Presidentially “Pardoned” Turkeys

cbs2.com – Pardoned Turkeys To Their New Home: Disneyland:

(CBS) ANAHEIM, Calif. A pair of turkeys that got a presidential pardon Wednesday at the White House will soon be the main attraction of Disneyland’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

In a White House Rose Garden ceremony, President Bush patted the red, fleshy head and feathered neck and back of “Flyer,” a 20-week-old, 36-pound tom, and said, “I am granting a full presidential pardon.”

This would be cute if not for Bush’s past as the executingest governor in recent American history… And his history of pre-emptive pardoning of Americans for war crimes abroad…

As it is, it’s just creepy.

UPDATE: It’s not a Bush thing, it dates from Harry Truman. Which, I dunno, you start thinking about what he did in Japan, maybe it’s still creepy. Presidents can be a creepy bunch.

Gray Goo Problem in the Absence of Nanotech?

The Gray Ooze That Ate the Indonesian Villages – Los Angeles Times

SIDOARJO, Indonesia — Nothing, it seems, can stop the mud.

For more than three months, the hot, noxious goop has spewed up through a crack in the earth at a natural-gas exploration site, swamping everything in its path.

The expanding, surreal gray lake with the stench of rotten eggs has enveloped more than 10 square miles of land in eastern Java, Indonesia’s most densely populated island. The flow has forced 8,000 to 10,000 people from their homes, engulfed about a dozen factories, contaminated fish farms and intermittently closed a major highway.

‘Satanic’ art in Catholic Church exposed

WorldNetDaily: ‘Satanic’ art in Catholic Church exposed

“Artists from DaVinci to Botticelli have embedded subliminal images into their art for centuries,” said Calace. “In this case we found penises on crucifixes, anarchy symbols, swastikas, demonic faces and in modern works even the word ‘sex’ encrypted into the images. The works in question include modern artists’ work currently on the covers of missalettes and hymnals that at this very moment sit in the pews of churches throughout the U.S. and on children’s religious teaching aids.”Calace said, “‘Rape of the Soul’ was created to heal the many that have suffered from these uninvited violations.”

You know how something can be so deeply deranged that it is just awesome? This is like that. What’s good for rock music and soft drink ads is good for centuries of devotional artwork!

I think that whoever named this “Rape of the Soul” should get some kind of “completely inappropriate use of a loaded word” award.  You know, like if somebody were to refer to a blight on grapefruit as a “Citrus Holocaust.”

via various parts of the blogosphere.

I almost want to see this, except for the fact that I would never get those hours of my life back.

Bigfoot

I don’t remember if I blogged about this before, but a couple months ago it came out on all the usual suspect link-aggregators that somebody had “stabilized” the famous Patterson bigfoot video, taking all the jitter out of it and splaying the panning out from left to right.  It is a really cool technique, but what it reveals here is sadly disappointing — the fact that there is no waythat is anything but a dude in a monkey suit.  It moves exactly like a human in a suit, swinging his arms a bit to be apelike.

The video is hosted by Bigfoot Encounters,  direct link here.

If you’re more into the whole JFK thing than Bigfoot, the same thing was done to the Zapruder film here.

Achewood Died for Our Sins

Achewood has had an incredibly gripping storyline going for a few weeks (as I mentioned here), and it’s at or near a climax.  No new strip was up this morning, but eventually a note appeared on the site that a new strip would be up at noon PST (3 pm our time).  At the promised moment, it was impossible to pull up the Achewood page.  It timed out.  So many people refreshing and refreshing the page hoping to see the update?  The situation went on for an hour or so at least, and rather than getting better it started redirecting to this Portland ISP — Achewood’s provider perhaps?

Did we kill Achewood, at least for today?  Yikes!