It appears this is now a collector’s item, as K & L’s Rock America is closing. Farewell, Mujibur and Sirajul.

Bush named Jerry Thacker, an HIV-positive evangelical who has referred to AIDS as a “gay plague” and homosexuality as a “deathstyle,” to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS. Thacker is also an advocate of strict abstinence-only education, and is among many on the hard right convinced that homosexuality is a choice that can be abandoned (a view not supported by the APA, among others).

It’s clearly not enough that they’re on some sort of religious-right anti-condom crusade — a crusade the pushes abstinence-only education as the sole approved way to talk about STDs and HIV, and ignores clinical data on what protection condoms offer. Now they’ve decided that state’s rights only means something if it’s a way to promulgate segregation.

Bush’s DEA is pushing for a federal conviction for an Oakland, California medical marijuana maven who worked within California’s medical use laws. Yup; the voters in California said what he did was okay, but the Feds don’t care. Gotta love the New Federalism.

UpdateThey’ve actually gone to trial; I’ve just read that the defense team have been forbidden from mentioning (1) what he was growing pot for (i.e., medical use) or (2) that he was operating with the blessing of the state of California.

Last year, an unnamed advertising agency hired Ween to write a jingle for Pizza Hut. It appears Ween are too odd for Pizza Hut, since the material they wrote didn’t get used — but you can listen to them here.

This is pretty darn recursive.

These people could have probably turned it into a hot tub.

Dodge is considering a 500hp motorcycle based on the Viper’s V-10 engine. The concept suggests a 2.5 second 0-60 time and a top speed of over 300 miles an hour.

This is clearly a very, very bad idea. But damn, don’t you kind of want one?

It was pretty much inevitable, I reckon: one two.

If you’re like me – and who wouldn’t like to be? – you love the Sprint commercials hinging on linguistically improbable misunderstandings attributed to spotty cellular connections. I love the “monkey with a cold” one, and “soap opera star” sends Erin and I into giggles with astonishing regularity, but this one may be their finest work yet.

Simon Swears. Vulgar and cross-cultural. Loud, and not work safe. Enjoy.

German family keeps pet eel in bathtub. For 30 years.

No, really. There’s a class action settlement about price fixing, and if you bought a CD between 1995 and 2000 — a set of people that probably includes everyone reading this — you could get between $5 and $20 just by registering here.If too many people register, they’ll just give the money to charity. Seriously.

Especially this week.

Airport security technically assaulted the burly magician in Vegas, but (God love him) he knows his rights. Now they’re kissing up to him like nobody’s business, hoping he won’t tell anyone.

I give you Lord of the Peeps.

For the canine lycra fetishist in your life.

It looks an awful lot like the Bush Administration is editing government scientific publications to support their social agenda, and in ways not supported by actual, you know, science.

I know you’re wondering about this, so here’s the answer: The Fifty Most Loathsome People in America for 2002.

This Christmas, my stepfather must’ve been very good indeed. Santa brought him a chain saw on a stick.

Merry Christmas.

Remember The State on MTV? This site has small Quicktime files of every single sketch. I’d buy this on DVD if I could — especially since the quality of this is pretty crappy — but for now, this will do.

NoGators will be taking a little Christmas Break, but we don’t want to leave you, our faithful readers, in a lurch. Therefore and in accordance with the prophesy, we provide the following list of other amusing blog sites you may enjoy in our absence:

• B0ingB0ing, a source for many a NoGators link;
• the porn-friendly Reverse Cowgirl, pleasantly racy and always fun;
• Sarah Hepola, a fine diarist/blogger I originally found in . . .
• the Morning News;
• and the sardonic world of Kitty Bukkake, which isn’t what it sounds like despite promises to “take it on the chin.”

Enjoy.

Oh, and don’t forget your monkey stuff.

I know I’ve linked this before, but what with the new movie coming out and all, I thought I’d toss it out again. Of course, before I didn’t have a link to a site covering the entire album from which this little ballad is taken.

Update: Senior NoGators Insurance Fraud Analyst Triple-F points out that the last link has already expired, damn it. Oh well. Take our word for it; it was very cool.

“Because people have a need to glue things to other things.”

For all your holiday needs, a place you can get Live Squid In A Box.

A fine archive of post-it animations. Enjoy.

Vocabulary words we learned by playing Dungeons & Dragons

Before I saw this, I suspected that “diorama” and “taxidermy” were not words I wanted to see used together. Now I am certain.

These fine folks have an online museum of pocket calculators, nerd watches, and (yes) walkmen.

We’re Christmas shopping here at NoGators, and it occurs to us that an oft-neglected category is spice. The good folks at Penzey’s have a number of gift boxes that any number of folks on your list might enjoy, particularly if they don’t live in some enormous concrete jungle with all manner of weird seasonings available at any hour of the day or night. And you won’t need a stillsuit, either.

…and people ask “Mr NoGators Man, where can we, the concerned public, go to learn about Strom Thurmond? Why, we know he’s old as the hills, and we know he’s all about segregation, but isn’t there more to this ancient political sphinx?” Well, yes. My attorney offers us Stromwatch.

I meant to put this up a couple weeks ago. Salman Rushdie wrote an editorial in the NYT. Read it.

You know the ones from the seventies — the puppetesque stop-motion holiday shows, like Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Well, we here at NoGators just had a screening of “Santa”, and got curious about the credits, so off to IMDB we went. And oh, what we found.

As it happens, Rankin and Bass did some other things I’d never heard of, most notably an adaptation of Tolkein that can best be described as a liberal reading, apparently. The cast for it, however, is kind of staggering.

Some people I know from the Well have created the world’s definitive Rehab Diary site.

This morning on NPR, I heard a story on this band. Listen.

Fewer famous people appear to do their own, or provide content not filtered by a publicist. Former UT standout running back and current Miami Dolphin Ricky Williams is one of them.

(NoGators wishes to clarify that UT here means the University of Texas, not the trailer park on Rockytop.)

Blowing shit up is cool.

If you’re like me, not a day goes by that you don’t think “Gee, Star Trek is cool and all, but what would it be like if they remade it in Turkey?” Well, now we know.

Well, I for one am glad to know that someone is keeping track.

Sen. Trent Lott (R, MS, plastic-haired weasel) on Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid, which ran primarily as pro-segregation and anti-civil rights:

Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

I want to go on record as a native of this same state: I’m ashamed of our past, ashamed that my fellow Mississippians voted this way in 1948, and I’m ashamed of Lott for continuing to make us look like unreconstructed hicks.

Thanks in part to the incessant badgering of certain Heights attorneys, I’ve enabled the “make a comment” feature on new Heathen items. Enjoy, but be nice.

A memo to former Tide coach and current weasel Fran.

tset

The fine folks — well, actually, I think it’s one guy — over at Get Your War On have posted a side-splitting yet profoundly depressing update.

We all know that the TV world is rife with evil twins. This curiosity has never been adequately explained by science, and yet evil Spocks, evil Willows, and even evil Carl Kirsts surface with alarming regularity. How, we wonder, can we discern the evil twins from their more law-abiding and pure-hearted siblings?

I am pleased to announce that we here at NoGators Labs have located a resource to help you in this dreadfully important pursuit. The folks at this site have noticed that nearly all evil twins sport goatees, and have photographs to prove it. (My favorite: the evil Olsen twins.)

And take this geography literacy quiz from National Geographic. After each question, they provide data on how many folks in each of a few countries answered correctly.

If you’re like me, you’ll be horrified that only 20% of 18-to-24 year old Americans can find Afghanistan on a map.

I’m almost certain this is a hoax of some kind, but it’s still funny in that weird, oh-my-God-what-a-freak way.

I don’t know about you, but I feel safer knowing this department is on the job.

Okay, I can’t tell which is worse: the notion that this is real, or the notion that it’s a parody.

As an experiment, I’ve reimplemented a Palm game called Dopewars using PHP. You can play it online right here at NoGators. In fact, I encourage you to play it. I’ll add a high-score list directly; right now, I’m still making sure the game probabilities are reasonable.

I won’t name names, but they rhyme (again) with (um) Schloachim, Sachel-Pan, and Barl.