Biomes Blog

Entry #687

How to build a haunted crypt in your backyard.  Looks simple enough.

Create a virtual jack-o-lantern.
[Update: via email, I received this even better flash pumpkin carving toy.  Dan has a good one in comments, too.]

Have your kids wear this downloadable mask tonight and save them from getting cavities since no one will give them any candy.

Let the Landover Baptist Church show you how to ruin halloween for the pagans and non-believers.

Awww, I want a two-headed snake, too.

October is National Toilet Repair Month.  Here are some tips.

Another illusion for you. This one is called “rollers” and once again, nothing is actually moving.

If the renaissance took place in more recent times, and the models were famous movie monsters/aliens, what would the artwork have looked like?

Last year's Biomes Blog halloween extravaganza.

Entry #686

This week's water tower is found in Niobrarar, WY.

Cool Site of the Week: Find out how old you would be if you lived on one of our other planets.  I’m only 21 on Mars.

  How Strongbad met Homestar Runner.

War for Fear, by Delaware Dem.

William Shatner’s blog.

I get a bit tired of receiving this essay, called “The Paradox of Life Today”, in my email box claiming it was written by either a Columbine student or, more commonly, George Carlin.  “He would never write such drivel”, was my first response when I got this a couple of years ago.   Here’s the scoop.

Here’s a craptacular list of words that were made up by The Simpson’s.  How many readers would I lose if I decided to use one of these in each post?

Entry #685

The actual Harriet Miers resignation letter to the president.  “Releasing all my papers, as congress wishes, would show the world how incompetent you are by trying to get me on the highest court in the land. lol. But you are still the greatest and smartestest man!! xoxo. I heart you.”  she failed to add.  Here's her blog.

Special Prosecuter Patrick Fitzgerald has a blog too, and it’s pretty funny. (Although Mixter beat me to it.)

Happy 39th birthday to NOW.

Seriously, who dresses up their kid in a polar bear harp seal costume for a trip to the zoo? (Thanks to Scorpio, for the correction.)

Timewaster of the Week: Tetka.  Along the same lines, Bush in Freefall is an animated representation of the man’s poll numbers.

Toothpick carving is pretty impressive.

Guitar jokes.

Intelligent Design is a hoax, by Daniel Dennett.  Don’t forget to use Bugmenot if you aren’t registered with the New York Times (although it’s free, so why wouldn’t you be?)

This week's recipe is "Mushrooms Stuffed With Feta", in the extended post below:

Entry #684

Van Morrison sings about ringworm.  It wasn’t much of a hit, but here’s the story about the song.

General Zod for president, 2008.

Why the Rove/Plame scandal is so serious and how the GOP has become the party of treason.

Play! Help the lady bug collect all the stars.

For some reason this guy makes one stuffed animal each day.  Here’s a years worth.

This is a gallery of insects in mid-flight.

On the last day of “Pandemic Flu Awareness Week”, DemFromCT put up a nice overview.  I hadn’t paid as much attention to these links he provides as I probably should have.  If the subject interests you, and you have some time to learn about this stuff, this is the place to go.  The flu wiki ain’t bad either.

Rabbits are more dangerous than sharks (although admittedly less fatal).  The relative risk of shark attacks compared to other risks.  Shark attacks in perspective.

iPod Shuffle:

1. Wake Up Little Suzie (Simon and Garfunkle)
2. You're A Big Girl (Bob Dylan)
3. Shooting Star (Bob Dylan)
4. We'll Be Together (Sting)
5. They Dance Alone (Sting)
6. If You Could Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot)
7. I Know What I Know (Paul Simon)
8. The Lazarus Heart (Sting)
9. Long Way Home (Don Henley)
10. Candle In The Wind (Elton John)

Entry #683

"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite." -- Sam Levenson

Dept. of Educashun: Ask Dr. Grammar.

Buy your Mr. Suicide Bathtub Plug here.

  Wolverines singing about a bananaphone.

What the hell is this thing?

  Oh, it's a goat.

Now don’t start on me.  I didn’t write it, I only linked to it.  But this is really an astonishing blog post, whether you agree with it or not.  The comments are pretty good as well. (Thanks, Sceptica for the heads up.)

Today’s slide show is of sloths in a box (via the brilliant and adorable blogging machine that is Majikthise).

Pet Corner: Beedogs is a site dedicated to pictures of dogs dressed in bumblebee costumes.

Entry #682

Really quick one today.  Typepad had issues last night and I gotta get to work.

Watch brainwashed idiot William Kristol on Jon, trying to defend criminals.

RIP Rosa Parks.

Russian mice.

Read my latest DailyKos diary here. [Update: Link removed but Kos readers can search if you're really interested.]

Animal of the week: Red Panda.

Entry #681

Wow, another rough night of seizures for Ngazi.  Not sure which one of us will hold out longer.  Three years of missing a couple of nights sleep a week is taking its toll on me.  She’s already well over the toxic level of phenobarb and the only other meds that could help contain bromide, which she has a genetic reaction to that causes severe ataxia.  The vets are pretty much stumped.  It would kill me to give her up, but I’ve been searching for some kind of non-profit group that can care for dogs with these types of problems. This is getting too much for me to handle.  How bad can these seizures get?  Glad you asked.  She had one while sleeping in her dog crate and the corner of the crate went right through a sheetrock wall. This can go on for three or four hours at a time. Sounds fun, eh?

Movie Rating: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Depp and Del Toro were fantastic, but this flick was too weird for me.  And this is coming from a huge Terry Gilliam fan.  He really needed to tone it down a bit and focus on Thompson’s writings.  Really disappointing, although it was a lot of fun trying to identify the many cameos, some only seconds long, like Ellen Barkin, Lyle Lovett and Gary Busey.  2.3 starfish out of 5.

Creationists slapped down by the director of “March of the Penguins”.  What a bunch of clowns.

Search Results: Someone found the Biomes Blog by googling “how to find lost things”.  It brought them here.

The ten most fuel efficient cars of 2006.

Stupid quotes from the bug man.

Entry #680

Well, this is embarassing.  But I appear to be Wesley Crusher.

  Click picture for quiz.

Stuff You Should Know: How to make your own pimped out megaphone helmet.

NOAA’s sunrise/sunset calculator.

Here’s a great Kos diary on hybrid vehicles.  I own a ‘97 Pontiac Transport mini-van with 200,000 miles on it.  Don’t ever buy one.  It’s been a nightmare since year one.  For work I need a van, and one where all the backseats can be removed.  It’s a money pit but I keep it going because every year Toyota says the U.S. release of its hybrid mini-van is right around the corner.  I don’t know if this piece of junk can hang on much longer, but as soon as that hybrid hits the showrooms I’m scooping one up. 

A little piece of Dylan: She Belongs To Me (1965).

The Casselton Can Pile doesn’t look all that safe to me.

Albino Monday: Baby Aardvark.

Entry #679

This week's water tower is from Honolulu, Hawaii.

How a second grader answers a question about a questionaire. (Click on the picture to play.)

It's my birthday. It's my birthday.  How depressing.  I can't really be 41, can I?  Although it's taken all these years to find the girl of my dreams, so that's a good thing, right? (Hi, Mary.)

Demotivators.

The mock movie trailer “Shining” appears to be all the rage around the internets.  Maybe I’m slow, but I don’t get it.  Someone want to fill me in.  (And yes, I’m aware of the actual movie.)

The food chain in action.

Buy your fishing lure toilet seat here.

A great white shark, named after Nicole Kidman (Katie Holmes is giggling), traveled 7,000 miles from South Africa to Australia in just 99 days, setting a record for open water swimming by a fish.

I can’t believe it’s almost time for the Koufax Awards again.  I’ve never been nominated, but you know, that’s ok. (Last year I suggested adding a “most useless liberal site award”, to no avail.)  Anyway, give what you can to MB and Dwight.  They put a lot of work into this every year.

Entry #678

As usual, Saturday's pic stolen from Maru.

I know I posted this a while back, but it was satire.  Christopher Walken is not running for president.

Timewaster of the Week: Interactive dots.

Squirrel messenger.

The real reason why dinosaurs disappeared was because hyperhero relocated them to another planet to make room for mammals.  Get more Hyperhero silliness here.

Stuff You Should Know: How popsicles were invented.

Ten ways to make your neighbor move.

Some pretty good jokes from A Prairie Home Companion.  And you can listen to a bunch of their annual “Joke Shows” on the upper right of that page, which has been keeping me from my 2 a.m. bedtime for a few days now.  The boy has been taping these ever since since he was around ten.

This week's recipe is Pork in Gorgonzola, in the extended post below.

Entry #677

Plamegate is heating up.  Pass the popcorn, this is getting good.

And, an arrest warrant issued for Tom Delay.  This week has been like it’s my birthday.  Oh wait, it is... on Sunday.

Walking your tortoise. (Via reader Dave)

Play! the drums.

Welcome to Meteor Crater.  Check out the impact.

Dinosaur eggs resembling “pineapple-sized potatoes” are found inside a fossilized theropod skeleton.  And are birds really dinosaurs?

Talking Bacteria, and How to Shut Them Up.  mmmmm...quorum sensing.

Chavez to trigger hurricane Uncle Sam?  One more reason why this president is such a disaster.  Shame on anyone who voted for this loser in 2004.  This is your fault.

Dog owners: I could be saving you fifty bucks here.  If your dog eats a tin of ant poison, she’ll be ok.  I never knew those things were filled with peanut butter laced with insecticide.  The vet will just need to pour a quart of oil liquid charcoal down her throat.  She never saw a dog do this before, but Ngazi drank the whole quart right from a bowl.
But here’s the thing that bugged me.  I realize the vet poison control center is non-profit and needs to be funded, but say you call them in a panic and your dog is writhing on the floor possibly dying.  You have go through a credit card approval process before anyone will speak to you.  That’s crazy.  Here’s their number anyway in case you ever need it.  1-800-548-2423.
And I couldn’t find the bottom part of the tin so Ngazi had to have a stomach X-ray done as well.  Damn dog.

iPod Shuffle:

1. Take A Chance (Bob Seger)
2. Man's Job (Bruce Springsteen)
3. Don Quixote (Gordon Lightfoot)
4. City of New Orleans (Willie Nelson)
5. Visions of Johanna (Bob Dylan)
6. Man of Peace (Bob Dylan)
7. Some Say (Rascal Flats)
8. Shiny Happy People (R.E.M.)
9. Angel (John Hiatt)
10. The Boxer (Simon and Garfunkle)

Entry #676

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.  --Woody Allen

Here we go again.  Meet Wilma and learn about the relationship between gulf storms and the economics of petroleum.  Wilma update.

  How to make friends by telephone.

Pet Corner: Advice from a dog on how to clean a toilet bowl.

Bring Back Warren Harding, by Frank Rich.  The New York Times may have buried their opinion writers behind a firewall, but the internets find a way.  Via the snarky and hilarious Tbogg.

And don’t forget to use Bugmenot whenever a website requires your registration in order to access their content.

Check out this car made entirely out of legos.  Except for the wheels.

Let me just take a second to explain my motivation for this little blog.  It is basically due to my fascination with the cultural changes that have been made by the internet.  The seemingly endless pages of information, opinion, news etc. is one thing.  But what really gets me is the amount of hard work mostly anonymous and unpaid people put into commentary, wit, clever animations and movies, comics and dedications to their specific interests.
This blog has evolved, as I explain here, to where my main goal is just to have some fun, bash some corrupt republicans destroying our country, and share some of this stuff I come across with whoever cares to read it.  The response to Entry #671 is an example of what I never expected this to be (that’s not a complaint).  I love when one of my seven readers leaves a comment, but I won’t take part in an endless back and forth debate here.  There’s plenty of that on my blogroll links to keep anyone busy forever.  I read a comment by a blogger the other day stating that he feared his site was becoming “one of those silly blogs full of links with no commentary”.  Well, that’s what this is.  Just a silly little link blog.  I’ll throw stuff out there and you do with it what you want.
Several years ago, as a web newbie, I stumbled across a site called Bartcop. He was at around issue number 500 or so and I was so fascinated I spent several weeks staying up most of the night reading his site starting at the pretty inept issue #1. One of the first things I read on his site was some advice for bloggers (didn't know what that meant at the time), which was basically if you want people to come back, give them something new every day.  So that's what I do.  One post each day, every day. I've even applied it to my business site.

And when I try to edit in html, why does " " appear after every single period in a paragraph?

No post is complete without a picture, but this entry is too long as it is.  So here's a tiny image of a tiny car:

Entry #675

Animal of the Week: Nurse Shark.
This girl on the left we donated to an aquarium when she got too big for us after five years.  You'd be surprised how attached you can get to these fish.  Here's more on this species courtesy of the Baltimore Aquarium.

Morford: What God Really Told Bush.

Gore would be an idiot not to run in 2008.  I agree.  And Wes Clark should be his running mate.  This pair would be unbeatable.  He already proved he could win in 2000, and with Wes by his side, and the realization by the rational people in this country of what an unbelievable disaster flightsuit boy and his cronies and puppeteers have been for this country, we could count on real change in America.  Change that is sorely, sorely needed.

George Clooney is a proud liberal.  I forgive him now for his horrid batman movies.
[Update: Here he is on Charlie Rose's show.]

Things you do not want to hear during surgery.

Now we’re cookin’: The “Food Loop” is the first heat resistant silicone food trussing tool.

Grudge Match: James Kirk vs Han Solo.

Anyone care to bet on whether or not Wiley is a Democrat?

Entry #674

Check out this gallery of celebrities photographed with a polaroid camera.  It’s called Celebrity Portroids.

Savage Chicken is a post-it note comic per day featuring chickens.  This is his talk like a pirate day entry.

The Meat Club is a blog about meat.

Some discussion on my "Yes, I'm a Liberal" post from a few days ago on the Amazon Basin chat site.

Welcome to Wolfsong Ranch.

Stuff You Should Know: How Krispy Kremes work.

Saddam’s Revenge, by Time Magazine Online.  A hopelessly inept, corrupt and apparently brain-dead leader makes the ex-Iraqi president look intelligent.  And that’s just sad.   

Buy your clam jerky here.

Sure, my dog loves her crate.  But this is just plain weird.  Be sure to check out the babycage submission of the week.  This is a joke, right?  [Update: Yes, of course it is, Mark. You dope.]

Search Results: Someone found the Biomes Blog by yahooing “poodle aerobics”.  It brought them here. And man, a lot of people find this blog by image googling Charlize Theron.  Brings them to January’s archives for some reason, and disappointment, I’m sure.

Hurricane Katrina was the work of an angry god. Good grief.

Entry #673

You're a Velociraptor - Spunky, but you do know how to kill.
You're small, yet witty, and love to play.
Which Dromaeosaurid Are You?

Movie Rating:  Amelie is one of those films on my "must watch once a year" list.  Audrey Tautou is just beyond adorable.  An extremely rare 5 starfish out of 5 for this flick.

Congratulations! You’re an atheist.  Be sure to read the FAQ.  Too funny.

A little piece of Dylan: Not Dark Yet (1997).

DarkSyde shows us our moon in ways I’ve never thought of before.  What a great essay.

Send photos of your tinfoil hats here.

Bill O’Reilly is such scum.  Phil Donahue eviscerates him on his own show and all he can do is threaten to throw him out and try his best to out-shout him.  What a tool.

Albino Monday: Red-tailed Hawk.