You know those evangelists that pace up and down the major thoroughfare in your town, with picket signs intoning the blurring of reality by cathode rays from space, or the secret rule by the whore of babylon, and how we'd all better wake up and realize the illuminati is running things, and 12 galaxies guiltied et cetera sky-is-falling type wisdom? In London, random squatter youth are hired to carry such placards, proclaiming the existence of the Pizza Hut messiah. The buffet is nigh. And the sky really is falling .

Who ever thought double cream was a good idea?
FTD, one bowl of fruit salad and I'm hooked.
Do not, under any circumstances, tell me where to find this in the states. Mmm...

Monkey Moves Computer Cursor by Thoughts Alone

The computer then moved a cursor on the computer screen in accordance with the monkey's desires--left or right, up or down, wherever ``the electrical (brain) pattern tells us the monkey is planning to reach,'' according to Meeker.

``In fact,'' she said, ``we found that he became quite reluctant to move his arm to the reach command once the cursor was introduced into the game. Apparently it was easier just to think about reaching.''

The use as a tool for locked in folks would be great, but this stinks with military purpose. Esp. as it'ss totally in synch with the nifty new 4-day amphetamine studies.

Oh yeah, while I'm here: D is back!

A pigeon hopped on our train at Edgeware Road the other day. He diligently scavenged the far end of the train, then hunkered down for a nap while his buddy fluttered from one car to the next of the train on the opposite side of the platform. As soon as the disembodied Voice of the Underground started intoning, I escorted the feathered pestilence from the train. Nothing messier than pigeons on a train. OK, almost nothing.

As it happens, there is no Dept. of Forensics at UCL.
Other than that, this hoax tells the story pretty straight. But I do love the London Underground:

If you are a regular traveller on the London Underground, here are some facts which you are going to wish you hadn't read. During Autumn of 2000, a team of scientists at the Department of Forensics at University College London removed a row of passenger seats from a Central Line tube carriage for analysis into cleanliness.
Despite London Underground's claim that the interior of their trains are cleaned on a regular basis, the scientists made some alarming discoveries.

This is what was found on the surface of the seats:

4 types of hair sample (human, mouse, rat, dog)
7 types of insect (mostly fleas, mostly alive)
vomit originating from at least 9 separate people
human urine originating from at least 4 separate people
human excrement
rodent excrement
human semen

When the seats were taken apart, they found:
the remains of 6 mice
the remains of 2 large rats
1 previously unheard of fungus

It is estimated that by holding one of the armrests, you are transferring, to your body, the natural oils and sweat from as many as 400 different people. It is estimated that it is generally healthier to smoke five cigarettes a day than to travel for one hour a day on the London Underground.

It is far more hygienic to wipe your hand on the inside of a recently flushed toilet bowl before eating, than to wipe your hand on a London Underground seat before eating.

It is estimated that, within London, more work sick-days are taken because of bugs picked up whilst travelling on the London Underground than for any other reason (including alcohol).

Or perhaps it was the small things, like the five-gallon can of lubricant, or the collection of penis stretchers, the trapeze, the electronic enema, the little hole allowing someone in the kitchen to watch people in the basement, the names of Satan's helpers spray-painted on walls or the hawk droppings that caked the surfaces of the upstairs bedrooms.

Brendan and I take off for London in just a few hours. Have to hurry up and childproof the house for the housesitters, eep. I've packed and repacked my one small suitcase, to allow for massive supplementation of my wardrobe courtesy of Camden Market, where we'll be gallivanting with Dave, Ann, and Miguel on Saturday. I hope my usual plan, of buying a cheap suitcase in Chinatown (yes, London has a Chinatown), is easily realized.
We'll be dining with a (virtual) fire inside on Friday, while toasting the arrival of Melly's Bean, and will traipse about the East End with the illustrious Iain Aitch on Sunday. Museums will be scoured during the week, when it looks like the sun might come out. Feh. Then we're off to Newcastle, to visit Brendan's family and to see if they still have floating clubs on the River Tyne.

This space will remain pretty static for the next 10 days, but there's plenty of entertainment to be found. Crawl through the archives! Have comment wars! Just don't hurt anybody.

"Women and children shrieked in horror, while men, who drive lorries to work and can drink gallons of beer, winced."

LEGODEATH Museum of Horrors!
thanks kd!

Monkey Cocaine Study Sheds Light on Drug Addiction

It reads like a macaque Real World:

A change in living arrangements was then imposed. The monkeys were moved into groups of four. In the ensuing social interaction over three months, dominant monkeys emerged in the five groups, and a hierarchy was established.

The Real World, mirrors, razor blades, and all:

The researchers then introduced cocaine to the monkeys, allowing them to self-administer doses. The five top monkeys were far less likely to do so than the others.

Brain scans revealed that the dominant monkeys -- those that were the most aggressive and least submissive toward others -- experienced major changes relating to dopamine starting after the group-housing arrangement was imposed.

Because these changes occurred after only three months of group housing and were not seen when the monkeys lived by themselves, the scientists said the changes in brain chemistry resulted from the process of becoming dominant.

I'm getting hits, again, from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And they're not even pointing to any obscure political/international development stuff.
???

Check out theWrybread tribute to Dr. King

Aerosol vodka.
Insert joke here.

Give us your tired, your poor, your easily targeted undocumented immigrants so we can plant fake drugs on them and deport them!

This guy needs to get a hobby. Wait: he already has one.
He follows hookers around Oklahoma City, and tapes them doing their business. I'd like to say these are amusing, but icky, perplexing, and downright skanky is more like it.
This guy is especially dedicated to his hobby: he just opens the car door if he can't tape through the john's window. I like how some of his victims smile for the camera. Spunky!

One somewhat cheery side-effect of the current economic malaise is that lots of people are starting to consider teaching. Kids. In schools.

Way back when altrusism trumped monetary considerations, lots of kids wanted someday to be teachers. But rents were so high that they kept getting better and better paying jobs that had not much to do with any deeply personal drive... and then they all got laid off. And there were no jobs at all, not even admin or tech support gigs, to support their lifestyles. Unemployment barely pays the rent, ramen noodles lose their novelty, and something primal kicks in.

Suddenly, altruistic tendencies feel free to show themselves without fear of ridicule. (well, I do know at least one person who is going into it purely for the money, and boy do I pity her.) Suddenly, $33K/yr doesn't sound so bad.

But like all trends, this one's gonna go sour any minute now.
In L.A., it already has. Who knew?

Where's the Punk?
What's become of him, since the big layoff?
Why, he's using pretty birds, and possibly pretzels, for political leverage!
Clearly, he will settle for nothing less than eventual world domination. Yow, he's also conquered the time barrier. Look out!

Happy Birthday, you acerbic wit!

this meme brought to you by Feral Living, purveyor of fine web memes.

Paranoia is bad: poor Adam Ant!

NotMyDesk is back from the grave, and ready to party.
So funny today. Do be careful if you are at work.
There are naughty, paroxysms-of-laughter-inducing, images.

Now comes the violent bit:
You have to kill... for the good of your art, you understand.

Kids these days...

Sometimes the search terms are just too good not to post:

tiny handjob
No, seriously.
"what'll it be, mister?" "oh, just handjob, thanks."
(rifles through purse) "small, medium, or large?"
"tiny. tiny (monkey) handjob."

I'm sorry, I couldn't make any more sense out of that. Someone else have at it, as it were. Seriously. Comments - right down there.

 
swedish bestiality laws
Well it's good that people do some research before making travel plans, I guess. When in Sweden, you know... But really I don't. Know.

voyeur menstrual
Almost like watching paint dry.

Oh, the countless times his mom has to nag him to feed his pets when he was a kid. And to maybe exercise some friggin' caution when choosing a pet, to start with. Heck, even I knew when it was time to get rid of the tokays. Well. It's too late for him.

What has this world come to?
Troops Deployed to Punxsutawney

OK, Dr. Richard Bronson kicks some endodontic ass.
My root canal was a piece of cake. It was a party, compared to the last one, done by someone else who took 2+ hours and didn't adequately numb the tooth first. Oh man that sucked.
Bronson, King of All Root Canals, took about 15min to perform the procedure. With xrays, injections, a composite filling and paying at the desk, I was in and out of there in half an hour.
Plus there was tons of free parking on their block, right on Union Street.
The Bay Area is a ghost town right now - you can find instant parking anywhere, and hail a cab by merely glancing into the street. Nutty.

One Who Knows figured out how the lioness fed the baby oryx.

It's Bushkill Park, featuring The Pretzel!
No, really.

Perfect for... low level violence.

Three weeks of worsening toothache, conceivably due to my own bad judgement. Two weeks in desperate need of a backrub. And today I fell. I'm almost at the end of the physical trials portion of this show, right?

I felt it coming, all morning, as I traipsed about focussing more on my camera than on my be-slippered footing. The part of my brain which takes care of such things was on heightened alert, until I put the camera down.

I launched into cleaning mode, it being a terrifically spring-like day, and scoured the kitchen still seeing through photo-observational eyes. I found a tomato, which had begun converting a corner of the fridge into a colony for new moldy life. So responsible I felt, carrying the offending fruit out to join the only-just relocated kitchen garbage. Its 11th hour gambit: squirm slightly in it's wrinkled skin. That part of my brain which monitors and adjusts made note and shifted my grip ever so slightly. And my slippered foot landed just shy of the path, in the ditch between the deck and the cement-walk fracture, into soft dirt and tall wet grass. Too late, the toe reach response became a trip alert. Clever fingers released the juicy red culprit precisely before impact with the unforgiving concrete.
Today's damage: 1 bruised and scraped knee, one ruined manicure, several angry and confused back muscles, and one oh-so-ex tomato.

Tiny little pit in enamel of bicuspid. Might incur decay someday. Get it filled now. Why not.
Don't let him give you PDL injections, says Dr. Cliff.
PDL injection 17 Dec, gum tissue blister, mmmm drill sensation.
Which: never a huge deal. Injections and recovery are worse.
Toothache. Grows, making holiday season that much more fun.
PDL injection 4 Jan really sucked. New filling. No xray. Ever.
More pain. Constant. Throbbing. Wake-you-up pain.
Eating hurts. Drinking hurts.
Steady diet of ibuprofen.
Visit endodontist 10 Jan.
Ice, percussion tests ow.
Rooth canal 16 Jan.
Vicodin now.
Whee.

All this week, the streets and freeways have been blessedly empty.
Either there was a meteor shower and we missed it, or the last dotcom wagon train finally left, or the yuppies all headed for Tahoe (probably that). Seemed like a good time to try to get a table at our favorite breakfast dive, without the standard hour+ wait. It was.

We signed up on the list and stood in line, where I chatted with this beautiful French girl about the freakishly dense fog that crept around just outside. She regaled me with stories of partying in London. Made a mental note to try really hard to sleep on the flight over. Then Jerry Brown sauntered past, making eye contact and saying "Hey, how are ya?" to each of us as he passed.
It took a second to register.
I noticed his voice as soon as he stood. But, I thought, Jerry Brown is so much taller than that, it can't possibly be. Oh, wait: he's doing that Paul Newman-on-David Letterman's-first-show-in-the-Ed Sullivan Theater- thing, shooting little finger guns. Hm. Yep, that's a politician all right. He had extraordinarily bushy, but well groomed, salt-and-pepper eyebrows. My pal and I were both a little taken aback. Jerry clocks in at about 5'5", just about our height in heels.
He and Willie both flaunt the Napoleon complex, with much aplomb.

I wonder if Jerry noticed Mike Dirnt sitting 2 stools down.

Mama's has the best coffee I've ever had at a restaurant. It's probably just Peerless, but it's extra strong and soupy and they feed it to you while you wait in line tapping your toe to the Kraftwerk that's being piped into the doorway. In the booth, we hear Mogwai.

Typically, the waitstaff is made up of tattooed ladies who could kick any supermodel's ass, but today we were waited on by Seth, who is of smallish stature his own self and was augmented by glittery green deelie-boppers. I've never seen someone wear deelie-boppers as naturally as Seth. It worked for him, especially when he walked around in the kitchen behind saloon doors that just reached the top of his head, so his audience saw green glittery deelie boppers running back and forth, seemingly of their own power.

Oh no.
Not again.
Fox is killing the coolest thing on broadcast tv.
Sigh.

If there was something to warn you about, he'd warn you here.

It's my World: geopolitics by memory. Collectible!

Even better: the Sticker Album.

All this time I've shied away from independent freelance work, I thought it was some freaky self-esteem issue: I can run a business like no one else, and I've got salable talent for days, too, but both at once, ooooh no I couldn't possibly.
This may be my way around that. One needn't believe in the merit of one's work so much as one must own one's inner con-man. Brilliant!

Brick Walls we have Known and Rawked
hooboy, thanks Elise.

A musical salute to the infernal baby doll.

No really, that's what it sounded like.
And its hands would light up and blink to the beat.
The horror.

The waiter then physically delivers the target woman to his table.

Apologies to those of you using Netscape 4.7x on a Mac.
This page looks like utter crap to you, doesn't it?
If you ditch Netscape and get a real browser, it looks much cooler.

Western medicine can be so crazy. Though I imagine having an extreme case of acne at 15 would have you halfway there already, prescribing a medication which causes depression, to treat acne ... wow... what a bad idea.

The Food and Drug Administration says 147 people taking Accutane, which affects the body's central nervous system, either committed suicide or were hospitalized for suicide attempts from 1982 to May 2000.

It only takes 3 or 4 seconds to become helpless in flowing grain.
(I heart misterpants)

The Faces of Abstinence Calendar begs a lot of questions.
Like: how can you tell which are Faces of Abstinence? Are they like "oh damn that was really tart!" face? Or are they clamp-jawed, with teeth ground down to little nubbins? Probably they're leathery from chain smoking. Mostly, though, I have to ask: "secondary virginity?"

Available at the Abstinence Clearinghouse
(insert motto here)

Robotic Scarecrow Prowls the Pond

"...solar-powered robot scarecrow... with a water cannon. "

Dude, I am so getting one of those for Burning Man next year.

Woohoo! MacWorld scoop: footage of the sexy new iPad!

Bank-robbing Bonnies Boost Bay Heist Rate
Who'd they hire to hack that headline?

Squirrel Wars!

Buckaroo Bonzai is finally available on DVD. My copy is in the mail. I could not be more excited. As a bonus, it turns out that movie is on the extraordinarily long list of films that are critical to my happy worldview which B has not yet seen. Wow, is he in for a good time. If having me squeal and bounce around while trying to sit through a movie is his idea of a good time. Hm.

Continued...

I am wearing, for the first time in my life, flannel pyjamas.
I have bought many a set of flannel pjs in my time, as they make fine Christmas gifts.
Never had I received one, though. Until now.
Oh, the smell when they come out of the dryer, and the feel of warm flannel on the skin!
Hooray for not-so-subtle Victoria's Secret catalogues left on each other's desks, like passing a note to Santa. Hooray for indulgent husbands.
Hooray for blue snakeskin jammies.

Continued...

"And in most cases, the anus had been cored."
Say what you will about President Clinton; at least he kept away the chupacabras.

Not a peep from the peanut gallery regarding extra-super-secret locals only things to make sure I do in London. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to get bagels and check out the markets in East End on Sunday morning, and a corset-and-boots shopping expedition is being arranged by AE (and Dave has promised dinner at TigerLil's). I will spend days in the British Museum, the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert.

I am loathe to fall into tourist traps. I am all for dank nooks and creepy crannies.

Don't make me walk the length of the city to find them!

Cheeto decides to curl the lip.

I think it might have stopped raining. For the time being.
I hope so. All this gloom is, um, gloomy.

Hell can go ahead and defrost now.

"...then they get blown up by 'battle droids.'"

Doesn't this sound like a swell party game?

"...20 people were randomly asked to stab a mannequin, rob it of $20 and then profess their innocence."

Residents of New Mexico secede to the year 1502 with a NYE book burning extravaganza.

Ah, yes, the first post of the year.
Green light: go!