Kara Jean

Dengeki Iraira Bou Returns (JP)


Irritating Stick (NA)

Irritating Stick (Jaleco - PSX - 1998/1999)

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Dengeki Iraira Bou Returns VS. Irritating Stick

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un-gif-dans-ta-gueule: Samsara - Ron Fricke

Kiera Wilmot — the Florida 16-year-old who created a small explosion just outside her school before classes started by mixing cleaning solution and tin foil (she was just curious, nobody was harmed) — will not be charged with a felony, after all. Florida State Attorneys dropped the charges against Wilmot yesterday. After her case garnered national attention, she ended up with a lawyer who has defended her mostly for free. There's no word yet on whether she'll be allowed to return to the school that expelled her and pressed charges in the first place.

In the meantime, the Internet has created a nice happy ending here. Homer Hickam — the writer and former NASA engineer whose memoir is the basis of the movie October Sky — started a Crowdtilt campaign to send Wilmot and her twin sister Kayla to the Advanced Space Academy program at the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.. The cost of space camp can run upwards of $1200. Hickam paid for Kiera Wilmot to go and the Crowdtilt campaign raised the other $1200 for her sister, plus extra money for their travel expenses. The campaign hit its $2500 goal in just two days and is now up to $2920. Hickam says the extra money is going to the girls' mother.

A second Crowdtilt campaign raised more than $8000 for a Kiera Wilmot Defense Fund. Now that the charges have been dropped, that money will go into a trust, to pay the few legal expenses the family does have and to cover costs associated with Wilmot's education — especially since it's still unclear whether she'll be allowed back into the local public school.

Good job, Internet!

 
Nick Cave reads the lyrics to “Dead Joe” and manages to keep a straight face.
 

donotdestroy: Eddie Fiola And Ron House Over A Burbank Police Car

DDM here, drinking an Irish Coffee and wondering how the GOP will find new ways to screw the poors today.

I’m new here, and have only been guestblogging for about a week. But I want to submit an entry for Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year (Federal Level Edition). He is my old pal, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Black Cloud of Poor Hating). Last week, he was working on screwing the poors overseas. Let’s see how he wants to make sure the poor stay hungry and pliant here in the US of A, too!

Finally, this recession is getting a little better, and the unemployment numbers and the deficit level are dropping. Sure, lots of people are still poors and whatnot, but it is getting better. As good libruls, Yr Wonkette believes that with a little help from government programs like reduced price (or even free!) school lunches, food stamps, and help with heating bills during the winter, the gubment can help folks in rough times so they are better positioned to get a jerb when the economy gets better. And just as things are looking to get better, cue a farthead from the GOP to come in and give us a rainy cloud of foaming sploding pig shit.

Top hat and monocle in place — which does look odd in his home state of Oklahoma — Rep. Lucas continues to find ways to keep the poor from extravagances like food and water. He is leading the GOP on the Ag Committee, and just passed a Farm Bill that cuts $20 billion in food stamp (now called SNAP) benefits. When asked about cutting $20 billion dollars from a program that helps people literally put food on their table, Lucas said that the reductions, “”won’t take a calorie off the plate of anyone who needs help.”

I know it is early, and you might be on your first Irish coffee too, but I have a hard time not believing that Lucas might be lying.

Lucas wants to change the rules of how people qualify for SNAP. In some states, when people sign up for one assistance program, they are automatically enrolled in SNAP. This saves time for people, reduces duplication on behalf of the federal government, and allows more people to, you know, eat. But Lucas, as we have seen before, is not a fan of efficiency. Make things easier on the poors? While he is all for simplifying the tax code, that would help mostly rich people, and the government is here to make things easier for the rich and harder for the poor, remember? So fuck those poors – let’s make them fill out even more paperwork than shady Tea Party tax-exempt groups!!!

 

So thanks, Rep. Lucas, for using your bootstrap to pull yourself up, then using said boot to kick the food off the table of hungry people. It’s just like some guy said: “The poor will always be with you, so fuck those guys.” (Jesus of Nazareth, New GOP Version).

Hey, speaking of religious-types people, how did religious groups react to your farm bill? Let’s have a look:

“A vote for this level of cuts is shameless,” said David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World.

“We as a society have a special obligation to consider first the needs of the poor, even as we act through government. The proposed cuts to this vital program put a disproportionate burden on the very people our Catholic tradition teaches us to elevate in our public consciousness,” said Father Larry Snyder, President of Catholic Charities USA.

“If divided evenly across Feeding America’s national network of food banks, every food bank would have to provide an additional 4 million meals each year for the next ten years, and that is just not possible,” said Bob Aiken, president and CEO of Feeding America.

Feeding America estimates that these cuts would amount to over 8 billion lost meals for struggling families.

Clearly these religious people are full of shit.  I just read that Rep. Lucas said that cutting $20 billion wouldn’t hurt anyone! Plus, what do faith-based groups like Bread for the World and Catholic Charities know about what Jesus would want, anyway? They must be drunk on communion wine.

But DDM, is there anyone in Congress who isn’t a shitmuffin? Glad you asked! Rep. James McGovern (D-Righteous Dude) has been fighting for years to help improve government services to feed the hungry both domestically and internationally. He is on the Ag committee and offered an amendment to reduce the cuts to food stamps. It failed. Still, if any of you readers are Massholes, you should give his office a ring and say thanks.

And if you are unfortunate enough to live in Oklahoma, Yr Wonkette shares this advice: You might be confronted by the instinct to drink alone. Trust that instinct. Manage the pain. Don’t be a hero.

Also, that Lucas guy can drink $20 billion worth of dicks.

[Boston Herald/Red Orbit/West Wing]

Photography by Gerald Rhemann Title: H. P. Lovecraft NGC 7293 Helix Nebula/Aquarius M20 M21/SAGITTARIUS M20 NGC6357/SCORPIUS Comet C/2009 R1 McNaught June 10 2010 UT 00h30m NGC 6726 Reflection and Emission Nebulas Scorpius/Ophiuchus Comet Hale-Bopp April 1997 Horsehead Nebula Comet Hyakutake at Perihel April 1996 M82 Ursa Major NGC 4565 Coma Berenices IC 4592 / Scorpius NGC3372 overview/CARINA Atley

My great-grandmother, Hedwig Nietzsche Koerth, never spoke English. My Grandpa Gustav didn't learn the language until he entered first grade. But, by the time I was in grade school — and was going through a brief fling of learning German — Grandpa no longer remembered much of what had once been his first language. Today, nobody in my immediate family speaks any German, much less the dying dialect of Texas German that my great-grandmother spoke. The BBC has an interesting story about the history and linguistics of Texas German, which will probably die out in the next couple generations — largely because the German Germans started a couple world wars in a row and changed the idea of what was and wasn't socially acceptable speech in America.

What happens inside a caterpillar's cocoon? Scientists got to watch the whole process with the help of X-ray 3D scanning technology. In the video above, you can watch a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Over the course of 16 days its breathing tubes (shown in blue) and its digestive system (shown in red) change shape and position within the body, while other structures grow from scratch.

Ed Yong has a great story to go with this, too. All about why it's important to actually watch the process happening in a single caterpillar, instead of just relying on the data scientists have collected from years of dissecting different caterpillars at different stages in the transformation.

Just now I was washing breakfast dishes and mentally composing a Facebook post, which started out “Last night was not a good night for Orioles – Red Sox – anti-Yankees fans! The three way tie for first place got broken in the worst direction! Us and our Red Sox buddies …” and I forget how that sentence was going to end, because I was caught up short noticing how it began. I’ve known about the ongoing spread of the ‘accusative’ pronouns forever – Sapir wrote about it (as a case of “language drift”), and Ed Klima, one of my favorite grad school professors, had worked on it and talked with us about it (we tried to figure out what kinds of rules would make ‘us’ and ‘me’ not get nominative in conjoined subjects while "I" and "we" as simple subjects are obligatorily marked nominative, and discussed similarities with French ‘disjunctive’ pronoun ‘moi’ vs. clitic subject 'je'). And it was the source of my oft-repeated anecdote about my son Morriss in 4^th grade asking me to proofread a composition he had just written – it started out ‘Seth and I went to the mall’ and he pointed to ‘Seth and I’, and said to me “That’s how you spell “me and Seth”, right?”.

But none of that had prepared me for having it emerge in my own dialect. But there it was. And when I think about putting “We and our Red Sox buddies” instead, it sounds over-formal, doesn’t fit in the context of baseball buddies. So it looks like “us and …” has made the move from passive recognition to becoming an active part of my (most?) colloquial register, at least the baseball buddies register.

Fun – I think I just gave myself a little lesson both about language change and about sociolinguistics and registers. Now I’m just waiting to see whether in my baseball register, I’ll start using the simple-present counterfactuals that I have found so interesting in baseball interviews (“He catches that ball, we’re into extra innings.” They’ll never say “If he had caught that ball, we would have been into extra innings” – though they might say “If he would of caught that ball, we would have been into extra innings.” I think the simple-present one is new since my brother’s day, but I’m not a dialectologist, that’s only my subjective impression.)

Read Drew's blog: The Worst Things For Sale.