Journal of No. 118

WWII-era Public service announcements:

When you fuck bareback, you're fucking Hitler.

Attack of the 50 foot ho-bag

My favorite

More for your delectation can be found here.

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The Scientist had an interesting article about the connection between disease outbreaks and "extreme" religious practice. It's not freely available, but I'll do a little extracting and expanding. The article had additional joyful discussions of cholera and rubella, but I'll just focus on polio outbreaks:

1978-1979: An outbreak in the Netherlands spreads to the US and Canada, brought by members of the Reformed Netherlands Congregation, which refuses vaccinations.

1992: Polio strikes the Netherlands again in "a strict Calvinist church that rejects vaccination against disease."

2004: The Nigerian state of Kano refused to take part in a UN campaign to vaccinate children. "Islamic clerics alleged that the vaccine had been filled with hormones as part of a US-led plot to sterilize African girls." The result? By September 2005, Nigeria is home to more than half of the cases of polio in the world and the Nigerian polio strain has spread to 11 other formerly polio-free countries (including Indonesia) with close to a thousand cases of paralysis.

2005: The first homegrown polio case in the US since 1979 is found among the Amish.

Now to be sure, there have been other outbreaks, presumably not related to religion at all. But none in the first world as far as I can tell.

inorganic-organic hybrid polymer dragon

Size: very very S, indeed

randbot mentioned something about one of the Enigmaversary photos being perhaps the earliest picture of dark_of_night. To outdo it, I present this exhibit. This photo was wedged into a book as a bookmark, and has probably been there for well over a decade. It fell out recently when Rebecca started rereading the book. It's like a weird time-capsule. Click on the image and check out the flickr notes. It's weird knowing that I still have some of that stuff.
In particular, I'll mention the poster thing in the upper right. It stirred a memory, but I couldn't quite grasp it. All I could see was a yin-yang symbol. Was it maybe something that came with Jordan Mechner's Karateka (which spawned Prince of Persia, which spawned many more Princes of Persia). No.... After locating the Mother of all Apple // game lists, I finally figured it out:

Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony. I still have that headband, too.

Wow!



Oh, and here's a more recent picture of Becca, taken by the_undertow at the wedding. Click for more bigness:



She's got the same cute smile! Aw!