Uh... wow.... check out the Exotic Guitars. The Eden and Skeletar are my favorites, though I don't know if they'd be much fun to play - they look a bit fragile.

via BoingBoing.

My Happening Blog describes a Catalan Christmas.

This is the light tent I used for all the plane pictures. It's a 2x2x2 cube made of 1" PVC pipe pieces, with 3 yards of white tafetta safety-pinned around the sides. This fabric does a great job of diffusing the light without losing too much intensity - exactly what light tent material needs. To find it, I went to JoAnne's Fabrics (with Mrs Cleek, of course) and held various fabrics up to their overhead lights; this tafetta was the whitest and diffused their huge halogen lights the most - and it was cheap. There's enough fabric there to cover the top and all four sides, though for the planes i left the top open and just turned out the overhead lights.

The two lights are cheap-o hardware store clip-on lights, with 100 watt GE Reveal bulbs, though I've used normal bulbs in there without any problem; color correction is easy enough in Photoshop that the light source really isn't an issue. One lamp is clipped to a microphone stand and the other to a guitar stand.

Inside the tent there's a plastic storage bin (Rubbermaid, i think - nothing but the best!) propped up on two pieces of packing foam. The bin is translucent and not very glossy. For the Zero, I put the plane directly on this storage bin. Notice that there are no shadows - it looks like the plane is floating. This is because the storage bin is translucent and light is coming up through it, eliminating any shadows.

All the other planes were bigger, and wouldn't fit on the plastic bin, so they're on spreads of printer paper. You can see the edges of the pieces in some pictures - I need to get bigger paper. And because the paper isn't translucent, you can see shadows under the planes (for example) - I need to get bigger plastic bins.

This is the same setup I use here, too. Most of those are directly on the plastic, some are on velvet, some are hung from wires in front of colored paper, etc.. Most are shot from directly overhead.

Total cost of the light box and lights? Maybe $40.

And that concludes our series of model airplane pictures. Hope you've enjoyed the show. Refreshments are available in the lobby.

Go read the wandering hillbilly's annotated Ten Commandments.

Here's the pilot.

Atrios has a spot about a school in Cary, NC that's teaching from a booklet that apparently whitewashes southern slavery. I haven't seen the booklet, but he has some excerpts - and they aren't pretty. The school claims to be teaching the "southern perspective" of slavery. Doesn't look good. And to someone who's never been here, I can imagine the picture it paints. But I think it's an inaccurate one.

I'm an upstate NY transplant to NC (I live like 3 miles from Cary right now - a "town" with over 100K people, and named "the hottest town in the East" by Money Magazine, Jan 04. it's no small town). And, honestly, I have neither seen nor heard of any actual racism in the 8 years i've been down here - honestly, not any. There's certainly no institutionaliszed racism, and I can't say I've even see any personal racism here. Sure I'm a yuppie who hangs out mostly with urban liberal yuppies, hipsters and academics, so maybe I haven't been exposed to the entire range of opinions NC has to offer. But, compared to my former home of upstate NY, there are more nationalities, more skin colors and more cultures here - and nobody seems to have a problem with it. From my perspective, it's a balmy little melting pot.

To be fair, there was a Neo-Nazi rally in Raleigh this past summer. But, all the Nazis were from out of town, and the protesters outnumbered the Nazis by probably 100 to 1.

Just my perspective.

"...like many of my colleagues, we all grow tired, in the sense of, not tired of our work, but tired of what we're called upon to do."

-- Anthony Principi, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs

Yes indeed. Those sound like the words of someone who is deeply unhappy with his situation.