Rats saving lives? Nahhh.... ?

Hero rats, as they are called, are trained over months, and sniff out landmines safely, reliably, and much faster than human operators.
Amazing.

About being contrarian

It was quite some years ago, but I was an adult and had already been a spiritual seeker, a thinker, and a keen student of philosophies, life and beyond for many years.

I was in conversation with the girlfriend of a friend. I forget what we were talking about, but I said something like "nah, I don't want that, it's too popular".

She looked up at me with her clear blue eyes and a smile and said: "but isn't that still letting others decide what you do?"

Ouch! That got to me. Here was this young little apple-cheeked chit of a girl barely out of her teens, and she was teaching me a basic life lesson I should have learned long ago!

If you are making a choice mainly to be different from others, you are still letting the others make the decisions for you.

I suspect that many highly successful, mature, intelligent people are still in this trap without realizing it. If a book is very popular, they can't possibly be seen reading it. If a viewpoint is normal, it's obviously not for them. Et cetera.

This is not deciding, it is reacting.

The Lollipop

A little eye candy for the gals.
I'm sure he trains, but he does not have the typical unnatural bulgy bodybuilder body.

Cheap comics for a good cause

Do you like to get interesting comics for a great price?
Do you like to support a good cause (how about free speech?)?
Here you can do both: The Humble Bundle comics collection. You decide what you pay, and the  profits go to Comics Legal Defence Fund, which I have supported more than once before, which helps authors and publishers who are being prosecuted for selling "indecent" comics.

Recommended. Warmly. It is a solid adult-comics bundle (high-quality ebooks, choice of several file formats), and it includes such comics events as Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol. 3! (Much different from the movie.) And Bone vol. 1. Both first-class comics for adults.

(Oh, by the way, before you press the Pay button, make sure your email address is written in just above. It won't work otherwise, and they don't make that very clear.)

"Crazy with a capital Cray"

Mike Johnston rings the right bell with this article.

"...So he was prosecuted for sexually exploiting a minor.

"Who was the minor? Himself. They were nude pictures of himself. Selfies, as we aging-out hipsters say now.

"Mind you, this teenager did not post said pictures on the Internet. They were not available for public viewing. They were just on his own phone, apparently kept private as a personal matter between himself and his girlfriend, who is the same age and also shows up in several shots...and who was also prosecuted for exploiting her minor self."

-

I'm gonna whip...

[Warning: mild profanity. So mild it may offend.]

I've not been able to imbed movies on Blogger (apart from YouPoop and Vimeo), so here is a link. A classic blues/folk song. Quite funny.

Ray Jessel... nobody saw this coming

(Don't watch this if you are offended by any mentioned of privates, even in latin terms.)

Funneee.

Hail Phoebe (video update)

Phoebe Cates (screenshot from Fast Times At Ridgemont High). The most underused film beauty from the eighties?

Update: Russ said:
How can we forget the iconic slow-mo swimming pool fantasy scene. 

Iconic is the word! Best bikini scene ever. She's a goddess.



(I did not even look for this scene because I thought NoBoobs would have deleted it in a New York Second. But clearly there's a world of difference between topless and nude, even if the nude only shows pubic hair. Odd world.)
 (By the way, in the scene when she enters the bathroom, Judge Reinholt (Brad) was faking his self-'abuse' with a big realistic dildo. Phoebe shot backwards out of the bathroom like a startled cat!)

Not a "better mousetrap"

[Thanks to TOP]

Ralp Waldo Emerson did not actually say any thing about "a better mousetrap". It was a perversion of what he did say, and which I find has much broader relevance:

"If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods." —Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Tiffany Aching closes Terry Pratchett's career.

Terry Pratchett, alas, is dead.

I was not surprised when I saw that Terry Pratchett's last novel, published post-mortem this week, is currently the number One bestseller.
I am glad it is a Tiffany Aching book that he managed to get out, she is my favorite witch, and the witches may well be my favorite characters of his. Tiffany is righteous, and smart, and strong. (The cranky eldest witch, Granny Weatherwax, actually takes off her hat to Tiffany at one point, something  which I'm not sure ever happened before.)

I would say "get it!", except I would recommend reading her books (five) in sequence, starting with the wee free men. The books start with her being around six, and in her late teens in the last one. So seen as a whole, you might say it's a big growing-up, or coming-of-age story. In an usual way, since it's less about boys and more about power and magic and responsibility and how can you fight an invisible, intangible enemy...

I'm not generally a fantasy reader. Most fantasy seems stuck in about twelve of the same ideas all the time, most Tolkien-related. There's only so many times you can read about orphans' destiny and magic swords. But: Terry Pratchett's book are not like that, not by a long shot. His books can be about anything, including suddenly a time travel story or whatever. But they always holds together.
They have great characters, and they are FUNNY.

Update: 
 Anonymous said...

That cover really blows,

Yes sadly I agree. The shade of green of the dress is just wrong (though she does wear green and blue. She intends to wait with wearing black til she is old (source: "I Shall Wear Midnight).). And he clearly does not know how to draw a young woman's face. (I had two choices of covers to show. The other one was worse.)

It's a pity, it's actually quite rare that they find a really good artist for book covers. They should look at among comic book artists, particularly comic book cover artists, there are some excellent ones amongst them.

3D "Life"

My friend, artist Zeppelina, sent me this:

Thought you might like this..... 3D printed forms, based on the Fibonacci number system., and as beautiful as they already are as sculptural forms, they spin them under a strobe light, and they become fascinating and quite magnificent.

On Robin

I was reminded of something I read in the Batman magazine letter column when I was a kid. Somebody asked the editor:
"Doesn't Robin freeze in the winter, given that his custome has bare legs?"
The editor answered:
"1) Robin is tough, he's no girlie-boy.
 2) He is actually not bare-legged, he's wearing pantyhose."