Biomes Blog

Entry #717

Animal of the Week: Scarlet Macaw.  This is its native range.

Now we're cookin': Green eggs and ham recipes.

If you're on Long Island, don't miss The Velvet Blog's Jim D performing at the Eclectic Cafe.

Need a job? Don't use a Mac.  (Unless you're a teacher.  I visit a lot of schools and I've never seen a PC in a classroom.) Macs rock, by the way.  Personally, I would never use anything else.

Buy your happy chair here.

Stuff You Should Know: Eight email mistakes that make you look bad.

Google's Blog discusses the practice of googlebombing.  They use miserable failure as an example.  Or failure.  Or a combination of miserable and failure.  For example if you google the word failure or miserable failure it brings up the results you see (when you type in failure or miserable failure).  Google Blog states that it does not approve of googlebombing phrases such as failure or miserable failure.  Please avoid googlebombing the words failure or miserable failure in the future.

Chief Moose's fan page.  This kid sure doesn't think chief Moose is a failure.

Entry #716

Search Results: Someone found the Biomes Blog by googling "Roberto Bessin".  He's a friend of mine and a very talented sculptor.  On the left are some herons he made and posed on top of the 140 year-old dam remains next to the Biomes Center.  Here's him working on his giant 40 foot tall heron, on display on the north fork of Long Island.

See the winners of the Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographers of the year (via Apostropher).

Dept. of Educashun: DarkSyde learns you all about viruses.

Try out Don’t Let Go.

More Search Results: Someone found the Biomes Blog by googling “Ballmer motivation speech”.  It brought them here.

Movie Rating: Showgirls.
Well, it took me a few years to finally get around to seeing this, expecting an Ed Wood-like experience of one of those so-bad-it’s-funny films.  Don’t even bother.  It was awful, and shows just why Elizabeth Berkley’s career is now nowhere to be found.  .7 starfish out of 5.

Morford: Bush Gives Me Hope.

Entry #715

Remember that video I posted (Entry #697 ) of the guy who walked through a pane of glass?  Check this out.  Here’s a pretty good explanation of how he did it.

“But congress voted to go to war.”  This statement makes my teeth soft everytime I hear it.  It’s not true.  I’ll let aged gouda explain.

I never thought I’d say this, but I almost, sort of agree with normally clueless Charles Krauthammer.  Phony Theory, False Conflict.

This is Alaska Airline’s “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon” jet.

If you’re going to try to convert an animal to christianity, start with an otter or hedgehog or something.

Kurt Vonnegut turned 83 a couple of weeks ago.  Celebrate the Backwards City way.

Found photos features abandoned film developed up to fifty years later.

A little piece of Dylan: Heart of Mine (1981).

Entry #714

This week's water tower is made of stone and can be found in the town of Beloit, Wisconsin.

Actual email responses from the Kansas school board on the open letter from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (see Entry #709 below).

  Buy your really expensive tea picked by trained monkeys here.

Bad news for Brazilian rainforests.

Draft Al Gore for President in 2008.  We really need this guy to clean up the horrible mess left by this corrupt, incompetent bunch of goons running this country.  Sign the petition.

Pseudoscience on the Farm.

Cool Site of the Week: What Time Is It? is yet another tool courtesy of google maps.  Click anywhere on the world map and it will give you the local time there.

Here are my website efficiency results, according so some web development experts of some kind.  Holy crap, it claims that 16,500 sites link to me. That can’t be right. Although apparently I’m violating some kind of legal code in Great Britain. Check yours here.

Entry #713

Stuff You Should Know:  The invention of the slinky.

Stuff I should have known: Grace Kelly married into the royal family of Monaco, not Morocco, which is really embarrassing to bring up in a conversation with a Moroccan exchange student during Thanksgiving dinner. Doh! Too bad, really, since I always imagined her hanging out at Rick's Cafe Americain.

Thousands of Sci-Fi book covers by Krazydad.

Timewaster of the Week: Some kind of chain reaction game.  I maxed out at 1328, but really didn’t waste much time on this.

Today’s slide show features the puppy purse.

Take the face memory test.  My results were 100% recognition score and 91% temporal memory score.

Nicely done.  Will Ferrell plays Bush trying to explain global warming. Funny stuff.

Ngazi update: 13 days without a seizure.  I think that’s a record.

If you have a brother who lives in the city and hasn't owned a car in 18 years, medicate him heavily before taking him on as a passenger for holiday road trips.  Jeez.  The Boy, over at Agahnim's Shadow, has some analysis.  In my defense, I've been driving for 25 years and have never been in an accident*.

*that was my fault.

Entry #712

Well, actually some stuff happened. Elsewhere.

I like John Cusack, but as Hoffmania points out, the website for his new movie, “The Ice Harvest”, is an absolute mess.

Play! The Fruit Game.  I keep losing.

Rock balancing, with video.  How the heck does he do that?

Movie Rating: From Toy Story to The Incredibles, I normally enjoy recent animated films.  But Ice Age was just lame.  1.9 starfish out of 5.

This must have been a fun little get together.  Topics included “God said it, and that settles it” and “Jesus rode a dinosaur”.  Nearly 50% of Americans believe the earth is only six thousand years old.  There is something seriously wrong with the education system in this country.

A note from Joe Wilson.

Today’s slide show is The Other Side Of The Coin, a heartbreaking appeal to help stop children from dying in poverty.

If Fox News had been around throughout history.  Love the last one.

iPod Shuffle:

1. Pink Bedroom (John Hiatt)
2. Trudy (Charlie Daniels Band)
3. Mrs. Robinson (Simon and Garfunkle)
4. She Moves On (Paul Simon)
5. House Of The Rising Sun (Bob Dylan)
6. Blind Love (Bob Seger)
7. Lousiana Lou and Three Card Monty John (Allman Brothers)
8. Slip Slidin' Away (Paul Simon)
9. San Fransisco Days (Chris Isaak)
10. I Can See It Now (Mary Chapin Carpenter)

Entry #711

Cousin Patty, Queen of Thanksgiving, insists I do the Chinese dumplings again this year.  Here's the recipe from last year's Thanksgiving Day post. [Update: This year I omitted the shrimp and water chestnuts and added a half tsp of hot bean paste. I also added a bit of beef broth to the chicken stock, which darkened the dumplings up a bit. Apparently commenter Scorpio made these but left out the ginger root in his dipping sauce. Blasphemy.]

I Will Survive, sung by a disco turkey.

Morford: A very Bush Thanksgiving.

Flightsuit Boy at a mid-1980’s wedding of a family friend.  Only in ‘merica.
(Included to help you with your diet.  If you can watch this on turkey day and still keep your food down, you deserve to gain weight.)

Entry #710

Forty Faces is kinda cool.  Once you submit your photo and url, they keep track of the forty bloggers who have posted most recently.

Today in History: In 1935 Ethel Leginska (1886-1970) became the first woman to write an opera.  In 1970 she was killed when struck by lightning.  Her epitaph: "Even God found her a good conductor".

What have liberals ever done for us?  Answer: Just about everything.

Another reason for protecting biodiversity.

60 minutes on “traitorgate”. Via Onegoodmove.

Buy your internet urinal here.

Return of the Jedi in only 211 kb.

Here.  Let me ruin Thanksgiving for you.  You’re welcome.

Entry #709

This is pretty funny. President clueless tries to open a prop door after a press conference in China.
Here's the video.

Buy your Monty Python killer rabbit plush doll here.

 Pink Five Strikes Back.  Dialup users move along, nothing to see here.

Search Results: Someone found the Biomes Blog by googling “VP Quayle”.  It brought them here.

The physics of extra-terrestrial civilizations.

The top 100 toys of the 70’s and 80’s.  I must have been a deprived kid.  I went through all of them and I owned only five  (including their #1, a bike, which really isn’t a toy.)

So, there’s this game show in Japan where girls strap pork chops to their foreheads and stick their heads into a monitor lizard’s cage.  Here’s a clip.

God listens to the prayers of deer hunters. Amen.

Open letter to the Kansas school board from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (I’m a member, by the way, having been touched by His Noodly Appendage).

Entry #708

So, I just sent an email time capsule to my 46-year-old self. It's a relationship-based prediction. I hope my future spam filter doesn't discard it.

Today’s slide show was put together by The Boy using photos he took at the Star Wars exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science.  Apparently he has inherited my lame sense of humor.

Staten Island’s boat graveyard.

Albino Monday: Sea Lion.

Entry #707

This week's basket-o-apples water tower is found in Mount Jackson, Virginia.

  Join the Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa Foundation.

Mansel Island sea forts (via Dan).

How to keep a healthy level of insanity at your workplace.

The Boy's loaded up the old movies he made of some of my animals onto one page.  We'll be redoing all of these next month in high res now that he's getting to be a bigshot film maker in the world of High School, and these old efforts are way too amature for him now.  He also wants to do the dubbing since my voice is "too pathetic for quality filming".  Nice...although he's probably right.   (Graham's isn't big on the whole tact thing.)

Help protect polar bears, although simply voting for Democrats would do more.

Happy birthday Selma Lagerlof (1858), the first female to win the Nobel prize for literature.

Cool Site of the Week: Bob Dylan’s clothesline saga.

Entry #706

Overworked Japanese businessmen.  Man, my life’s a breeze compared to these guys.

Timewaster of the Week: Play with an eye.

Here’s the Deuling Banjos scene from the movie Deliverance.

(Sat. image from Maru.)

Dept. of Educashun: Alaska timeline.

Maybe we should just open ANWR after all.  This is how the alternative fuel “biogas” is produced.

Breakdancing with fingers.  You know, if you’re going to share a video of yourself doing something stupid with the whole world, at least straighten up your bedroom a bit first.

Send a virtual greeting to your favorite chocolate lover.

Day late iPod Shuffle:

1. Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight (James Taylor, live)
2. Watered-Down Love (Bob Dylan)
3. Homeward Bound (Simon and Garfunkle)
4. To Find A Friend (Tom Petty)
5. Seven Days (Sting)
6. The End Of The Innocence (Don Henley)
7. Flesh and Bone (Jimmy Buffett)
8. One Of These Nights (The Eagles)
9. Brilliant Mistake (Elvis Costello)
10. Your Bright Baby Blues (Jackson Browne)

Entry #705

Happy 175th Birthday Harriet the tortoise.  Supposedly she was collected by Charles Darwin in 1835.

Play! Mastercards (concentration with paintings).

Buy your illuminated bathtubs here.

DVD Rating: The Awful Truth.
I’ve just watched season one of Micheal Moore’s short run series, and if you aren’t moved by how much this guy cares about people and this country, then there is something seriously wrong with you.  I admit it was a pretty lousy format for his talents, but moving none the less. 3.7 starfish out of 5.

Take the polling point poll, and check out how your views correspond to those of about 40,000 other web users.  (you can skip personal info when they ask.)

Stuff You Should Know: How to knit a representation of your digestive system.

Maybe this whole ribbon magnet thing is getting a bit out of hand, ya think?

How to transmute the elements by engineering the geometry of standing waves.  Don’t even bother clicking.  I have no clue what this guy is talking about.

Entry #704

Lots of reading here, so I'll stay away from the usual silliness.

Once again, DarkSyde says what I would say if I actually knew how to write.  “What it’s Like to be an Atheist”. And part II, “Why I am an Atheist”, where he may wrongly be accused of utilizing the Chewbacca Defense.
These essays are followed by a very good, thoughtful rebuttal by a theist.  Take it away Pastordan.

Morford: On Bill O’Reilly.

Well, ok.  A little bit of silliness. A message to Bush from Van Morisson, 1967.  Prescient.

Entry #703

Animal of the Week: Black Gray Squirrel, like those I mentioned Monday. Listen to a song about one:  Vicky in Victoria Park.

Lumpy squirrels, caused by a botfly, is grossly fascinating.

What Have We Become?, By Cenk Uygur of the Huffington Post, who is fast becoming one of my favorite bloggers.

One hundred things we don’t know.

Now we’re cookin’:  The invention of the potatoe* chip.

Here’s another speech by Gore, this one from back in May 2004 (it’s referred to commonly as the “how dare they” speech).  I actually watched this whole thing online at the time and it was the first time I was actually blown away by the oratory skills of this man.  I’ve always liked him, but man, this was one good lecture.

The conservative divide: Neo-con/stupid vs the religious right/brainwashed.

Ouch! That’s gotta sting.  The New York Times comes out swinging.

We’re all about the tasteful humor here at the BB.  But.... I dare you to watch the farting preacher and not have to wipe tears of laughter from your eyes.