Everyone Needs Some Bunny to Love

Yet another cuddly viral cross-species surrogate mothering video. Can't help it: this is the attitude that would save the world if we let it. :-D

If the babies don't mind the milk, then neither does the mama

I never quite get over stories like these. Even better, the video:

Sometimes I have to state the obvious

My SO (of many, many years) has been generous and patient enough over the years to point out to me when I need to be more mindful of my audience in my speaking and writing. It's a tough habit for a geek-grrl who is deeply attracted to the complexities in people, and objects, and especially language.

I'll admit that his advice has helped a LOT as I've waltzed into the academy with a skillset (personality? let's not go there) that neither my colleagues nor my students have been entirely prepared for, especially that part about, as he puts it, "not using the unfamiliar to describe the unfamiliar."

(OK, maybe I slipped that one time when I compared certain Metaphysical poets to certain progressive rock bands, but that doesn't count because one of my students actually got it.)

But the help has its limits. Oddly, he has been getting after me today for using my regular blend of jargon in our conversations... never mind that I'm directing these statements to him, who I'm willing to assume understands what I'm saying. (Or at least he *should* by now IMHO.)

After the last jibe, I had to call him on it:

"You know, if you're going to get after me for using big words... you picked a helluva point in our relationship to start."

Thankfully, he's smart enough to see the humor in it. But he still complained that I made his eyes water. Again.

Getting after me for using big words.... good grief...

Literary Scholars: It Is Now Safe to Display Your Comic- I Mean, Graphic Novels

Courtesy of Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog:

The NYT reviews works that take stock of the 20th Century Multimedia Wars, noting in particular the eminent silliness of ghettoizing "genre" fiction.

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When FOX News ambush journalism goes horribly, terribly awry :-)

Thx to Current. Shows that there are still good... and brave... and un-sold-out... journalists in this world:

(We're in Iraq for $20/barrel oil... I'd completely forgotten Murdoch had said that! TYVM Bill!)

Your Job, Except in India: What It Really Looks Like

Courtesy of Tim Ferriss's blog: a-whole-nother perspective on globalization and the outsourcing thing. It's worth a look if you've got about 40 minutes (commercials excluded except for the evocative "priceless"-ness of Spurlock's voiceovers).

Trading Places with Indian Outsourcers

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Men: Pay Attention! You want to see *this* list of babes

For your consideration:

The 2008 AfterEllen.com Hot 100 | AfterEllen.com

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My concerns: Why is Naomi Watts so low on the list? And WTF is Nicole Kidman still doing on it? (Sorry, but I find her - her being - incredibly unconvincing sexually.)

Wait. Where the hell is Anne Hathaway? Hmmph... maybe next year...

Tragedy as Drunk Driver Collides With Cyclists in Mexico : TreeHugger

What more can be said? ...

Tragedy as Drunk Driver Collides With Cyclists in Mexico : TreeHugger

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From pen to pixel: my proposal for a new "green" SMV symbol

greensmv
Originally uploaded by Peejster

Check this out :-)


For the nitty-gritty about this symbol's development and purpose, please click on it to go to the Flikr page.

Note the CC license and tell me what you think.

No, not THAT P.J. Emery...

.. but thank you for the compliment. Or, at least, the surprising web search result .

But he's a he and he's holding his guitar the wrong way. Better luck next time.

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A new calculator in which to crunch your meals... but for carbon impact

When it comes to the environment, I've discovered that food is a really, really fraught subject: foodways + individual psychologies + politics + those awful, terrible commercials with the barbecue sauce just dripping off the chicken (hang on, tummy, it's almost lunchtime) = the ultimate tinderbox. And the fires that so easily ignite are not good for the environment, people.

So bear with me. I'm not advocating all-or-nothing ascetic responses with this link. And the site itself is careful about acknowledging the limits of its calculator (see their FAQ) and the goal of mitigating "relative carbon impacts."

But, you know, if you're a militant meat-and-potatoes type (you know who you are)... if you're curious, turn on your anonymizer and click through. I won't tell. :-)

Eat Low Carbon Diet Calculator - Bon Appétit Management Company

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McSweeney's Internet Tendency: (IM)agna Carta.

ROTFLMAO!

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: (IM)agna Carta.

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I can vouch for this: I lost six years there myself

A myth, huh? People don't get lost, huh? So, tell me... why is the Coleman company headquartered there?

30 Years Of Man's Life Disappear In Mysterious 'Kansas Rectangle'

CHICAGO—The last known communication from Kevin Corcoran made reference to plans to marry a large blonde woman and enroll in a local technical college.

Because nothing works like good old-fashioned meta-journalism

Dying Newspaper Trend Buys Nation's Newspapers Three More Weeks

WASHINGTON—A recent glut of feature stories on the death of the American newspaper has temporarily made the outmoded form of media appealing...

UCLA Squirrel EXTREME CLOSE-UP

My very first upload. Aww, isn't it cute...

Can't stop the click: The Onion's sonofa Mouse article

This is too good not to distribute as widely as possible:

Son-Of-A-Bitch Mouse Solves Maze Researchers Spent Months Building

IOWA CITY, IA—The mouse briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds, roughly 1/8,789,258 the time it took to secure funding for the experiment.

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The Miss America Pageant: New Wine in An Old, Shriveled, Timeworn Teat of a Wineskin?

Not to be a complete wet blanket, I have to credit the folks at TLC who helped make last night's Miss America pageant a little more culturally relevant.

I say, a little more. But in a world where the pretty girls aren't giving us much to look at - whether it's the recovering Lindsay Lohan, or the abusive Naomi Campbell, or the disintegrating Britney Spears [do your own damn web search] - I'm beginning to wonder about the cultural relevance of a contest in which young women, under the guise of nubile virginity, are rewarded largely on the basis of physical attractiveness, with points thrown in for performing a few tricks they learned in finishing school, and speaking in complete sentences that demonstrate effective deployment of clauses like "I believe that" and "such as."

Is there anything wrong with acknowledging hotness? I don't think so. It depends on circumstances, but that's for another post, isn't it?

But is there anything wrong with two equally-qualified people receiving the same pay for the same work, the same seniority, the same achievements? There shouldn't be. But I have to wonder whether the beauty pageant mentality - perpetuated by these resucitation attempts - somehow filters its way into how "female achievement" is defined.

Perhaps I am making a spurious correllation here. One doesn't directly cause the other... but maybe both are symptoms of larger issues that threaten to hamstring a society's development, precisely because they threaten to hamstring one very large segment of that society.

What other indicators can we check besides this redirection of energy into Miss America?

Perhaps the already-tired media obsession with race versus gender politics, despite the outcry over its irrelevance, should get us thinking.

Perhaps the confluence of the conservative stacking of the Supreme Court, the emphasis on abstinence-only sex education, the coincidental uptick in (especially teen) pregnancies and drop in abortion rates, and the gag-order aesthetic that has crept into the "girl in trouble" film genre - exemplified in Juno - should give us pause.

Maybe the very act of removing a child from a parked car - a habit of attention we have strangely naturalized as "instinctive" despite the artificiality of automotive technology and our stimulus-saturated environments - and the huge disparity in prosecution and sentencing depending on who has committed that sin of omission - should make us wonder whether we really have interrogated our assumptions about what is appropriately "male" and "female."

Because a revamped beauty pageant, whatever else it does show, will not offer a peek at the machinery of assumptions, stereotypes and institutional biases that drives it.

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American Apparel misogyny and its discontents

The obvious location to link this would have been facebook, but the LA Times has completely jacked up the way its links appear when you attempt to post them through the "posted items" app. Anyway, when I saw this hot little story I was immediately reminded of fellow facebooker Vivian's link to blog Jezebel's assessment of the visual effect of fashion misogyny on the female form, courtesy of American Apparel. Now... however trendy it is, is it really worth padding this spitwad's wallet?

Lawsuit has fashion mogul in spotlight - Los Angeles Times

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For those who may have stopped dreaming: a refresher

Ladies and gentlemen, may I offer you one of the greatest speeches in history - and I don't think I'm exaggerating here. Advice: watch, reflect, act. And don't stop dreaming.

Embedded video

The full text of the speech, along with the video source, can be found here.

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A reminder: I'm not joking about escalators

It's never a good idea to horse around on moving machinery after consuming significant quantities of alcohol. But I'm telling you, there are some machines to which we have become so habituated that we easily forget how dangerous they can be.

And it's never occured to me that those rubber belts on the banister could be ridden. Most of the time they don't even go the same speed as the steps. Plus, do you know how many little vectors have touched those things? (No, that's not my #1 anxiety, but still...)

I've been to the Hollywood & Highland complex. if you're on the top floor looking out into the open courtyard, you'll quickly notice that it's a long way to the bottom. Whatever transportation you take to get there. Which is probably why I don't go there much. All the same... I think I don't even want to know all the details of this tragedy. I just imagine one of the three or four nightmare escalator scenarios I've already filed under WCS and that's all I need.

The only thing that would have made it worse is if this fellow had been taking the escalator with a baby stroller in tow.

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I got Foo Fighters tickets and now I want to scream like a little girl

The Internet presale started at 10 a.m., and I got my tickets at approximately 10:04, but it has just now hit me that I am truly in a position to attend the Foo Fighters concert just added to the tour schedule. In LA.

It has just now hit me and, since I have the catalog (plus the typical boots) but have never seen them perform, unless you count that little program on DirecTV's channel 101 back in September... and that was from the IYH tour, before ESP&G... to my chagrin, I have this strange impulse to go completely spastic.

But I'm going to hold on to this feeling. I'm going to save it up for the gig and then go loopy. Until then, I will work diligently on my various academic projects and duties, and eat as much ramen as it takes to stay within budget. Especially since I just had to buy a couple of new tires in the wake of yesterday's blowout. But that's another story - stay tuned...

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