for some reason the world of warcraft bans any clans from identifying as glbtq b/c they want to avoid meanness or homophobia or something, strange.

5 reasons why tortue is wrong, from xian today, a measured and morally complicated reponse, whos subtext seems to be refuting Bush's god talk, but its smart enough not to say so directly.

A bunch of ads from the 50s (plan 59)

I am always suprised how social realist these look, how the ideological set of both soviet communism and american capitalism require the same aesthetic sense (cult of machines, cult of bodies, information conveyed with utter simplicity, primary colours, heavy shadows, etc)

This one is the one i think is the strangest, one of those better living thru chemistry dupont monstroities, betrayed in 20 years by Carson, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, The Love Canal--it has a religious look, the great fair/wrathful hand of god, stripping away the coperal nature of man--(god here is the same white god of watchtower magazines, the baptist bed time stories of uncle arthur, the christ in america of freiberg, all done roughly the same time) but its not religous, the hand is ambigous, is it the invisible hand of adam smith, the metyonomy of duponts chemist, or something else (and on a much stranger note, what it really reminds me of, is that chemistry was really good at stripping skin, incedrary bombs, then the atom bomb, then napalm, there are earlier examples, of course--dalton trumbos johnny get yr gun comes t o mind) but that may be going to far--it really is a phophetically strange image.


sputnik

dude takes pictures of cows, prints them slightly smaller then the usual size, then posts them all over the place, in big cities, with blutak, so you can take them home--and the photos ar fantastic.

a queer bdsm/erotica writer's career is at a dead end, so he pretends to be navaho/white and writes 3 books, about his struggles, most of which prove to be either
a) plagarzied
b) made up.
stranger then LeRoy, and more of a political landmine--the brilliant journalism and better writing is here this should be read, its pulitizer territory.

SoDak is about to ban abortion, as a test case, for the new supercon (Roberts, Alito) supreme court. They call it the Womens Health and Protection Act. What can we say?

Amazing collection of beefcake photos, including lots of really interesting Champion studio stuff. (look at the one with the balloon)

a fantastic article on MLK jrs hard left rhetoric, against war, imperalism, and global capitalism, often forgotten in the fuzzy, easy, metaphors of race that come with his holiday..


The thing that people forget about Rauschenberg, is his amazing colour sense.

sports photos of epic abstraction, w/o people...amazing.

great fotos from various slideshows.

The brazillian governemnt provides 51 differentbirdsongs in easily downloadable mp3s, its really special to put itunes on shuffle, and having a little bird call interupt what ever song you are listening to,

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

The decision was denounced yesterday for treating the Pope’s words as “saleable merchandise” and endangering the Church’s mission to “spread the Christian message”.

A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500. From the Sunday Times, here story here

Jeremy Milsten won a prize for his series of airplanes, the rest of his photos are medicore, but i wonder how he did these the rest are here

Bush apparently knew about hurricane katrina before hand.