I am in Seattle

Hey, more links! This is just like old times!

A statue of Jesus has stirred some controversy in a wealthy neighborhood. One woman even called the police on it.

People matching their bodies to book covers.

Mysterious floating black rings are cool. The world is full of neat stuff.

There's a real need for good microscopes in the developing world, but they can be expensive and hard to maintain. Enter the Foldscope. A paper-printed microscope that costs less than a dollar to make and could help doctors identify pathogens or just mean that kids can carry a microscope in their pockets... SCIENCE!

Focus testing the Green Lantern Animated Series, with a bit about why Bruce Timm thinks such focus groups are idiotic.

The Eisner nominees are up. I haven't read most of them, and a couple are in my to-read pile.

It's hard not to be a fan of a baseball team when they pull antics like this. Via Elayne.

That whole Nevada thing? The Atlantic explains it pretty well. In short, the guy stopped paying grazing fees that his family had been paying for generations and mooched off government-owned land, and now he has a bunch of fellow moronic traitors supporting his view that he can stiff the government of millions of dollars.

Rest In Peace, Dave Niehaus

I've been a Mariners fan literally as long as I can remember, and for that entire time, Dave Niehaus was the voice of my team. He will be missed. May the ryebread and mustard be plentiful in heaven.

And, from now on, forget "Safeco Field". The stadium of the M's will forever more be know as "The Niehaus".

So say we all.

Linkdump

Eisner Award Winners. Hubby-Eric and I read the list together and cheered for our favorites who won, including Tiny Titans (yay!) and Sunday Press Books' Little Nemo in Slumberland reprint (we just got the Oz reprint and hung out with the publisher at the Oz convention).

Ichiro and Obama.

Classic Doctor Who Review: The Mind Robber.

I think my big brother should build one of these for the goats his family is raising.

Not the best retirement cake ever, but there's no accounting for tastes.

One fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way at night due to light pollution. I wish we, as a society, could reduce the amount of light we allow to spill out all over at night. I have a particular hatred for a business about three blocks over from my house whose security lights shine in our windows at night, instead of at the lot they ought to be protecting.

Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths. I'm 100% for a single-payer system like Canada. Insurance companies that profit from killing people by denying them needed care should by abolished and all their CEOs thrown in prison. But I'll settle for just getting a decent health care system.

A disturbingly wonderful headline.

I'm going with MIB myself.

It's juvenile, but I laughed anyway.

Links Links Links!

I was ready to lose weight, but Mark Evanier's story was the trigger that gave me the strength to actually do it. In a couple of weeks it will be my 3rd weight loss anniversary.

Absolutely stunning video of the night sky over at Bad Astronomy. Wow. Cool stuff. I hope Eric and I get a chance to spend a night out in the desert over here sometime to watch the Milky Way.

A very strange story from Japan, where Google maps ran into an unexpected problem with a historical map overlay. Apparently class distinctions are alive and well.

I love this story of a baseball player whose host family is an assisted living facility.

Switched at birth.

As if being a cab driver weren't hard enough, false accusations of assault by preppy drunk idiot girls can only make life worse. I hope the driver wins the case. Thank goodness he had a camera in his cab, or he would've had his life completely ruined.

Mystery of the clock... how did this timepiece survive an ill-fated Arctic expedition?

Wow, the first draft of Star Wars was really really bad. Almost worse than bad. Wow.

More creative ads in Unusual places.

Source code for breathalyzer is crap. Great, now we can't trust breathalyzer tests, either.

LOLCat Theology.

Pugs for the in-laws. I saw a pug in the neighborhood today when I walked to the library. It was sharing a yard with three dachshunds, and looked positively giant next to them.

Baseball Season Help

Ok, I want to have an RSS feed that only gives me the Mariners box scores. I haven't yet found anything that does just that. Everything I can find either gives me too much or too little. I just want the freakin box scores. Anyone know where I could find such a thing?

Linkdump

Comic Book Legends Revealed #197: Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Art Thibert, and Savage Finster. Comic Book Legends Revealed #198: Skippy Peanut Butter, Bluto/Brutus, and Gone With the Wind. Comic Book Legends Revealed #199: Rube Goldberg, Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, and D.B. Cooper.

CBC Article on Vaccines (ht to Carolyn for the link).

Seattle Sketcher visited my old stomping grounds and did some sketching.

Pictures of Pripyat, Ukraine from 2009. This is the home of the the workers of Chernobyl.

Disturbing news about an old baseball trade.

I wouldn't call this brainteaser "tough" so much as "annoying".

Linkdump

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #160: MLB Logo, Micronauts, and the Periodic Table.

Albino crows spotted in BC. Wow, that's just cool. I wanna see one!

Ever seen a DOT hazardous material sign and wondered what it meant? Boing Boing has the answer!

Sporcle is evil.

Speaking of evil: Replicating the Milgram Experiment. Yes, someone was able to safely do it.

If cooks reacted to new cookbooks like fans react to new D&D.

The Microsoft 30-years-later picture.

Switch Hitter versus Switch Pitcher.

It's the Goodyear Cat. But this isn't LOLCat theology.

Thursday Links

Bizarro Sports Illustrated. Despite the M's horrid record, I'm cool with any season in which the Yankees suck.

Is this video of a Tokyo Hotel an advertisement, or a warning?

She's 6-foot-1, and plays basketball extremely well. And now she's been kicked out of a boys' league because she puts the boys to shame.

Yikes: remote bricking is possible (making a computer useless remotely by overwriting the BIOS).

Our paper money is unfair to the blind. I honestly never thought about that before, and I'm ashamed I missed such an obvious problem.

A Lost Parrot gives his name and home address to a vet.

Fuel cells are getting closer to being something useful and world-changing.

What, you mean that restaurants lie about calorie content in their food? And use dubious definitions of "serving size"? Who would've guessed? This is why eating out is a rare treat for me now.

Slate looks at lab-grown meat. I still think getting to the point where hamburgers in massive fast food chains are made with lab-grown stuff will make a huge positive difference in food safety and quality and no noticable different in taste.

A supernova is caught in the act of being born. Cool.

A very cool Back to the Future shirt design.

Congrats to my first TV crush, who plans to marry in California soon.

If you have a few bucks and want to fight breast cancer, please donate to support us in the Race for the Cure: Laura Gjovaag, Eric Gjovaag, or Lisa Dunham (my suggested donation is $5 to each of us, if you have $15 to spare, or $5 to one of us (flip a 3-sided coin) if you're poor like me).

Pugs for the in-laws. And a bonus pug.

It's Friday Night, Time for Links

Ingredients of the Batman Ice Cream are revealed (scroll down).

A collection of links about The Dionne Quintuplets. If you've ever read an old comic book, you've seen ads featuring them.

The Gordon Lee case is dismissed. It should never have started in the first place. And Lee offered to write a letter of apology before the whole thing even started, so the District Attorney is a scumbag twit and should pay back every dollar spent on this wasteful attack.

Can't afford any more action figures, but these would be fun to have.

I like Augie's To Do List. I might try it myself.

When I consider what I and my siblings got away with at 9 years old, I can't see why people are so upset that a woman let her 9-year-old son ride home by himself on a New York subway and bus.

You can watch all of season one of Babylon 5 on-line.

BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!! Sorry, the idea of a guy in a trash bag yelling "Darth Vader!" attacking poor wannabe Jedis is hilarious.

I went ahead and added Mecca Time to my FoxClocks add-on, just in case.

Scientists find 17 living relatives of 'iceman' found in glacier. Yup, DNA testing.

One Laptop Per Child: keyboard problems. Not good.

It's not illegal to take photos, even if stupid police or overbearing security guards think it is.

Be good to your local postal carrier, she just might save your baby.

Plastic Ban. Anyone know what types of bottles have this in them? I'm just wondering if I drink anything with this stuff in it.

Why DRM sucks. MSN music DRM server to be shut down: all legally purchased music through them won't work on new computers, because it can't be validated. Stupid stupid stupid.

The Oldest Active Fuller Brush Man.

22 innings in 6 hours and 16 minutes, yeah, old news by now... but still impressive.

I think I want this. Numbered drawers... so useful. So nerdy.

A win for the good guys.

I like the idea of a prize for "vat-grown meat". But, as Slate points out, it won't do anything.

As for meat, would you eat meat from cloned animals? This is a different question than vat-grown meat, and I have a different answer. Cloned animals present all the same problems as far as waste to the environment, and they are living creatures. So, while I would eat it, I'd rather try the vat-grown stuff.

For the in-laws: a sad pug puppy.

Tuesday Night Links

Northlanders #1 is now available free online from DC/Vertigo. Go check it out.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #151: Nextwave, Jan Duursema, and Jill Thompson.

Evil Inc gives you a choice of seeing the strip in B&W or in Color.

Thieves publish an artist's website as an incredibly expensive book.

The Everywhere Girl.

South Korean cars have cell numbers as window stickers. This is so people can call the car owner if they are blocked in by the car.

Freezing small portions.

Origins of the firepole.

Easy Bake Ovens and memories. I wish I'd learned his trick for getting cheaper cake mixes. I seem to recall that we stopped playing with mine because we couldn't afford the mixes.

A LOT of reproduced artwork comes from one village in China, and some of the artists were asked to do self-portraits.

Did the 1918 Cubs throw the world series?

Censorship or not, a quick review.

Relying entirely on GPS is really stupid. You have to pay attention to the road as well as the navigation system. D'oh.

Here's a pug for the in-laws

Saturday Night Links

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #143: Wonder Man, Flex Mentallo, and The Human Fly.

The Marvel Assistant Editors' Month.

Ok, maybe I need one of these. I bet my sister could make one.

Obama, Japan has a preference for the US President.

Scoble takes a ride in a Tesla Roadster. I don't want a sportscar, but I'd love a commuter car that fit some of those specs.

Saved by a dvd.

Häagen-Dazs to battle Colony Collapse Disorder with $250,000 in research grants.

Another NorthWest meteorite.

New ways to study baseball statistics reveal that Jeter does suck.

Boycott Hot Topic T-shirts.

Boing Boing reports on the effort to put Carl Sagan on a stamp.

This news probably shouldn't make me so happy. But I hated those ads with an overwhelming passion.

Happy Villain dyes her hair. That's a way to fight depression.

Images from a fire should never look so beautiful.

A solar grand plan: how to end US dependence on foreign oil by 2050. Along the same lines, the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century.

Open Source software, Vendor-Free software, can help companies keep running critical components. Because they don't have to worry about the vendor going out of business.

This website seems to be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Speaking of lawsuits, this article makes me want to never go to Home Depot again. Especially since I usually bring tools/parts with me to the hardware store to compare to what I'm purchasing.

Ah, for Doctor Who fans.

Pugs.

Random Thoughts

More New Frontier stories. I'm there.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #133. Indiana Jones, Jessica Drew, and Power Rangers.

Leezle Pon, the greatest ever Green Lantern.

D'oh!

Heh: I want this. Just to be annoying.

Spike Jones.

More on Texas science being doomed.

The Baseball scandal: 12 Former Mariners Named in the Mitchell Report. Not the ones I expected, either. The one I most expected wasn't in the report, which doesn't mean he didn't do drugs, just that he hasn't been caught yet. The Times also compiled a full list of players mentioned in the report. I knew the drug abuse was happening, and it's one big reason baseball has become more meaningless to me over the last few years. I'm still bitterly disappointed in every one of these guys, and sick over what we might learn about other players in the future.

Sunday Night Links

Happy Birthday Elayne!

The Emerald City Comicon has a new announcement up, including artwork for the con from Tim Sale showing the Hulk and... just go look.

I have always liked Popeye. I loved the cartoon as a little kid. I wonder what that says about me?

Brian Wood has a fascinating blog entry on the inspiration for artists. Very neat stuff there.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #131. Star Wars, Purple Gloves, and The Legion.

This post applies to me... Blogging on infinite Earths?

Amelia Rules to become a Musical. Cool.

The Webby Awards' 12 Most Influential Online Videos of All Time. I'm surprised at how many of these I have seen, and I'd at least heard of all of them.

2007 LEGO Advent Calendar Day 2: A fire hydrant and supply case for the fireman. The supply case includes a walkie talkie, axe, and fire extinguisher.

Augie on Charity Overload. I agree with him mostly, except for the Girl Scouts (at least they are selling and not begging). And I never have any problem saying "no" to anyone sitting outside a grocery store.

Special Instructions To Players. "In fact, it is so over the top that at first we thought it was some type of a joke. But as we examined the paper, found that this language did exist in the 1890s, considered that general rowdiness and the use of obscene language by players were big issues in baseball in this era, and noted that the accompanying items were all from the same era, we soon realized that that this was not a joke at all."

I've gotten as high as level 46 at FreeRice, but never stay up there for long. I'm usually in the low 40s. Has anyone reached 50?

The Bad Astronomer has news from Texas regarding its doomage.

Oh dear, too funny: Newlywed Terrorists.

Teenage Mutant Turtle, must train to be Ninja.

An Experiment

Pugs do not care for baseball.

Random Thoughts

I never intended to write three blogs a day. Heck, I didn't even have any particular thoughts of doing one a day. But for some reason, I'm disappointed in myself for not keeping up the pace of the first couple of days! Pathetic, yes? Especially since my husband seems to be the only one regularly reading this...

There's no real subject for me to write about today. I'm doing my best to shut out the outside world. Little bits seep in, like the Angels winning the World Series. There's also a bit about the Seattle School District being millions of dollars in the hole due to mis-accounting. While that may eventually impact me in my current job, I don't think it will any time soon. And I don't want to see this country go to war against Iraq, at least not with the lack of evidence we've seen so far. But all that is outside, and for today it stays outside.

I spent this fine morning (the second day of my weekend) rapidly scanning through a bunch of Silver Age Aquaman stories to write my article for The Aquaman Chronicles. I'm chronically late, but John puts up with me anyway. Have I mentioned that any Aquaman fan not getting this fanzine is seriously missing out?

I won't spoil the article by telling you what it's about, but it was fun to rapidly skim a lot of Aquaman stories. Though I do start to feel surreal after a while of listening to filk music and reading old comic books...

At least I've got chores of laundry and dishes to keep me down-to-earth.

Let's see. Tonight I go to the HeroClix tournament in Redmond. I'm hoping that at some point I can win a Limited Edition Aquaman, or at least trade for one with something else I've won. Unfortunately, that means I have to play to win, which takes a little of the fun out of it for me. I'm far too competitive a person to play for "real".

Shipping lists for Wednesday are up, so I know what I'll be reviewing this week, provided they actually ship. I also got a text version of Previews just a few minutes ago, so I can read through the solicits before seeing the art. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I find it difficult to read through previews with all the yucky art, and so the text versions that several sites provide on-line is my first line of defense and my most fruitful reading of Previews.

Ack, starting to strain my brain, time to move on to some other activity...