A Map of Sin and the Death of the Dumpling King!

New archaeological evidence from China for the first time documents a chain of events that forged the relationship between human and feline.

#Srirachapocalypse: the ongoing Huy Fong saga. This time it’s personal! Should I start shopping my “Srirachanado!” script yet?

Ohsho Dumpling King Dead after Suspected Shooting! Last year, Japan’s National Police Agency reported 17 gun murders. In the U.S., where population is about 2.5 times greater than Japan, the number of homicides involving firearms hovers around 10,000 per year.

Two-Headed Pig Underscores China’s Need For Quality Semen!

Some naughty crinimals hacked Target’s credit card data over Black Friday. Easier to carry than gold bars, I guess.

Meet Valkyrie, NASA’s new “superhero” robot.  Okay fine, it was designed to be able to access disaster areas and help rescue survivors. Let’s all hope for very slow disaster scenarios and that the bots can play Wagner.

The Only Thing Weirder Than a Telemarketing Robot… a Telemarketing Cyborg!!!?

Sun will ‘flip upside down’ within weeks, says NASA. It does that. The SyFy original is bound to write itself.

It’s the end of the world for radio evangelist Harold Camping. Same goes for legendary country singer Ray Price.

How Benign Bacteria Evolve to Virulent Pathogens: it’s just a shout away!

A Map of the Weirdest Sex Laws in the United States. Oklahoma bar owners: you MUST NOT ALLOW simulated sex with animals (not even them fancy animatronic ones)  on your premises! IT’S THE LAW!!!

Little Bunny Foo-Foo

Make that ‘Little Bunny YuTu’:  Good luck to ‘Jade Rabbit‘!! China has achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 37 years!

The 500 people who live in Awra Amba, Ethiopia, do things a little differently, by design. The village has a mill, where grain is crushed into flour, a textile factory, a café, a tourist hostel, and two stores that cater to people from outside the village. Yet the people of Awra Amba do not follow organized religion, and that can make waves with neighboring communities. Let’s hope they don’t weigh the same as a duck, eh?

Here’s chapter and verse on a more-or-less comprehensive list of things banned in Leviticus. Some seem awfully petty. A number of them are punishable by death.

‘Rudolph’ is non-canonical. Death to the Rudolphite heretics! And the adventures of a philosophically inclined mailman.

This Khmer Rouge history lesson by Spalding Gray still fascinates me.

Walt Disney as a complex character of his times with some kinks and warts. In The Wayward Canary, from 1932, Minnie Mouse seems to own a lighter with a swastika on it, for some reason.

Traditional Catalan nativity scenes include a figure you don’t see in the States much.  He is known in Catalan as the caganer. That translates most politely as ‘the defecator’ – and there he is, squatting under a tree with his trousers down.

There’s so many similarities between the mythology of faeries and ETs, it’s like they were one and the same critters.

Nifty rocket launcher, it’s like a lazy-susan of death! This is sooo coool, but it needs Ron Popeil to really sell it!

Did you know mammoths still walked the earth when the Great Pyramid was being built?

Here’s some early incarnations of some iconic toys.

When do the action figures arrive? Google has officially acquired Boston Dynamics, makers of robots as cool as they are terrifying. We are ordered not to fear them.

A Brief Sunday Post

The RoboCup in Eindhoven, Netherlands, has more than 300 teams and 1000 football playing robots from 40 countries, with the mission of beating the human World Cup winners by 2050.

Stalker much? A system being developed by Dina Katabi,  professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her graduate student Fadel Adib, could give us the ability to track people in different rooms using Wi-Fi spectrum signals. “We wanted to create a device that is low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors.” Hopefully this technology will only be sold to military/law enforcement types.

A Political Quiz

I’m not real big (openly contemptuous, actually) of those cutesy “online quizzes” (Which ‘My Little Pony’ Are You?), but I clicked ten or so tickie-boxes and more or less agreed with the scoring of the “World’s Smallest Political Quiz“.

Yes, I’m Liberal (as opposed to Fascist) and damned proud of it, too! I thought several of the questions were totally bogus and derived from nonsense GOP talking points (privatize Social Security? Trust the banksters, are you INSANE? What part of ‘security’ don’t you understand?), but at least it didn’t tell me what a Statist I am.

Yes, we do need government for taking on the big problems that for-profit organizations won’t touch, like disaster relief, the common welfare and national defense, etc. We need to control our borders and know who is in the country (you aren’t really a nation if you don’t). I’d readily support selling legal residency cards for a year’s minimum-wage income and good biometric identification data. The tricky part about government is keeping for-profit concerns (Evil Corporations) from ‘regulatory capture’, subverting the common good for private gain. You know, like the way things are going  now.

And don’t get me started on Libertarians! They are perhaps the most bogus bunch of sociopaths masquerading as a political movement yet! They should all move to Somalia, if they actually believe in what they say (but they don’t!). They’re the only lot worse than American ‘conservatives’, as far as I’m concerned. At least conservatives acknowledge the concept of ‘society’, even if they seem to be committed to destroying it most of the time.

A Tuesday Cornucopia

Behold: robo-cat! Just the thing to catch those computer mice.

Afghan lessons for arming the Syrian rebels from the CIA’s mujahideen point man. “People have criticized the CIA effort in Afghanistan because we gave weapons to Islamic fundamentalists,” he said. “The implication is that if only some history professor could have told us who to give the weapons to, we would have found the Methodists and the Presbyterians”.

Discuss this among yourselves: Can We Just Pretend We Already Invaded Syria? How about requiring our congress-critters to find a country on a map before they get to invade it?

And here’s just the thing for baking a cake for your elected mis-representative or soulless plutocrat. I’d suggest a hand-squeezed cream filling.

Drill, baby, KILL: Massive toxic spill  from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. “Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene First Nations. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres. The leak follows a pair of other major spills in the region, including 800,000 litres of an oil-water mixture from Pace Oil and Gas Ltd., and nearly 3.5 million litres of oil from a pipeline run by Plains Midstream Canada.

The best surprise is no surprise at all: J.M. Berger wrote in Foreign Policy of his experiment in applying Big Data to extremist networks online, with an eye toward measuring influence and engagement among Twitter users following well-known white nationalists. He found the number 1 hashtag used by people following white nationalists online was #tcot — “top conservatives on Twitter.” Number 3 was #teaparty, and number 5 was #gop.

The latest in anti-pervert accessories for girls: hairy-leg stockings.

More drone adventures of the totally beneficial kind:  video of a drone rescuing another drone. Flier A got distracted and his iFly-4 got flipped over and stuck on top of Hadleigh Castle. Flier B pulled off a daring rescue mission with his home-built  copter and super-modified controller.  England prevails.

A spy-bird in a guilded cage: a fresh, rugged,  minimalist design for a land & air drone.

What a great idea, I’m just sorry I didn’t know about it earlier. Trollthensa  proposed giving the NSA a little stress test, with thousands sending each other innocuous emails containing keywords that should trigger a security response. The date for the mass action has passed, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to contribute a few red herrings in the name of the Fourth Amendment.

Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted

The Huffington Post has tracked 2,243 gun-related deaths in the United States since the Newtown massacre. Click here for an interactive map.

Second Amendment solutions, anyone? The National Rifle Association has been flooding Newtown with pro-gun robocalls and  postcards. “I’ve got a 5-year-old son who went to preschool on the Sandy Hook Elementary School campus,” a resident reported. “These calls were the very last thing I needed.” That’s your dues at work, NRA members. Stay classy!

A rethuglican sheriff in Massachusetts defends his joke that President Obama could best serve the country by being assassinated. Har-de-har har, eh?

I did not make this up: a Tea Party group is boycotting Fox News for being ‘too liberal’!

Tweets from the twits: Donald Trump and Michelle Malkin have a hilarious cat-fight via Twitter.  What a pair of useless bitches!

Carnegie Mellon’s snake-bot just got a little creepier. Oh, and meet the six deadliest real snakes in the world.

Speaking of real snakes,  rich moochers are leaching the economy dry using this 3-point plan. Let’s call it what it is: class warfare.

One of the most surprising facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. Here’s a 2011 UC-Berkely study showing that the Riches are just less compassionate than the rest of us.

It’s as if their “bullshit detectors” get worn out:  the elderly may be easier to scam due to age-related disfunction of the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the region that controls belief and doubt.

Researchers at the University of Nottingham have found no link between the noise level of small and micro wind turbines and reports of ill health. What they did find was a correlation between negative orientated personality traits and those complaining about ‘wind turbine syndrome’.

Can photovoltaics go greener? A transparent material derived from cotton and castor beans can replace the plastic or glass covering on solar cells.

A nice activity for the kids: Heifer International has a fun and educational how-to on making adobe bricks, with a demonstration of how adobe houses stay cool in the daytime and warm at night.

Not an internet hoax: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is offering grants of $100,000 to $1 million to build a better condom. “We are looking for a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use”. I volunteer to lead the testing.