• As a spiritual followup to an item from a couple weeks ago comes a link to a stereotype-busting gallery of fat people in love.
• There ought to be more covers by repurposed hardware.
• Every so often I get emails for Zogby's online surveys; I'm not sure that they matter at all, but they're an interesting enough diversion that I take a look at what they' ( Read more... )

• Cats are incredibly cute, no matter their size.
• Most. Awesome. President. Ever.
• This Week in Deconstructing Hurtful Stereotypes: NewsWeek and this Flickr group highlight people engaging in athletic activity regardless of body size. Not everything about it is perfect, and there's no shortage of ignorant and hurtful comments on the NewsWeek site, but I ( Read more... )

Apparently there's a 100-character limit on post titles, so I've finally been forced to resort to Arabic numerals. Huh. Who knew? Anyway, this is a super-sized Holy Special Edition Batman, because posting this last Sunday didn't feel appropriate.

• You can't punt in the new Cowboys stadium. This is the kind of thing that just makes me all giggly.
• From ( Read more... )

• I trust everyone's already seen Marc Shaiman's contribution to the political discourse, yes?
• FailBlog really does have to acknowledge a win sometimes.
• Ralph McQuarrie's Battlestar Galactica.
• Even if it's nine months too late, Ebert can still bring the goods on Ben Stein's creationist claptrap.
• There was one saving grace to this week's dose of football ( Read more... )

• Even though I have a considerable backlog of music I haven't been able to listen to at work due to a few things that've greatly reduced the time I can spend on my headphones, I've found myself returning to the Prometheus expanded CD of Quigley Down Under again and again. It's a great pick-me-up--a light and breezy listen, with an expansive western- ( Read more... )

• We Can Has Habeas! And now the cases start rolling in. Read the whole thing if you like; I'll throw it to Justice Kennedy:Our basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply.... ( Read more... )

Dinosaur Comics examines the finer points of linguisticsThe (serious) problem implied is a large one; you obviously can't completely formalize living languages because they're continually changing based on the whims of individual speakers at the end of the day. "Language is in a constant state of change," my first linguistics professor would intone ( Read more... )

There's been some discussion lately about a particular study by Jonathan Winawer at MIT and other researchers on the effects of the Russian language's distinction between light and dark blue, a distinction we don't have in English. From the New Scientist article:English speakers were no better at distinguishing between dark and light blues than ( Read more... )

I haven't commented on the Virginia shootings because, really, what do I have to add to the din of coverage? The first thing that really caught my interest was that everyone and his brother keeps calling this thing a tragedy, which of course is technically true, but also makes it easy to believe in some subconscious way that this is something that ( Read more... )

Short-short version: it was a really fun show, with a lot of good matches and a couple that may have been great; I'll ultimately decide what I think of those when I watch the whole show again in a month or so. Longer version with segment-by-segment rants inside the cut, ( with a couple bad predictions to boot. )