original action
with Thousands of english aromatic pornstars
with pretty fannies Eglin Air Force Base

I'm a little intimidated by the thought of aromatic porn stars, and I'm really not sure how Eglin Air Force Base fits into it all, but the combination amuses me mightily for some reason. The actual text of the message continues on in a supposed English accent...

Ello!
How are you?
Looking for pretty anals of grand darlings?
Often updated private pictures with prime portugal brunettes.
Lovely possibility.
Huge quantity of Look at their bubbies!

I can just hear someone saying all that in a very chipper sort of voice.

Ta!

For every problem,
there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.

~Henry Louis Mencken


The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.

~James Yorke


You have your way. I have my way.
As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way,
it does not exist.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Do whatever you will,
but first be such as are able to will.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Ok, Verizon just pissed me off again, closely enough to the last time they pissed me off, that I'm researching other carriers. I like some things about Verizon - they don't have the holes in their coverage that Sprint has, for example, especially in the areas where I spend the most time. But their overage charges are absurd, and upgrading my plan means switching to a plan that doesn't suit me any better than my current one does.

Bring on the advice. Who do you recommend?

Shouldn't that be rediscover...? In any event, check out the article, and the link to the wikipedia article on girih, for some examples of the patterns. They're pretty.

"Medieval Islamic artisans seem to have developed a procedure for creating jigsawlike mosaics that ultimately led them to an exotic pattern that mathematicians would discover nearly half a millennium later. Researchers report that 15th-century buildings in Iran feature tiles arranged in a so-called quasicrystal, which is symmetric but does not repeat itself regularly.

Medieval Islamic mosques, palaces and other buildings were routinely covered in ornate tile work, called girih, that inscribes stars and other shapes. [....]The shapes of the tiles actually appear on a 15th-century Islamic scroll documenting architectural practices. They note that the tiles seem to have come into use as early as the 12th century to make regularly repeating, or periodic, patterns. But by the 15th century, artisans, perhaps driven to increasingly complex artistic feats, seem to have reached a new level of sophistication.

In particular, the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, which dates to A.D. 1453, is covered in a symmetric pattern of pentagons and 10-sided stars. If extended indefinitely in all directions, the researchers say, it would never repeat itself - the hallmark of a quasicrystal."

"Islamic Artisans Constructed Exotic Nonrepeating Pattern 500 Years Before Mathematicians," by JR Minkel
February 22, 2007, sciam.com

Correcting a myth I was taught many times, and have repeated myself, here's a bit of an article from Scientific American. I formatted the quote for clarity & ease of reading, rather than propriety of citations. However, the entire article, with a more complete explanation of the chemistry being discussed, is here)

"In medieval European cathedrals, the glass sometimes looks odd. Some panes are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top. The seemingly solid glass appears to have melted. This is evidence, say tour guides, Internet rumors and even high school chemistry teachers, that glass is actually a liquid. And, because glass is hard, it must be a supercooled liquid.

Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid -supercooled or otherwise- nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid - a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.

For practical purposes, glass is like a solid, although a disorganized one. Like liquids, these disorganized solids can flow, albeit very slowly. Whatever flow glass manages, however, does not explain why some antique windows are thicker at the bottom. It would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted."

"Fact or Fiction?: Glass Is a (Supercooled) Liquid," by Ciara Curtin
February 22, 2007, sciam.com

This one's for dbmyrrha...

Rabbit the bunny a hare-raising fire hero.

The full article, Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain, is about twice the length of the quote below.

"Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular mental limitation, which has to do with our ability to use a mental trait known as executive function. When you focus on a specific task for an extended period of time or choose to eat a salad instead of a piece of cake, you are flexing your executive function muscles. Both thought processes require conscious effort-you have to resist the temptation to let your mind wander or to indulge in the sweet dessert. It turns out, however, that use of executive function -a talent we all rely on throughout the day- draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain. When this resource is exhausted by one activity, our mental capacity may be severely hindered in another, seemingly unrelated activity.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn't eat a cookie."



"Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain," by On Amir
sciam.com, July 22, 2008

The presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively.

"The Effects of Serotonin on Spirituality"
Huffington Post, July 21, 2008

Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?



"Bearhug"
by Michael Ondaatje
excerpt from The Cinnamon Peeler
©1989, by Michael Ondaatje

Score one for protecting freedom of speech!

I forget which of y'all linked to this, but it's a wonderfully written response from a library director in Colorado, to a patron who wrote a concerned letter about the book Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah Brannen.

For those of you with wee Munchkins, check out Knee Bouncers, and prepare to abuse your keyboard. Or get your munchkin one of these kiddie keyboards.

by way of rambleflower
____ . . ____ . . ____ . . ____ . . ____ . . ____ . . ____ . . ____

For those of you who enjoy the surreal and darkly absurd, try Have a Slogan!. It mixes popular commercial slogans with things that are silly, awful, or both. (Potentially not safe for work).

via chalepa_ta_kala

Time is the substance from which I am made.
Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

~Jorge Luis Borge

This is absolutely terrifying-

The Department of Health and Human Services has released a proposal that "allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services."


via danjite