Coming to Kindle and Smashwords

Coming to Kindle and Smashwords
November 2013

Mar 31, 2011

cheers.....

 
German police are concerned about an increasing number of teens who are reportedly getting drunk using vodka-soaked tampons as the alcohol delivery system. The practice is known as "slimming," a term that hit the Urban Dictionary way back in 2008. From The Local:
Police in the Baden-Württemburg city of Tuttlingen responded Tuesday to growing online chatter among teenagers that they could become intoxicated using the vodka tampons without having alcohol on their breath. This is not true, police said, denying that it was an effective way to get drunk. They also warned girls that the alcohol could damage vaginal walls and increase the risk of infection. Boys have reportedly also been using tampons anally

Mar 30, 2011

shameless merchandizing....but cool anyway

This geeky dad made a growth-chart for his daughter that allows her to log her height against Star Wars and other science fiction franchise characters. It comes as a seven-foot-tall PDF, in case your kid happens to grow to Darth Vader heights.

Mar 28, 2011

having it his way....

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I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but it looks important

Mar 26, 2011

doing his part...

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Greenham Airfield,June 5, 1944

He gives the order of the Day : 'Full victory-nothing else !' to paratroopers in England, just before they board their airplanes to participate in the first assault in the invasion of the continent of Europe.
Greenham Common Airfield in England about on June 5, 1944

Mar 25, 2011

interesting...


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A novelization of the “lost” Doctor Who serial “Shada”, scripted by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams in 1979, will be published next year, the Guardian reports:
Adams wrote three series of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, when he was in his twenties and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first airing as a BBC radio comedy. “Shada” was intended as a six-part drama to finish off the 17th season, with Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor.
The story features the Time Lord coming to Earth with assistant Romana (Lalla Ward) to visit Professor Chronotis, who has absconded from Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, and now lives quietly at Cambridge college St Cedd’s. (The Doctor: “When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn’t you, Romana?” Professor Chronotis: “Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect.”)
Chronotis has brought with him the most powerful book in the universe, The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey - which, in a typical touch of Adams bathos, turns out to have been borrowed from his study by a student. Evil scientist Skagra, an escapee from prison planet Shada, is on its trail.
Large parts of the story had already been filmed on location in Cambridge before industrial action at the BBC brought production to a halt. The drama was never finished, and in the summer of 1980 “Shada” was abandoned – although various later projects attempted to resurrect it.
Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who series are among the very few which have never been novelised, reportedly because the author wanted to do them himself but was always too busy. Gareth Roberts, a prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter, has now been given the job.
Publisher BBC Books declared the book “a holy grail” for Time Lord fans. Editorial director Albert De Petrillo said: “Douglas Adams’s serials for Doctor Who are considered by many to be some of the best the show has ever produced. Shada is a funny, scary, surprising and utterly terrific story, and we’re thrilled to be publishing the first fully realised version of this Doctor Who adventure as Douglas originally conceived it.”
Ed Victor, the literary agent representing the Douglas Adams estate, said: “The BBC have been asking us for years [to allow a novelisation of Shada] and the estate finally said, ‘Why not?’” Having Roberts novelise the Adams script was “like having a sketch on a canvas by Rubens, and now the studio of Rubens is completing it,” he added. The book will be published in March 2012 as a £16.99 hardback.
Adams died in 2001, and a posthumous collection of his work, including the unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, was published the following year. A Hitchhiker’s Guide followup, And Another Thing…., written by Eoin Colfer, was published in 2010, but Victor said there were “no plans at the moment” for more such sequels.
Bonus clip: Andrew Orton’s animation on the Daleks, inspired by Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide

Mar 21, 2011

man, that about sums it up...


John Scalzi's Epublishing Bingo card captures nearly every tedious talking point from nearly

Mar 20, 2011

should have known better...

 Www.Comicsalliance.Com Media 2011 03 Source02
DC Comics apparently shut down commenting on its blog The Source after things got ugly in a thread about an eternal question: Who runs faster, Superman or The Flash? "DC's Blog Closes Comments, Gives Up On Even Trying To Talk to You Jerks"

Mar 18, 2011

perfect


President Bush Portrait Made of Porn

At first glance this portrait of President Bush by Jonathan Yeo looks perfectly normal… and then all at once you realize that this Bush painting is actually quite NSFW.
Source

hard core....

From The Atlantic's archives, a harrowing 1961 account of a Soviet surgeon on a primitive Antarctic base who had to remove his own appendix, stopping frequently as he battled vertigo and blood loss:
I worked without gloves. It was hard to see. The mirror helps, but it also hinders -- after all, it's showing things backwards. I work mainly by touch. The bleeding is quite heavy, but I take my time -- I try to work surely. Opening the peritoneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Suddenly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn't notice them ... I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and ... At the worst moment of removing the appendix I flagged: my heart seized up and noticeably slowed; my hands felt like rubber. Well, I thought, it's going to end badly. And all that was left was removing the appendix ... And then I realised that, basically, I was already saved

Mar 16, 2011

what the hell is this?

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Armchair, 2009, mixed media, 7cm x 8cm x 8cm @Jessica Harrison. Courtesy of the artist.

The use of what seems like the corporal as material is shocking and allows us to reconsider our relationships with the familiar. Take, for example, an armchair

finally, something to wear with my summer weight seersucker.....


A bookmaker called Betfair has released a line of synthetic hoof-shoes as a charity fundraiser. They cost £1,300 a pair, and sport carbon fibre hooves with horsehair uppers.

Mar 14, 2011

very cool....

cuban-cigar-sandwich.jpg They made a Cuban pork sandwich that looks like a Cuban cigar. "We take the spices that go into the pork shoulder and fashion that into ash," said Cantu." We take the sandwich and wrap it up into a collard green" and add an edible cigar band. "We put it in a $1.99 ashtray and charge you about 20 bucks for it."

Mar 13, 2011

does anyone doubt that this dude does some strange sh** late at night when his blinds are drawn...

powerofthewill.gifConservative pundit George Will offered a remarkable turn of phrase in his analysis of presidential candidate Mick Huckabee's recent political dog-whistling.
...sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party. The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won the 2008 Republican caucuses in Iowa and reached that year's national convention with more delegates than Mitt Romney, and who might run again.

Mar 9, 2011

got to love this guy, for sheer balls if nothing else...

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Of course it was, Newt. We’re all that fucking stupid…
Watch in amazement as cretinous, hypocritical blow-hard Newt tries to wiggle out of his past—and widely known—“indiscretions” with this ridiculously preposterous, transparently obvious attempt to connect with Christian votes on CBN. Where else does a Republican sinner go for absolution?
“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich. “And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.
“I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God. Somebody once said that when we’re young, we seek justice, but as we get older, we seek mercy. There’s something to that, I think.
“I feel that I’m now 67 I’m a grandfather. I have two wonderful grandchildren. I have two wonderful daughters and two great sons in law. Callista and I have a great marriage. I think that I’ve learned an immense amount. And I do feel, in that sense, that God has given me, has blessed me with an opportunity as a person.”
What a complete farce. This man’s unbelievable (in every sense) hubris is a gift to the nation’s comedians and satirists. The only good thing—besides the yucks—of a Newt Gingrich candidacy is that he’ll be soaking up political donation$ on the right with his no-hope presidential run.
 


Via TPM

cool....



Mar 8, 2011

tough economy


Pawel Hynek's 2006 image "Obsolete" depicts a homeless robot begging for electrical power; it's striking and funny as well as a little uncomfortable-making. It reminds me of one of the most demented scenes in science fiction history: the moment in Ian McDonald's stupendous novel The Broken Land in which a re-animated severed head is reduced to performing sexual favors on a street-corner in exchange for nutrient bath to fill the shallow dish in which its neck-stump rests.
Obsolete (via JWZ)

Mar 7, 2011

America is not broke.

Picture of US Flag - Free Pictures - FreeFoto.com
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke.
Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
 
  Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic—and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it

                                                                              Michael Moore

I don't think I like this....

Alcon Entertainment, producers of the Blind Side and The Book of Eli, own the rights to make a prequel or sequel to Blade Runner. They seemingly haven't gotten much further than that. From Entertainment Weekly:
 Files 9Bnzzeukaxdrodekqltopetptit*Vbuq6*Ufgodsfucyrlf0M2Etybjaaiizgzps*Xwa7P2Brwj4Ewj57Fjsheortlfbswh2 Rutgerhauer-2 “We have some ideas that we’re not in a position to discuss yet,” Andrew Kosove, Alcon’s co-CEO, teases to EW. “But from our point of view, the thematic core of the original movie — what does it mean to be a human being? — is even more relevant today than it was when the film came out. After all, we’re living in the industrial age of technology.” Kosove and his fellow CEO, Broderick Johnson, are partnering on the project with Bud Yorkin, one of the producers of the original film. “That picture turned out so well — it’s just been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress — that for a long time I was afraid to try to make another one,” Yorkin says. “But now seems like the perfect time. We just need to find the right writer and director

Mar 6, 2011

well said....


As always, Mr Stewart puts it into perspective -- the same people who object to limiting the tax-funded bonuses of bailed out bankers because it would violate their contracts say that teachers' contracts should be torn up and their benefits slashed.

Mar 5, 2011

I love crazy...

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The ratings for Glenn Beck’s nightly Fox News conspiracy theory rants are still taking a Nielsen nosedive. I’m not going to go out on a limb again and say Beck’s “over” because he rallied the very next day after I did it the last time and I just had to take it all back. So I’ll simply point out what James Downie wrote in The New Republic:
Beck, says [biographer Alexander] Zaitchik, was caught “in a vicious circle”: To keep viewers coming back, he had to keep creating new, more intricate theories. Last November, in a two-part special that indirectly invoked anti-Semitism, he accused liberal Jewish financier George Soros of orchestrating the fall of foreign governments for financial gain. During the Egyptian Revolution, Beck sided with Hosni Mubarak, alleging that his fall was “controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Beck is now warning viewers not to use Google, accusing the search-engine giant of “being deep in bed with the government.” In recent months, it seems, Beck’s theories became so outlandish that even conservatives—both viewers and media personalities—were having a hard time stomaching them. Now, each new idea appears to be costing Beck both eyeballs and credibility. “At some point,” says Boehlert, “it doesn’t add up any more.”
Yep, at this point even the very dumbest people watching Beck’s show have probably realized that Van Jones and obscure magazine articles written in 1965 don’t have shit to do with anything.
“It’s hard to gain a million viewers,” says Eric Boehlert, of Media Matters, in the article, “but it’s really hard to lose a million viewers.”
Worse still, for Beck’s, uh, fortunes, as Adam Weinsten points out on the Mother Jones blog today (quoting “The Wrap” an entertainment trade blog):
In January, [Beck’s] FNC show averaged 1.76 million total viewers during the 5 p.m. hour, according to Nielsen estimates—down 39 percent compared to January 2010.
And he scored just 397,000 viewers in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic, a 48 percent slide.
February did not show much improvement. Through Feb. 27 his Fox show is down 26 percent in total viewers for the year (2.06 million compared to 2.89 million last year) and off 30 percent in the demo, averaging 501,000 25-to-54-year-olds vs. 760,000 last year.
But dig what this implies about the, er, vintage of his viewers:
Here’s the salient fact: Less than one-quarter of Beck’s viewers are ages 25 to 54. Assuming the number of youngs who watch him is negligible—a pretty safe assumption, I think—that means that dang near to 80 percent of his viewership is in or around senior-citizen territory. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the olds like Beck. But it gets me wondering: Who exactly makes up that 25 to 54 demographic

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Icecreamists, an ice-cream parlour in London's Covent Garden, is selling human breast milk ice-cream for £14 a scoop. The breastmilk is purchased from lactating mothers, and the product (called "Baby Gaga") is intended to raise awareness of breastmilk's deliciousness and encourage more breastfeeding. The milk is pasteurised and flavoured with lemon zest and vanilla pods.
"Some people will hear about it and go yuck - but actually it's pure organic, free-range and totally natural." Mrs Hiley, who gets £15 for every 10 ounces of milk she donates to the company, said it was a great "recession beater".
"What's the harm in using my assets for a bit of extra cash?" she added.
"I teach women how to get started on breastfeeding their babies. There's very little support for women and every little helps."
Mr O'Connor said health checks for the lactating women were the same used by hospitals to screen blood donors

Mar 4, 2011

hmmmm....., beats recycling

Glass Eaten With Secret Fluid (Jun, 1931)



Glass Eaten With Secret Fluid
EATING light bulbs, bottles and tumblers with relish is the amazing feat performed by “Professor” Paul Owen, of New York City. The secret of his performance lies in a fluid which he swallows to render his intestines immune to cuts by the