Walled In: Learning About The Berlin Wall

I knew that it had been a daunting obstacle at the time but I actually had no idea that it was quite so intricate a structure:


I visited pieces of this former cold war landmark several years ago but I couldn't really get a feel for just how menacing it really was at the time. In fact, I nonchalantly purchased a replica KGB pocket watch on the East German side of Checkpoint Charlie but viewing this digital recreation has given me a much more sobering look at this monument to communist oppression.

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650 Million Years In 80 Seconds

A nice time-lapse video depicting the probable past and possible future of the Earth's various land masses:

LPPD: Not Their Finest Hour

If you thought that the FCC was bad about a few swear words and one 40-something year old tittie wait until you hear about the dangerously life-threatening, repressive bullshit behind the refusal to answer this 911 call:

In Lincoln Park, Calif. Michigan, a 17-year-old called 911 when her father (recovering at home from brain surgery) had a seizure. Her first call didn't go through, so the panicked girl hung up and tried again. While the phone was still ringing, the girl said "what the fuck." Apparently 911 calls are recorded even while the phone is ringing, so the police officer heard her say it. When the officer answered the call, he was only interested in the fact that the girl said "fuck" and wouldn't help the girl. Instead, he swears at her and hangs up.

After the girl places several more calls to 911 trying to explain that her father was about to die, the officer finally called the fire department with a fabricated version of what happened.

Eventually, the girl gets arrested and jailed by the police for a crime that isn't on the books.

Oh, you don't like the language I'm using when I'm panicked and calling an emergency service to save another human being's life? Well, FUCK YOU! Just do your goddamn job and send a goddamn ambulance! The fact that people think that they can function as the morality police for our society, especially in extremely dire circumstances such as this, is just sickening to me.

Wasp Virus Holds Caterpillar In Thrall

I can't decide if this is better or worse than having an alien bust out through your chest:

A clip from a National Geographic program In the Womb: Extreme Animals, apparently due to air next week. There's a brief "yuk" portion, but you need to get past that to see the very end, where the effect of the parasites on the host's BRAIN is explained. The "wow" factor isn't the larvae in the body, but rather the behavior of the caterpillar after larval emergence that is truly incredible. Watch and see.

The natural world is so incredibly adaptive:

Manhattan 1609 vs. 2009

Computer recreation takes the metropolitan island back in time 400 years:

Before it was an urban jungle, Manhattan was home to the Lenape Indians, who called the island Mannahatta, or "land of many hills."

Built up and--thanks to land reclamation--out, downtown Manhattan, circa 2008, towers over the New York City island as it was more than 400 years ago (computer rendering at right), when Europeans first set eyes on it--complete with campfires.

The images were created for the Wildlife Conservation Society's Mannahatta Project, which launched April 20 and includes a book, museum exhibition, and Web site. The yearlong celebration of Manhattan's natural history aims to recreate the island as it appeared 400 years ago, on the day English explorer Henry Hudson arrived in 1609.

If you've ever watched the movie Fight Club closely, you'll recognize Tyler Durden's description of the future New York City in these mock-ups. It's Mother Nature's world, we're just passing through it with our materialistic culture.

Gun Show Nation!

Now I've stated since the very beginning of this blog that I'm pro-gun ownership but there are so many crazy wingnuts out there that blanket gun ownership rights, as legal and valid as I find them, still just scare the ever-loving shit out of me. Max Blumenthal went to a gun show in California and emerged with the following report and subsequent video:

Fueled by the screeds of radio hosts Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and the lesser-known but increasingly influential online conspiracist Alex Jones, many gun-show attendees I spoke to were convinced Obama planned to usher in a Marxist dictatorship. They warned that the president’s power grab would only begin with mass gun seizures. “If Obama takes away our guns,” a young, .45 pistol-toting man from Reno told me, “it’s just a step into trying to take away everything else.”

Indeed, in their minds, average Americans opposed to the Obama agenda would be herded into FEMA-run concentration camps by a volunteer army of glassy-eyed liberal college graduates. “When they start imprisoning Americans, and people start seeing that we’re the enemy, then that’ll make it hot,” predicted one Antioch-based young man sporting a button for former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul. “People talk about a revolution,” the young man continued, “an armed revolution. I think police crackdowns on individuals will tip the scales.”

More than a few gun dealers and attendees echoed the young man’s seeming enthusiasm for armed revolt. One Contra Costa, California-based gun dealer named Rich predicted during an otherwise casual off-camera conversation that “some nut” would assassinate Obama within one year of any Democratic attempt at gun-control legislation. While the prospect of organized right-wing violence against the federal government seems far-fetched at this point, the paranoid rhetoric I documented suggests the militia movement that organized against President Bill Clinton’s policies during the 1990s could experience a dramatic resurgence by mobilizing resentment against Obama.

This auction was conducted in Northern California; these people are my (relative) neighbors. The fact that they believe the garbage being spouted by Beck and others is just one more reason to keep at least one eye and ear trained on them:

Penquins Go South On April 1st

While I hope many of you went for my April Fool's joke extolling the virtues of the virtually worthless technology that is Twitter yesterday I have to admit that it pales in comparison to this one put out by the BBC last year:

March Of Shame

The timeless dance continues:


[Update: On a related note, I think Morgan Freeman should voice every documentary made from now on until he dies of old age. Hopefully by then we'll have a sophisticated enough computer program to take over for him.]

Attenborough's Tree Of Life

The evolution of all life on Earth in six minutes:

Picture Of The Day

Cheney still defends the torture of waterboarding. Surf's up! (from Gaius Nation)

Shuttle Endeavour Night Time Launch

Another crew of intrepid explorers "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" last night to rendezvous with the International Space Station:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The space shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted into the night sky Friday, bound for the international space station and the most extreme home makeover project ever attempted by astronauts.

The shuttle rose off its launch pad at 7:55 p.m. ET, right on time, in a brilliant flash of light visible for miles around.

“It’s our turn to take home improvement to a new level after 10 years of international space station construction,” commander Christopher Ferguson radioed before liftoff.

...Ferguson and his crew will double as kitchen and bathroom installers once they arrive at the space station Sunday, hooking up extra cooking and sleeping equipment so the station’s crew can expand next year. They will deliver a new refrigerator as well, giving residents much-desired cold drinks for a change.

Night launches are fairly rare and a pretty spectacular sight to behold. The actual footage of last nights launch is fairly pedestrian (while still extremely cool if you're a space nerd) but this archival footage of the same shuttle from last March is pretty sweet and set to Jethro Tull, no less: after the first 2 minutes you get to see the shuttle pull away from the cameras mounted on the solid rocket boosters; truly beautiful:

Sarah Palin's Demon Haunted Churches

Now I'm not one to cast aspersions on organized religion or anything like that but...oh wait, that's exactly who I am and what I do. Seriously though, as I've written in the past I really do think that John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was a blatant move to woo the conservative, religious base of his party, and she's made very clear that she comes down on their side as it pertains to cultural issues in this election. But if you've been paying attention (and I have) you might have noticed that the McCain campaign has kind of downplayed the extent of her Christian revelry; they've made it very clear that she's a Christian with all of the little clues and codewords used to describe her faith but the details of her church and what goes on there have been conspicuously absent from their mainstream ads and press releases. This short documentary about Palin's church (which was removed from YouTube for "inappropriate content") may shed some light on why this is the case:

Mindless religious zealotry like this scares the shit out of me anyway but when you factor in that they're asking people for money every week (and based on pretty much every church and/or religion I've ever seen or heard about, I have no reason to doubt that they are) I get just that much more uncomfortable with McCain choosing this woman as his running mate. Examining the vast extent of religious fervor and magical beliefs in this country sometimes makes me feel like the last sane man in a massive asylum; I'm not saying that religious believers are crazy, just that they can really come off that way most of the time they're saying or doing anything religious.

[Update: And then there's this exchange between Palin and a social activist while Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK; from Salon.com:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.'

"I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'"]

Reverse Graffiti

Paul "Moose" Curtis is an urban artist who practices what he calls reverse graffiti, wherein he partially cleans buildings and structures to express himself and get his message out to the public. This video features some of his work in the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco:

Team Obama

If you've ever worked on or volunteered extensively for a political campaign, you'll recognize the mixture of the heady feeling of accomplishment after a brutal primary win and the steely look of determination as the general election looms before you like a tsunami wave. The words "an enormous sense of obligation" say it all; this country needs a president Obama:

An Inconvenient Tenor?

If you thought the Barackula musical was artsy, you're going to love this one. From The Guardian.uk:

For a man sometimes described as the world's most famous loser, Al Gore is quite a winner. Since the start of last year alone, he has picked up an honorary fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, prizes in Spain and Sweden, several honorary doctorates, the Sir David Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Film-making and an Emmy - not to mention the Nobel peace prize.

But even Gore may feel humbled by the latest distinction to come his way. The legendary La Scala opera house in Milan has commissioned a full-length work to be based on his book, An Inconvenient Truth, and the Oscar-winning documentary of the same title.

La Scala's artistic director, Stephane Lissner, told a press conference the new opera had been commissioned from an Italian composer, Giorgio Battistelli. He said it would be staged in 2011.

Al Gore's quest against global warming has become a cultural juggernaut. I wonder what part my kids will someday play in their elementary school production of An Inconvenient Truth? I'm hoping for either cherry picker or laptop.

The Real McCain

I had so much more respect for this guy 7 years ago:

POPaganda

This short film is an introduction to guerrilla artist Ron English. You may remember some of his creepier McDonald's themed art from the transition scenes in the Morgan Spurlock documentary Super Size Me. English is known as a guerilla artist because he hijacks billboards that are paid for and used by corporations to get his own artistic messages out to the public:

He's In Some Cave, Right?

I'm a big fan of Morgan Spurlock; I own Super Size Me and I watched every episode of 30 Days I could catch without a DVR at the time. So when I saw the trailer for his new documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, I knew I was going to have to see it. Here's the trailer (and if you do know where he is, please tell us):