Japan receives record snowfall

Zenkoji's pagoda in snow scene
Originally uploaded by tabito.

Japan has experienced its heaviest snowfall on record.

Is this another sign of global warming or merely normal weather aberration?

This storm has already claimed over sixty lives and the death toll looks to march higher. Another powerful example of how climate change threatens human civilization.

One concerned blogger frames the question this way:

Will our current environmental crisis lead to the economic or social collapse of civilization? In the face of patently unsustainable consumption of natural resources, and the almost complete lack of political awareness of our leaders and most of the public, is this not inevitable? Global warming is now in progress, food production per capita has been declining for decades, oil production may peak in the next five years or so, soil erosion and deforestation are rampant, water tables are falling almost everywhere that it matters. |Link|

Roller Derby Renaissance

Rock & Roll
Originally uploaded by zeiss66super.

Roller Derby is enjoying a resurgence in the U.S.

A&E has a new docu-series titled Rollergirls about the LoneStar Rollergirls of TXRD that you can catch Monday nights. Yahoo!TV has a sneak peak and as well as local TV listings.

The LoneStar Rollergirls use a banked track which increases the speed of play, but there are also teams using a flat track, such as the Minnesota Rollergirls in my home state.

Photo Blogging and Open Worldcat

Veteran's Memorial Bridge
Originally uploaded by Aprevit.

has made photo blogging incredibly easy. And so long as the poster's privacy settings allow, you can blog any photo on Flickr.

Another wonderful development for blogging is the launch of the Open Worldcat initiative. Open Worldcat now allows bloggers to provide an authoritative bibliographic record for print resources. Worldcat will then help people find that print resources at a physical library near them. You can also download a Worldcat interface for your browser's toolbar (IE and Firefox).

Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man

Hmmm. I can't seem to make the comments work over at zach's blog, so I guess I'll post my comment here. Here it is:

Actually, I think the recommendations are spot on. The original Planet of the Apes movies were chock full of anti-racist social commentary, though it's easy enough to miss it if you're distracted by the spectacle of talking apes (or, alternately, talking humans). By grouping Planet with those other films, Wal-Mart is pushing a reading of the film that progressives ought to embrace.

What the heck am I talking about? This controversy. Apparently, when shoppers at Wal-Mart's web site clicked on the DVD of the original Planet of the Apes they were shown recommendations for "four movies about King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner." Outrage ensued, Wal-Mart apologized (blaming a 'computer error'), and now we are once again free to see Planet as pure popcorn.

Addendum: I'm guessing that the reason my comment wouldn't take over at zach's was that he was updating the post to include a link to this story. The added wrinkle there is that similar recommendations were given for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. No defense of that from me, though I stand by what I wrote above.

Friday dumb game blogging, breakfast of champions edition

Egg Fighter

Yum!

A tip of the hat to Exploding Aardvark for tracking down this promising recipe:

Bacon snack bars

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup light corn syrup

1/2 cup peanut butter

1 pkg. (2.8 oz.) OSCAR MAYER Real Bacon Recipe Pieces

4 tsp. TANG Orange Flavor Drink Mix

3 cups POST HONEY BUNCHES OF OATS Cereal, any variety

MIX sugar and syrup in large saucepan. Bring just to boil on medium heat, stirring frequently. Remove from heat.

ADD peanut butter; stir until well blended. Stir in bacon pieces and drink mix. Add cereal; mix well.

PRESS evenly into greased 8-inch square pan. Cool completely before cutting into 12 bars to serve.

|kraftfoods.com|

What did the congested spy say?

"I got a code in my nose"

But seriously folks, I have a death cold, which is why my blogging has been especially sporadic and sucky. Which brings me to a question: Does the new methamphetamine-free cold medicine actually work?

You go, girl!

That's a great G.O.P. talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us.

| link |

Now you tell us

Today's New York Times has an article in which Peter Kalikow, chairman of the MTA, admits to a mistake:

"I put out a proposal that I thought would be most palatable to the union, and it turns out I was wrong," he said in an interview. Before the strike, Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, had repeatedly said he would not accept a pension plan that did not treat future workers the same as current ones.

Mr. Kalikow, who was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki in 2001, defended the settlement reached last week as fair. He said the union's main concession - having workers for the first time pay part of their health-insurance premiums - was more valuable than the pension demands that were ultimately abandoned.

"It didn't matter to me where I got the savings," he said.

The curious thing here is that before the strike Kalikow insisted that the pension demand would not be withdrawn. That sort of brinksmanship looks downright stupid if, as he says now, he didn't care where the savings came from.

The tendency of management to act irrationally when dealing with labor unions is a pervasive feature of contemporary labor management relations. Managers frequently goad unions into striking by refusing to budge on issues where the cost of a management concession is swamped by the cost of a strike. My best shot at an explanation is that managers can't quite get their heads around the idea that the union gets a say in how the business is run.

But why is that so hard? It's not like managers are dictators unaccustomed to negotiating with anybody about anything. The deep problem, it seems to me, is that the hierarchies of the workplace give managers the idea that workers aren't their equals. This perception of inequality, in turn, seems to legitimize a practice of imposing conditions rather than bargaining in good faith.

ted

[from Middle English, tedden]

tr. v.
To strew or spread (newly mown grass, for example) for drying.

It's right here, under this veil

One Senate Republican aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Republicans soon will unveil ethics reform legislation in an effort to blunt criticism from Democrats that they have fostered a "culture of corruption" in Washington.

Hey, didn't the Republicans come to power by promising to eliminate the "culture of corruption?" Well as DeLay knows personally, the most profitable exterminators make sure the infestation comes back.

link

Congratulations GOP!

You've managed to transform public criticism of a clearly illegal program of domestic spying into a discussion of the ethics of leaking the details of (illegal) classified operations. Keep it up! Remember, if we can erode civil liberties enough, the evildoers will have no reason to hate us.

And another thing

This, from Jane Hamsher over at firedoglake, is right on, but I would add one thing. If a news report is a summary of, or even if it prominently mentions, a document of any kind then a link to that document should be provided as a matter of course. Don't just quote me an excerpt from a press release, give me the whole thing. And for God's sake, if you're writing about a court decision, give me some help finding the text.^[1]

---------------
1 And if a link is too much to ask, how about providing a clear enough citiation for me to look it up for myself?

Hey look

Dru took a picture of J.Son, me, and a much more successful blogger. I'm the one with the coffee.

Which reminds me that I still haven't emailed Dru a thank you for the invite. What a jerk I am!

The new The Bellman: all sex all the time for 2006

My union organizing gig starts in a few days so I spent some time today researching an area they've focused on that I don't know much about. Namely, transgender issues. But that's not what this post is about.

During the course of my wide ranging googling, I came across tiny nibbles which, if you happen to be in the market for a sex blog, is top notch. The writer, Violet Blue, also does a podcast called Open Source Sex and I'm so entranced by the blog that I'm thinking about breaking my I-shall-never-listen-to-a-podcast oath. Consider, for example, this excerpt from a post about Violet Blue's first lap dance:

Out on the stage came four women, and one got so excited when she saw us she barely did her routine before jumping off the stage and landing in my lap, grabbing my boobs and pulling me into her chest. It was the beginning of what was to be our nonconsensual relationship. She grabbed my head and pushed my face between her tits -- of steel. My nose hit her breastbone -- bonk! She smashed her boobs together around my face -- bonk, bonk! Hard, everything was hard. My nose hurt. I didn’t know what to do -- there was no pleasant squishiness, like when you nuzzle a pair of soft, yummy boobies. Suddenly I was covered in perfume, ack. The woman and her blonde coworker summoned us into the other room, with another stage and several padded tables surrounded by chairs. We sat at a table near the stage, (which was on hydraulics and I thought was pretty neato) and after a song the same two women came over to our table, led mostly by the hard-boob lady, who was actually enthusiastic and cute. They threw a blanket over the table, got up on it, and performed cunnilingus for about one minute, with the blonde in my lap and the other with her legs spread in my face and her left high heel hooked around Hornboy's neck. I was beginning to appreciate subtlety in all its forms. This wasn't it.

But that's not really what this post is about either. Though before I get to the point I want to mention that Violet Blue is a very well rounded sex blogger. In addition to blogging, podcasting, fleshbot editing, and writing actual real books she's a machine artist working with an outfit that goes by the name of Survival Research Labs. I'm not even going to try to explain what that entails, but maybe you'll enjoy this video

What this post is really about is The Extra Action Marching Band which looks to me like a brassier -- and probably queerer -- Crash Worship. Now, I've only been to the one Crash Worship show, but it was...well, words fail me. What I most clearly remember about my introduction to Crash Worship, though, was being utterly surprised both that the band existed and that I hadn't known that the band existed. Seems to me that that's probably a pretty common reaction to The Extra Action Marching Band. The first part, anyway. So the point of this post is to say, "Hey look at this thing that exists. Who'd'a thunk?"

I love the internets.

MMORGY...mmm...orgy

Terra Nova has a post exploring massive multiplayer online erotic games. For instance, Naughty America: The Game claims to be the evolution of dating. Until virtual reality interfaces improve, I seriously doubt that. But it will undoubtedly change the connotation of opening your ports for an MMO...

Captain Ed rides to the rescue!

Captain Ed breathlessly reports that the US policy of Extraordinary Rendition began under Clinton in 1995, and lambasts publications for not putting this on their front pages.

Well, of course, Clinton mentioned this himself earlier this year, and it is regularly mentioned in stories about rendition. I guess the Captain was too busy regurgitating the swift boat veterans for truth to take notice at the time.