harikari.com

If this phone can do this, like this, this easy, I’ll sell my first born son to get one. And if you want to go to the actual, HQ version of this commercial just visit the Apple website.

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Ha! Just kidding little guy, you’re worth WAY more than $600. Way more I would bet.

But I would be surprised if the iPhone lives up to this hype! I mean, jesus. Stop the movie you’re watching on a tiny little device only because you have nowhere else to watch it at the moment and you can call some seafood restaurant in San Fransisco to get it delivered?

You’ve either spent rent getting the phone, upgrading the memory, and downloading movies, and now you can’t have anything but delivery calamari, since your new address is “the alley behind the GAP on the Haight”, or the ad’s not telling the whole story.

The whole story would be: watching a movie on your iPod iPhone on BART and you see a clip in this movie — that’s so great you can’t wait till you get home and watch it on your non-hand-held entertainment devices — where the protagonist is thwarting thugs and earning 6 figures on this super cheap electric scooter that gets to ride in the HOV lane called the “Green Scoot Zoom”.

You pause your movie with a swipe of your index finger (or whatever) and discover that this amazing new carbon neutral carreer advancement device of transveyance can be delivered to your work before the end of the day.

Because why else would you be watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a handheld device and suddenly think, “Hey, delivery…”?

According to researchers at the University of Hong Kong, there is a species of barnacle (Rhizocephalan Sacculina) of which the female will invade the body of male and female crustaceans (crabs in particular) in order to distribute their nutrient absorbing, branching root structure, mature and protrude a reproductive organ, mate with a passing male barnacle, and lay their eggs inside the host.

What’s special about this parasite is that they will first make the crab infertile, make them lose interest in mating, and, most interestingly, change the physiology and psychology of the male crabs in order to make them better mothers to the parasite’s egg sacks.

“The life cycle begins with the female cyprid invading the crabs and then developing into a parasite with an internal root system (interna). Once the interna matures, it will develop a reproductive body outside the crabs through the abdominal part called the virgin externa. Male cyprids will then enter the virgin externa, which give rise to a fertilized externa with the eggs brooding inside it. Larvae will then be released via the externa once the eggs became mature.”

Once the eggs emerge from the crab’s abdomen, it will nurture them to maturity the same way it would it’s own brood.

Sad News:

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.

Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.

In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her ideological opponents with droll precision.

More here. 

If you want to go back and read some of her stuff, this is a good place to start.

Upate:  Here are some links to columns written by her friends and admirers in the media.

John Nichols – The Nation

Bill Moyers – Common Dreams

Paul Krugman  – The New York Times

and Maya Angelou

Up to the walls of Jericho

She marched with a spear in

her hand

Go blow them ram horns she cried

For the battle is in my hand

The walls have not come down,

but they have been given a

serious shaking.

That Jericho voice is stilled now.

Molly Ivins has been quieted.

Every time I fly, I find myself annoyed by the preflight announcements. As they rattle on over the PA “…In the event of a water landing…” I want to interject “We will all die!”, but I never say it, don’t wanna jinx the flight. Instead I look at the illustrated safety card and think that about how ridiculous the illustrations are. The guy over at airtoons.com has come up with his own illustrations for the cards.

Today I came across this post on Boing Boing and it made me chuckle. The post is a summary of the original piece in the Economist speculating on what a truthful announcement would be like.

Highlights include:

The flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft.

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.

Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it.

Please consume alcohol in moderate quantities so that you become mildly sedated but not rowdy. That said, we can always turn the cabin air-quality down a notch or two to help ensure that you are sufficiently drowsy.

But unfortunately, the airlines know better than to scare the flying public like that. Instead we all sit there half-listening, looking at SkyMall magazine wondering who in the world buys that stuff.

Last Sunday night (August 27, 2006) at approximately 11pm I experienced my first UFO sighting.

My girlfriend and I were driving back to Seattle from Portland and somewhere outside of Federal Way (around mile marker 149) we saw something falling from the sky leaving a long brilliant green trail behind it that light up the sky to the north/northwest.

At first we thought it was a meteor / shooting star. But it appeared to be dropping straight out of the sky and not shooting across the sky as the meteors and shooting stars I have seen. (I don’t know what they look like or how they appear to travel right before impact…)

I got out my digital crayons today and made a quick sketch to illustrate what we saw.

The green trail on the left shows how the object fell off in the distance. We did not see any impact, etc. Perhaps it fell into Puget Sound.

As we were near the airport, there is the possibility that we saw something related to an aircraft, but it sure didn’t look like it, or appear to be that close.

If you saw this or any other unidentified flying object, I would love to hear about it. So would the National UFO Reporting Center based out of a former ICBM missile base in eastern Washington.

Well, it looks like the probe into the CIA Leak is finally working its way up the political ladder. According to a story on Truthout.org, the indictment of Karl Rove is imminent.

From the article:

Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

More cartoons about Turd Blossom can be found here.

When news broke that Cheney shot someone in the face, I assumed that he must have been drunk, high, or both.

It turns out that in addition to the copious quantities of medication that he takes daily, he did have at least one beer before the hunt.

When old Dick was on Fox last week discussing the tragedy, he admitted having a beer with lunch. One thing that he didn’t mention was how the Secret Service sent away a deputy that came to interview him that evening. They scheduled an appointment for the next day. Did he need to sober up?

Think progress covers his advisors comments with “Meet the Press” here.

Courtesy of Perrspectives.com

Over 30 gallons of VX nerve gas was spilled last Friday. Fortunately it was contained without incident, as a single drop would kill an adult. Unfortunately, this recent discovery does nothing to help justify the current war in Iraq, but does raise another question. If one drop will kill a healthy adult, why would we need 250,000 gallons stored in Indiana? That is a lot of VX.