…against blog spam, at least. Thanks to “MT-Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ and diligent spam-swatting by our authors, this site has sucessfully repelled thousands of attempts to hijack comments pages. Good job!
Now if I could just get something that effective for my e-mail…
Space Daily has an engaging “overview of X Prize progress”:http://www.spacedaily.com/news/xprize-04u.html, including both the trials and the triumphs of the frontrunners. Even the mistakes are exciting, as fun to follow as the series of progressively-more-impressive rocket tests in “October Sky”. Go teams!
While roaming a mall-based Waldenbooks yesterday, I happened upon a display of books promoted as “paranormal romance.” The great majority of them in the store were vampire romances, which really caught my attention since I’m teaching “Death, Burial and Culture” this fall and want my students to do projects on folklore surrounding the dead (or undead, as the case may be). So I, uh, bought one… For research purposes only, of course (Oh, like I’m supposed to pass up something titled, “A Girl’s Guide to Vampires”).
To restore my now-tattered academic credentials, here’s a fairly serious literary analysis of this subgenre by Lee McClain.
Twenty years ago, excited by the Summer Olympic Games being in Los Angeles (and by playing “Summer Games”:http://screenmania.retrogames.com/c64/01/c64_0008.html on the Apple //c), some friends and I recreated the Olympics in our own neighborhood. Each of us picked a country to represent, and we competed in a series of (probably very lame) “events” to determine who would get the (probably plastic) “gold medal”. Like the actual Olympics, we spent much more time and effort on the rules and ceremonies than on the actual sports, but that wasn’t the point.
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Hey, kids. I came across the work of Andy Goldsworthy in a magazine and decided that you guys would love to see it. He interacts with nature to make beautiful, non-damaging art and the results are really lovely.