Wouldn't it be totally awesome if the Saudis went nuclear?

No, it wouldn't. It would be terrifying. But that wouldn't happen.

( Would it? )

The entire story is behind the cut, or you can just read it here if the url hasn't gone away. From the Asia Times, via Harry Shearer in the Huffington Post.

Childhood Tales: The Plants I Hated

1. Algerian Ivy:
   
   The back of the house and half the front were covered with ivy in about a three foot thickness. It grew at about an inch a day. Dark chambers inside the ivy contained black widow spiders, rats, ants, grass fleas, worms, and probably gigantic poisonous snakes. The ivy secreted ichor that melted paint and stuck to everything. Stuff rolled into the ivy caves and didn't come back, especially toys. Anything that spent time in the ivy turned into a damp, foul-smelling version of itself. My earliest garden chore was trimming back the ivy and prying the more tenacious bits off the stucco and concrete with a dull table knife. When my father finally decided that the ivy had to go, an army of landscaping guys with power tools, chemicals, and fire spent a week fighting it. To this day the smell of Algerian ivy makes me slightly ill. I noticed last week that our neighbor's ivy is crawling over our garden shed towards the house. It's time for chemicals, fire, and power tools.
   
   
2. Bottlebrush:
   
   At one side of the house, looming over the carport driveway, was a gigantic bottlebrush plant. Beautiful red cone-shaped flowers made of a million little hairs stretched out. And oozed some kind of sticky goo that instantly stained any object. When skating into the carport, if I cut it just a little too close I'd sideswipe a bit of bottlebrush and suddenly be coated with Nature's Pigmented Airplane Glue. It was my job to cut this thing back, and when I did I always got a nice raised rash on my skin everywhere it touched.
   
   
3. Bird of Paradise:
   
   At the corner of the house seven or eight of these tropical jungle plants lived. Their "flowers" looked like the Toucan Sam of the vegetable kingdom, or like an early prototype for the banana: long pelican beak-like boats of leaves with colorful petals protruding. They slowly produced a stinking greasy liquid which dripped down the plant. As the goo dripped, the "flower" rotted from the inside. Flies and ants gathered, and a miasma of South Sea decay rose into the air. I was assigned to hack off these diseased protuberances and heave them into the trash, in the process covering myself with insects and plant spooge.
   
   
4. Bougainvillea:
   
   This is an awfully pretty bush, with shiny spiky leaves. We had several in the back yard and one in front next to the bottlebrush. Bougainvillea has very long, sharp thorns. As the plant grows older, the thorns get longer, and wider, and stronger. Its blooms and leaves obscure the thorns pretty well, so that when you're in the process of wiping out on a skateboard you can easily forget, in the heat of the moment, which plant you're about to belly-flop into. It hurts so, so very much to slam into a bougainvillea, or to be heaved into one by another kid. Hey, guess what one of my other tasks was? I learned very early on to borrow Dad's gloves when I was told to clip this one.

I liked the cherry tomatoes and the basil and mint I grew. I liked the calla lilies and the tangerine trees and the big pine, and the palm that was a bitch to cut back but big and beautiful. And I even liked the cactus, which was spiky and dangerous but honest about it; you couldn't fault a cactus for stabbing you, it was your own damned fault. But I still hold grudges about those others.

Oh no, here comes Lumbergh.

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/

tidbits from livescience.com

1. High School dumps books. This confused me, and not because I'm a book-hugging Luddite. I can see why browsing a crappy modern textbook on a laptop is not much worse or better than holding one in your hand, but what about English classes, for example? Is there an advantage to reading The Scarlet Letter on a screen in electronic form versus the Penguin paperback? Or is this just the latest version of administrators falling in love with technology?
   
   
2. Cockblocking (literally). Chickens, like swinging 20somethings, have lots of empty sex.
   
   
3. This inappropriately funny headline actually shows how STDs spread among teenagers.

Rootless linkmopolitan: "Figuring", or math art

L.A. Observed reports on the Institute for Figuring, a new organization about, well, figuring. What they mean by this is the graphical representation of math in all ways: fractal art, paisley, mathematical patterns in natural objects, mosaics, buckyballs, half the stuff on your screensaver. There's fascinating stuff on the site about paper folding, crocheting hyperbolic space, etc. It reminds me of Bathsheba Grossman's amazing sculptures.

This heaven gives me migraine

Waiting for my mother at the doctor's office just now I picked up a magazine called "Organic Style", thinking "this should be good!"

It does not disappoint. A more descriptive name would be "The magazine for women who need to be so healthy and virtuous and beautiful that they are all hot yoga adepts and Jane Goodall and Susan Sarandon at once".

Ads for Shell Oil face editorials decrying Arctic drilling. A product sidebar touts a $249 "earth/peace scapulare" that makes a statement in 14k "recycled gold". There are many, many skin moisturizers and breakfast cereals. One is commanded to indulge everything, always.

The best part was a Dove ad. It was actually an ad for an advertising campaign (!). Dove wishes to celebrate "real beauty" of "women with curves" who are not size 2 models. They laud their own ad campaign, in which they stand firm for real women and unretouched photographs and celebrating... Anyway the women in the ad for the ad are impossibly hot twenty year olds with perfect everything laughing in their underwear. I guess it's okay to be a size 4 catalog model now, gals! Size 0 is no longer mandatory!

BRAAAINS (dopamine mechanism)

Looks like I'm not the only one with issues about dopamine. My ADD/depression/anxiety/self-hatred galaxy revolves around the stuff, and of course it's the mechanism of addiction. But these poor bastards found out that the medication they were taking for Parkinson's disease was turning them into pathological gamblers.

When the drug was discontinued, the urge to gamble disappeared. The AP story is here at Salon.com and the full scientific article from the Archives of Neurology is here.

That's a Holy Shit Moment, that a dopaminergic drug can cause that specific an addiction to a behavior.