The Tory Party

Water Cone

Absolutely. Freaking. Brilliant.

I want to make millions of dollars so I can give them to this guy and the dude who invented Baby College.

Bathroom Mirror Prank

The completely deadpan reaction of the pranked women amuses me greatly. I would love to see some tween girls in this situation… perhaps after a group screening of Twilight OMG!!one!

Soil, Slavery, and a Blue North Carolina

I emailed this to a friend to supplement my own theories about why NC voted for Obama this month. A lot of blue NC counties directly correlate to the big cities:

Wake County = Raleigh
Orange = Chapel Hill
Chatham = Carrboro
Guilford = Greensboro
Forsyth = Winston-Salem
Mecklenberg = Charlotte

But I couldn’t explain the pockets of blue in the north and south of the state.

Dear Gawd, maybe this does:

Along the ancient coastline, life thrived, as usually does. It especially thrived in the delta region, the Bay of Tennessee, if you will. Here life reproduced, ate, excreted, lived, and died. On the shallow ocean floor, organic debris settled, slowly building a rich layer of nutritious debris. Eventually, the debris would rise as the sea departed, becoming a thick, rich layer of soil that ran from Louisiana to South Carolina.

65 million years later, European settlers in America would discover this soil, which was perfect for growing cotton. They settled the land, and built plantations, importing slave labor from Africa to toil the fields, while the settlers reaped the profits. Though they did not know it, they built their plantations on the floor of the ancient seas.

It was a reasonably successful endeavor from the slaveholders’ perspective, surviving hundreds of years. It took a civil war to free the slaves from bondage, if only technically; during reconstruction, many of the slaves were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule, and encouraged to remain on the land, farming, but this time for themselves — at least in theory.

Many of the slaves took that deal, and stayed along this rural belt in the south. While in the north, rural America was becoming a land of sundown towns, in the south, the racism was universal; there was not the same exodus of African Americans into the urban centers as was forced in the North. The population of these rural counties remained largely African American for well over a century; indeed, it remains so to this day. Today, it’s referred to as the “Black Belt,” a set of counties stretching from Louisiana to South Carolina, one that, as has been noted, voted for Barack Obama on Election Day.

- Jeff Fecke, on his blog Alas!

(As seen on Sociological Images)

Brain. Asplode.

An Active Wednesday

Mom’s in town, and today we did the tourist thing at Hollywood and Highland. This involved:

1) Pouring rain

2) Pee Wee’s bike at the Hollywood Museum. WOOT. Weird that it shared a room with three walls of kinda lurid Marilyn Monroe paraphernalia, including one of naught but her nudes, but what can you do? PEE WEE’S BIKE!

3) Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum. Great for the whole family! If you cover the young ones’ eyes in the Room of Impalings.

And then later Studio City! I got to experience Studio Frozen Yogurt, which I would like to move into immeds pls kthx. They had all my favorite things: protein bars, low-sugar froyo, and other protein bars. I nearly peed. And I am still burping Devil’s Food flavor, so I totally got my money’s worth.

There is more, but mostly — do y’all remember “I am the Cheese”? It’s like a young adult novel about a kid biking to his dad, and also getting interviewed in a mysterious location about his past. Anyhoo, I am reading it, cos I didn’t read it growing up. It is weird.

Weird.

THE END.

Moony Relapse

Good Lord, I really thought I would quit being moony by now.

The patter of rain outside (for hours… in LA! WHAT THE FRICK) is incredibly peaceful, strange and not helping.

Any advices in this department would be greatly appreciated.