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Cooter’s in Nashville

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Nashville

My Daemon

Hot Fuzz

By the power of Greyskull!

Prehistoric Brocolli Trees, Food Photoshop, and Tony’sTube

I’ve been slowly working through a gorgeous Nova episode about the first flowers, a fascinating documentary about this area in China from which most of our popular flowers originated. Its pretty much scene-after-scene of flower porn, all rendered in brilliant 1080i. Then, today I saw this awesome recreation of a prehistoric tree. Something about it reminds me of the Mars I pictured in C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, those towering trunks with alien fronds jutting out in the crown.

This self-described Pulitzer-caliber site begins to catalog the promise and the reality of food advertising. With all the Photoshopping that goes on these days, is it any surprise that your fast food orders don’t come out looking quite like their head shots? This, of course, from the guy that actively believes in the reality of the dessert tray. Oh, those dashed dreams and waxy bites!

Finally, thanks to MountainCabin for this great find of a site devoted to Broadway videos. Though I’m not the biggest fan of Broadway, I know many of my friends for which this will provide countless hours of tubey goodness. And they said “the internet is [only good] for porn!”

This Day in History

taken from the New York Times On This Day

• Paul Revere started his ride to warn of the coming British soldiers back in 1775.
• San Francisco got rocked by the devastating 1906 earthquake.
• The League of Nations closed its doors back this day in 1946.
• Albert Einstein kicked off in 1955.
• Tom Cruise demonstrated his not-being-gayness to the world with the birth of Suri in 2006.

• and Patrick and I had our first date 10 years on this day in 1997.

Solidarity

The kind-of anonymity afforded to us by the internet, that ability to be whoever you want, say whatever you like, is liberating. It brings out the parts of us that could never have been expressed except, perhaps, in the deep recesses of our beings. For some, this freedom transforms their otherwise boring, real-life existence into one that’s transcendent, eventually bleeding over from online into reality and helping them truly realize an actualized life. For others, though, it unlocks their own inner asshatness.

I have an online friend who I’ve corresponded with online over the last year. This friend, I think, embodied the former of the two people described above. His blog touched the lives of many, and that was made even more apparent by the incredible response to a recent, severe illness. His absence from my daily web-crawl was palpable, and his subsequent return relieving. In spite of everything else going wrong, one part, at least, was right with the world.

Unfortunately, the latter of the two types described above also exist. It seems inevitable that all good things have their inverse partner. Evil is probably the oldest thing in creation, so it really shouldn’t surprise anyone to see it appear and thrive online. The funny this is, this person is probably quite normal to all outward appearances. I doubt that anyone would believe them to be anything other than a normal person, probably even quite pleasant. Only online, bathing in liberating anonymity, can this evil really manifest itself.

My friend is now offline, driven off by an evil person. His life that he shared through his blog is now closed to the world, all because of a griefer. Though it would appear evil has triumphed, so long as we make a testament to this story, the victory is, in fact, only temporary. My friend will recover, pick up the pieces, and one day rise again. For those of us left, it will be a long wait indeed.

TikiTron

Top Ten SciFi Movies

The British SciFi magazine SFX reports the top three SciFi movies as follows: Serenity, Star Wars, and Blade Runner. While I certainly treasure each of those and also feel that Serenity was woefully under appreciated at the box-office, I would never dream of putting such a recent release at the top. Given that Firefly and Serenity have a rather rapid and internet-centric fanbase, I’m not really surprised to see this kind of achievement in what was likely an on-line poll. Anyway, in the interest of balance, below is my top 10 list. Every SciFi-loving blogger reading these words would be shirking his blogger-duties by passing up this meme. You have been put on notice!