arse poetica

Friday Dingo Blogging

I've been reading in bed a lot lately. I think Dingo's trying to tell me something.

Gonzalez Resigns

Good riddance to bad rubbish. His legacy cannot fade fast enough.

Embattled Attorney General Resigns.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Whose tenure has been marred by perjury? These Bush madministration assholes commit so many crimes that it is impossible to list them all in the lede and journos are forced to list only their most recent crime -- in this case, lying to Congress. This criminal codified torture, for God's sake!!! Torture!

Great Cosmic Nothingness!

I don't get it at all, but this sounds v. cool.

Great 'cosmic nothingness' found.

It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.

The "hole" is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths.

The discovery will be reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

Previous sky surveys that have traced the large-scale structure of the nearby Universe have long shown, for example, how the clustering of galaxies is strung into vast filaments and sheets that are separated by great gaps.

But the void discovered by a University of Minnesota team is about 1,000 times the volume of what would be expected in typical cosmic gaps.

"It's hard even for astronomers to picture how big these things are," conceded Minnesota's Professor Lawrence Rudnick.

"If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you'd have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side," he told BBC News.

Hunh?

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies.

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and also had an apartment in Manhattan.

Ms. Paley had been ill with breast cancer for some time, her literary agent, Elaine Markson, said yesterday.

Ms. Paley’s output was modest, some four dozen stories in three volumes: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (Doubleday, 1959); “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and “Later the Same Day” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed at once to be surgically spare and almost unimaginably rich.

Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.

Thank you, Grace Paley.

Ya Think?

I'm sure people have been sexually active in the 80s, 90s, and Oughts, too. What does this headline mean?

Many Found Sexually Active Into the 70s.

Into their 70s, maybe?

Life Under Bush

It's just too hard sometimes:

Bolton: I ‘Absolutely’ Hope The U.S. Will Attack Iran In The Next ‘Six Months’.

White House Manual Details How to Deal with Protestors.

White House Fights Disclosure (of "Deleted" Emails).

Poll: White Youths Happier Than Others.

[photo credit]

Dumbbells?

Does this count?

Dur!

Lobes of Steel.

Scientists have suspected for decades that exercise, particularly regular aerobic exercise, can affect the brain. But they could only speculate as to how. Now an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain.

Fine, I'll do an extra rotation on each foot of the ankle circling. Jeez.

[Photo courtesy of PEP UP YOUR LIFE: A FITNESS BOOK FOR MID-LIFE AND OLDER PERSONS from your federal gubmint.]

I'm the new blue blood, I'm the Great White Hope...

I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders...

This song is totally getting me through today, friends. Enjoy!

The National - Mr_November (mp3)

Maybe It's Just Goo Goo Eyes

It wouldn't take much special training to read my expression as: This is a crock. Grandmothers taking off their shoes - honestly! This illusion of security is tiresome and the whole exercise a sham.

New airport agents check for danger in fliers' facial expressions.

Next time you go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you than you notice.

Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant.

They're called Behavior Detection Officers, and they're part of several recent security upgrades, Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley told an aviation industry group in Washington last month. He described them as "a wonderful tool to be able to identify and do risk management prior to somebody coming into the airport or approaching the crowded checkpoint."

I'm well aware of non-verbal cues and might even put stock in them in some circumstances; I just can't take anything these assholes do seriously.

[photo credit: Mike Farruggia, United States of Whatever,         Mixed media, 2005.]

Who is he, the Wiz?

Oh, please let it be Fitzmas soon.

Rove's August Surprise.

“Karl Rove is moving on down the road,” President Bush told reporters, amplifying his Texan accent.

Ease on down, ease on down that road...to prison. He'd better be amplifyin' his legal representation.

“I’ll be on the road behind you in a little bit.”

Can't happen fast enough for this grrl.