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A man who is named one of the ten sexiest men in America by *Playgirl* magazine has a responsibility to his fellow men to say a few words about it, especially if he is forty-four at the time, a Midwesterner who majored in English at a Big Ten school, and wears glasses and grew up fundamentalist--not to gloat over what is, after all, a God-given asset (how many men does God put in the top ten, anyway?)--but to offer help and counsel. Unfortunately, it's 10:30 on a Saturday night and I'm about ready to head upstairs, so this will be a shorter lecture than what you hoped to hear, perhaps. (1) If you have a choice between poetry and football, choose poetry. Football wrecks your legs and you can't use it for anything. Other guys put their arms around you in football. You write a poem for a woman, you give it to her, she is speechless. What can a jock give her, his socks? So I chose to write poems about her delicate body being like a shy deer nibbling the blossoms of an apple tree. It's not an original image but it was an easy choice. A quarter-century later, my wife remembers it. (2) The human elbow, particularly the tip of the elbow. I don't want to say more. (3) Foreign women release something in men, and perhaps vice versa, so don't shy away from your foreign side. I'm Scottish with some Canadian. (4) Fundamentalists have more fun. You can't enjoy sex to the fullest unless you've spent some time in the wilderness, being repressed. (5) Sex is better in marriage than anywhere else you can imagine, like the song says: It's all right to get your appetite walking round town just as long as you eat supper at home. (6) Eating in bed afterward is perfectly natural. (7) It gets better.

Sex is a progression of sweet blessings, and one learns to enjoy each one of them whether or not it leads to the next.

It is good to be with you.
To talk with you.
To touch you.
To be alone with you.
To kiss you.
To be naked with you.
To make love with you.
To have a baby with you.

After a while, each blessedness seems more or less as enjoyable as any other, except the last, which is distinctive.

I accept this honor on behalf of all fundamentalists, and all Midwesterners, and all forty-four-year-olds, and good night.

I dug this up, a little surprised I didn't quote it before, especially that poetic progression near the end. I tend to misremember it a bit, and think of it more in terms of how for a chronically non-judgemental guy like me, the range of pleasure between "doing something super cool!" and "just hanging out" is smaller than with most folks - which can create tensions with and seem unbearably lame to people with more ambitions in activities. I wrote yesterday's entry on FB and got some great sharing responses... here's what I wrote back

Wow, thanks to everyone for thoughtful responses! It sounds like a tough and important question for a lot of folks.

20 years ago I made the half-joking observation "I'm one of the most or one of the least enlightened people I know." - I was less aware of my emotional registers then, and I think I meant I was at ease with the idea of "the self is an illusion" (I got there by reading materialists like Dan Dennett rather than like insight meditation) But since then... like when I hear people say the great thing about meditation is it stills the wandering "monkey mind" and so permits unanxious relaxation... But for me, letting the mind wander is almost always pleasant. It may brings up ideas I don't like, but I guess I intuitively GET that "I am not my feelings, I am not my thoughts" in a way other folks don't. (And it is reinforced by a pile of cultural and material privilege where 'eh it will all be ok in the end' has a decent chance of being correct - especially if I'm less buffeted by negative emotions in the meantime)

But don't let me sound full of myself. (says the guy with socks of his own face) I get low grade anxiety about things, I angst and procrastinate on work and other things that might bruise my big old ego. Even the odd blow up of temper, though generally directed at more abstract things like traffic, hardly ever individuals, and usually only when I'm alone and it's ok to rage.

And I probably don't connect as readily or as deeply emotionally as other folks do- I think I have an easy time aiming for autonomy and co-self-actualization than I do providing healthy co-interdependence. (though I guess that avoids the problems of co-dependence) Working on it.

I think about how i got here. Religion is a bit to thank, or blame; I took to heart the idea that the only thing that REALLY mattered in this life was avoiding eternal hellfire (and getting that sweet heavenly eternal bliss, though that somehow less pressing) and so my personal feelings and preferences were just potential stumbling blocks to my final destination, handicaps in a game played for infinite stakes. (Artist and polymath (and polyglot) Nicole Bernstein, a frenchwoman from my Science and Spirituality group, mentions she got a much healthier (still nurturing and refuge-providing) view of a God engaged with us in the here and now... I'm envious!)

But between that "fear of damnation" and the fixed mindset of being a precocious, smart kid, where I had infinite confidence in being a smart and worthy kid as long as I didn't test it too hard... I think it set some patterns of not letting the pigeon drive the bus (albeit with ego as an only semi-rational aspect demanding protection)

And...other things changed me too, later. I think pining after one woman all through college and a bit after, where there was a maddening on-again, off-again aspect... I guess that affirmed my need for self-actualization vs interdependence. Piled on with a divorce and a broken engagement - it does seem to emphasize the importance of parallel strengths in a relationship rather than mutual need. (Like I figured out or read long ago, "it's a lot cooler to be wanted than to be needed"... because then you have more freedoms and you are there because you want to be.)

And its sheepish to admit, but I do wonder if someone how Y2K fears - so quaint now, but it did take an awful lot of programmer work to make sure there weren't at least some of the problems the doomsayers were predicting - provided a secular version of the apocalypse (a bit after I got over my anxiety about thermonuclear war, the other secular apocalypse) and maybe somehow changed me. I remember once a person at the front desk of my job mentioned she could always tell when it was me coming up, because of the happy humming or bopping I'd be doing, and a few years later I realized that was no longer the case, and wondered what happened, where that went. Right now I wonder if that cheerful intuitive behavior was the victim of getting all the noisy schoolkids in my head, the seeming K-12 all in one classroom, in line.

Yikes, that got long. But some thoughts I've been juggling around for a bit...

I think a great solid takeaway for me from other's responses is that for a lot of people talking about anger or another bad emotion helps the emotion that is there disperse and dissipate, like steam from a simmering pot, while for me talking about negative stuff tends to be more kindling to a fire that otherwise would burn out of its own accord, and more quickly than with other folks. (One of the commenters mentioned the wikipedia page Social Sharing of Emotions...)

FOLLOWUP: Heh, almost exactly 13 years ago I was referring back to the earlier "least or most enlightened" bit... I had a lot of good things to say about it then to.

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There's interesting left hemisphere implications in trans-rights issues; like recognizing rather than dictating who someone really is. Apparently horses can be pretty good at it.

The body is a nation I have not known.
The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping
from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.
Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin-
covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark.
Like that. 'The body is a savage,' I said.
For years I said that: the body is a savage.
As if this safety of the mind were virtue
not cowardice. For years I have snubbed
the dark rub of it, said, 'I am better, Lord,
I am better,' but sometimes, in an unguarded
moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent
of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat
and the screaming grass.
But this distance I keep is not divine,
for what was Christ if not God's desire
to smell his own armpit? And when I
see him, I know he will smile,
fingers glued to his nose, and say, 'Next time
I will send you down as a dog
to taste this pure hunger.'

Via the Poetry Unbound podast. This one really spoke to me; I conflate the body with the subconscious part of the brain; the mind/heart split can be so pronounced that the mind can challenge the legitimacy of the heart; almost its existence. But what a thought: "For years I said that: the body is a savage. / As if this safety of the mind were virtue / not cowardice. For years I have snubbed / the dark rub of it, said, ‘I am better, Lord, I am better'" For someone like me, who as a child gulped drank from two vials, one "I am super smart" and the other "I have to control myself or I am going to spend eternity in Hell"... pointing out the dialog of virtue and cowardice that represents is a crucial reminder.

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Just thought of the old Arabica Coffeehouse in Cleveland (at least in the late-80s and still there by the looks of it.) They were generally pronounced "air-uh-BEE-kuh", not like the coffe bean. But I remember someone mentioning nicknames for a few of them - Freak-abica for the bohemian neighborhood in Coventry, Geek-abica for the one near Case Western Reserve University, Chic-abica for one in an upscale neighborhood, and then there was some other coffee place the coffee cognizati called "Wanna-bica".
Today I am marching in solidarity with the spooky skeletons that are inside us all, waiting to get out. #justwait

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Huh - Google's Pixel 2 does Shazam/Soundhound style audio fingerprinting locally? And that db for that is only half a GB? I never would have suspected the numbers were like that (even knowing factoids how like a simple formula "does the subsequent note in series go up or down, note by note makes a unique key for melodies in a surprisingly small number of notes") A while back Winnie Gong sketched me as the mythical Unicorn full-stack developer...
Martin Amis is an English novelist. One of the very strangest bits of his career, the most out of character for him as an author, was a guide to video games (with a weird, jaded "streetwise" view of culture around the arcades, then in its prime) called Invasion of the Space Invaders. The author generally won't talk about the book, and as The Million's 2012 review of it quotes Sam Leith:

Anything a writer disowns is of interest, particularly if it’s a frivolous thing and particularly if, like Amis, you take seriousness seriously.

On a whim I bought a copy of this hard to find book (I think I paid a bit over $100 for it a few years ago; currently the one copy listed on Amazon is going for north of $500) Recently I undid the binding of my copy and scanned it in and sent it to Anna Anthropy for Annarchive, her repository of old shareware and other video game historical artifacts- you can download the full copy there, and it's kind of an amazing piece, though as Anna points out full of casual homophobia, racism, and a surprising amount of references to child prostitution.

But there's also overwrought gameplay advice prose like this for Pac-Man:

Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it

and

PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.

There was another great quote:

"That seems to be the psychology behind Atari. You can never win, and you always can get better."

Besides the prose (and referring to Steve Jobs as "Atari's Steve Jobs") what I find most striking about the book are the obviously reconstructed screenshots. I guess in an era where video games were tough to photograph (presumably in smoky arcades with cranky owners) it made sense to hire graphic artists to recreate the shots... sometimes that can be done for artistic effect (like all those Activision boxart screenshots) but my feeling is these were made to look relatively authentic (and I left out a few actual screenshots they included, like for Frogger and Turbo.) I do wonder what technique, presumably analog, was used to get the pixel effect in all of the screenshots.

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Also:

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Do women hate beards? Dang. Two haiku from the British Museum's exhibit "Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanes art":

Onto his silent lap
she lowers
her eloquent hips
--anon

and

Though anxious
unable to know your true heart
I give my body to you
--Onakatomi no Yoshinobu

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--A little toy for Glorious Trainwreck's Kackling Korpse of the Monster Klaw Playful ghosts play tag, and you can bounce them around with your ectoplasmpuck. Or press mouse button to call them to you. It's been a LONG time since I'd drawn with pencils. I think when I was a kid I was traumatized in Sunday School when they gave us god-awful #3 pencils to try and write on glossy-ish sunday school activity book paper. But now I kind of dig it, especially if the pencil is nice and sharp. Ink fits my way of simplifying the world into simple shapes and sharp borders, but with pencil it seemed more natural to be a bit more loose.

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In my dream, "Cornflower Blue" seemed like the ultimate band name, but "Testing Testing 123" came in a close second.

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But if you want forgiveness for being a computer, don't put rocks in the snowballs.

--via Miller, found here

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All you need is a dodgy priest

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I apologize for the recent New England snow- I had raised the odds by tempting Murphy and His Law by not putting shovel in car- fixed!

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Not a very deep sports thinker, but I wonder if its the Ass't Coaching that was the old boon, now bust for Patriots? We keep losing 'em...

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http://www.slate.com/id/2232914/ - Slate on the magic behind the iPhone app "Shazam"-for me it's one of those "wow they can DO that?" things

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http://www.visibone.com/colorlab/big.html - decent little web colors thing. Its name for Brown seems to be "Obscure Dull Orange" Ack, the Red Sox.

Boston is no longer long-suffering sports-wise (except maybe for hockey fans) but it would be nice if our teams continue to show long-term strength.

Ah, civic pride. "Our millionaire manchildren can totally kick your millionaire manchildren's butts!". Or maybe "Our coaches and business men make better use of their large sports market financing than nearly anyone!" which is better, but not much.

Young Astronauts in Love

chapter 2	The setup on GHIBAL 3 was kind of odd
There was so much we didn't know about the anomaly, it really kept the scientists busy, and some of the lawyers	sometimes they had to do research the outposts. there was a minilab for them, with its own coffee maker.
then, one day...	lydia showed up
lydia was one of the lab-scouts. THE fastest jetter i had ever seen	the scientist-scouts were the elite of the elite.
and lydia in the lab... her specialty was this unspace stuff i could just barely get the outlines of	didn't stop me from trying though!
techs are supposed to ask questions, and she was pretty patient	and so it rolled on... lab-scouts came and lab-scouts went.
my own work was pretty interesting, and i had a few side projects	for a while i had a theory she was showing up more often than her research demanded
it was tough to tell. her stuff was pretty obstruse. and it wasn't like i was the only lab she stopped at.	probably i was just projecting
women! or maybe just people.	compared to them, circuits were cake.
maybe her research was about the kind of complexity i'm thinking of	circuits:on, off, mu. you don't understand something, you set up testcases, you can isolate your assumptions and test them...
i've always been pretty easy to read	one time it was near the holiday break. we were talking schedules.
"had you noticed how often i'm here? i've virtually had to make up a new branch of anomaly wave dynamic to justify my trips here."	"i'll bet you say that to all the techs!" i said
no, she hadn't

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When I write Josh, who lives in Japan, I oddly switch to more Japanese english stylings.. "please enjoy this book" for "I hope you enjoy"..

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<<this is not Ibiza / this is not Cologne / this is not Osaka / this is not Lisbon>>

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Hofstadter points out a thing that makes me say English is a bit broken; in most other languages conscious is the same word as conscience.

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Filled with a kind of weary melancholy. Maybe I'm just tired. Max points out something Bill Simmons points out in his ESPN column:

Speaking of fan bases, the fans from a certain New England college are outraged that I refuse to acknowledge a particular undefeated college season that's happening right now and resulted in an especially high ranking last weekend. And you know what? You're right. I need to be the bigger man here. So let's acknowledge it ... congratulations to the Tufts Jumbos on your 4-0 start!

So, um, Yay Jumbos. But are 4-0 starts that rare in college? I guess the one thing you can say about a team like Tufts is unlike football factories it can't really pad its schedule with creampuff opponents, because if anything, it would be one of the creampuffs...

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Drawing of the Moment
In helping Evil B up in Rockport, we came across this sketch for the layout of a bedroom. We believe it was done by Alice Cox:

Click here for a larger version. Apologies for the digital photo, I tried to lighten it up some but the pencil drawing still doesn't come out to well. Here's a close up of the chair, sidetable, and lounge:
Cool stuff! I admire the technical skill as well as sense of design that went into this arrangement.

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Instructions You Didn't Know You Needed of the Moment
I liked wikiHow's instructions on How to Become a Hobo, but its How to Be a Hobo with a Web Based Income is even more up my alley.

On the road!

Wrong lessons learned thus far:

• Trains are a decent way of travelling but a bit bumpy. If you're using a laptop consider disabling that "tap on pad = click" feature.
• People in Delaware seem to have a hard time making change. I only had 3 bucks in small bills because the Acela folk requests passengers not to use twenties. The cab driver couldn't break a twenty for a 4 dollar fare. The hotel bar was closing, and could only give me two tens. The front desk could give me a 5 and 4 ones.

You know, I was thinking that this was the first time I'd been on a train since this weird Red-Eye trip I took with Dylan in sixth grade or so, but then I remembered Europe, from third-world-ish sardine-can packed bar cars in Portugal to multiple trips around Germany. It still feels rather novel, though.

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Anecdote of the Moment

President Coolidge had a group of guests on the presidential yacht cruising the Potomac. As he stood alone at the rail, looking out at the expanse of water, someone exclaimed, 'Look at that slight and slender figure! Look at that head, bowed over the rail! What thoughts are in the mind of this man, burdened by the problems of the nation?' Finally, Coolidge turned around, and joined the others, saying, `See that sea gull over there? Been watching it for twenty minutes. Hasn't moved. I think he's dead!'

Though it was funny (+ suspicious) when I looked in the back and saw the story attributed to "A. Krock"... somehow reassuring to know that inane presidential remarks are nothing new.

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Photo of the Moment

-"-A UPS-owned B767 departs Des Moines Int'l and turns south", via cellar.org Image of the Day, who got it from airliners.net. Almost makes me regret travelling by train this time!

Doodles of the Moment




The top left might be the server at the same place the booze glasses were doodled in yesterday's set. There's an attempt at a sketch of Mo there, and as for the last two...errr. Well. Isn't it interesting, my friend Erica taught me that it's much simpler to write in cursive with a low-fidelity sketch pad such as this than with my usual printing.

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Film of the Moment
Last night Evil B got me to go see the film MirrorMask...pretty decent, and it's too bad there's not more publicity for it. It's a collaboration between Henson Studios (the similarities with Labyrinth and I've heard The Dark Crystal are pretty strong) and author Neil Gaiman...visually, it's incredibly rich, though the story is thin, surprising given the Gaiman influence. I was going to say that it's kind of lile "Through The Looking Glass" meets Salvador Dali, but it turns out that the overarching art influence is Dave McKean...I'd recommend his page (have to click...they're playing some stupid games preventing a direct link) over the official Sony pictures one.

Unfortunately, it might be a "wait for the DVD" kind of thing, given its poor distribution...here in Boston it seems like only the artsy cinema is showing it.

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Article of the Moment
Slate on the inverse relationship between an institutions health and its tendency to make interesting architecture, the logic being that companies that are still enganged deeply in doing cool work don't have time to make the perfect HQ. I've seen this in action, in a small way, with my dear departed dotcom Event Zero; moving to the new offices (with a conference room sharing the oval shape of the company's logo and with the late-90's cliché blue/orange color scheme) was one of the death knells...a big capital suck that any company hoping to ride out the dotbomb crash of 2000 couldn't afford. Stupid Internet connection was down yesterday...man that bugs the heck out of me. Electricity, Water, 'Net...it's really a close third.

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Kinda Feeble Fable of the Moment
SCENE II BRUNO: Ahhhh, Marcus?
MARCUS: What?
BRUNO: Like, why did we come to this cave?
VALK: Yeah, why?
MARCUS: Listen, you wanted the gold, right?
BRUNO AND VALK: Yeah.
MARCUS: And you wanted fun and wild adventure?
BRUNO AND VALK: Yeah.
MARCUS: And you were both bored out of your minds vegging out in front of TV which neither of you have because it hasn't been invented yet, right?
BRUNO AND VALK: Huh?
MARCUS: Never mind. Anyway, understand?
VALK: No.
MARCUS: Good, cause neither do I.
(Blackout, enter Narrator)
NARRATOR: Ok, now time for another feeble moral: Slow and steady wins the race. (Exits, pauses, reenters)
NARRATOR: Ok, ok, it doesn't make much sense, but neither will a lot of this play.
--Those who can write, do. Those who can't, get self-referential.
I think that's a vague Hitchhiker's Guide "Excitement, adventure and really wild things" reference there

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Coverup of the Moment
Looks like The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election. Nice. Too bad Bush isn't a democrat, maybe they'd sick Ken Starr on him.

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Sci-Fi Thought of the Moment
If any wants a recommendation for some good...nay, terrific short sci-fi, I heartily recommend "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge", currently being lent to me by the EB. I'm only about halfway through but MAN is that good some stuff.

I don't have time to think about it now, and I'm sure cleverer minds than mine have thought about this, but one throwaway line in one of the stories, "That [image is] from a camera aboard the Vengeance. It's transmitting by gravitic means, so we'll be able to see everything up to the detonation" made me think about the idea of somehow using Gravity as a form of communication, and what the speed of that communication could be. I probably should read this paper, which seems to indicate the answer to "what's the speed of gravity?" is somewhere between "lightspeed" and "instanteous", inclusive, so the next question is, could we make a communications device from that? I suppose one problem is that gravity is blunt...I think that it tends to be a single vector at any point, the "sum" of all the gravitation forces at that point. But still, if you could move a mass around quickly enough, a sensitive and highly tuned meter might be able to detect it's movement from an arbitrary distance away? I dunno. There's got a be a reason why you can't do this, or why if you could do this it wouldn't violate the idea in relativity that information can't travel faster than the speed of light... (is that the case? Man, it's been why too long since I've read up on and thought about this stuff.)

People less muddle-headed about these high-falutin' ideas, feel free to chime in...

Heh. Nothing like waking up to six copies of e-mail with a subject "Put a bullet in SPAM!shenanigan" in a row. (All to the same e-mail address...usually multiple Spams at least our targetting different e-mail for the same account.) And to think they say irony is dead.

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Quote of the Moment

If you took all the students that fell asleep in class and laid them end to end, they'd be a lot more comfortable.

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Game Link of the Moment
"Elite" was one of the awesomest games of the early 1980s...you flew a spaceship around a wireframe universe, fighting off pirates (or being a bounty hunter yourself!), trying to make a living trading goods from planet to planet. (Actually, one of the coolest things was your path wasn't set, you had many alternatives to try to make your way.) Years ahead of its time, I remember playing it on Todd Beecher's C=64. Slashdot posted to an Guardian article on the history of the game, or you can check out the author's Elite homepage...including information on Elite: The Musical.

The article goes into some detail about how they auto-generated their galaxies; rather than coming up with the memory needed to store the details of a handcrafted universe, they came up with some pseudo-random formulae to generate a huge number of planets. From there, it was a matter of 'gardening' to find the sequences that would make a good gamer experience. (I remember being very impressed with the game's sequel called "Frontier"--the universe it created was even more rich and impressive, yet it still all fit on a 1.4 meg floppy.)

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Software of the Moment
Feh. I probably won't have time to play with this 3D modeling and motion program 'Juice' but it looks like fun... Political Cartoon of the Moment

--Tom Toles. I would've just linked to the online version, but the UComics site is slow to the point of death. Anyway, this cartoon is one of the likelier scenarios I've seen...

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Quote of the Moment

In this great and creatorless universe, where so much beautiful has come to be out of the chance interactions of the basic properties of matter, it seems so important that we love one another.

--via Stileproject, obviously (raunchy site) I've seen this idea before but never done so well...