Happy memorial day! This week on the web brings you the Saga of Devil Corgi, the new Nook, a head in a jar, kitten hugs, and more!
Donate to the Red Cross: To help the victims of the Joplin disaster. Or, you can text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate ten dollars.
In Which We Acquire a Corgi, And I Acquire CorgiPox: Part One of the Saga of Devil Corgi, a hapless, neglected furball that we tried to love.
In which we relinquish our corgi to a better place: Part Two of the Saga of Devil Corgi, where his repeated attempts at murder force us to reconsider our intentions.
So I Promised I’d Blog About Wishy: The Fiancee is still collecting her thoughts, but she does have a picture of our (smarter) cat hiding from the Devil Corgi.
You can adopt a war dog: There’s an organization that allows you to adopt a retired, possibly titanium-fanged war dog from the US Military. I link to this because adopting a war dog is almost certainly safer than adopting Devil Corgi.
Eric deals with the fallout of Russel Edgington: The latest trailer for True Blood. These are getting better and better. Here’s hoping that they fix all of the (glaring) problems from Season Three.
New Green Lantern trailer: This one goes into the history of the Corps, and the main villain, Parallax. This is kind of getting me onto a sci-fi kick again.
A scene from We Are the Night: There’s a new vampire flick playing via On Demand; I’ll probably check that out sometime today.
Lenny Kravitz cast as Cinna in The Hunger Games: Not how I pictured him, but I’ll deal. Also: Lenny Kravitz is an actor now?
New transformers promo: This apparently features someone called Mirage. Also, this is the sound of me not caring.
A stunning, 55-minute long Matrix fan film: Remember when The Matrix was awesome? I think there’s still potential in the idea…
Barnes & Noble announces the new nook: This edition is one big, black-and-white touch screen, which I love, because it maximises space, and the screen is supposed to refresh about eighty percent faster. It’s wi-fi only, losing the previous nook’s cellular capabilities, but I think that’s a small trade-off. And the battery lasts twice as long as the Kindle’s. DO WANT.
Ars Technica looks at the new Nook: A nice overview of the new nook’s features and capabilities.
Hands on with the new nook: With video of the new divice in action.
Barnes & Noble, Amazon engage in battery-life pissing match: Seriously, boys, just whip ‘em out and measure ‘em. Which is actually what Barnes & Noble claims to have done.
The scientific reason why the honey badger doesn’t have to give a s**t: Skin so thick it can sleep off a bite from the world’s deadliest snake. Also? It can take on a goddamn lion.
Zombie-Head in a jar costume: Some people really are just brilliant.
RC SuperHero: A humanoid-remote controlled air toy that looks kind of like Iron Man.
New algorithm that turns 8-bit rasters into vector images: This would make some of the old-school Nintendo games look amazing.
Harold Camping speaks: The lunatic Pastor claims that May 21st really was judgement day… it was just kind of a “soft” judgement. He still claims that October 21st is going to herald the end of all things. (via Brian in Shortsville)
Harold Camping re-predicts the end of the world, Twitter laughs on: A look at the lighter side of the apocalypse.
Harold Camping vs. Regular Christians: This does an excellent job of pointing out the fallacies of everyone who’s upset at Harold Camping because he picked a specific day. (via Almighty God)
The best rapture bombs: Do you know how I said I was going to scatter empty sets of clothes around town? These guys actually did it. I love the one reading The God Dillusion.
Is kitten hugs time!: Your weekly does of squee.
Bernie Sanders calls for an end to medical patents: He would replace them with a reward system for developing new life-saving technology. I haven’t had enough time to think about this and form an opinion, but it’s dead in the water, anyway.
Pete DeGraaf calls for women to prepare financially for their own rape: I know it isn’t cool to wish rape on somebody, but… well, I hope Pete DeGraaf gets bent over a couch by a giant, tattooed biker named Bubbuh.
This is what happens when you don’t vaccinate: From the article: “There have been 118 reported measles cases in the first nineteen weeks of the year—which is the highest number of infections for that period since 1996. That’s particularly noteworthy because, as the CDC points out, “as a result of high vaccination coverage, measles elimination (i.e., the absence of endemic transmission) was achieved in the United States in the late 1990s and likely in the rest of the Americas since the early 2000s.”
LOL at the photos of the clothes strewn about. Especially the Stormtrooper outfit. #thingsIwishIhadthoughtof
The kitten was highly squidgeable. Squee indeed.
The honey badger does indeed not give a shit.
Hey Dayna
When I see someone do something like the clothes-strewn-about thing, I start wishing I wasn’t so lazy. I talk a good game, but these people follow through on it. Good on them.
One of the videos linked in that article actually shows a honey badger making a lion back down. That’s seven kinds of impressive.
Food and beverage warning on Randall narrating the honey badger video, please. That cost me a substantial portion of what started out as a pint of beer.
Sounds and images SO dissonant as to be hysterical.
That video is pretty fantastic. And a Honey Badger is almost certainly a better pet than a Devil Corgi…
I’ve read of all sorts of creatures (cheetah, ocelot, ferrets, otters, anhingas, cormorants, giant carnivorous toads, hawks, falcons – and that was just ONE guy! Also hunted with bow and arrow, crossbow, bolas, blowguns, boomerangs, and harpoons), being kept as pets and/or trained to hunt, but as far as I know, badgers were the reason Jack Russell terriers were developed in the 1st place. I think I’d want one for a pet about as much as I’d want a possum.
WRT the medical patents, Dennis Kucinich proposed something similar in 2004 when he made his run and has tried to sneak it into legislation from time to time since.
He wanted to limit the duration of exclusive patents to one year (IIRC, it’s currently five) on drugs/medical devices developed with grants from the NIH (which is pretty much all of them). He asked, quite reasonably “how can you have the taxpayer both fund the R&D on the product, then get a license to gouge them under an exclusive patent once it’s approved for use?” Don’t think about the question too long. The short answer is: Big Pharma owned both house of Congress and all three branches of the Federal Government in 2003-04.
GAH! Should’ve checked first. From the ‘issues’ page of his House website:
Free Market Drug Act
“Congressman Kucinich introduced the Free Market Drug Act, which would effectively result in most major drugs being priced as generics by removing patent protection on pharmaceuticals produced with public funds. The bill would fund the world-renowned National Institutes of Health (NIH) to perform or control the research and development (R&D) on pharmaceuticals in the US. Some funds would be used to expand NIH’s capacity to do R&D and other funds would be granted to pharmaceutical companies and universities who already have the infrastructure to do that research. But whenever a drug developed with public funds was ready to be marketed, any qualified entity able to get FDA approval would be able to manufacture and distribute it.
The savings to the government and consumers from competition in the prescription drug industry would likely exceed $130 billion annually.”
Man, this is the blog that just keeps on giving.
Too much content for one sitting, but now I’m on to Kansas Rep. Pete DeGraaf, with the time to play internet Tarzan swinging from link-to-link until getting back to the original AP piece.
Within the context of Kansas state politics (BRILLIANTLY explained in Thomas Frank’s excellent book “What’s The Matter With Kansas – How Conservatives Won The Heart of America – which I have in hardcover, not nook -sorry.), abortion has been a political lever since Operation Rescue staged it’s Summer of Mercy in Wichita in 1991. That summer mobilized the social conservatives into a force that took the Kansas Republican Party over from the socially-moderate business-minded old guard.
Also, now with proven reptile Sam Brownback now sitting in the state house vacated by Democrat Kathleen Sebelius (who vetoed the bill on which they were re-voting when this nutburger got loose) doesn’t surprise me in the least. Kansas is reliably safe territory for this kind of thinking.
That he actually verbalized his small-mindedness in a public forum that is going to be recorded for all posterity can only help expose the idiot for what he is (not that I think it’s going to do him any great degree of harm).
The blog that’s hyperlinked in the Science Blog piece though, isn’t doing the rest of us any favors. Printing the nitwits home address and telephone number (granted, obtained from his legislative webpage) and putting it out there that democracy works best through the free exchange of thoughts, is a pretty serious bit of irresponsibility in citizen journalism. I hope the left just decides to have a brownie and not go beat on this guys door. He may have daughters too. And they probably think their dad is a nut too. I’ll bet HE doesn’t own a dog.
Hey Brian,
The Honey Badger is a total badass, but you’re right… I don’t know that they’d make a fantastic pet. A great weapon, but not so much with the cuddles and hugs.
Any kind of real medical reform is pretty much dead in this country… the pharma lobby is too rich and too powerful, and congressmen are cheap.
As to the Republican’s continuing War on Women… I really think we just need to give them a few states to fuck up, and offer free passage out to anyone sensible enough to see what’s coming. They’ll kill themselves off in a generation.