make this

Note to readers: my grandmother made the blackest, richest Devil's food cake I've ever had. I never got the recipe from her, or my mother, while I had the chance. Maybe this will come close... sounds like it could.

David Byrne tells us a little about Neurochemicals. My favorite part:

Left on our own we tend to select partners who have a set of genes known as the MHC complex that are dissimilar to our own. Pairing these different gene sets produces healthier offspring. It is thought we do this by scent. (Here's to sensory abilities we didn't know we had.) However, women on the pill tend to select men whose MHC is the same as their own. Something gets blocked or short-circuited. They make what is not necessarily the best choice…but, they won't have a child anyway, so it all evens out.

Karl Rove indicted ? Oh happy day!

This set of images, from The Cellar Image of the Day is pretty cool.

(which Mrs. Cleek sent me in an email, and I then located on-line with Google)

Last week, my stepfather sent me a box of pictures and school papers from when I was in elementary school. Among them was this undated assignment, from probably 2nd or 3rd grade:

A bed of leaves

My yard is full of leaves today.
Brown yellow and red
I think i'll rake them
in a pile. higher than my head.
Then I'll pretend it is my bed
I'll jump in very quick.
And pile the leaves up over me
for covers soft and thick,
I'll just lie ther[e] so nice and warm
And look up at the sky
And watch the leaves that float
down on me
To rake up by and by.

Now, in the original, this wasn't a skinny little column down the page. No, this was printed in big letters, all the way across the page, in pencil. The line breaks above are where I hit the right margin. Or, in printing terms, it was fully justified (an effect I can't seem to duplicate in HTML). Yessir, this was a solid page worth of artistic expression.

How did I do? Well, the teacher made a couple of spelling corrections, including the final line, which she changed to:

To rake up bye and bye.

...even though my spelling in that case was correct. Ahem. But, the big insult, and probably the ultimate root of my overactive cynicsm and distrust of authority, was her comment at the bottom of the page, in red pen:

Chris, you didn't write this as a poem

Whaaa?? Not a poem? Of course it's a poem! I know it's no sonnet, but come on; by any reasonable definition of "poem", it's a poem. If this is a poem, what I wrote is a poem. Sure, it's not a great work of art. Sure, I wasn't obviously destined to become the next William Carlos Williams, or Shelly, or Wordsworth; but in my unbiased opinion, it's a decent showing for a seven year old who couldn't even spell "there". Ugh. Such potential stifled, at such a tender age.

So to you, Ms. Forgotten Provincial Teacher, I say:

Soon, the projected cost of implementing the Kyoto protocol in the US will be less than the actual cost of war in Iraq.

Awesome!

Allegedly, it's a simple matter of getting a hookworm infestation in your gut!

Huzzah!

Oh Apple and your wonderful iPod commercials... you've lead me to another band: Wolfmother. What's a Wolfmother? It's a huge, crushing, mountain of ROCK. Carved from the same stuff as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Soundgarden, with a bit of the White Stripes here and there (especially in the vocals and some of the lighter bits). Really likes to be loud.

El yay.

No-one who sees a system as "natural and inevitable" can really examine it

In the comments, here.

You can find that, along with "Attila The Stockbroker", "Rash of Stabbings", "Ultimate Spinach" and many other interesting entries, at The Canonical List of Weird Band Names.