The U.S. sent tons of cash to Iraq. Literally. Not figuratively. On Pallets. With forklifts.

The question:
"Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone? But that's exactly what our government did," the California Democrat said during a hearing reviewing possible waste, fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq.

The GOP response?
"We are in a war against terrorists, to have a blame meeting isn't, in my opinion, constructive," said Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican.

America's 150 favorite buildings

It seems that there's a movement of fundies jumping on the big-energy anti-Global Warming bandwagon. While the Christian right's anti-intellectual stance has never been a secret, this descent into abject hatred of science and reason is phenomenal in its implications.
This truly amazing open letter to the faithful tells all. (pdf)

“It does not seem likely to me that God would set up the world to work in such a way that human beings would eventually destroy the earth by doing such ordinary and morally good and necessary things as breathing, building a fire to cook or keep warm, burning fuel to travel, or using energy for a refrigerator to preserve food.”

A very cool RC dragonfly toy (accompanying nytimes article)

Giant stringed instruments of the Yi people of China (via fmu)

US/Iran openly threatening oneanother (cnn)
This is getting ridiculous.

cube mellons

Crappiest toys in the world

Space Junk threat (NYTimes)

Tycho Brahe: gold prosthetic nose: check. beer-drinking moose? yep. Clairvoyant dwarf who sits under the table during dinner? sure. more

Camera Tossing: Put your camera on auto, toss.

The Iraq Trillion

While government and academics intellectualize over whether or not climate change is real, the insurance companies, who can map risk to dollars, are already taking action.

"And in the coast-hugging states of Delaware, New Jersey and Connecticut, the company will not write new business no matter where the property is."

Self-balancing skateboard (google vid)

A few from the UK's Angry Young (then) Men.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions - Oliver's Army

I remember seeing this video on MTV as a kid and thinking that this cat was the coolest looking guy I've ever seen.

Graham Parker and the Rumour - Don't Bother With the Local Girls

Joe Jackson - Different for girls

I've always been a Joe Jackson nut.

Steampunk laptop

A large index of free stock art and photo sites

New Camille Rose Garcia paintings at mkgallery

A Century of Chairs at the digital design museum

Innignotz detonated?!

Shiftspace promises that you'll be able to create and trade content on top of other people's pages.

Some great new stuff on the Jim Flora website, including artists sketchbooks and some new prints from old blocks. (found on boingboing)

Giant, unblinking eye
Lockheed won a $40M contract to spy on you from a giant blimp.

Adam Koford's Hobo Flickr set
(heard about it on drawn.ca, which currently features an animated illustration of #600)

Imetthewalrus
"War is big business" --John Lennon

The GOP shills at Diebold have done some inept things in the past, but this is staggering.
They put a picture of the key that opens their voting machines online. On their own site's store. A closeup. Someone cut one. It works on every Diebold machine.
More at bradblog

The most horrible sound is...

Readymech 002
Print, cut, fold from 8.5x11 paper

Designer shed

Why packing tape is attracting designers like flies (Id)
“Tape is a cheap and therefore democratic object that can be easily mass-produced,” she explains. “Plus, it’s not too intellectual, which can be a nice break from the other projects that designers work on.”

11 intriguing lost albums (from avclub)

“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”

A great NYTimes piece about a Georgia town that is banning children's soccer because it's players aren't American enough.

Colbert explains AT&T (Youtube)

January is nearly over and I'm just getting around to last year's 50 most loathesome people.
Utterly harsh and often spot-on.

3d illustration of Carlo Giovani (from Drawn)

Ricky Gervais interviewed on the OnionAVClub

Olberman on the "Surge" (MSNBC)

Through a Glass, Darkly (Harpers)
How the Christian right is reimagining US history.

Target price-drop hack (from boingboing)

Marc Newson's work in marble, from Dezeen

A relatively dark conversation with Frank Gehry

Typo-cheesecake from TwentyFour

Bill of Wrongs The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006

The Holy Blitz Rolls On
A fantastic article from salon that casts the moral bankruptcy of the fundamentalist right in the light of past fascist movements.

Since the midterm election, many have suggested that the Christian right has peaked, and the movement has in fact suffered quite a few severe blows since both of our books came out.

It's suffered severe blows in the past too. It depends on how you view the engine of the movement. For me, the engine of the movement is deep economic and personal despair. A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. You can't deform your society to that extent, and you can't shunt people aside and rip away any kind of safety net, any kind of program that gives them hope, and not expect political consequences.

Democracies function because the vast majority live relatively stable lives with a degree of hope, and, if not economic prosperity, at least enough of an income to free them from severe want or instability. Whatever the Democrats say now about the war, they're not addressing the fundamental issues that have given rise to this movement.

The Beach Impeach project

The Merry-Go-Round, featuring Emitt Rhodes, live at the Hollywood Palace

The ollllld "giant sheet of glass" prank

Another nice little wood radio gallery. 2

Edison's Frankenstein (1910)

Willie Nelson is playing "I Never Cared..." uptempo these days.

Jet-man (actually more of a Wing-man). If he could only land it without the 'chute

Hurdy Gurdy Girls

Bush quietly authorizes opening American's mail.
President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the New York Daily News has learned.

The president asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

The first year of Thrasher Magazine (1981) is now online with great ads (above). There needs to be an 80's xerox-zine repository. Somebody get on this.
(via boingboing)

So God told Pat more stuff.
While sane people were wishing one another a Happy New Year, Pat Robertson was busy concocting sociopathic (yet safely Christian) fantasies about millions of dead Americans. Prophet or weasel-faced enemy of mankind?

Huge Diesel
(via /.)

Line Rider has me hooked.

Who needs a police state when you can have a private patrol state ?
(Washington Post)

With the sleeve patch on his black shirt, the 9mm gun on his hip and the blue light on his patrol car, he looked like an ordinary police officer as he stopped the car on a Friday night last month. Watt works, though, for a business called Capitol Special Police. It is one of dozens of private security companies given police powers by the state of North Carolina -- and part of a pattern across the United States in which public safety is shifting into private hands.

Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places -- and trying to expand their terrain. The "company police agencies," as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets.

Tickle me emo

Ways to go, and by the numbers

Science is the Devil's Work
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

The Vintage American motel postcard index.

Another year of the OnionAVClub's Least Essential Albums

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

The Highwaymen: Republicans is selling off American Highways to special interests by privatizing another public resource. (mother jones)
Why you could soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish builders for the privilege of driving on American roads.

Edwards throws hat.

The greatest band on earth, Ween, performing "Freedom of 76" on local TV in 1993. Brilliant.

Popmatters best albums of 2006 (with videos for most)

Sheesh. The townspeople of Hazleton, PA sure hate Santa. And illegal immigrants.

If there's one thing the Jive loves more than batshit right-wing paranoia, it's batshit right-wing paranoia drawn as cartoons.
Apparently, the NRA is putting out a graphic novel to... well, warn kids of the danger of gas-can toting hippie chicks who roll mob-style with chickens or lobsters or something. I'm not sure why the hippie is so dangerous, but the NRA's message is clear: Without our beloved guns, how can we possibly shoot her? (via boingboing)

The Jive wishes a Merry Christmas to all. Be kind to one another.

50 greatest cartoons (youtube and google video links to complete videos)
Don't miss "The Man Who Planted Trees"
(via metafilter)

A nice youtube TV index (complete shows)

Sure your commute is bad, but at least its not on the Bolivian Hell Road. The most dangerous roads in the world

Lou Reed - Dirty Blvd.

Some stuff you just can't make up.

Not even the Grinch would steal this shit. More ugly christmas stuff at this appropriately URL'ed site.

Walking Table (uncreatively sniped from youtube's front page)

Just when the right-wing bat-shit crazy talk started to slow down, we get hit with the wisdom that soy makes you gay. Where do they get this stuff?
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality.

North Pole Ice Free by 2040. Holy Shit. We're all gonna %&$#@! die.

The Nasa-funded US team of researchers said the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process.

In between 30 and 50 years, they concluded, summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region.

Posted kinda late, but still worth seeing, are Chris Ware's New Yorker Thanksgiving covers. Nice, big scans from the NewYorker

Nice flash game - draw lines to guide a bouncing ball to target

Unreal origami

Roughing it, man-style, in the great outdoors.

Java Spirograph

What American accent do you have? (if you're American, that is) is either really accurate or an IP-snipe trick. It nailed me as the Philadelphia/No Accent type. I've started to notice that northeast Philly says 'yizz' where south Philly says 'youze'. 'Y'all' starts to appear in Delaware and Maryland and goes all the way down. Don't even get me started on the crap that comes out of peoples mouths over in Jersey.
Slanguage gives lessons on how to talk like the locals wherever you are, but some of it's nonsense. I've been around cheesesteaks all my life and I've never heard 'cheesesteak wit' once "Wit"? Somebody made that crap up for the guidebooks. While I'm at it- both Pat's and Gino's are tourist traps. Go for the stainless-steel carts every time for a standard: $3.75 with a coke and chips. If you're up for something really special, the Abbeye on N.3rd in the Northern Liberties serves the best cheesesteak in Philadelphia. Hands down.

The always-brilliant Ricky Gervais (free) podcasts have been resumed.
Download the Podfather pts I and II at the Guardian

Cheap toy roundup 2006 (onionavclub)
Toy pickles? Damn.

The Chrysler HighWay Hi-Fi
Hey, vinyl fanatics, have you ever wished you could listen to your records while cruising in your car? From the mid-50's to the early 60's, Chrysler made this dream a reality with two generations of in-car phonographs. The original Highway Hi-Fi hit the streets in Autumn of 1955, for model year 1956 -- a factory option in the full Chrysler Corporation line of vehicles: Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, DeSoto and Imperial.

Those that can't afford to own this can download it here for free.
If you're really itching to have it on vinyl, these guys will make you a one-of-a-kind pressing.
Update: Sold for $155K

Its a fruit, Goddamn it!
(from Cabinet Magazine)

Boiling water in space

Wooden structures covered in foam. From Bourroullec

Geogreeting.

Duke Ellington making a record

(from Bifurcated Rivets)

The only thing geekier than a slide-rule is an exhaustively-researched online slide rule archive

Scott McCloud's "Making Comics" chapter 5 1/2, which is now available online is a pretty good intro to print vs. online graphics. Recommended even if you havn't read the first 5 chapters of his book.