The morning after.
This hilarious illustration is by writer-artist Zina Saunders as part of her series depicting her unique interpretation of the McCain-Palin campaign. They've been collected into a book titled "The Party's Over." You can purchase it for me from this website.
View more here.
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Coined the "Butt Bandit," some guy has been terrorizing the residents and business owners in Valentine, Nebraska.
Beginning more than a year ago, some man has been skipping from one business to another at night, pressing his naked behind — sometimes his groin, sometimes both — on windows. Store owners, church workers and school janitors have had to wash lotion and petroleum jelly off the windows he selects.
This is quite a "pressing" issue for the local police chief who isn't at all amused by the elusive and "slippery" vandal. Puns!
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Mental Floss collects 10 fun facts about our new First Wifey. I thought this one was funny.
8. She once brought her then-four-month-old daughter to a job interview. With another daughter, she wasn’t sure if she wanted the job or not, and brought Sasha to sort of sabotage the interview. She did such a fine job interviewing, she was offered the position anyway.
Read more here.
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Here are a few that I like from this collection of environmental artwork by various artists who connect "two aspects of Finland, the natural landscape (forests, grasslands, snow and ice, etc) and the presence of myth and legend."
Jonna Pohjalainen, Color Pencils
Martti Kukkonen, Countryside can be imported 2: Red cottage and potato field
Jaakko Pernu, Parasol
View more here.
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It's a rainy day in New York City today, which is the perfect opportunity to post this sad photo.
Photo by Jerry Lara, AP/San Antonio Express-News: A dog sits in the heavy rains from Tropical Storm Erin on San Antonio's south side Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007.
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Someone has a lot of time on their hands. [flickr video=3010606160]
Professor Robert Bosch at Oberlin created this portrait of Obama using 44 complete sets of double-nine dominoes. Directions here.
This layout of dominoes creates...
...this.
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Check out this passage in Chief Justice John Roberts' recent dissent [pdf] in the case Pennsylvania v. Dunlap. It reads like a page from a detective dime novel:
Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three dollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood.Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens. He radioed a description and Officer Stein picked up the buyer. Sure enough: three bags of crack in the guy’s pocket. Head downtown and book him. Just another day at the office.
So was it the clerk who wrote this with the final amused approval given by Roberts? Or, was it Roberts himself who penned this piece of noir? I conjecture it was the clerk in the parlor.
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Demolition Man's trivia page on IMDB claims:
Wesley Snipes’s kicks and punches sometimes look lurchy and awkward. Snipes is a black belt in real life, and his kicks and punches were so fast that they blurred on camera. Hence the producers asked him to slow them down.
Reads like a Chuck Norris joke.
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1. Help! I'm surrounded by ignorant, fascist homophobes! 2. Nnamdi's new hat.
3. Your Friday action item: Build the Star Trek Enterprise with just office supplies.
4. The last speech of Obama's campaign. Inspiring stuff.
5. After losing his gentleman's bet, McCain and his staff ate this pie.
6. Detailed Army Man Halloween costume.
7. FOB mom confuses granola with a similar sounding STD. This website makes me wish my mom too was a FOB. Unfortunately she is the exact opposite.
8. It's Movember.
9. When not peering at Sarah Palin, the Russian president is a mac user.
10. Obama Street in San Francisco.
11. What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party?
12. BAD ASS Guitar Hero guitar.
13. Sweet Banksy costume.
14. Wilco performs new song on Colbert Report.
15. FOB mom confused by soup or salad. LOL.
16. Bromances in Sci Fi.
17. Ferrari versus pole. Pole wins in a no contest.
There are some great behind-the-scene candids at Barack Obama's Flickr account, such as this one.
Photo by David Katz
Obama's campaign was the first presidential campaign to finally "get" the Internet and genuinely harness its wide range of user generated tools and products, but most importantly, which future candidates should take note of, it was executed in a way that never felt contrived. We've officially moved from the era of Campaigning 1.0 to, yes, I'm calling it: Campaigning 2.0.
[Thanks Annie!]
Update: Related to my point above, I came across the following while reading the fascinating Newsweek "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign" 7-part series:
To the casual visitor, the New Media department at Obama headquarters seemed at once ultrahip and painfully earnest, a touchy-feely, emo sort of place where people talk about saving their souls and use lefty academic jargon like "agency." One reporter described the sentiment toward the candidate as a sort of "Lincoln 2.0." The frat brothers over in Communications liked to joke about whether the geeks in New Media were still virgins.
When it came to what they actually did, however, the nerds of New Media were cold realists. "We never do something just because it's cool," the campaign's official blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, told a NEWSWEEK reporter. "We're always nerdily getting something out of it." He showed off the Obama '08 iPhone application. With its deep Obama blues, correct fonts and glassy graphics, it looked like an electronic bauble for the well-heeled voter. Closer inspection revealed a sophisticated data-mining operation. Tap the top button, "call friends," and the software would take a peek at your phonebook and rearrange it in the order that the campaign was targeting states, so that friends who had, say, Colorado or Virginia area codes would appear at the top. With another tap, the Obama supporter could report back essential data for a voter canvass ("left message," "not interested," "already voted," etc.). It all went into a giant database for Election Day.
Early that summer, the campaign made the unorthodox decision to announce its vice presidential pick via text messages sent directly to supporters. It wasn't just a trick to do something flashy with technology and attract media attention. The point was to collect voters' cell-phone numbers for later contact during voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. Thanks to the promotion, the campaign's list of cell-phone numbers increased several-fold to more than 1 million. (Among the registrees: one Beau Biden, son of Joe.)
"I don't care about online energy and enthusiasm just for the sake of online energy and enthusiasm," said Chris Hughes, head of New Media's social networking. "It's about making money, making phone calls, embedding video or having video forwarded to friends." There was nothing starry-eyed about Hughes, who had been the Harvard roommate and later partner of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and made his first millions before he was 24. His goal was to make old techniques—like call centers and getting polling information to voters—more efficient. "When computer applications really take off, they take something people have always done and just make it easier for them to do it," he said. "And maybe bigger."
During the primaries, the sight was familiar at vast Obama rallies. Before the candidate appeared, a campaign official would come onstage to urge audience members to pull out their cell phones to call or text their friends and neighbors. By the thousands, people of all ages would spread the electronic word—and dollars and votes would follow.
[...]
The power of the Obama operation could be measured: doubling the turnout at the Iowa caucuses, raising twice as much money as any other candidate in history, organizing volunteers by the millions. (In Florida alone: 65 offices, paid staff of 350, active e-mail list of 650,000, 25,000 volunteers on any weekend day.) The ultimate test would come Nov. 4. In the meantime, there were indications of a great storm brewing. At the end of August, as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We've been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross Web site in less than 15 minutes.
[Thanks 
Come on California. Get your priorities straight, no pun intended. 
[
Formerly George Garratt, this British 19-year-old legally changed his name to
