Get a piece of wood, 1.75" x .75" x 2'.

Call this the "neck". I used poplar, next time I won't. You might be better off with a hardwood like oak or maple. You can get poplar or oak at any big-box hardware store. It's really cheap. Poplar cuts like butter, which is great if you're using hand tools.

Get some more wood, 1.75" x .25", build a box. For the back, use a .25" x 5.5" (?) board - I forget the exact dimensions of these boards - but they're the thin and wide boards, obviously. Cut the back first and use it as a template to build the sides. Don't attach the back yet though.

Make some cut-aways on the ends, roughly .5" deep x 1.75" wide. The neck is going to fit into these.

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Won't Get Fooled Again

Advanced Cat Yodeling

P.Z. Myers strokes his inner mad scientist, as he talks about persuading chickens to let him manipulate their embryos in hopes of reproducing a dinosaur:

As for respecting the chickens themselves, what can be grander and more respectful than this project? I would whisper to my chickens, "With these experiments, I will take your children's children's children, and give them great ripping claws like scythes, and razor-sharp serrate fangs like daggers, and I will turn them into multi-story towers of muscle and bone that will be able to trample KFC restaurants as if they were matchboxes." And their eyes would light up with a feral gleam of primeval ambition, and they would offer me their ovaries willingly.

...

But I have a dream, too. Of a day when biotechnology is ubiquitous, and middle-class kids everywhere will have a cheap DNA sequencer and synthesizer in their garages, and a freezer with handy vectors and enzymes for directed insertional mutagenesis. And one day, Mom will come home with a box of fresh guaranteed organic free range chicken eggs, and Junior's eyes will glitter with a germ of a cunning plan, fed by a little book he found in the library…and 30-foot-tall fanged chickens will triumphantly stride the cul-de-sacs of suburbia, and the roar of the dinosaur will be heard once again.

Sweet! I hope I live to see the day... and the day after.

Tortured By The Cardassians

Msnbc.com:

BRUSSELS - The Belgian bodybuilding championship has been canceled after doping officials showed up and all the competitors fled.

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

Verberg je naalden!

I Believe In Irony

Honda Insight 1.3: A Dog On A Ham Slicer

Q: What would it take to set up a Truth Commission to investigate the torture committed by the US ? Whose authority is needed to do this ?

Here's the Cashbox US Top 5 singles from this week, 1969:

Tommy Roe - Dizzy
(song starts @ 40s)

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Proud Mary

Foundations - Build Me Up, Buttercup

1910 Fruitgum Co. - Indian Giver

Jay & Americans - This Magic Moment

I had never heard "Dizzy" nor "Indian Giver".

And then, way down at #80 is MC5 - Kick Out The Jams