Amorous Ephemera

• Flashing tourist (NSFW)
• Man-beast erotica in advertising
• Raquel Welch turned 70 over the weekend
• The truth as rendered by Yakov Smirnov (NSFW)

Big Athletica

• Does Brett Favre’s invulnerability, and the endless agony it puts him through in terms of retirement choices, make him Faust? (Pal Rob introduced this theory to me last night.)

Cosmonautica

• Russians love Ernie Hemingway

Deep-Fried Dystopia

• 18% of people think the economy is fit as a fucking fiddle
• Does speaking truth to power even work?
• Hitchens: “…I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled ‘free exercise of religion’? No, I am not.”
• Jacob Weisberg on Obama, re: gay marriage: “How dismal that America’s first black president will be remembered as shirking the last great civil rights struggle.”
• Los Angeles school named after Al Gore full of toxic contaminants
• Seattle police, whom I’ve found to be quite friendly, nevertheless have much blood on their hands right now

Divine Illumination

• Sean Carroll expounds on Stephen Hawking’s recent God talk

I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind!

• “Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” — Jessamyn West

Look at That Pussy!

• If you live in Austin, Texas and find yourself in dire need of kittens, here’s the place to go

The Road to Hell is Paved With Misspent Tax Dollars

• Light rail hijinks in Seattle
• Welcome to Portland, a city run by 16-year-olds prone to penis humor

A new “Audio Files” column is available for viewing at When Falls the Coliseum. Topics float from Wang Chung to Glenn Danzig to Carl Sagan to liquid orgasms to Boris the Sprinkler.

Scroll down the page a bit and there’s an excellent piece by Daniel Kalder on the din of dystopian chatter that enshrouds the Ground Zero-Mosque “dialogue.” Writes Daniel:

The theory goes like this: (Imam) Rauf is a fraud, a man who won’t denounce Hamas, who said numerous dodgy things about America after 9/11; he is merely posing as a moderate and this structure is designed to be a symbol of Islamic triumphalism, spitting in the face of our values, a front guard in the spread of Sharia law around the world.

FACT, OR BOLLOCKS? Who the fuck knows? He certainly equivocates when it comes to Hamas but then so do many members of the “Professional Left”. That’s not just a Rauf thing.

He also likes to ramble on about Sharia, allegedly a system of perfect laws handed down to man by God in Heaven via Mohammed but then again Sharia is not monolithic. For all I know Rauf may have developed his own groovy retconned interpretation that jettisons all the gay-bashing, woman-oppressing, hand-chopping, other-religions-subjugating stuff you find in the harsher variants. Or he may not have: again it would be nice if someone in the media had actually taken the time to ask a few questions to clear up some of these issues.

All that aside, it certainly doesn’t help that the perennially grinning Rauf is too cowardly to appear in public to argue his case; nor that the sources of the building’s funding have not been revealed. If it has been paid for by mystical Sufis, or an enlightened soul like the Aga Khan (not a Sufi NB but rather an Ismaili) then we could dismiss these fears out of hand. If it’s been funded by the Saudis however, well then it probably is a front for some truly appalling ideas. However, pix of Rauf yukking it up with the occasional anti-Semitic/genocidal freak such as those which have been unearthed on Pajamasmedia don’t prove all that much. That’s what you do when you’re a jetsetting global dialogue coach getting lots of cool stuff for free from the public teat as Mr. Rauf most assuredly is.

Consider our own president for example, who by contrast has a real and quite onerous job. Mr. Obama visited Saudi Arabia in June and immediately went into full grovelling mode, thanking King Abdullah for his ‘wise counsel’ and other such crap. King Abdullah of course is the gerontocrat who presides over one of the most oppressive states on earth, an appalling tyranny which enforces gender apartheid, religious apartheid and even today crucifies people on occasion. Lovely! But still, when King A. hands a bucket of lukewarm shit to Prez O., the Harvard educated, oh so urbane ex-Constitutional Law professor laps it up, pats his swollen belly, turns to his grinning host and yums: Oh your Highness you are really spoiling us!

Scroll down further still and the redoubtable Ricky Sprague offers up hilarity as only he can in a piece about Obama’s automobile-themed rhetoric:

For the entirety of my so far very short life (I am a young man), both democrats and republicans have “driven” the government. They have gone to great lengths to ensure that members of other parties, and those without any party affiliation, have a very difficult time making it into “the driver’s seat.”

“We’ve made sure that third-party candidates don’t get their hands on our keys!” Obama needs to say. (Can you imagine how much worse off we would be if someone who wasn’t a democrat or a republican got elected to a major political office?)

It’s as if the economy is one of those “economy” cars that you sometimes get stuck with when you don’t pay close attention at the rental agency. And the rental agency is run by the American people. They say to the renters, “Here is your car, the 2010 American Economica, please take care of it.”

Then the renters (politicians) say, “Okay, I won’t do anything to mess it up.”

And then when they take the keys, they wink.

Now, some red meat for the snarling masses:

• Portland artist Bijijoo provides a great service to our nation — portraits of our presidents cradling ham hocks.

• Three questions: What is a “second chakra,” what is it doing in the pubic area, and why does Al Gore have an alleged interest in releasing it? (h/t Jack B)

• Why Peruvians are painting the Andes white

• Big, bad-ass bears from Kamchatka

• Sperm whales, unlike many Portlanders I know, have personalities

• Swimming lizard robot. Hi, fella!

• Bagby Hot Springs gets a write-up in Atlas Obscura

• Does the public function as a mass, partisan critic of administration moves, or does it behave more like a thermostat?

• Following a mishap with a combine harvester, Oscar the Cat gets bionic appendages

• Mark your calendars, Oregonians: July 11, 2010, AD at Lincoln City — the prestigious Competitive Rib Eating Contest returns. Making an appearance will be Joey Chestnut, the world’s most decorated gustatory athlete.

• Did a bag of potato chips lure a confession out of a portly rapist?

• Screwing up makes us whipsmart

• Why is a Ukrainian jet stuck in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

• 5 Interesting tidbits about Stevie Hawking

• Obama and cheeseburgers

• The most grating mystery of our time, and one deserving of unrelenting scientific inquiry, is the question of why Ozzy Osbourne is still alive

• Why don’t Penn and Teller attack Islam on BULLSHIT? The reason is a valid one, and I respect and appreciate it, although it offers a sad, illuminating commentary on the state of the world: they have families, and they don’t want to see them beheaded or suffer some other insane atrocity at the hands of murderous, pathological thugs who are offended by what two magicians say on TV.

I guess that’s where we are these days in terms of global, intellectual discourse — if free speech still exists, it’s either hanging on by a loose, tattered thread or floating about nominally. Markets used to rule the world, and back then, we thrived. Now pathological madmen who live in caves rule the world, and nobody can speak ill of them lest we want to see our loved ones slaughtered in the streets.

Barbarism. Seventh-century idiocy. Nukes as readily available as Little Debbie Snack Cakes.

Yep, I like the direction this world is headed in.