Revealed: Secrets of the Magic 8 Ball

I must admit it. I've loved the Magic 8 Ball since my childhood. Hours were spent with a girlfriend (her brother owned the mystical fortune telling device) asking every sort of question.

It took ages for us to tire of playing with the Magic 8 Ball, but eventually we moved on. But not before we went through transition every child goes through with the toy. That is the transition from question-asking to curiosity about how the damn thing works!

For those who may never have opened their beloved Magic 8 Ball, I offer the following hunttula.com exhibit showing a Magic 8 Ball Autopsy. (click "continue" at the bottom of each frame)

Museum of Freaky Food

I've found a pretty cool web site, hanttula.com, and they've got some fun exhibits. I am posting two.

The first is hanttula's Museum of Food Anomalies, wherein a viewer gets to see freaky foods. You know, the grilled cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary. Or, the Happy Face potato chip.

Enjoy!

Funny: But Too Bad It's True

"On Capitol Hill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and then everybody had a good laugh and went back to what they were doing."
---Jay Leno
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"News has just broke that the administration is seeking a high-powered "war czar" to oversee the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. So there you have it folks---five years into the global war on terror the president believes it is now time for someone to be in charge of it."
---Jon Stewart
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"Rudy Giuliani got in trouble because, y'know that presidential question they ask: "What's the price of a gallon of milk?" He didn’t know. That doesn’t bother me, really, if a president doesn’t know. What I want to know [is], does the president know the price of a war with Iraq?"
---Craig Ferguson
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"Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter has filed papers to run for president. But in his official filing, he misspelled the word 'president.' Political experts say it's all part of Hunter's plan to attract Bush supporters."
---Conan O'Brien
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"It was announced that Hooters would open one of its restaurants in Israel this summer. So much for keeping the meat separate from the dairy."
---Amy Poehler
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"In 200 years, we've gone from "We the people," to "Up With People." From "the best and the brightest" to "dumb and dumber." And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by "elites." It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And, by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling just hired to keep her ass out of jail...went to a real law school."
---Bill Maher
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Thank you to Bill in Portland Maine for compiling the snark

You Fuck, You Die

The decision handed down by Bush's Supreme Court of the United States represents a very dark day in history for all American women.

I have stolen and posted, wholesale, an important blog post that reflects precisely how I feel. THANK YOU MARYSCOTT O'CONNOR!

A friend of mine said he wanted to start a blog to document and explore the reprehensible act of so-called "honor killings" of women around the world. You know, where the husbands, fathers, and/or brothers of women have given themselves the "right" to literally be judge, jury and executioner of females who they deem to have impinged family honor for any number of minor acts of personal self-determination.

The ban against late term Intact D&E terminations is just that: Five conservative male (Roberts and Alito having lied their way in prior to the 2007 Dem takeover) Supreme Court Justices have just upheld Bush Administration's "ban" on late term terminations with no waiver if the mother's life is in danger. In otherwords, they've legalized the "Honor Killing" of America's women. If you fuck, you die.

Read it and weep. God, give me the strength to survive - and change - what the Christian Jihadists, the GOP, and George W. Bush have done to my fucking country.

--Shella

You F***, You Die
by Maryscott OConnor
Wed Apr 18, 2007 at 12:19:49 PM PDT

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

It was the day that changed everything


5 Supreme Court Justices, not one possessed of a uterus, cervix, vagina or medical degree among them, have seen fit to pass a death sentence on any woman whose late term pregnancy threatens her life and necessitates a safe procedure to end it.

It hardly seems suitable to say "I told you so," but what the hell...

I TOLD YOU SO.

I, and millions of women and men not blinded by craven obeisance to political "propriety" and the fear of losing a seat of dubious power.

So, to the Alito Nineteen, a collective of putrescent, cowering, rotted remnants of what MIGHT once have been decent human beings, now merely another set of cowards in Democrats's clothing, we say to you, Thanks for killing us.

Make no mistake, that is EXACTLY what the federal ban on late-term abortions is: a death sentence upon any woman whose life depends on a safe medical procedure to end an unviable pregnancy.

I'll say it again:

5 Supreme Court Justices, not one possessed of a uterus, cervix, vagina or medical degree among them, have seen fit to pass a death sentence on any woman whose late term pregnancy threatens her life and necessitates a safe procedure to end it.

I shake with rage and sorrow for every woman in this country who now must fear every step of those last few months of a pregnancy, not only for the health of a baby whose arrival she awaits, but now as well for her own health and life, lest anything go awry with that pregnancy, leaving her with NO choice but to carry the pregnancy to term, be the fetus alive or barely, viable or no.

Of course, there is a way to avoid all this messiness, young ladies -- just don't have sex.

Abstinence -- yeah, that's the solution. Except, of course, we're not really talking about preventing abortions, here, are we?

What those 5 MEN on the Supreme Court have done is not to prevent abortions or premarital sex, not to dissuade such things from happening nor to make illegal anything related to them -- except, of course, should the situation arise in which the sex a woman has had results in a late-term pregnancy that needs to be terminated for her health or to save her life.

No, the perverse sonsofbitches and their Congressional co-conspirators have merely made it illegal for a doctor to treat properly and safely a patient whose pregnancy, taken so long to term that it is obviously a WANTED pregnancy, has become a danger to her.

To what end?

My dear friend shanikka, an attorney and thus far better equipped to translate the language of the Supreme Court decision (pdf), has this to say about it:

Some of the language in the majority opinion is fucking scary. The Scalia/Alito majority are not even trying to hide it: this is about upholding their neanderthal patriarchal views on not only the concept of pregnancy, but on what women are supposed to think and feel about their biological role as potential mothers period (count the number of times some variant of the phrase "a woman feels" or "women feel" appears in Kennedy's majority opinion if you really want to be scared) and the duty of the state to make sure that they are "protected" from those who might act based on feelings inconsistent with that biologically-defined role as joyous vessels of potential human life.


As if any of the five dick-swinging cosigners onto the majority opinion can ever say what women collectively feel. They haven't even pretended to be dispassionately applying law to the factual record below - indeed, as Ginsberg points out, they've largely ignored it and their own precedential language in Casey and Sternberg to boot. All because of what they admit early on is concern about the "morality" of it all.

I referred to it above, but in case anyone has any doubt as to what those 5 men on the Supreme Court have done, what medical procedure they have now outlawed, the fact that it is, in fact, an actual MEDICAL PROCEDURE, performed rarely and virtually ALWAYS when only absolutely necessary, here is a link to an essay I wrote about the procedure itself:

Abortion: Intact Dilation & Extraction

That is the procedure's true name, by the way; if anyone reading this doesn't already know this, that grotesque mockery of a nickname for it, "partial birth abortion" is a complete misnomer, an utter fabrication designed SOLELY to persuade the ignorant that the procedure is some barbaric act wherein a live baby is brought screaming into the world and killed before its mother's eyes. Complete horseshit; the vast majority of fetuses terminated by intact dilation and extraction are so lacking inviability that breathing, let alone screaming, is an impossibility. But don't take my word for it: PLEASE, do the reading, do the research yourtself, instead of taking the word of the lying liars whose sole aim seems to be to cast us all back to the days of back-alley abortions and punishing women for having sex -- or, put more simply, for being born female.

Make no mistake... if they have their way, that is what will happen. And then, then we will be seeing a lot more of this:

Simone's Midnight Art Project: Cool or Creepy?

When I first moved into my house, and at Remarkable Simone's request, I did a quick sketch of her on the white coated cardboard insert from a new set of bed sheets.

It hung around in Simone's room for about four years, she never wanted to get rid of it (God only knows why, I am no Rembrandt).

A day or so ago, around midnight she pulled out her crayons and much to my surprise, colored the sketch. She wouldn't go back to bed until she finished it.

The result is shown here, but my lousy photo does not really do it justice.

Simone's art is actually --- well, remarkable. Her use of vibrant and untraditional color is lovely. And primitive.

I guess the only thing that I can't quite figure out is why she didn't color in her eyes. It gives the art a very odd quality. I can't quite decide if its cool or creepy. Not that it really matters, I am so taken with this that I am going to have it framed.

--Shella

UPDATE: Mr. Fix-It cleaned-up Simone's art. How's this?

For Posterity's Sake: Madame Speaker Presiding Over Her First SOTU Address

Congrat-ulations, Nancy. It's about damn time.

--Shella

"It is the fundamental principle and unalterable law of this Nation that public servants, agencies, and governmental bodies exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business. It is critical and central to the Constitution of the United States that the people’s business be conducted openly so that the public may remain informed.

“The people find and declare that it is the intent of law that the actions of public servants – whether appointed or elected – agencies, and governmental bodies be undertaken openly and their deliberations be conducted openly.

“The people of this county do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies or officials that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.

“The people insist on remaining informed and with access to all manner of information so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”

--By: Shella