Thanks to tipster Adam for letting us know about truckspills.com, which, as should be evident, covers all things related to truck spills. The spill of the week: a 50 foot Sperm Whale, beached in Taiwan, was being taken on the back of a semi to a research center for autopsy when the gasses trapped the behemoth’s stomach exploded across a thoroughfare, covering motorbikes in foul-smelling whale offal and half-ingested giant squid.

I wonder if that kind of stuff happened in our whaling days of yore. After all, Rhode Island’s Royal Charter did note that:

And ffurther, for the encouragement of the inhabitants of our sayd Collony of Providence Plantations to sett vpon the businesse of takeing whales, itt shall bee lawefull For them, or any of them, having struck whale, dubertus, or other greate ffish, itt or them, to pursue unto any parte of that coaste, and into any bay, river, cove, creeke or shoare, belonging thereto, and itt or them, vpon sayd coaste, or in the sand bay, river, cove, creeke or shoare, belonging thereto, to kill and order for the best advantage, without molestation, they makeing noe wilfull waste or spoyle, any thinge in these presents conteyned, or any other matter or thing, to the contrary notwithstanding.

All of which is of course now hella illegal.

You NEED to see the pics after the jump. (more…)

Ok, I haven’t seen it, but it looks phat as hell: CGI Woolly Mammoths, ancient civilizations, and non stop-action. Too bad it got panned hard by the Times:

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend.” This bit of fake-folk wisdom commences the voice-over narration of “10,000 BC,” and the more you think about it, the more preposterous it seems. If anything, time confuses the issue. But it’s best not to think too hard about anything in this sublimely dunderheaded excursion into human prehistory, directed by Roland Emmerich from a script he wrote with Harald Kloser, who also helped compose, using his better ear, the musical score.

Whatever. There’s no need to to be snooty. Sometimes you just want to some action-packed reverse-sci-fi Sabretooth Tigerz and Zigguratz and Clan of the Cave Bear-style hairdos, something that tickles you in that StarGate/Atlantis/Lost Civs/ Erich Von Daniken spot, and you want it now.

This is on the top of my list to catch at Providence Place- anyone seen it yet? (more…)

Justice League: New Frontier, the cartoon adaption of Darwyn Cooke’s instant classic about the dawn of the Silver Age of DC Comics, came out on DVD last week. When I was watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. My friends who hadn’t read the miniseries thought it was sweet, but I guess the actual comics ruined me. The movie didn’t capture those iconic moments like Hal Jordan kissing Carol Ferris before he takes off to fight the Center and J’onn J’onnz going apeshit and transforming into the Martian Manhunter we know and love when King Faraday died. That being said, I want to talk about something a little more substantive than fanboy concerns.

I want to talk about the political overtones of the story. That period in the late ’50s was an exciting (and scary) time to be alive for far greater reasons than the dawn of the Silver Age of comics. Americans were suffering silently under conformity, lynchings raged across the South, McCarthyism destroyed people’s lives, and we all feared that nuclear annihilation was around the bend.  But the Global South was on fire with social revolution — A lot of folks believed a real change was a-coming. Among them was Martin Luther King, Jr. (after the jump): (more…)

Which one is Ben Stein?  Here he is in the Projo, going off on Darwinism. And here he is on O’Reilly:

Stein gets this right (while taking on the tone of the godless evolutionist Christopher Hitchens):

Maybe we would have a new theory: We are just pitiful humans. Life is unimaginably complex. We are still trying to figure it out. We need every bit of input we can get. Let’s be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and maybe in time, some answers will come.

But how does that jibe with broad assertions of Creationism, predicated on nothing?

Something cool at Brown this Wednesday for Women’s History Month:

“Women in the Labor Movement”
4:30pm on Wednesday, March 5
Petteruti Lounge in Faunce House
75 Waterman St.
Providence, RI
Featuring Roxana Rivera
RI Director of SEIU Local 615 and workers from Brown

Learn about the role of women in leading and joining the labor movement. Hear Roxana Rivera’s perspective on being a female leader in what remains a male-dominated movement and workers from Brown speak about being part of the union.

Sponsored by the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center and Women Students at Brown and the Student Labor Alliance as part of Women’s History Month 2008: Women Inside/Outside Tradition

If you’ve been looking for a movie that doesn’t have Morgan Freeman, I think I found one. Persepolis is still at the Avon Cinema. It is up for an Oscar in the ‘Animated Feature’ category, but that should read ‘Best Picture’. It’s the wrenching, but frequently funny, tale of life in Iran since the Shah was toppled. However, I must make it clear — I did not read the graphic novel. My experience regarding this type of film has always been that the group known as ‘people who have read the graphic novel’ is never satisfied with a movie that is ‘based on the graphic novel’. But just regular people should like this movie.

For a different take on Castro’s resignation, one that the mainstream press can’t really offer, check out this tidbit from the folks over at History is a Weapon:

We hang with the anarchists, we’ve got a whole stack of Spanish Civil War books on the shelf and are quick to argue the possibility and beauty in an anarchist world. Occasionally, we drink with the liberals and we hang with every sect of lefty faction, including the world renowned communist factionalist league. But some of them anarchists grit their teeth when they hear us talk about Cuba. We love Cuba. A quick sail from the deepest south, a plantation society was overthrown.

(more…)

New York Magazine features actress/singer/tabloid fixture Lindsey Lohan as Marilyn Monroe in “The Last Sitting”- the famed final photo shoot before her tragic death in 1962.

Lohan behold (!!), almost a half century later nudity still makes headlines. Office readers, click the link at your own peril.

Also in the news, the actress likened Heath Ledger’s death to Monroe’s in a related NY mag interview: (more…)

No wonder Mary Todd Lincoln went off her rocker. I give you the Electric Six and their song ‘Gay Bar’ and I will surely burn in hell. (NSFW)

PROVIDENCE - The Rhode Island School of Design Museum will present the following events in celebration of Black History Month.

• Rhode Island Black Storytellers, Sunday, Feb. 17, at 2 p.m.
• Sunday Family Workshop “Proud Portraits,” Feb. 10, 3-4:30 p.m.
• Free-For-All Saturday, Feb. 23, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a tribute to African and African American artists
• Visualizing Black Culture lecture, Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m.

Online sympathizers of al Qaida from across the internet have submitted hundreds of questions for deputy leader Ayman Al-Zawahri over the past two months for an “on-line interview” on a militant Islamic website, and many supporters seem to be as in the dark about their activities and future plans as the rest of the world.

“Knight of Islam,” asks, “We are awaiting a strike against American soil. Why has that not been done? Why are the Jews in the world not struck?”

“We hear a lot about the non-centralization of al-Qaida,” one supporter writes. “Is the loss of direct control by al-Qaida’s leadership over the jihadi cells harmful to al-Qaida? … Does al-Qaida intend to try to reassert its control?”

( HuffPo)

A Liberal and Conservative perspective of the Supreme Court’s shift to the Right

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Lunch beginning at 12:00, event from 12:30PM - 1:30PM

At Roger Williams University School of Law (Room 262) in Bristol, RI

From the Left: Nan Aron, president and founder of Alliance for Justice, a national association of public interest and civil rights organizations, serving as the country’s voice for a fair and independent judiciary. Her notable accomplishments include helping to defeat Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 and supporting the nomination of Roger Gregory, the first African-American judge in the Fourth Circuit, in 2001.

From the Right: Ronald Cass, president of Cass & Associates, and chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law, an independent, non-profit center of international scholars analyzing rule of law issues. He served Presidents Reagan and Bush as Vice-Chairman and Commissioner of the U.S. International Trade Commission. He is Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, and serves on the Roger Williams Law Board of Directors.

Presented by: American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society, Women’s Law Society, Multicultural Law Students Association, and Association of Public Interest Law.

Ms. Steinem,

Yesterday, in the New York Times, you published an op-ed, “ Women Are Never Front-Runners,” in which you claim that a woman with Barack Obama’s record, experience, and biography would not be considered a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States, and you call for a feminist movement in support of Hillary Clinton. You declare, “What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system.” As one of the countless younger women inspired by and active in Barack Obama’s movement for change, I feel compelled to respond.

(more…)

What’s all this about Roger Williams not being America’s patron saint of religious freedom?

Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657.

The author goes on to describe how some dutch cats in Flushing, by providing a safe haven for Quakers against the orders of Stuyvesant, were the real founders of religious tolerance. Whatevs. Big ups to Flushing and all, but the people hiding out there just went and moved to Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, where the first Quakers arrived at Aquidneck in that same year of 1657 and where, thanks to our quaint “experiment in liberty of conscience,” they were not persecuted and therefore did not have to hide out in Flushing in the first place.