don't know when I'll be back again

You can fly around the globe in Google Earth using the flight simulator feature.

(Mr. Hoo tells me that "everybody knows that.")

Found, along with the answer to life, the universe and everything, in Google easter eggs: 15 best hidden jokes in today's Telegraph »

speaking of art (or: the transubstantiation of tacos)

I’m sure I don’t understand this.

I’m fairly convinced it’s an homage to Obama and, perhaps, tacos. Or are those celestial orbs doubling as sacred halos? No (scans the bottom of the frame) tacos: with meat, cheese, tomatoes and sour cream. No (scans the upper left corner; notes the rays emanating from the sun; notes the transmutation of rays to... lettuce? in the halo behind our President’s sainted head): these are celestial tacos; holy sacraments.

I think.

That our cast of characters, outside Obama in his staid blue suit, are all clad in underwear that, not incidentally I believe, shines the same bright white as the White House behind it, further baffles me. And the tighty whitey balanced precariously on point in Obama’s outstretched hand? Please. Help me understand.

The Mexican flag flying standard from the crown of the White House is the one visual reference that makes we wonder whether this is something less than an homage -- an image worked through with the fear of foreign incursion rather than cooperation. A what might be if Obama comes to be (I don’t know when this was painted but suspect, given the campaign sign, that it was during the campaign season).

But the exuberance calls me back. This is a celebration. The chorus is clad in their underwear not to seduce, but to call attention to their patchwork of ethnicity, each individual a many colored rainbow of skin tones.
 A fiesta of promised pluralism.

I think.

But I’m sure I don’t understand.


Found at http://badpaintingsofbarackobama.com/ via @heatherlorin.

atomic artifact

The plutonium, found in a one-gallon glass jug after a cleanup crew tore open the safe with an excavator, was processed at Hanford in late 1944 from spent uranium fuel from a reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn. It was the product of test runs of a plant built for separating plutonium for use in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

The New York Times reporting on the man-made plutonium (read: nuclear waste) that was discovered in a glass jar in an "old safe buried in a waste trench" at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in 2004.

The piece continues: "The only earlier sample of man-made plutonium known to exist was produced in 1941 in an accelerator and is stored at the Smithsonian Institution."

The glass jar was labeled: "Wastes for Recovery."

the most dangerous animal in the wild

embiggen »

Human's feet bear the full weight of the body when standing or walking, so the track shows a print of the entire sole. They are the most dangerous animal in the wild.

Found in The Mammal Tracks of Thailand by Oy Kanjanavanit

Which I found, not surprisingly, in Thailand, and can't find anywhere online.

linzie love

inspirational spam
Originally uploaded by Linzie Hunter.

Flickrite Linzie Hunter makes lovely hand-lettered works of art from spam subject lines.

Check it out here »

Many thanks to Vasta at Squandrous for the link!

artifact.

the moon is not yet dead

The moon is not yet dead, nor has it revealed all its secrets.

Found, and then quickly lost again, in digg labs' big spy.

The zeitgeist of which I could watch, mesmerized, for hours at a stretch.

(Swarmin' and stackin' are fun too.)