11 things to expect in the future.

Turns out God is a woman and she just stabbed her son with a screwdriver.

Americans are getting poorer, unless you're a congressman in which case you're probably a MILLIONAIRE.

I hope there's a giant at my funeral.

Photo gallery of deserted London Christmas morning.

I love the sea dwelling cone snail, their venom can get you high and they eat things alive with utmost decorum.

Whale sperm is not the reason the world's oceans are salty.

German insurance firm rewards top employees — with an orgy.

The Sacramento Bee has an "Crime Q&A" section on their website.

Kay Stevens, Rat Pack blowj.... er, sidekick died at age 79.

Rio Grande Sun police Blotter 2011.

Five reasons not to leave the house on new years eve.

On this day in 1984 Bernhard Goetz turned himself in to NYPD because he shot a couple kids on a New York City subway a couple weeks previous.

• Oh Geez (cliffdweller) [ Sun Jan 1 2012 2:08 PM ]
  
• After the incident, Bernard Goetz hid out (Carl Petersen) [ Mon Jan 2 2012 9:49 AM ]
  
• Maybe the South Dakota clench of Guardian Angels gave Goetz the keys. (geoffreyplant) [ Mon Jan 2 2012 1:50 PM ]
  

 

Don Kirshner, the man behind prefab pop-rock group The Monkees has died at 76. Read about Kirshner here.

Watch a Monkees video after the jump.

“I’m a Believer,” by The Monkees

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Harvey Pekar has died at age 70 of unknown causes. Pekar beautifully chronicled his mundane life in American Splendor comics. My favorite was the one where he and his buddies found a dead dolphin and strapped it to the top of their car. An award-winning movie of American Splendor was made in 2003. Pekar was one of David Letterman’s most successful hecklers. Rest in peace, scary little comic book man.

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• American and the world... (robertmcat) [ Tue Jul 13 2010 12:30 AM ]
  
• My Hero (novalis) [ Tue Jul 13 2010 12:33 PM ]
  
• Harvey Pekar is Dead (JJehosaphat) [ Wed Jul 14 2010 8:59 PM ]
  

 

The math teacher who inspired Stand and Deliver died today at age 79. Edward James Olmos says Escalante exposed the dangerous myth that inner city students can’t excel. "Because of him, that destructive idea has been shattered forever."

 

The poet Ai, whose work was astoundingly varied and consistently forceful, passed away last week from pneumonia. She was 62.

Ai was born Florence Johnson but changed her name to the Japanese word for love. She was half-Japanese and raised by her mother, who was black, Choctaw and Irish. Ai's poems, in turn, are voiced by a range of speakers and reflect a host of human experience (from bored wives to coma patients to Trotsky).

Read her New York Times obit here.

Here's a short poem I like. Check out the one about Trotsky, called "Killing Floor" here.

Conversation

for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

 

The screenwriter, director and auteur of the ’80s teen-romp genre—National Lampoon’s Vacation, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for starters (which launched the showbiz careers of a slew of actors like Matthew Broderick)— has died. Spend some time with his IMDB credits. Rest in peace, Mr. Hughes.