If you’re really geeky, you probably already know about the forthcoming novel by Neil Gaiman. His publishing journal – weblog/diary, really – is pretty neat reading even if you never read Sandman.

…for making sure that we in the South continue to look like a bunch of ignorant, slack-jawed, inbreeding yokels.

This time around, it’s evolution they’re after — again. A bill in the Arkansas House would bar the topic of evolution or radio-carbon dating of animal and plant fossils from state-funded textbooks. Additionally, teachers would be required to instruct students to mark references to evolution or carbon dating as “false evidence” or “theory” in the margins of books already in use.

Paging Mr. Scopes, Mr. John T. Scopes…

This is an index of graphic files showing the relative density of particular (eponymous) national heritages by county in the U.S.

What those two hotspots of Canadian activity are in Texas I’d love to know. Is one of them Tarrant County, i.e. Ft. Worth?

You know those cool balls they put hamsters in to allow them pseudo-free mobility outside the cage?

Now you can get one for people. And I know just the guy.

One afternoon in 1986, a crew of independent filmmakers visited the parking lot of a Maryland auditorium in the hours before a Judas Priest concert. The results are at once compelling and repellant, in particular if you ever owned or wore anything in a zebra print.

Mark Strauss over at Slate seems to think he’s funny in his latest tirade, a call for Northern secession in an effort to gerrymander the U.S. into a nation more likely to elect presidents with politics more closely resembling his own. Strauss blames us for Dubya’s ersatz victory, but fails to note how many of us voted against Bush even in states viewed as GOP strongholds. In his altogether wrongheaded burst of screed, he paints Southerners as slack-jawed NASCAR addicts too stupid to the political light of day — which boils down to an ad hominem attack on millions of people, many of whom voted the same way he did. I’ve seen broad-brush attacks before, but never one quite so wide and quite so absurd.

Strauss, of course, fails to note that neither side of the Mason-Dixon line corners the market on either NASCAR devotees or PBS supporters, and overlooks the role of the South in the cultural development of the the U.S. Most glaringly, he ignores the millions of voters in the South who voted for someone other than Bush last November. Sure, 150 years ago there was a wrongheaded war about, among other things, slavery. But since then the South has reinvigorated itself socially and economically; cities like Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Houston, and Austin have huge high-tech economies. Southern writers and artists make tremendous contributions to our national cultural ledger. Andwhere would America be without the Blues, Jazz, and Rock and Roll? Barbecue? Mardi Gras? SEC football?

Strauss notes — and is clearly alarmed by — Northern migration to the South and its implications in electoral voting (hint: we get more votes next time — and this troubles him). We can only hope that he continues to believe us all to be drooling evolutionary throwbacks and stays up North — either that, or he comes to visit and meets a crowd of people who don’t take kindly to his high-handed babbling in general — and his barbs about Earnhardt in particular.

Apparently running out of maladies to cure, Eli Lilly has created a new one. Actually, they’re just calling good old-fashioned PMS “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” and are giving their “new” remedy a marketing full-court press.

The kicker? This new wonder drug — “Sarafem” — is actually just Prozac, i.e., fluoxetine hydrochloride. Oh, what a Brave New World in which we live…

Check it out at Plastic.

Today is my birthday. According to a whole mess of sites I’m too lazy to link in here, I share it with:

• Percival Lowell, astronomer, 1855
• Hugh Walpole, writer, 1884
• L. Ron Hubbard, “entrepreneur,” 1911
• William J. Casey, crooked Iran-Contra uberspook, 1913
• Al Jaffee, MAD Magazine artist, 1921
• Clarence Nash, voice of Donald Duck, 1936
• Neil Sedaka, singer, 1939
• William H. Macy, darned good actor, 1950
• Dana Delaney, acceptable actor, 1956
• Adam Clayton, U2, 1960

It is my sincere hope that the inclusion of Clayton, Macy, Jaffee, and a few others compensates for Casey and Hubbard. Hope hope hope.

Somebody done lost their monkey.

Thomas Friedman has a great column in today’s New York Times. My favorite line, in re: the GOP’s rampant desire to spend a surplus that doesn’t yet exist: “I suppose all this won’t hit home until the Republican Party realizes that, without the surplus, there won’t be any more federal buildings to name after Ronald Reagan.”

Word.

If there’s any such thing as comic book heros, they don’t wear capes and fight crime per se; they’re the men and women who created comics as we know them the middle part of the 20th century. These people — like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — invented many of the motifs and themes we all not recognize as cannonical comic elements. Lee created or co-created characters like Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and (perhaps most notably) the wildly successful X-Men. Instead of artificial heros in made-up cities, Lee and Kirby gave us real people with unreal abilities who lived in real places and dealt with the rent, pain-in-the-ass bosses, and in general exhibited a level of humanity not seen before in the medium.

Lee, though, never really saw the kind of money you’d think appropriate for someone with his resume. For all his years at Marvel, he was an employee — by his own description, a well compensated employee, but an employee nevertheless. With the rise of the Internet, he saw an opportunity to work his magic again, but with a new medium — and as an owner. A pretty gutsy move for a guy in his seventies, but after all, substantially less robust business plans appeared work, right?

The Standard is running a feature about the sad collapse of Stan Lee Media – done in not so much by the now-infamous dot-com bubble, but by unsavory partners and a lack of business savvy. It’s a damn shame. Excelsior anyway, Stan.

This has to be the ultimate in truth in advertising.

By way of followup: this and this.

Ah, the heady days of early spring 2000! Yahoo was trading at $178, and Microsoft was over a c-note. P/E ratios for billion-dollar-market-cap firms involved division by zero. In short, the good old days. If, like me, you’ve had a “near-wealth experience,” you might shudder when you read CNet’s recap of the bubble’s rupture one year ago this week — last March 10, the NASDAQ reached its peak, 5,048.60.

No, I don’t know what it is today. No, don’t tell me.

Wasn’t this in some way inevitable?

Kevin Goldstein has compiled these stunningly erudite and informed comments about the Modern Library’s Top 20 novels of the 20th century (culled from reviews at Amazon.com, natch).

Clearly, it’s the common man who knows best. I don’t know what we need all this booklearnin’ for anyhow.

You know those sand-pendulum desk geegaws you can buy in office/gift shops? Apparently, this one created a pretty cool pattern during the Washington earthquake last week. Neato.

A photograph – unfortunately large – promoting upcoming film you might wish to check out.

Regardless of no-doubt certain suckage, the costumes are perfect.

There’s some stuff that I just plain couldn’t make up. Enjoy.

General Mills can now free you from the tyranny of pre-selected cereal components. Create your own at MyCereal.com. It remains to be seen if this is an actual moneymaker, even if it is General Mills. In the current plunging-NASDAQ environment, it’s pretty obvious that the notion of custom cereal via the Internet is more a dot-com punchline than a business plan.

You might think that I’m making fun of a certain group of people by calling attention to a page like “NASCAR Poems by Trish!.”

Well, you’d be absolutely right. But with lines like “Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin, and a guy they call DJ / Show the true meaning of FORD , when they race, / on every race Sunday / Jeremy Mayfield, Jeff Burton and don’t forget Awesome Bill / They race with all their hearts and souls and a very eager will,” how can you not?

Psychic-debunker James Randi – the guy behind the prove-your-psychic-powers-and-win-a-million-bucks price – explains how “cold readers” work on talk shows. Fascinating.

I don’t know what they do, but check out their guarantee.

Even though, if you’re like me, it’ll give you a really bad feeling. Greg Palast, an American working for the Observer of London, explains why there was zero coverage of Jeb Bush’s illegal purge of 64,000 mostly black voters in Florida in the months before the election. This evidence of a larger problem in the American press is chilling.

If those Matrix figures aren’t enough for you, try these. I really want the one of the Pope, complete with Holy Cross Kali Stick and Walther PPK and wearing the “blood red Vatican Assault Uniform.”

In case you’re interested, this site gives instructions for seeing the Space Station in various locations, including date/time and degree/direction data. Pretty cool.

Malcolm Gladwell has a piece in the current New Yorker discussing fat, french fries, and Ray Kroc’s role in defining the American fry. He also makes fascinating points about real vs. perceived fat content, what the deal is with Olestra, and how McDonald’s could tweak their formulas to great public health benefit. Well worth your time.

Find out with the Gay-O-Meter.

According to http://slashdot.orgSlashdot, this is the most retro home page ever.

Have you ever noticed how much some men resemble a certain country artist as they age? (Also this week’s winner of the longest-domain-name prize.)

Frightened of the New World Order, but unsure exactly how to register your displeasure? Need that special something for your Secret Pal in the militia? I’ve found just the thing.

My friend Mike said that, a long time ago. I suspect he’d enjoy, then, Helena Echlin’s Letter from Yale. You might, too, unless “The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible.” makes sense to you. (In which case I urge counseling.)

ABC reports an, um, interesting theme park has opened in Gruta, Lithuania. Book your trip now!

Chris assures me that this is not in fact illegal, at least in Alabama.

There’s a firm out there selling personal luxury submarines. Unless this is a monstrous hoax, these guys are actually offering subs (though not built on spec — I don’t think they’ve got inventory) from small 2, 4, or 6 passenger boats to 20-, 36-, and 65-meter undersea yachts. The 65-meter Phoenix was designed for a client who didn’t buy; it awaits a buyer for a cool $78 million. For that, though, you get 5 state rooms and a boat capable of remaining submerged (down to 1,000 feet) for up to 3 weeks at a time. No word yet on the torpedo option.

Those pesky goons over at the The Spark are at it again. Gender Test uses your answers and the (in)accuracy of its ultimate guess to improve its data pool. Kind of neat. Also, it purports to show that one gender is slightly better than the other at recognizing whether or not clams are alive.

Er, right.

Eugene Mirman sings. Oh dear sweet Lord.

My right-winger friends love to talk about how biased the media is, which I guess explains the complete love-in over the whole Lewinski/impeachment deal a while back. Of course, it’s not that simple. As case in point, I direct you to a piece in Salon today about the very selective media coverage of the Clinton’s gift fiasco. There’s plenty of very interesting data that never made it to print, largely because a whiff of scandal sells papers. For instance:

• No, HIllary didn’t register anywhere.
• Contrary to most of reports, the $190,000 haul is actually the accumulation of several years’ worth of stuff, not the result of a loophole-exception gift frenzy.
• No, Senatorial gift guidelines don’t play into this at all.
• No, the didn’t take items belonging to the White House.

This feeding frenzy is good food for thought the next time someone babbles about “the liberal media.”

There’s just not much I can say that would improve on it: Charlotte’s Goat.

Betcha think this is a funny webmaster screwup, eh? Think again.

Why do my own ranting about the aggressive stupidity of most big-budget American Cinema when the SF Chronicle’s Jon Carroll will do it for me?

Or, at least, you know you know something. One of the things you now know is where AskJeeves gets its answers. Go on, show off a little. You know you want to.

You damned, dirty ape.

If you ever have a sense that someone in your life might be making tickmarks in a notebook concerning your alleged misbehavior, remember, you might be right.

Some jackass has managed to burn the hell out of himself attempting to mimic a stunt from MTV‘s Jackass, only without the elaborate safety precautions no doubt undertaken by the possibly eponymous host.

This fellow seems to be a bit confused about the traditional notion of “chasing a little tail.”

Not feeling fresh enough? Maybe you ought to shove a lit candle up your butt.

Ever feel the need to bathe in Jello? Yeah, me, too.

Remember all the awful things I’ve sent you to under this heading? I think we may have hit some sort of barrier with this one.

Unless said barrier is surpassed by this.

The Unemployed Philosophers Guild offers a number of compelling products, including Dorothy Parker martini glasses and a pillow printed with the Last Supper that plays “Hey Jude.”

No, really.

With the election and coronation of Bush II, ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’. And thank God — or at least the Supreme Court — for that.