So I'm watching the last episode of Season Five of the X-Files and see a guy who is the spitting image of someone whose desk was beside mine for a year and a half. I looked up the episode and lo and behold it is him! I never knew the guy was into acting.
Naturally I can't link because of Google searches and so on, but how much bloody fun is this?
TORONTO — The Conservatives' new environmental platform is a “complete and total fraud” that is “designed to mislead the Canadian people,” former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said Saturday.With neoconservatives in power, I wouldn't look for moral leadership from Canada any time soon. In fact, just forget our feds. They've been sucking for years. It'll be cities and provinces showing leadership on environmental issues. Oil companies couldn't care less about the environment, and conservatives have, until very recently, balked at the science behind global warming. It wasn't until a poll showed a majority of Canadians view global warming as their number one concern that Harper started pretending he cared. Before that he pretended to care about public health care. And we know how well that's going.
[...]
The Conservative government strategy focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out precisely what many of its regulations will look like.
“In my opinion, it is a complete and total fraud,” Mr. Gore said. “It is designed to mislead the Canadian people.”
Mr. Gore acknowledged he is not a Canadian citizen and said he has “no right to interfere in your decisions.”
However, he said, the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that's why this week's announcement was so “shocking.” (Globe and Mail)
From the what was I thinking? department.
Cheesies, popcorn, licorice and oatmeal chocolate cookies consumed close together are guaranteed, apparently, to create a colossal toxic gas bubble in one's gut that has hideous side effects, not the least of which is the most vile sensation: nausea.
Thankfully the agony lasted only an hour or so.
I blame the cheesies and vow never to eat that Republican food again!
Eli, an Australian cattle dog, leaps off the back of his owner, Josh Mumme, while chasing a disc at Riverside Park in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Photo and video (below) by Janice Clark
Well it finally happened. The last of the Hawthorn elephants are now free. Gypsy (right) and Nicholas (who is still a relative youngster) are now living at the Performing Animal Welfare Sanctuary in Galt and will soon be relocated to the PAWS' Ark2000 Sanctuary in San Andreas. There they will share a vast and beautiful home with five other freed Asian elephants: Winky, Wanda, Annie, Minnie, and Rebecca.
Updates, photos and videos here.
More of the story here.
Lota, you can relax now. Your tribe is free!
Gypsy and Nic playin' in mud, mud, glorious mud:
It's hard to imagine that these elephants were, until their rescue, living in a fetid windowless barn, chained up to 18 hours a day when they weren't performing in circus acts.
I still wouldn't trade places with this "Prozac Burp".
Resistance is Never Futile
...when the curtain is pulled back, our fellow creatures emerge as active beings each of whom has the ability to shape the world around them. Agency is not unique to the human animal. Cows, pigs, monkeys, and elephants can also resist their exploitation. read more
More impossibly cute pet photos.
Ntodd's petz.
4/5 of the Pack (third down) looks like an Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair cover pic. I have advised Ntodd that I totally love it and would buy the large size. Seriously.
A stunning collection of photographs by Fred Herzog. 
Lucy/Georgia
Like something Magritte might have painted:
Two Men in Fog
Album: West by Lucinda Williams
The Amazing Chase or A Blur of Bassets:
Writing: James Wolcott on Rush Limbaugh:
Global warming's most popular denialist, talk radio's most imitated showman, conservatism's minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.Amen, brother.
He's been dancing (or tottering) on the edge, and his supporters have been applauding his brilliance. Only this time he chose go a little too close to the edge and fell over. It's not kosher, even in today's fundamentalist America, to call young women playing college basketball nappy-haired hos, when these young women did nothing to hurt Imus, had no political power and were in general acting out the accepted version of the American dream. This is pretty much the consensus, and we should not forget it.Coming soon: Another motherfucker should be out of a job next week. Wolfowitz apologized "to a few hundred staff members assembled in the bank building atrium, only to be greeted by booing, catcalls and cries for his resignation." I'm no fan of the World Bank but I chuckle thinking of staid bureaucrats heckling this asshole. Goddamn, that must have been a sweet moment.
Now step back a little, and ask what it is that we are not really debating in this great Imus-debacle. We are not debating the context (watch the video on the site) in which Imus's comment came. It started with him making fun of the idea that women could play basketball at all, and it continued with essentially rating the fuckability of the two teams in the championship match. It then turned into the "nappy-haired hos" statement.
This context seems to me to consist of first ridiculing women's athletic abilities, then their right to be seen as anything but sexual objects for men like Imus, and then putting the black women into their even lower place as nothing but frightening whores.
Now, this is not how Imus spoke, of course. He spoke in code. But the reason he expected his audience to appreciate the code is that he believed them to agree with him on all those matters. It is this that should be the talking point in the debates, much more than whether certain things can be said or not and by whom.
It's all Greek to me, but it sure is amazing to behold.
The inner life of the cell.
Lahey: "You know what a shit barometer is, Bubs?"
Bubbles: "...No."
Lahey: "Measures the shit pressure in the air. You can feel it!
Listen Bubs, hear that?
Bubbles: "...I don't hear anything."
Lahey: "Oh but you will, my sorry little friend. When the old shit barometer rises your ears will implode from the shit pressure.
(Trailer Park Boys Season Five: "The Winds of Shit")
MONSANTO WANTS TO MAKE RBGH LABELING ILLEGAL
This week, Monsanto declared war on dairy companies that have chosen to ban the injection of their cows with Monsanto's genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). Due to escalating consumer demand, an increasing number of large dairies around the U.S. have declared themselves rBGH-free in the last couple of years. Monsanto, the sole producer of the synthetic hormone, has seen substantial losses in sales as a result of this voluntary movement of the industry towards healthier milk. Although rBGH is banned in most industrialized nations, including Europe and Canada, due to its links to breast and colon cancer, the controversial drug remains legal in the U.S. This week, Monsanto filed a formal complaint with the FDA and Federal Trade Commission, demanding that labeling of rBGH-free diary products be made illegal. Learn more and get involved with OCA's "Millions Against Monsanto" campaign by signing on to our petition.
Mark Dowd is only now going public with a claim of long-held disillusionment with the Bush administration.
He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.Why is "stepping forward" difficult, when the overwhelming majority of the electorate hasn't supported Asshole&Co for months.
