Fun Stuff

787 pieces of Clip art humans in a loop

Anti-Abortion article cites the Onion

Preserved comments for above article

Harry Potter fan from hell Ms Scribe

Nerd Baby Alphabet

Go, read, learn.

I've just been googling for some good blogs on the war Israel is raging against Lebanon. I can't vouch for all of these, but check them out yourselves. If anyone has suggestions for great feminist blogging from Lebanon or by Lebanese women, I'd love the links!

Moorish Girl

Dove's Eye View

Left i on the news

Lenin's Tomb

Beirut Update

Witnessing Again beautiful art and commentary!

Go, read, learn.

I've just been googling for some good blogs on the war Israel is raging against Lebanon. I can't vouch for all of these, but check them out yourselves. If anyone has suggestions for great feminist blogging from Lebanon or by Lebanese women, I'd love the links!

Moorish Girl

Dove's Eye View

Left i on the news

Lenin's Tomb

Beirut Update

Witnessing Again beautiful art and commentary!

Go, read, learn.

I've just been googling for some good blogs on the war Israel is raging against Lebanon. I can't vouch for all of these, but check them out yourselves. If anyone has suggestions for great feminist blogging from Lebanon or by Lebanese women, I'd love the links!

Moorish Girl

Dove's Eye View

Left i on the news

Lenin's Tomb

Beirut Update

Witnessing Again beautiful art and commentary!

Flyer to hand out at today's demo

Fall Actions flyer

Yesterday's Demonstration Against Israel's Attacks on Lebanon

CircleVision has pictures from yesterdays demonstration downtown. There were 200 people at Peavey Plaza getting a lot of friendly honks from passsersby.

Osama Bin Parkinsons and The War on Terrorble Diseases

Jon Stewart on Stem Cell Veto and "Murder"

Demonstration tonight!

From the Women Against Military Madness website:

Thursday, July 20, 2006
Stop the U.S.-Israeli War on the People of Gaza and Lebanon!
No More U.S. Tax Dollars to Occupy Palestine and to Destroy Lebanon!

4:30 - 5:30 pm
Peavey Plaza, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis

Israel's attacks on Gaza in response to the capture of an Israeli soldier constitute collective punishment of the entire Gaza population and have left close to 100 Palestinians dead, hundreds wounded and countless homeless and without water and electricity and in an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.

This is only the most recent step in Israel's brutal and unending, illegal occupation of Palestine. Israel's massive assault on Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers and killing of eight is also collective punishment of the people of Lebanon in clear violation of Geneva Conventions and international law.

Even as the U.S. blames Syria and Lebanon for arming Hezbollah, the U.S. government is the main military supplier, funder and protector of Israel and has expressed its open and complete support for Israel in its two-front war. Possibilities loom to expand the war to include attacks on Iran and Syria.

Join us in opposing these assaults on Gaza and Lebanon and the looming possibility of attacks expanded to include Iran and Syria.

Organized by the Coalition for Palestinian Rights

In preparation for tonight, I created this flyer about the Fall Actions against the War in Iraq:

Success!

Mizna had a terrific journal release event last Friday at the University of Minnesota book store. Over 70 people attended and nine contributing authors read from their work. It was wonderful.

Today I finally managed to put together a flyer asking people to subscribe to the journal. For some reason, I found this particular assignment very difficult. I can do event flyers, but I wasn't sure how to put together a flyer publicizing the journal. The journal is wonderful and has terrific writing about a subject of great importance today. And yet I put it off until the last possible minute. The journal mailing was tonight and I managed to finish the flyer at around 2 p.m. this afternoon. Sheesh!

Tonight there were ten of us mailing out the most recent version of the journal along with my fliers and other information to journal readers. The mailing went relatively quickly and much hilarity transpired.

So even though Israel and Lebanon are once again at war and many of my friends are currently in Lebanon, trying to get out, there is comradery and soldarity from our small corner of the world. If you can, please subscribe to Mizna. It has great writing and artistry. You won't be disappointed.

New and Used Terms for the Times

I just got this in an e-mail. I tried to find the source. I think a lot of them came from Dilbert, but I can't find the web locale.


404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they claim to solve.

ALPHA GEEK: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group.

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

BATMOBILING: putting up emotional shields. Refers to the retracting armor that covers the Batmobile as in “she started talking marriage and he started batmobiling”

BEEPILEPSY: The brief siezure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions, and stopping speech in mid-sentence.

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

BODY NAZIS: Hard-core exercise and weightlifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.

BOZONE: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

CAREER LIMITING MOVE (CLM): Used among microserfs to describe an ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.

CHAINSAW CONSULTANT: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the brass with clean hands.

CONTRATEMPS: The resentment permanent workers feel toward the fill-in workers.

CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles

DEAD TREE EDITION: The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms.

DILBERTED: To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character."I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

DORITO SYNDROME: Feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction triggered by addictive substances that lack nutritional content. "I just spent six hours surfing the Web, and now I've got a bad case of Dorito Syndrome."

EGO SURFING: Scanning the Net, databases, print media and so on, looking for references to one's own name.

ELVIS YEAR: The peak year of something's popularity. "Barney the dinosaur's Elvis year was 1993."

FLIGHT RISK: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

GLAZING: Corporate-speak for sleeping with your eyes open; a popular pastime at conferences and early-morning meetings. “Didn’t he notice that by the second session half the room was glazing?”

GOING POSTAL: Euphemism for being totally stressed out, for losing it. Makes reference to the unfortunate track record of postal employees who have snapped and gone on shooting rampages.

GOOD JOB: A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" job. A well-paying job people take in order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they are solvent again.

IDEA HAMSTERS: People whose idea generators are always running.

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The J-Lo and Ben wedding (or not) was a prime example -- Michael Jackson, another.

KEYBOARD PLAQUE: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards.

KINSTIPATION: A painful inability to move relatives who come to visit.

MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

ORF: Old Retired Fart - the retired officer or NCO who has returned as a contractor to do the same job he did on active duty.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

SARCHASM: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

SNOOPERVISION: A management or regulatory style characterized by intrusiveness or excessive prying.

SQUARE-HEADED SPOUSE: Computer

STARTER MARRIAGE: A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.

STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

TELEPHONE NUMBER SALARY: A salary (or project budget) that has seven digits.

TINK: Acronym for a highly paid single consultant. Ten Incomes, No Kids!

UMFRIEND: A sexual relation of dubious standing or a concealed intimate relationship, as in "This is Dale, my...um...friend."

WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

YUPPIE FOOD STAMPS: The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal: "We owe $8 each, but all anybody's got are yuppie food stamps."

Ancient Corvid

Crow believed to be oldest in world dies

Fri Jul 7, 4:53 PM ET

There's no way to prove Tata was the world's oldest crow when he died Sunday at age 59. But an expert on crows says it's possible.

Tata's tale began in 1947 when a thunderstorm blew the fledgling out of his nest in a Long Island cemetery, a mishap that likely led to his long life. Injured and unable to fly, the bird was scooped up by a cemetery caretaker and brought to a local family with a reputation for taking care of animals, Tata's most recent owner, Kristine Flones, told the Daily Freeman of Kingston.

"He was never able to fly, so he became their family pet," said Flones, a wildlife rehabilitator in the Woodstock, N.Y., hamlet of Bearsville, 95 miles north of New York City.

The Manetta family took care of Tata for more than half a century but gave the bird to Flones in 2001 because of their own health problems.

Blinded by cataracts and 54 years old when she got him, Tata was still a wonderful pet, Flones said.

"When you came around him, his energy was very beautiful," she told the newspaper. "It was as if he were exuding or giving off a loving energy."

"It's an incredibly old bird," said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at Cornell University who has studied crows for more than 20 years. "They don't live that old in the wild."

McGowan said the oldest living crow he has documented in the wild is a bird he banded as a fledgling and has tracked for 15 years. There is an unsubstantiated claim of a 29- or 30-year-old crow in the wild, but he knows of no older crows, tame or otherwise.

While claims of animal longevity are tough to verify, McGowan said, "This one sounded pretty reasonable to me."

In an environment without predators, communicable disease or the likelihood of a fatal accident, a crow could grow as old as Tata, he said.

Flones said Tata was still active and alert in his later years, to the point each spring that he called out from inside the house to crows outside, often loudly and beginning at 5 a.m.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

¡En espanol!

Can't have a salsa party without a flyer in Spanish, eh?

Updated Mizna flyer

Had to add a few things: the ADA symbol, the phone number (du-uh!) and the web address. Still liking it, tho.