Tommy Westphall's Mind - A Multiverse Explored. In the series finale of the show St. Elsewhere, the audience is given to believe that the entire run of the series had taken place in the imagination of a young autistic boy, Tommy Westphall.

Here's the problem: characters from St. Elsewhere had appeared on 12 other shows during the series' run, and vice versa. Others make mention of specific parts of the St Elsewhere fictional universe, placing them within the same fictional sphere.

So, if St. Elsewhere exists only within Tommy Westphall's mind, then so does every other series set within the same fictional sphere. The site explores the snowball effect of the theory, and shows how 280 shows covering ~60 years of television are interconnected. There's an LJ comm: tommywestphall. More from TV squad. Six objections from Crooked Timber. Also, from televisionary, here. Comic Book animator Dwayne McDuffie addressed this three years ago in "Six Degrees of St. Elsewhere."

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BSG VFX (bsgvfx) is a new blog written by someone who works on the special effects for Battlestar Galactica and who previously worked on Voyager and B5. He's currently discussing design differences between the old and new cylon centurions.

Starting on May 26th, A&E will air a 4-hour mini series "loosely based" on Michael Chricton's Andromeda Strain, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott. (The series aired 3 weeks ago in Europe on Sky. Official website. Viral Marketing site: What Happened In Piedmont?.

"Wizard's First Rule", a miniseries based on Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" adventure novel series will premiere later this year on the SciFi channel. Wikipedia has a page on the book.

SciFi has also commissioned a 10 webisode Farscape series, which will complement a new 4-issue comic.

A US version of Life On Mars starring Star Trek alum Colm Meany is being added to ABC's Fall lineup. The show will be produced by David Kelley and directed in part by Tommy Schlamme.

Thousands are feared killed and injured after a powerful earthquake (magnitude 7.8,) his Southwest China this afternoon. At least 50 bodies have been recovered from the rubble of a school where an estimated 900 students were buried. Because the earthquake struck in the middle of the day, it is feared that many school children may be among the victims.

Some Plano, TX students who are Jewish say they were pressured or taunted to pick up copies of the New Testament from school display tables during recent weeks.

Wikipedia: First Haircuts. "The first haircut for a human has special significance in certain cultures and religions. It can be considered a rite of passage or a milestone."

In the Arab world, has the real struggle for press freedom gone online?

Monday Morning Insight (MMI) is "a compilation of internet stories and resources that would be of interest to pastors and church leaders across the United States and the world. We discuss everything from serious theological issues to humorous stories and satire about church ministries."

10 Excellent Online Tools to Identify Trends

Rotten Tomatoes: Top 50 Most Memorable Movie Cars

Malcolm Gladwell: The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.

coffeeandink: Nice is different than good

Wiki: TV Tropes and Idioms

A Cloud Cult concert doesn't end with the encore; it ends with a bidding war. After every performance by this rising Minneapolis rock band, fans vie in a silent auction for one-of-a-kind souvenirs from the show: pictures painted to the music by the group's two on-stage artists. They currently have two videos available on their YouTube channel.

The New York Times looks at Steampunk

Occultopedia

"Aethereality Gallery is a huge image gallery site that offer high quality anime, manga, and game scans for graphics and web designing purposes."

Esquire: The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master

This was originally a filtered, locked post. Now, I'm opening it up for public consumption.

( Read more... )

"Kill Mr. Big? I would have been chased around the planet by women with torches."
~ Michael Patrick King, director of the movie Sex and the City, on rumors that the popular male character from the TV series would be eliminated from the film adaptation

Mildred Loving of Loving v. Virginia passed away on Monday.

LJ Mobile

The Great Uncluttering: The best books, articles and websites for helping you organize your life. This article references the following LJ syndicated feeds: lifehackfeed, lifehacker, unclutterer.

The Gospel of Consumption and the better future we left behind.

Via kiji_kat, KellysBags.com Electrolux has teamed with Kelly Ripa for charity. By logging on each day and (selecting a bag) you are entered to win one of 10 Electrolux suites of kitchen appliances. Started 4/14 and will end 5/18. Very important: Check the fine print: "Must be a legal resident of the 48 continental U.S. or D.C., 21 or older & owner of your personal residence."

As predicted by David Brin: Robotic Bugs will soon invade the battlefield. More here.

Six ex-Los Angeles Times editors discuss life at the paper

The Root is a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today's news from a variety of black perspectives. therootonline

Now free to speak his mind, an ex-mayor is doing so.

Call girls speak out about the suicide of Deborah Jeane Palfrey and the complicated truths it reveals about their lives.

A new series of short films on the Sundance Channel starring Isabella Rossellini will investigate how insects reproduce. The videos are live at Sundance's website.

Portland needs... acupuncture?

Nerve: 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of all time.

YouTube:
30 Minutes of 1980's Cartoon Openings
30 Minutes of 1990's Cartoon Openings
30 Minutes of 2000's Cartoon Openings
ABC Saturday Morning Cartoons Bumpers

It's a shame Battle of the Planets / Gatchaman premiered in the 70's, but I'll throw a video of their theme as well.


Sites:
Pop-Cult
80's cartoons (US)
80's cartoons (UK)
90's cartoons (UK)


Analyses:
Branded in the 80's: The Essential Saturday Morning Cartoon Ads, 1979-1989
TV Squad: Saturday Morning: 1960 to 1964
TV Squad: Saturday Morning 1965
TV Squad: Saturday Morning: 1966
TV Squad: Saturday Morning: 1967
TV Squad: Saturday Morning, 1968
TV Squad: Hanna-Barbera
GiggleSugar: The Electric Company's Lollipop from Lollihell.
The Disappearance of Saturday Morning


Defies categorization:
* Beatles' Action Figures
* Cracked: The 10 Most Disastrous Saturday Morning Cartoon Adaptations
* Cartoon Crushes are not that Weird (This one seems to be edging into Rule 34 territory)
* Sid and Marty Krofft
* Time for Timer

Your friends Are Not Watching the Same Show You Are. (And That's Ok.)

Jailed Chinese Journalist Shi Tao's Poem Follows Olympic Torch's Route Online

Linguistics: How the Brain Learns May Be Determined By Language

Antivaccinationist Activism vs. The Measles

Oops

162 Reasons (Charlie Pierce from 12/01.)

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The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

Time lapse video:

The game is college softball. The teams: the Central Washington University Wildcats against the Western Oregon University Wolves. This past Saturday, they played a doubleheader.

At the top of the second inning, Western Oregon's right fielder, Sara Tucholsky, came to the plate with two runners on base, took strike one and then "The career .153 hitter smashed the next pitch over the center field fence for an apparent three-run home run." Sara is a senior who is expected to graduate in June. This was her only home run in her four year college career. A huge moment.

But she injured badly her knee rounding first.

"I was in a lot of pain," she told The Oregonian on Tuesday. "Our first-base coach was telling me I had to crawl back to first base. 'I can't touch you,' she said, 'or you'll be out. I can't help you.' "

Tucholsky, to the horror of teammates and spectators, crawled through the dirt and the pain back to first.

Western coach Pam Knox rushed onto the field and talked to the umpires near the pitcher's mound. The umpires said Knox could place a substitute runner at first. Tucholsky would be credited with a single and two RBIs, but her home run would be erased.

For more, read the article or watch the video:

Trust me, it's a great story. :)

Thank you, dervishspin for the article link. Two others, here and here.

OK, I know this is a serious topic. And, I'm glad they're finally taking action to protect their citizens.

But honestly, isn't it rather hard to take the article seriously when the accompanying photo is of a medical expert who looks like he's afraid of imminent harvesting? Couldn't they find a better picture to use from the press conference?

"Philippines Health Officials: No Kidneys For Foreigners"

From the National Review: A Blood Libel on Our Civilization (Can I expell Expelled?)

The author is noted conservative and anti-immigration proponent John Derbyshire.

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

And.....

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

That's right: The National Review. My cup runneth over. :D

For more on ID vs. science, try Charlie Pierce's Esquire article.

Positive Exposure is a photographic essay of people with genetic disorders, intended to challenge stigma and celebrate difference. (Downloadable PDF).

All Things Girl (ATG) profiles women with creative talents.

The human genome is old news. Next stop: the human proteome. (From the Genetic Future blog: (geneticfuture)

El Caminito del Rey (The King's Pathway) is a walkway, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Álora in Málaga, Spain. Check out a video walking tour. Definitely not for the acrophobic.

Bill Gates has been touring universities for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His talk, "Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back" can be seen here).

Never let Howard Stern design your department's logo.

Does Sex Sell? (YT vid. I'm gonna label this NSFW, even though there's no actual nudity.) This is a marketing ad for a real estate agent.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats (YT vid)

Aaaaaaaand....

Muppetstar Galactica (20-second YT vid).

So many beautiful titles I could write for this post...

Why Do Republicans Hate Hamburgers, Hot Dogs and French Fries?

Guess what's not coming to dinner?

Red Sauce States

Brother, Can You Spare A Beefsteak?

But all jokes aside, the GOP's artificially inflated fears of a brown planet country have finally vine-ripened. Unfortunately, their bright red crop of fearmongering plums is filled with some unexpected worms.

Typical. They freak out and the rest of us get the short end of the... uh... fruit.

In addition to Rice and Froot Loops, y'all should definitely stock up on Tomatoes. Why?

Tomato growers in New Jersey say that tougher immigration enforcement may change this year's crop. It's getting harder to hire the migrant laborers — many of them from Mexico — who traditionally pick tomatoes during the few weeks when they're ripe.

(NPR link courtesy of kiji_kat. The rice story was provided by quixotickitten)

Actually, I take that back: it's not "unexpected". We all saw this coming, didn't we?

When you crack down on the people who do the jobs that no other American wants to do, those jobs won't get done.

It's not just Jersey:

...a prominent Pennsylvania tomato grower has sacrificed a year's crop and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, making a dramatic political point as presidential candidates crisscross his state.

Keith Eckel, 61, has spent more than five decades tending to the tomato fields first planted by his father in 1949, rising to become the state's largest grower and a major supplier of tomatoes to the Northeast. But with the government trying to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, it has become increasingly difficult for Eckel to get the farmworkers he needs.

To compound the situation, Sacramento Valley and Tennessee growers have been fighting a cold snap. Until it hit, Tennessee looked like it was going to have a bumper crop. We'll have to see how they recover.

What does it all mean? Stick to your local farms. Make your own ketchup? Endure the inevitable higher prices.

And the next time a politician tries to fearmonger, throw a tomato at them. Assuming you can find one, that is. :)

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters has an extensive post up analyzing Michelle Malkin's failed campaign to have AP photojournalist Bilal Hussein convicted as a terrorist. Pathetic, yet fascinating.

Also, Helen Thomas seems to be the sole White House Press Corps reporter willing to confront Press Secretary Dana Perino on the recent revelations that our President and his administration planned out ways to torture Guantanamo detainees.

( Transcript: )

Evil Monkey's Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals

"Mongolian Death Worm - A: “No, because you cannot eat anything that crawls on its belly.” EM: “Does that mean an injured kosher animal that is crawling along isn’t kosher any more?” A: “Yes, because you can’t eat an animal that’s been injured or is sick.” EM: “It’s a wonder you haven’t all starved to death.”"

Comments on that post are also awesome.

From dakiwiboid. :)

rm has a posted a poll regarding unwanted sexual contact. The more responses she has, the better. So please feel free to chime in if you're so inclined.

From the blog Think Gene (I created an LJ RSS feed for it: thinkgene)

New research by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford provides the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with the mother’s diet. Published today (23 April 2008), in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the study shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The findings may help explain the falling birth-rate of boys in industrialised countries, including the UK and US.

The study focused on 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK, who did not know the sex of their fetus. They were asked to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy. They were then split into three groups according to the number of calories consumed per day around the time they conceived. 56% of the women in the group with the highest energy intake at conception had sons, compared with 45% in the lowest group. As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons.

This news raises interesting social and ethical issues and might have a negative effect on the boy-girl gender imbalance of certain Asian countries, such as China. Breakfast cereals are typically formulated to be highly nutritious. I wonder if xī fàn (rice porridge, also known as congee) might count as a "breakfast cereal". (I suppose xī fàn paired with some sort of traditional vegetable dish, such as tsa tsai might?)

For gbam:




"Thank you, Your Holiness. Awesome Speech."

Personally, I liked Kyrie O'Connor's take on this week's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me: "In his defense, Awe is very important in Catholicism."

Bah! I only answered 50 out of 60 correctly — 83.33 % Pitiful.

eugie kindly posts:

To All You Book-loving Atlanta Locals:

I just got a note from Sean Wallace, Publisher/Editor with Prime Books/Wildside Press. It seems that SF/F publisher Meisha Merlin, which declared it was shutting down in November, has a rather large amount of stock (tens of thousands of books) in its Stone Mountain warehouse (1440 Kelton Drive, Stone Mountain) that needs to be rescued or it will all be destroyed/recycled.

Sean is renting a truck which can fit fifteen pallets, single-stacked, or thirty double-stacked, but there's no forklift available, only a pallet jack. So he has to fill the truck by hand. He'll be in town Tuesday and Wednesday (4/22 and 4/23) to load up, and he's asked me to spread the word that he's desperate for volunteers to help him. Anyone who volunteers can cart off any books they want that don't fit into the truck.

If you can help out or know of folks who might be able to, email Sean at: seanwallace@comcast.net

Meisha Merlin owned the rights to publish books by Robert Heinlein, Jodi Lyn Nye, Sharon Lee, George R. R. Martin, and others. Could be a treasure trove for anyone looking to build their scifi library.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Robert J. Hanlon

"You know more than you think you do." - Dr. Benjamin Spock

"This year, because you were on your best behavior, the government is giving each of us a $600 tax rebate. By my calculations, that money is equal to one cupcake a day for a year. So what if the economy is in the toilet and global warming is getting worse. Don't worry, America... have a cupcake." - Lewis Black (via calysto)

"Thank you, your Holiness. Awesome speech." - President Bush, to Pope Benedict, Washington, D.C., (4/15/2008)

"I am no longer in New York during passover and a papal visit (which means the chance of my actually being able to say "Good yontiff, pontiff," has now dropped back from astonishingly faint to none)." -Neil Gaiman

"The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one." - Bill Hicks

"My cousin flies for a major airline, wears eyeglasses. They’ve got to go through security. He’s got a little eyeglass – you know – repair kit with the screwdriver. Security said, “We’ve got to confiscate – we’ve got to take that, captain.” And he’s a nice guy, so he said, “Go ahead, take it. But, I’ve got to tell you, I’m the pilot.” If I want to bring the plane down, I don’t need this. And I… and then he goes to the guy, he says, “I don’t – I don’t want to rock your world, but there’s an axe in the cockpit, you know.” - Jason Alexander on Real Time with Bill Maher (4/18/08)

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson

Weapons Locker 1701D?

Nice. :)

Edit: happydog called it. This is a hoax. A terse statement from Yale can be read here. FoxNews article here.

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Yale art major Aliza Schvarts' senior art project is a documentation of her repeated artificially inseminated self-pregnancies that she deliberately miscarried. The installation will feature video recordings of her forced "miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process."

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathroom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

Students interviewed believe her work either trivializes abortion (pro-choicers) or our society's moral code (pro-lifers). They're also not too thrilled about it.

Media Coverage: UK Telegraph. WashPost. Jezebel has a couple of posts up about this as well. Predictably, Michelle Malkin and other conservative bloggers are ranting about how the project offends their sensibilities already.

Which of course, is what Schvarts wanted.