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Insurance company execs are the real victims of health care reform. Watch Will Ferrell and friends make the case.
Garrison Keillor discusses his recent stroke and facing up to his mortality in “My Great Escape”.
Ten items that went down with the Titanic.
Hump Day musical interlude:
Watch a big UCLA squirrel help a little UCLA squirrel over a wall.
There’s a town in Spain that’s built under a rock.
Stuff you should know: Monkeys recognize bad grammar.
Tuesday Coonhound Blogging: Fall's coming. Click to embiggen.
This picture of the Horsehead Nebula is the 2009 winning entry for astronomy photo of the year.
Today’s long read is Esquire’s old piece on what twenty bucks will get you.
Tactical canned bacon will still be edible in ten years.
Brad Reed (of Sadly, No!) takes a look at the fast food industry’s seven most heinous concoctions. I never would have imagined that the number one food on this list is actually real. It is.
Albino Monday: A brook trout, sent in by somebody (claim it if it's you.)
This week’s Green Thing is square foot gardening.
Sticklebacks show human-like intelligence when searching for food.
Buy your anti-theft lunch bags here. They make your sandwiches look moldy to potential food thieves.
Morford: Down with Crab Cakes! Ban Whole Foods!
The ten most historically inaccurate movies according to Times Online, How Stuff Works and Yahoo News.
Today’s slide show is of the winners of the 2004 “small world” microphotography contest .
Pet Corner: Beware of Dog signs in Nepal are usually hand-painted. Here’s a photo collection of them.
Here’s a niche blog called the dullest blog in the world.
Out of bounds photos are pretty cool.
Movie Rating: U-turn.
You don't see a lot of good modern film noir, but this story of a loner (Sean Penn) getting stuck in a really odd little desert town while on his way to pay off a mob debt, is full of all kinds of plot twists and weird characters. Oliver Stone directed this one. 3.5 starfish out of 5. Here's Ebert's take.
Geek Stuff: Stormtoopers reminisce about the death star.
Cool Site of the Week: Disney/Marvel mashups.
iPod Shuffle:
Bad Astronomy has some amazing photos of the sun.
Animal of the Week: Argentine ant mega-colony takes over the world.
Tink's on the board with yesterday's trivia answer. It's a ring-tailed coatis.
Watch the incredible mimic octopus.
Meet the black squirrel. I photographed one at the Bronx Zoo a few years ago.
Trivia (10 Biomes points): Name this animal. Clicking makes it big.
Watch the Big Dog in a three-part interview on Jon Stewart’s show.
Ten incredible early firsts in photography.
The Eclipse is the world’s biggest yacht.
Hump Day musical interlude: "Walking in Memphis" by Marc Cohn, with Cher.
World Carfree Day is a good idea, but I won’t be participating. I have a job to get to and they don’t allow horseshoe crabs on the bus.
Stuff You Should Know: Why athletes use black grease under their eyes.
Now we’re cookin’: The hot dog strikes back is a new form of unpleasant food art created by inserting dry spaghetti into hot dogs and boiling them.
Tuesday Coonhound Blogging: This photo of Creole at work isn't all that remarkable, except that it shows a new behavior I thought was kind of funny. There aren't any soft places to lay down in my building, so she pulls towels down off the shelves and spreads them out on the floor with her paws.
Learn about Belle Starr.
Bacon has jumped the shark.
A Japanese company has invented a battery that you recharge with your urine.
Albino Monday: Another hummer.
Top ten ways to master your grill.
Blame It On the Voices has a collection of celebrity photographs taken before they were famous.
Morford: All depression to end by 2025.
If you want to listen to music while you sleep you can buy your sound asleep pillow here.
You’ll be swarin' some of these pencil drawings be photographs.
Pirates make lousy dry cleaners.
A scurvy dog. More chicken pirates here, as Doug Savage tackles this holiday wi' a wannion.
In case you haven't noticed, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day once again. Yarrrr.
Only eight months 'er ye picaroons can Talk Like a Pilot. Tally ho, matey.
Learn about pirate ships.
Cool Site of the Week: Interesting and bizarre predatory animal defenses.
"Why did God let my kitten die?", and answers to other tricky questions that kids ask.
Play! Red Remover.
Geek Stuff: John Scalzi’s guide to the most epic fails of Star Wars designs.
iPod Shuffle:
Animal of the Week: The myrmrachne, an ant-mimicking jumping spider.
T. got yesterday's trivia right. It's a potato fungus called "blight". It's what caused the Irish potato famine of the 1840's.
September's architectural eyesore of the month.
Here are all thirteen natural bridges with spans of 200 feet or more.
Trivia (3 Biomes points): What’s this showing?
If you need a gotta go briefcase you’re working way too much.
The Boy just installed Snow Leopard on my Mac. I don’t notice much of a difference. Here’s one caught in a camera trap in Afghanistan.
Watch the six and a half minute National Geographic story about Apollo 11, the true story of the lunar landing.
Hump Day musical interlude: "Sweet Jane" by the Cowboy Junkies.
Now we're cookin': A friend gave me some striped eggplant he grew and it made an incredible eggplant parmesan that took me three hours to make last night. I used this recipe from epicurious, and even though it calls for five pounds of plum tomatoes, it still isn't quite enough.
Tuesday Coonhound Blogging: Creole with the striped eggplant. Click to embiggen.
Like the velociraptors in Jurrasic Park weren’t scary enough as predators, now it appears they ambushed prey from above by climbing trees.
You can rent the Pedal Pub. It’s slow fun.
Stuff you should know: It has now been scientifically proven that vampires could not exist.
Today’s long read is how economists got it all wrong, by Krugman.
Learn about a hundred different ways to use a strip of bacon.
Normally Friday is movie rating day around here, but I'll make an exception for Julie and Julia, which is easily the best film I've seen this year. Meryl Streep is jaw dropping as Julia Child and the movie combines cooking and blogging, possibly my two favorite pastimes. 4.5 starfish out of 5. Watch this clip and tell me Streep's not awesome in this role. Here's Ebert's take.
Picking up on what Mark Morford said in his piece I linked to yesterday, this study shows that the internet has actually increased literacy.
Albino Monday: Meet Frosti the albino squirrel.
This week’s Green Thing is a list of eight innovative green buildings.
There are some places in the world where you can live comfortably on $500 a month.
Morford: Jesus fears your Facebook profile.
Ten stunning photo blogs.
Buy your doll that looks like you here.
Cat ladder is a niche blog about cat ladders found all around the world.
Test your knowledge of African countries.
Pet Corner: Bunny twinzes.
Today’s slide show is a photo essay about the 100-year-old planned community called Forest Hills Gardens in NYC.
Geek Stuff: Here's a bit of a math forum exchange I stumbled upon.
The world’s tallest man is 8’ 5.5”, and he just got a bike.
Movie Rating: Inglourious Basterds.
This movie is a lot of fun. I think only Tarantino could pull off a funny movie about Nazis. Brad Pitt is good as usual, but the highlight performance is the SS officer played by Christoph Waltz. You can watch some clips here. 4.0 starfish out of 5.
Joel corrects me in comments on the last post. It’s not Japanese hibachi, although that’s what the restaurant calls it. It’s teppanyaki. Here’s a demo.
iPod Shuffle:
