Sewers of Babel : braineel

Ben lane's son wrote the story, nice to have an animator as a father eh?

Even as an adult I still find the Disney movies a stunning retreat from the everyday. Neal Gabler's new book assembles bits and pieces into a coherent picture of an enigmatic man.

Gabler's book gains momentum slowly, as we follow the itinerant Disney clan around the country, eventually to the small town of Marceline, Mo., and later with Roy to California. Walt would try to re-create the Marceline of his youth with Disneyland, which Gabler calls "the creation of a wounded man … devising a better world of his imagination." Building the Anaheim theme park filled Disney's need for "control, about crafting a better reality than the one outside the studio, and about demonstrating that one had the capacity to do so.

Neither whimper nor bang,
nor fire nor ice,
the world will end in night.
The last man is Right.
Rage as you might.

Lovely

Ok the infectious quality of this is startling, i played i momentarily today and people are walking around humming it everywhere DO NOT CLICK THE LINK ABOVE!

you have been warned.

Thx Karyuu

Click linky in title, thx to minetus.

Johns Hopkins and M.I.T. put out a report that U.S. President George Bush disagrees with. Although the report was based on household interviews, 92% of the families asked questioned in the study were able to produce a death certificate for their loved ones, according to CNN.

The US president, George Bush, tonight admitted "a lot of innocent people" had lost their lives in Iraq but rejected the findings of a controversial report that the civilian death toll in the war-torn country had reached 655,000.

"I don't consider it a credible report," Mr Bush told a White House press conference in response to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet. "Neither does General Casey, neither do Iraqi officials," he added, referring to George Casey, the top US general in Iraq.

The Iraqi government said the report's death toll was "inflated" and "far from the truth", but did not give its own figure for the deaths.

Mr Bush, who last December suggested there may have been 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, would not give a figure today for overall fatalities.

The study found that the equivalent of 2.5% of Iraq's population had been killed since fighting began more than three years ago. The study, by the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, was based on household interviews - not a body count - and was a follow-up to a report by the same group two years ago.

According to the site iraqbodycount the number dead in Iraq is closer to:

Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq 43,850 to 48,693

Gen. George W. Casey argues with the number as well.

"That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen," Casey said. "I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all."

The link above will show the best and worst schools in 2005-2006

Fun with tigers, a must see. Thanks to josephoenix for another great link

Anyone who has watched televison in the last week or so has likely been exposed to advertising about coal ala learnaboutcoal.org I might be being cynical, but I dont think something as essential as coal should need advertising. . .

So who or what is trying to SELL me coal? Fortunately Alternative energy blog covers these matters very effectively.

While questions are increasingly being raised about remaining oil and gas reserves, we are assured that there is plenty of coal left to burn. Indeed in a talk to a meeting of builders and contractors at the Capital Hilton on June 8, 2005 President Bush asked the audience,
"Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?"

Hopefully readers will spot this obvious gaffe. The figure quoted by the coal industry is 250 years of reserves, not 250 million years. The energy illiteracy of the average person is worrying enough, but in our political leadership it is a real cause for concern.

George Lucas did LOTR?

Thanks to josephoenix for the link