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This week’s Green Thing is a collection of environmentally friendly cardboard custom designed coffins.
In case you missed Obama’s convention speech on Thursday, here’s the whole thing.
Another example of corporate welfare, which should get conservatives screaming with rage “let the markets work!!1!”, but won’t. I believe in capitalism, which is why for the foreseeable future I’ll be buying Toyotas. Also, since this article came out the figure has doubled.
Watch Duck Soup’s mirror scene.
Stuff you should know: How to detoxify yourself. 101 tips to remove the poisons from your body and your life.
That polar bears are being increasingly spotted many miles from shore, searching for ice flows that are no longer there, isn’t just a climate change myth.
Today’s slide show is of some very funky office furniture designs by Tom Spina. Like this Han Solo in carbonite desk.
Stuff You Should Know: Landing sites on the moon.
Meet some Italians who have been driving the same car for a long, long time.
The thirty creepiest trees on earth.
Tuesday coonhound blogging: Creole having fun with the camera. I posted this last week, but tell me this isn't a gorgeous hound.
Watch a message by Joe Biden. I’ve decided that I’m going to use this month’s google check, which should be around $200, to send to the Obama/Biden campaign via this link. Anyone who matches me gets ten Biomes points.
Get your free Obama/Biden bumper sticker here.
Meet Eldon McSmith.
Ten stunning bridges from around the world.
Ten things you can clean in your dishwasher besides dishes.
Top ten water wasters: From washing dishes to watering deserts.
Ten exotic fruits you’ve probably never tried. I’m 0 for 10 here.
Ten internet memes that people ended up hating.
Ten things people do with their first cup of coffee.
Ten odd-looking marine creatures.
Ten things you didn’t know about Harry Houdini.
Ten machines to avoid at the gym.
Ten weirdest U.S. museums.
This week's Green Thing is my new hummingbird/butterfly garden, which has finally been cleared, with some non-attracting plants saved for now. From left to right (click for an embiggened pop-up window): Morning glory on the trellis and birdfeeder, black-eyed susans, behind susan is a newly planted butterfly bush, next to that a cluster of mums, and some red bee balm. In the center is my kitchen herb garden which the mint has completely taken over and killed everything else. This will be dug out and started over with new herbs next week. In the back corner is a volkswagon beetle, an unidentified shrub-like tree that I pruned way back this spring and below this is a rose bush and some vinca groundcover. Next is a new hibiscus in front of the butterfly house, which the monarchs have been checking out all week. Finally, a watering can and a young rose-of-sharon. I'm hoping to add a ladybug house this fall.
I'm satisfied, but not ecstatic, with Obama's veep pick. I was pulling for Wes Clark, but I just realized that I hadn't seen anybody mention Howard Dean as a possible candidate, which would have been a very cool surprise. Nobody claimed the 25 Biomes points from my V.P. contest last week.
Markos’ reaction to the Biden announcement.
John and Cindy McCain and their finances.
This weekend is my first official fundraiser in nearly five years of blogging (all you have to do is click the ad at the top right), and it figures that google's adsense page has been down since Friday night. So I have no idea how we're doing. I'll update once they get their act together.
[Update]: Adsense is back up. I was hoping for 50 ad clicks over the whole weekend, but we got 58 in the first twenty-four hours. Thanks everyone.
[Update II]: The boy just informed me that my agreement with google included a clause that I not ask readers to click on the ads. Oops. Please disregard my request to click the ad. You know, the one on the top right of this page. Leave it to my son to be the only person in the universe to read the fine print of an advertisement contract.
My Marine Life Series on Daily Kos this week is Exploring the Surface of an Asteroid.
Joker interrogation scene from Batman.
Play! The Accent Game. People from around the world are taped reciting a line from Kipling. Guess where they are from based on their accent. I was pretty bad at this and only scored 20 points, including a few bonus points based just on luck.
R.I.P. Sandy Allen. At 7’7”, she was the world’s tallest woman.
I'm going to try a fundraiser this weekend. I'm not asking for donations or to buy anything from my Amazon wish list. All I ask is that you click on the ad on the top right corner of this page. I'm getting a small check from Google at the end of the month and I'd like to see if I can get 50 clicks for the weekend to give it a boost. Maybe I can make a credit card payment with the proceeds. I should have around seven or eight hundred hits over the next two days, so all I'm asking for is fifty clicks. Let's see how we do.
Timewaster of the Week: Click the kitty.
How about purchasing your very own supply of holy water?
The 14 lb pearl and other world record gems.
Someone put this sweet photo set together on Flicker, called “Skyplay”.
Scientific American has an update on plug-in cars.
I never knew that back in the 1930’s there was almost a new state formed called Absaroka.
Send a Phreeting to your friends. It’s pretty easy to use, just type in a keyword and it will give you a choice of photos. Drag the pic and type in your message and send it to whoever you want. I tried it out and sent this test to myself.
Today’s slide show consists of 186 beautiful photographs taken in North Pennines, England by a guy walking his dog. Click on slide show in the top right corner.
Someday, hopefully a long time from now, when I get that diagnosis from my doctor that everyone dreads, I'll handle my fate as well as Randy Pausch. He died in July and this is his last lecture as a Carnagie Mellon Professor.
Tuesday Coonhound Blogging: Creole in front of my work-in-progress hummingbird/butterfly garden. (Click to embiggen.)
“The way you deal with your coonhound’s slobber can perhaps be the most telling way of how you handle your everyday problems, after all he is your best friend.” --Thomas Jefferson
Myth-busting momisms. Don’t believe everything your mother told you.
Stuff you should know: Twenty ways to come up with amazing ideas.
Banana skins in urban landscapes.
You’ll be slightly less foolish-looking on Toyota’s new Winglet than you would be on a Segway.
Meet Cooter Obama, Barack’s long-lost hillbilly half-brother.
Newsweek interviews Woody Allen.
Woody Allen cuts his banana into seven slices each morning. Six slices, or eight, and something bad might happen. "I know it would be total coincidence if I didn't slice it into seven pieces, and my family were killed in a fire," he says. "I understand that there could be no correlation, but, you know, the guilt would be too much for me to bear, so it's easier for me to cut the stupid banana."
Because Republicans favor massive welfare givaways, the top welfare kings in the nation are raising ten times more money for McCain than for Obama.
Fly-swatter 1:1000. Using a fly swatter gives the human a huge upperhand. This one has a hole the size and shape of a fly in the middle of it. Now the fly has a (small) chance to survive.
Cool Site of the Week: Look at tiny grains of sand.
Albino Monday: Alligator.
This week’s Green Thing is my greendex score, which is 54. Calculate yours here.
The lives of elevators. Here's the video of the guy who is featured in this article who was trapped in the McGraw-Hill building's elevator for 41 hours.
What elevators can teach us about superstition.
Stuff You Should Know: How to do time-lapse photography. This is way too much work for me to bother with.
Morford: The end of the SUV.
“Ah, the Hummer H2. Has any consumer product embodied our misguided arrogance better? The ridiculous scale, the horrible handling, the crappy build quality, the contemptible road manners, the false machismo, the Cro-Magnon design, the ability to traverse 60-degree rockslides in a hurricane even though all you ever really needed to do was run over those little concrete bumps in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”
