Well, fuck. We had the first edition floating around our place for a long time (interestingly, it was my purchase, not Hec's), but it's gone. Either I packed it up so as not to damage Matilda's delicate little snowflake eyeballs or...
fuck me...
I sold it during one of our gotta-pay-the-fucking-bills Half Price Books purges.
I'm proud to have voted for Obama, I'm relieved every single damn day that he's our president, and after reading the committee's statement about his reversing US course on things like nuclear proliferation and climate change policy and negotiation/diplomacy I kinda sorta see what they were aiming at, but still...the Nobel? This early? With Guantanamo still open, investigations and prosecutions of the previous administration's human rights violators stalled out, and involvement in the morass of Afghanistan cranking up with no clear visible plan and no indication that it's going to go any better than it has for the past seven years? No.
And the likelihood of it giving Beck and Limbaugh and their ilk something new to rant about, and feeding into the craziness of the scary fringe that really needs no feeding at all, ever, is just making me queasy. I keep thinking about the news report a couple of weeks ago about the Secret Service confirming that he's already getting five or six times the serious death threats, daily, of any previous president, and this makes me want to cover my eyes and never open them again.
Ballistics film was awesome, in the truest sense of the word. Also, cool how impact craters and coronas are the same at any scale.
Re placentas and Peace Prize, I am as one with all y'all.
tommyrot, someone on Facebook made that joke too. Heh.
I want to see the ballistics video, but that's blocked too.
I gleefully voted for Obama (though not in the primary), and I am thrilled he's our POTUS.
But I honestly cannot BELIEVE that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after doing...jack and shit.
Seriously. Bill Clinton deserved in a HUGE way yet got the shaft. But Obama? That's a bit much.
Boing Boing
1, Ralph Lauren 0.
Ralph Lauren apologises for digitally retouching slender model to make her head look bigger than her waist
The image of the 23-year-old Swedish-French model attracted widespread revulsion when it was reproduced on an Internet blog last month with the caption: 'Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis.'
A spokesman for Ralph Lauren said: ‘For over 42 years, we have built a brand based on quality and integrity.
'After further investigation, we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body.
'We have addressed the problem and going forward will take every precaution to ensure that the calibre of our artwork represents our brand appropriately.’
Ralph Lauren's initial reaction to the image being published on the website was very different.
The company accused the Boing Boing website, which highlights the web's weird and wonderful sights, of copyright infringement when it reproduced the image.
Boing Boing, however, refused to remove the post, claiming that the image publication was: 'classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting."'
Co-editor Cory Doctorow wrote: 'Instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them.'
Other strategies were to include reproducing the ad with the original criticism, publishing Ralph Lauren's legal threats and offering 'nourishing soup and sandwiches to [their] models'.
The article has an unretouched photo of the model (not the same photo as the retouched one).
I thought Clinton *did* have a Peace Prize (that he shared with Rabin and Arafat for the Middle East Peace Accords), but apparently that's just my brain trying to revise history.
(Or else they all won Time Man Of The Year and I'm going to be horribly embarrassed to have mixed those two prizes up.)
