No One Wins in a Parrot War

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

An article about innovation in sustainability and how the US is not faring so well with the process, compared to Europe and most other 1st world countries.

http://ecopreneurist.com/2008/05/15/europe-leading-the-way-in-sustainable-innovation/

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED for a behavioral survey of invasive populations of the Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus). I am a PhD candidate at New Mexico State University studying this species in both the native and invasive ranges. I plan to conduct a behavioral analysis to determine whether behaviors differ between the invasive and native populations, and also to test whether behaviors differ among invasive populations. I am looking for people interested in spending a few hours on weekends observing parakeet behavior at and around nests during both the breeding and non-breeding seasons. Volunteers must have their own binoculars and must be able to devote at least 2 hours a month to observation. Birders, teachers, and interested “citizen scientists” are encouraged to apply. To apply, please email ELIZABETH HOBSON (EM: monk.parakeet.project AT gmail.com) with a short description of your interest and availability for the project as well as a description of any previous research or observation experience.

::sniffle::

If only for genius of this caliber:

Call it a linkdump, if you must. :-) Our net connection was down for most of the day yesterday, so these tabs have been hanging around for a while, in some cases.

1. Damned happy about California's recent Supreme Court decision. It's always extra fun to watch a wanker like Glen Levy whine that the gays are stealing our jobs ruining marriage for folks like him (because, you know, if gays get married, they'll magically stop bigoted assholes from finding each other with their Ultra Leet Gay Marriage-Disruption Rays).

2. I'm also happy that CA filed charges against Lori Drew, who deserves whatever bad crap comes her way.

3. I think that the new Youtube Mac app from Google, Vidnik, has some nifty potential.

4. Even if it's been linked to a million times, Roger Ebert's piece on fanzines is great. As is tnh's amplification.

5. I'm happy that Chicago came to its senses about foie gras.

6. Charlie Stross has some good points on the onslaught of bloated web pages.

7. WIkileaks has some simply fascinating reading material.

8. This article about contemporary pirates is fascinating.

9. The first trailer for Dollhouse is out! Watch it before Fox cancels it!

10. The World Science Festival is at the end of the month, for anyone in or near New York City!

Last night I put on a Queen Helene Mint Julep mask and slept with it on my face. This wasn't a bad idea -- it's a common practice and my face likes this product -- but the mask contains sulphur and...well...today my face smells like hardboiled eggs. I'm grossing myself out over here.

Phishing scams are annoying, because they get people to willingly hand over their information, right? They're all sorts of destructive, even if only 1% of people are fooled by them. Where I work, it's a constant struggle to inform customers about phishing scams, because the senders are always coming up with more and more plausible-sounding reasons for needing you to send them your information. But, today I saw a phishing scam which surprised me. I definitely wouldn't repost it, except I found other examples of it on the web. I'm actually a little surprised I've never seen this one before, though. Anyway, someone here received this one:

SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don't comply. I was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within 3 days.

Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you. If you are in doubt with this I will send you your name and where you are residing in my next mail.

Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about you. I decided to contact you first and know why somebody will want you dead by all means. Right now my men are monitoring you, their eyes are on you, and even the place you think is safer for you to hide might not be.

Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $5,000 is all you need to spend. You will first of all pay $2,500 then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead to you and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $2,500. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.

Warning: do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because I will extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead knows you too well and some members of your family as well.

For your own good I will advise you not to go out once is 7pm until I make out time to see you and give you the tape of my discussion with the person who want you dead then you can use it to take any legal action. Good luck as I await your reply to this e-mail contact.

So, wow man. Wow. Phishing AND death threats? People are so nasty, man. :( Anyway, tell your grannies and un-internet-savvy great-aunts not to worry about things like this. And let them know that if they send me their credit-card number, mailing information, and IP address, I'll install INTERNET PROTECTION BOT 5000 on their machines for them.

Grin.

from Atlanta's Daily Candy, omg funny!!!

May 16, 2008

There’s something irresistible about a DJ in hot pants. Especially when he’s spinning a Miami Sound Machine-Biggie-electronica mix atop a lifeguard stand on Krog.

That’s what mix master David VanArsdale will be doing this summer.

Fans know him as DVA or Beachtitti during the summer, when he plays bashes for Decatur Social Club, Faster Mustache, and Corndogorama. Now, catch him in guerrilla solo mode at random pop-up shows (or for hire) throughout Cabbagetown, Midtown, and South Fulton.

DVA’s tastes are eclectic — Purple Ribbon All-Stars’s “Kryptonite” over obscure French pop; Chromeo’s “Needy Girl” running into Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It,” or a run of Marvin Gaye meshed with European dance music. His presentation? Unique. Yes, that’s Hawaiian Tropic you smell. Oil-soaked sheets laid over air vents is a scene-setting trademark, along with the Brazilian nut huggers.

Just keep your shorts on.

DVA (davidvanarsdale@gmail.com). Preview a mix online at beachtitti.com.

You know, I may bitch about my job sometimes, but the company is paying to send me to Anaheim for two days to work at ALA's annual conference and just now one of my coworkers walked past my door and said, "may I shoot you with a rubber band in a playful manner?"

It's pretty awesome being me, you know that?

1. Jick made it very clear that using multis in the dungeon is a bad thing. If you've got more than one character in the clan, make sure that only one of them does the Hobopolis content when it comes out, okay?

2. From the latest radio show:

Q: Hobopolis info plz?
A: 6 New outfits, probably 6 new familiars, though that's probably not as exciting as you think. 15 new skills.


Definitely some good stuff to look forward to. :-)

wing man

9x12, ink on bristol $100 at kandeart.com

drawn entirely from imagination. brian said "i think that's the best thing you've ever done". i'm not sure i agree, but i'm not going to argue with him either. : )

before doing this one i played a bit with crayon and liquid inks. sadly since liquid inks are more pigmented than crayolas you don't get as dramatic an effect with the wax resistance. so going forward i think if i'm going to do much with wax effect and ink i'll have to stick to the old crayola standard.

i did the above with just prismacolor markers and my pitt india ink pen. i'm slowly beginning to use prismacolors more than anything else. i really really like them and i'm probably going to have to invest in a bigger set.

i did some other drawings that way but i only had time to scan the one this morning. the others were an owl and a weight-loss thing. the weight loss thing was actually sort of painful to do, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable to look at it. i was trying to accurately picture the progress i've made, and it's hard for me to think about how big i got. but the drawing makes me feel very naked (kind of literally) so it's kind of a hard thing to post.

last night i swam a mile. 41 laps in the pool at my health club. i'm sore today but it's good sore.

season finale of the office was last night. it was so good! but now i'm totally on edge for the next few months until next season because i can't wait to see what happens and i'm kind of filled with a sense of foreboding.
~me

I'm a huge fan of The Teaching Company, even more so now that I'm listening to a course I bought on their website, but Modern Scholars does a lot of things right too. Modern Scholar's website isn't nearly as good (and I don't love the TC website) and their selection is a bit odd, but their seem more famous: Alan Dershowitz recorded a course for them.

Of course, it's hard for me to tell if I like Modern Scholars or just Michael Drout's A Way With Words. For one thing, he wasn't reading his notes and while sometimes this led him to say things that made me rewind and check if he'd actually said what I thought he said, it also lent a more amiable tone to his lectures. I guess if you're teaching about rhetoric and great speakers, you can't suck in your delivery. The grammar and logic was very basic, but it was worth being reminded of. The lectures on schemes and tropes were so good, I listened to them twice in a row and I could see myself re-listening to the entire set in a year or two.

I liked that Drout is a bit of a geek, talking about Tolkien and linguistics, and tells cute stories from his education. I liked that he read from Churchill and MLK - I'd never read "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and now I want to look up "Politics and the English Language" as well, and maybe read more Orwell. Apparently he also has separate audio lecture courses on sci fi and fantasy - how cool is that? - and his history-of-the-English-language sounds more interesting than McWhorter's. Good thing I'll be running a lot this summer.

Your Noble British Name Is:

Lady Deline Phillada Hillgarth

"I hate hate hate the way that people equate 'anything we can legally do to discourage abortion, no matter how much it treats women as The Enemy and basically nonpersons' with 'respect for life'.

"Because, I'm sorry, NO. If you *actually* have respect for life, that doesn't end at birth. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for women. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for Iraqis. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for the poor. If you have respect for life, that includes respect for the victims of torture. If you pass laws against abortion, all that proves is that you can pass laws against abortion. Well, good for fucking you."

-- lydiabell, 2008-04-18

I'm about to follow suit, but was struck by a question: how new is the strain of anti-intellectualism in American popular culture? After reading radiata's latest political post, I just wondered about the role of rationalism in the American psyche. Certainly humans have always been given to passions, yes even Americans. But there's also this mythos of the Founding Fathers being... wise. Is this sense of wisdom left only for the long dead? Nowadays the old are usually just seen as senile, unhealthy, as something to be pitied for being so close to death. The concept of wisdom gained through experience is somehow translated, in the political landscape, as someone corrupt and out of touch. Perhaps the cynicism borne out of Nixon's era has done more to damage progress than even any of Bush's policies. People no longer even seem to want to think about their politics, assuming that they ever cared to do so, it's all about how a candidate makes them feel. It's how we got Bush in the first place.

Have we always been like this?

Today I bought a new laptop. It's really very sexy. It's got 3GB of Ram and a 250GB harddrive, and it has a dedicated graphics card, and it has a built in webcam, and it (sadly) has Vista, and it's, wow. Wow.

Also, I touched a Macbook Air, and then promptly fell to my knees and proposed to it. Holy shit, those things are sexy.

ANYWAY. I'm so excited. I've already installed The Sims 2 on it. Now, once I upgrade my router at home to something that moves above a crawl, I will be GOOD TO GO.

Also, in one week's time, I will be in Chicago with my giiiiiiiiiiiiirls. ♥_♥

I wonder how drunk I have to be to start narrating porn out loud.

Looking for the best speeding ticket attorney in Atlanta. Any suggestions anybody?

Moon from Quincy Market.

I celebrated the California Supreme Court's decision today to overturn the ban on gay marriage by going to see a production of Terrence McNally's Some Men. (Actually, I reserved my ticket a couple weeks ago, but it was still extremely appropriate.) My, there were quite a lot of penises. The artistic director of that theatre has told me that his board complains if he doesn't choose shows with enough nudity in them; this one should fill that quota for a while.

Frivolous news from the last few days: Iron Man rocks like a moraine. I gotta say, were it not for the drugs, my crush on Robert Downey, Jr. would knock the pants off the one I have for Johnny Depp. (Also, unlike Depp, Downey's never made a really bad movie, or at least not one I know of.) Probably has the edge anyway, honestly. Stay strong, RDJ.

I found a black Jackie O-style dress that looks awesome on me for not a whole hell of a lot of money, along with two pairs of jeans that fit me for even less. (One pair is grey, which I'm not entirely sure about, but since they otherwise fit me beautifully and only cost $10, I couldn't not get them.) Fortunately, it looks as though the repairs to my car that I had partially done today--I have to wait on a part to have them completed--will cost far less than I expected, so it's okay that I spent some money on clothes. Also, I finally found out today that the H&M in Atlantic Station will open June 13th. Finally!! The one at Northpoint Mall opens this weekend, apparently, but while I'm excited about finally having an H&M, I'm not so excited that I need to drive up to Alpharetta to go to it.

Between the fading burns and the self-tanner, my skin is changing colors at an alarming rate. I'm still not quite ready to show my feet in public--they're going to look odd all summer--so it's a good thing that the weather has been cooperatively rainy the last couple of days.

Oh, and I picked up a new copy of Season 2 of La Femme Nikita for cheaper than I paid for my used copy of Season 1. I don't know that it was a great tv show, but I love it so very much.

so, I bowled 6 games tonight. that was fun, now I'm tired.

High game of the night, 245.
Can't wait till the bowling league starts next week. :)

I fixed my macmini, everyone rejoice.

I'm listening to Better Than Ezra and it's good.

Now it's time to back up my xp machine and setup some raid. :)

I hope all is well with everyone.