, as the unemployment rate held at 9.7
percent, the Labor Department said on Friday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/business/economy/06jobs.html?8au&emc=au

I'm not going to take the time to read it, but two things: First, losing fewer jobs than expected doesn't really seem to me to be a basis for "raising hopes of recovery." Second, the US economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs per month just to keep up with new entries to the job market. I have a number of young friends who will be graduating in the next few months. I can tell you they're not very hopeful. I also know a few grad students who are finding ways to procrastinate on finishing up. That blurb just seems insulting.