Soviet Retro Sci-Fi Art

Alien City, 1953

Some very nice stuff. Take a look. A lot of it has a definite 'Forbidden Planet' vibe.

Brief GOP Affair with the Common Man Ends In Tears

Short of Money, G.O.P. Enlists Rich Candidates

Comment Rescue!

I left the following comment on a post at Ron Silver's (let no one say that Hollywood types should keep quiet about politics!) blog which expounded on his (definitely not Neocon!) philosophy. I'm reproducing it here just in case 'anything happens to it *wink* *wink*'.

You're correct in thinking that being labeled a 'neocon' is irrelevant. You prefer the label 'Lieberman Democrat' or 'Revolutionary Liberal'. Whatever.
You're deeply wrong, however, in thinking that your 'philosophy' is not substantially aligned with that of the neocons.
It has the same arrogant, elitist reek that steam from the writing of Leo Strauss and Machiavelli. You feel that those who disagree with you just don't comprehend the historical scope and sweep of the vision that underlies Bush's glorious global freedom campaign; that we just don't see the existential threat posed by 'The Terrorists'.
The reality is that many of those who disagree with you (such as I) do so with a complete comprehension of what the neocon position. We feel that it is driven by selfishness, racism and the deep-seated belief that you and your cohorts are worthy of determining what the future of humanity should be and are the people with the brains and balls to implement it. Please.
Stop playing Risk with the real world and losing.

original link via TBogg

Bacon!

You've seen The Oracle of Bacon, right? It's a Web application that calculates the degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and any other actor/actress based on the movies they've been in. It crunches the numbers supplied by The Internet Movie Database.

The number of degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and another person is known as the Bacon Number. The average degree of separation (across all 900,000 or so people in the IMDB) is much lower than you might think. The lower this number, the better that actor or actress represents the 'Center of the Hollywood Universe'. For Bacon, it hovers around 2.9! There are about a thousand people who are better 'centers' than Bacon. The unnamed 'least connected' actor in the database has an average degree of separation of around 9.2.

I was wondering, then, what the real average separation number was, not for Hollywood folks only, but for everyone in the world. It turns out that others have been wondering, as well.

Lacking, fortunately, a database logging the relationships of everyone in the world and a concrete definition of what a relationship is, we can only speculate. I'm going to wildly guess that the global Bacon Number is around 14-15.

Zombies Throughout History

Evidence of Historical Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis

We Can Win in Iraq!

Evidently, the new definition of 'winning' the conflict in Iraq solely involves the metric of US troop deaths (a position that seems to ooze out of the woodwork every time there's a minor downturn in the body count). If that were really the case, then we could achieve TOTAL VICTORY by bringing all the troops home now and reducing the US troop death count to zero!

Mas 'Mas y Mas'

They're Not Happy Just Listening To Your Phone Calls

Now the Bush Admin wants to read your emails without warrants, too!

A US Predator/Hellfire Hit?

'Missile hit' on Pakistan village

Local people say the missile was launched from an unmanned drone aircraft and that the dead were believed to be militants.

The Pakistan military says it was not involved in the incident in the village of Danday Darpakhel.

In Washington the Pentagon has denied that a US drone plane from Afghanistan was involved.

"Every indication was that there was no US military involvement in this activity that you've seen," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Correspondents say that US forces based in Afghanistan have used drones in the past to attack militants in Pakistan.

Rudy!

The thoughts behind the rictus.

Tie Up Another Virgin!

John Fogerty's new album has a song [iTunes] which is apparently about Bad Girls like Britney Spears, lamenting their lifestyle as a "waste of life." I prefer to think of self-destructive celebrities as sacrifices upon the altar of the insatiable, slavering hunger of our hyper-capitalistic, bare-knuckled media economy. We have to feed a steady supply of boys and girls into the volcano's white-hot maw to appease the emergent gods of our baser nature.

Conservative Humor Discovered!

No Kidding: Baby almost socks it to Hillary LOLPols!

But "Indian & Pakistani Friends of Ron Paul"? WTF!?