Sewers of Babel : kerinth

In the boxing ring, elevated, harshly spotlighted, men are pitted against each other in one-on-one mirrorlike combat in order to release energies in themselves and in their audience that are demonic by the standards of ordinary—or do I mean noncombative?—life. The triumphant boxer is Satan transmogrified as Christ, as one senses sitting amid a delirium-swept crowd like the one that cheered Mike Tyson on to victory.

Ah America, land of optimism. As the powers that came before and during (and perhaps after) our ascent to empire are predicted to drop over the next 40 years or so, the United States keeps on truckin. This article from The Economist predicts that the United States (outside of any economic, domestic, or foreign policy disasters) will be able to sustain this growth by developing a suburban-alliance sprawl of sub-city communities like this one outside of Houston:

At the Woodlands, a 28,000-acre (11,300 hectares) planned community north of Houston, you can buy a three-bedroom family home on a quiet wooded street for $130,000. By comparison, the median house price in San Francisco is over $700,000. The Woodlands has good schools, 145 miles (235km) of hiking trails, golf courses designed by the three greatest retired golfers in the world, and a cluster of oil and high-tech firms.

Hmm. Well, at least Americans can celebrate about their birth-rate numbers: 2.1 children per woman, well above the EU's 1.47 or Japan's 1.25 (which seems to be on the rise this year).

Keep updated on the approximate population of the US with this tool, the Census Bureau American FactFinder

Quote from the photographer:

This place was taken out of commission by King Henry VIII on account of it being a wee bit Catholic and the monks not recognising said King as head of the Church in Britain. So King Henry had it burned down.

The Wikipedia Article

Wordsworth's Poem Tintern Abbey (or more correctly Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey)

Norton Anthology online supplement on the poem and Romantic-era tourism.A quote:

William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey (NAEL 8, 2.258–62) has been described as a tourist poem in which the center of attraction, the famous ruined abbey, is out of sight "a few miles" downstream; a nature poem in which, after the opening paragraph, there are almost no images of nature; a political poem in which most of the speaker's political, social, and economic beliefs lie unexpressed between the lines; a religious poem in which what seems to be unmediated contact with a pantheistic deity (for example, "we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul . . . [and] see into the life of things," lines 45–49) is soberly, even logically, explained in terms of tourist postcard chitchat ("How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, / O sylvan Wye," 55–56; "Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods," 102–3).

Finally the Poem Itself in excerpt:

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,
In darkness, and amid the many shapes
Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee

Wordsworth is hymning to Nature that is unavailable in its entirety or past naivete, yet all buildings under our sun will be tintern abbeys in their time.

No, this is not necessarily a sign for product placements to come. At some point we all must become comfortable with the limited scope of our expertise, and be willing to pontificate on that point for the benefit or bane of humanity. Also, i thought it cute that the official web site has no link to or images of this product, and so we (along with bevnet) would be the first results.

So how does the thing actually taste and function? There is an established form for energy drink reviewing which I eschew here. Instead the bullet points will highlight impressions:

• Just as powerful as other Rockstar drinks, with the same pseudo-stimulant and stimulant ingrediants and amounts. Must be a taste upgrade then.
• Taste = sugar. Syrupy grape/guava, unidentifiable taste that reminds me perhaps of grape dimetapp. No pulp like the citrusoid rockstar.
• More of a medicinal aftertaste than dimetapp, though.
• Ah, guava. There you are, you pungent devil. With an effect similar to that of mango, the guava helps me imagine swallowing a gopher-spiked wine.

And that's about it. I am not sure I would recommend this to first-timers - Rockstar Guava seems to be mainly growing the post-clubbing agebracket that feels the need to "naturalize," in this case spiking an unholy juice/herbal supplement blend with massive amounts of sugar. If it is sugar you need, try SoBe Gold or Amp. The guava pulp does not define the energy drink revolution! The counterrevolutionary parties will be amputated from the body public!

once again, this was not a product placement. thank you for your time

Play it! Reminiscent of Stunt Copter for Mac System 6, with different physics at play:

via mefi

A tremor, 4.2 on the Richter scale, was detected in northeastern North Korea at 10:36 pm EST (USA). Soon afterwards a press release came from the NK government, excerpted here:

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology, 100 percent.

It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA [Korean People’s Army] and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

While the spin on the test will most defintely be debated, there remains the fact that North Korea (depending on the veracity of their report) has joined the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, People's Republic of China, India, and Pakistan as the only countries to have tested a nuclear weapon. How this plays out in the fields of diplomacy, military aggression, and proliferation will determine how this test is remembered in the context of history.

This site is really a link to a large single image made up of scans of children's letters to God. They are interesting in that cutesy sort of naive way that Bill Cosby taps into, but with both there are nuggets of insight.
Through the eyes of a babe and all that but these are interesting compositions of a Christian-Scientific-Apologist nature:

and literary criticisms:

edit: One can read the debate on metafilter about the letter's authorship or buy the book.

Not much more to say than direct-quoting the site's short description:

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

Lots of nice incidental overlap between two very dissimilar paradigms. Might also work to combine Garfield and Nietzsche.

A Romania-specific stencil archive, organized by city.
For further exploration of the stencil phenomenon, check this previous post.

The toplink has more of these. i am surprised that there have not been more innovations (aftermarket maybe) allowing drivers to change the mood of their car. for example, a headlight could be angry (top slanted inward) banal (level) or woeful (top slanted outward), and a car could change its posture. Hydraulics somewhat accomplish this, as do most car enhancements; it is the image superimposed on our selves that we put forward for the judges.
'sides, i don't need a piercing to be rebellious - just check the former ride:

toplink via mefi

From the poignant

Now
Sky crying
Dark, cold, hard
Stop crying and smile
Please

to the satiric

In class
Don't interesting
writing, hearing, sleeping
time passes so slowly
pain

Interwebbed by their English teacher.

Trauma

Although I am writing about psychological
, it is also important to keep
... Thus, a
tic event or situation creates psychological
when it ...

by google.asp

Create your own google-keyword-textmashes via the link at the top.
Here is a more lighthearted example:

Cloudberries

The cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus), also called bakeapple in Newfoundland and
... Unlike most Rubus species, the cloudberry does not self-pollinate. ...
As a Rubus species, Cloudberries are certainly close relatives of raspberries,
... "It cloudberry plants grows in a dry mossy soil, is of the form of a ...
The
it is one of the smallest of this group, its single erect stem seldom
... The distribution of
includes the northern Russian Republic, ...

The reason the
has yet to take the world by storm is that the habitat it
... Given all that, the only way to harvest cloudberries is pull on your ...