Barbara Gordon all growed up becomes Oracle after The Joker severs her spine in "The Killing Joke".

My knowledge of the Civil War was replaced with that. Thanks, honey.

That's really bad, Cindy. I'm glad everything is OK.

Ummm, is the relationship with Renee Montoya in Gotham Central somewhere? Or is that going to be part of 52 too? (I have only read part one of 52 .)

Thanks, Jesse. We mostly knew it couldn't be anything too dangerous because we're careful with medicine and cleaning fluids, and all that jazz, but before it happened, I would have said I mostly knew my six year old wouldn't eat an unidentified object he found on the toilet rim, you know? And with two other kids in the house, there exists the possibility someone else took something from somewhere that they shouldn't have, and then attempted to flush it, or whatever...

It was probably nothing, and he's perfectly fine, today. I need a vacay.

Ummm, is the relationship with Renee Montoya in Gotham Central somewhere? Or is that going to be part of 52 too? (I have only read part one of 52.)

My bat-knowledge doesn't really extend past the CNN article.

The article says Batwoman is Kathy Kane.

She was around in, I think, the 40s (possibly not until the 50s) and that's pretty much where she stayed. Anyway, the era of comics when no one got killed and urban design prominently featured really, REALLY big versions of mundane objects (coins, combs, etc.).

Castles for sale!

F2F2007?

Nice Castle built in 1865 on 3 levels with lift + independent apartment of 180 yd2 in a superb wooded park offering a tennis court, 2 swimming pools, a chapel, a winter garden, stables/garage, a fitness center, little vineyard with cellar and wine museum, a private airfield, a golf driving range, an animals park...all established on 100 acres.

Army Corps: La. levees were poorly built

[link]

Well, no shit.

Well, everyone needs new and interesting uses for castles!

Posted verbatim from Leonard Pierce's blog:

Hey, remember a while back when the National Review's resident pederast, John Derbyshire, wrote a column where he talked about how gross Jennifer Aniston's saggy ole titties were, and explained how only he is brave enough to tell the truth about how the only women with tits worth looking at are those of teenage girls?

Well, he's launched a defense of that column that's, uh, interesting, to say the least. Highlights are mine:

Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.

He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14.