Back after Labor Day

Ma and Pa Kettle on vacation

“Guerilla Public Service”

Los Angeles 4th St. Bike Boulevard!  Hardcore.  From the organizers:

“However! If, after a reasonable attempt, we the bicyclists of Los Angeles, are not granted our request for safer streets, we will simply do it ourselves. Calling all professional sign painters and sharrow cutters!!”

Omega-3’s

Omega-3 Fatty Acids are important to neuron function, repair, and growth.  The claim is that fish oil works as well as antidepressants. 

Gray sex

As usual, when you look at the fine print, this study doesn’t seem to be saying much:

“Being sexually active was defined as having had mutually voluntary sexual contact with another person within the past 12 months.” 

Once, in the past year, you had “sexual contact.”  Oy.

Male pregnancy

As those fancy social science multiple regressions show, the fact that females are the ones that have kids accounts for up to 95% of their social disadvantages – jobs, wages, etc.  It makes up a good deal of the gender schemas imposed on women – “nice” “motherly” “incompetent” “untechnical” vs. “vixen” “bitch” “frigid” polarity (try finding that tightrope in between – it ain’t easy).  If men can have kids, too…  and it happened on a wide scale… (Another steal from Andrew Sullivan)

Fine points of bike paths

Love the Oregonians. 

Little worm in your ear:  Sell your car and buy a bike!  Sell your car and buy a bike! 

Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies

A beautiful, good thing from Miyazaki’s studio, this gorgeous reminder of the universality of suffering, the destruction of war.  Youtube trailer.

Crazy Person + Guns = VA Tech Shootings

The posturing and scurrying-about and ceremonializing and apologizing and committee-forming and report-producing in the aftermath of the VA Tech shootings is shameful.  It was a crazy person.  The situation was made worse by his easy access to weapons designed to kill large numbers of people quickly.  Sending out cell phone alerts could hardly have prevented it, my dears.  On the other hand, making weapons-designed-to-kill-large-numbers-of-people-quickly illegal would have made such an event, with such consequences, highly, highly unlikely.

14 American soldiers downed in Iraq

Distressing news from Iraq nearly every day for months, years now.  End the war.  Bring. Them. Home. Now.  You can’t end terrorism with shock and awe, torture, massive civilian unrest, deaths, and displacement. 

The Lutherans might maybe love gay people, too

Always amusing to watch old school white male religious leaders with those black glasses from the fifties flounder about in the oh-so-confusing age of gay rights!  Hoorah for the reader responses to this guy. 

Meow. MEOW.

Tight: Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock?

Apparently available at Blockbuster’s!?  (Always surprising to find anything that never showed at the Googleplex there.)  A seamless, sly achievement of the documentary age – tight, crackling, whip-smart show piece – which is not an art house film about Jackson Pollock.  See it and savor it. 

The new This American Life?

Serious sources say Radio Lab is on the up and up.

You know those Atheists on Youtube?

An atheist myself, and usually the Skeptic crowd turns me off, but this is right on.  (From Andrew Sullivan…)

Bush manual on protesters: shut em out, shout em down

“Not that they’re worried or anything. But the White House evidently leaves little to chance when it comes to protests within eyesight of the president. As in, it doesn’t want any.”  Link

Hello world!

A blog of good stuff.