2007-11-29
2007-11-28
Sir Swimsalot?
Green Peace is holding a whale naming competition. With names like: Amal (means 'hope' in Arabic), Bumi (pronounced 'boo-me' means 'Earth' in Mal)a, Humphrey, Jacques (named for Jacques Cousteau, environmental activist, educator and explorer of the oceans), Kaimana (means 'divine power of the ocean' in Polynesian), Manami (means 'love of the sea' in Japanese), Shanti (means 'peace' in Hindi )and Veikko (means 'brother or a good friend' in Finnish) to choose from, what are the people of the word voting for by 72%?
Mister Splashy Pants.
Read more about humpback whales migration in the Great Whale Trail blog.
2007-11-27
Precious
The name of the latest, cutest giant panda cub, born August 3, at the San Diego Zoo has been determined.
Zhen Zhen, which means "precious," is now 16 weeks old.
2007-11-26
Stephen King - Layin' the Smack Down on the Media
STEPHEN KING: So who's going to be TIME Person of the Year?
TIME: I really don't know, there's a very small group of people who make that decision.
SK: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
T: Really?
SK: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.
So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn't think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. And then the guy from Nightline said, "Well, obviously you've not been watching World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson." But I do — I watch 'em all!
TIME: I really don't know, there's a very small group of people who make that decision.
SK: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
T: Really?
SK: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.
So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn't think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn't think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. And then the guy from Nightline said, "Well, obviously you've not been watching World News Tonight with Charlie Gibson." But I do — I watch 'em all!
2007-11-25
2007-11-24
My Name is Jen and I am a Logophile
log•o•phile
Pronunciation: (lô'gu-fīl", log'u-), [key]
—n.
a lover of words.
"There is a disease which consists in loving words too much. Logophilia first manifests itself in childhood and is, alas, incurable." - Peter Ackroyd
Since childhood, books have been my friends and I have always read constantly. At 10 years of age, I could often be found in a patch on sunlight in my bedroom, my dog Trouble with his head on my lap and my nose buried in a Vocabulary Builder.
I wasn't like other kids.
They wouldn't sit with me on the bus and I was always chosen last for school dances and for teams. But I wouldn't have traded my love of words for the social acceptance of people that listened to disco and called each other to make sure they'd be wearing matching skirts the next day.
I made it through the worst years of school by reading bags and bags of books that I would pass on to the few weirdo friends I had. I moved from sci fi to sociology to Sufi poetry to Sartre without out a sense of ever being full of enough knowledge.
Etymology is also a hobby that I take no shame in announcing to the world. How language came about, the zigzagging history of various words, the bizarre rules different languages have and the endless number of words that can be encountered make me a happy girl. There are even words about words! That is glorious! And new words are being coined all the time! And, yes, I can be quite the sesquipedalian.
And I'm not the only one.
Because of continued voracious appetite for words and knowledge, I stumble across heretofore unknown words constantly. Today, I took great joy in discovering the word crepuscular. It sounds like some horrific bodily fluid that leaks from some horrific infection.
Quite the opposite.
It refers to what I always called a "God sky." You know, the ones they feature on Christian album covers - a dark, cloud filled sky with sunlight streaming through from what seems a single source from behind, throwing shadow and light in a truly heavenly fashion.
For a dry yet accurate description, lets go to Wikipedia.
Crepuscular rays, in atmospheric optics, also known as sun rays or God's rays, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds, are diverging columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. The name comes from their frequent occurrences during twilight, when the contrasts between light and dark are the most obvious. Various airborne compounds scatter the sunlight and make these rays visible. We see the light so defined because of diffraction, reflection and scattering.
Is that not cool?
Let me show you:
Can you almost hear the choir?
Me, neither.
But what a lovely word.
I must now go back to putting many words into a document and sending them to someone so that they can be inserted into a magazine full of many, many words.
Just had to share.
Pronunciation: (lô'gu-fīl", log'u-), [key]
—n.
a lover of words.
"There is a disease which consists in loving words too much. Logophilia first manifests itself in childhood and is, alas, incurable." - Peter Ackroyd
Since childhood, books have been my friends and I have always read constantly. At 10 years of age, I could often be found in a patch on sunlight in my bedroom, my dog Trouble with his head on my lap and my nose buried in a Vocabulary Builder.
I wasn't like other kids.
They wouldn't sit with me on the bus and I was always chosen last for school dances and for teams. But I wouldn't have traded my love of words for the social acceptance of people that listened to disco and called each other to make sure they'd be wearing matching skirts the next day.
I made it through the worst years of school by reading bags and bags of books that I would pass on to the few weirdo friends I had. I moved from sci fi to sociology to Sufi poetry to Sartre without out a sense of ever being full of enough knowledge.
Etymology is also a hobby that I take no shame in announcing to the world. How language came about, the zigzagging history of various words, the bizarre rules different languages have and the endless number of words that can be encountered make me a happy girl. There are even words about words! That is glorious! And new words are being coined all the time! And, yes, I can be quite the sesquipedalian.
And I'm not the only one.
Because of continued voracious appetite for words and knowledge, I stumble across heretofore unknown words constantly. Today, I took great joy in discovering the word crepuscular. It sounds like some horrific bodily fluid that leaks from some horrific infection.
Quite the opposite.
It refers to what I always called a "God sky." You know, the ones they feature on Christian album covers - a dark, cloud filled sky with sunlight streaming through from what seems a single source from behind, throwing shadow and light in a truly heavenly fashion.
For a dry yet accurate description, lets go to Wikipedia.
Crepuscular rays, in atmospheric optics, also known as sun rays or God's rays, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds, are diverging columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. The name comes from their frequent occurrences during twilight, when the contrasts between light and dark are the most obvious. Various airborne compounds scatter the sunlight and make these rays visible. We see the light so defined because of diffraction, reflection and scattering.
Is that not cool?
Let me show you:
Can you almost hear the choir?
Me, neither.
But what a lovely word.
I must now go back to putting many words into a document and sending them to someone so that they can be inserted into a magazine full of many, many words.
Just had to share.
2007-11-20
2007-11-19
Ripped From the Headlines
Here they are, in tandem:
Food pantries struggling with shortages while Wall Street Plans $38 Billion of Bonuses as Shareholders Lose
Happy Thanksgiving!
Oh, if you're curious, this is who the world would vote for for President of the United States.
Food pantries struggling with shortages while Wall Street Plans $38 Billion of Bonuses as Shareholders Lose
Happy Thanksgiving!
Oh, if you're curious, this is who the world would vote for for President of the United States.
What are you running from?
Terminus - can the drone/working man man in the odd pants lose the concrete figure that follows him from the Montreal subway before he looses his sanity?
Best chase scenes since French Connection.
Trevor Cawood of Spy Films, who has a tremendous amount of visual effects work under his belt (including the Nike Revolution ads and The Matrix films), runs until he finds out.
I feel pathos for the poor concrete creature that really just looks like he wants to play. But no one has time for art in the deadline-centric world we live, do they?
Aired at the Toronto Film Festival and the Swerve Festival in LA, this short is burning up the web.
2007-11-18
2007-11-17
Happy Birthday
At some point in November of 2004, I began this blog. Ostensibly because I wanted to keep myself from constantly emailing people all the weird, fascinating and pointless things I find whilst forever wandering the web for mental sustenance. Somehow, despite a short attention span theater of a brain, this blog remains.
Odd.
But sustained.
That's me...
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