[links] Link salad feels like Leisure Suit Larry

The Lakeside Kickstarter has begun — The complications in my cancer have created complications in the filming process. The producer needs to extend the budget a little further.

imdb with the listing for Lakeside — Still being built, but there's a movie poster there, and acting credits for me and the_child.

Lord of the Strings: The Influence of Tolkien on Heavy Metal Music — Um? Wow. (Via Cora Buhlert.)

Faster, Quentin! Thrill! Thrill! — Roger Ebert with a lot of interesting things to say about Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained [ imdb ].

Closed off tunnel now sheds light on Portland's sordid past — A squib about Portland's Shanghai tunnels.

Round Trip — I love this 1943 Shorpy photo of a railroad roundhouse.

The US And New Zealand Secretly Tested The First Tsunami Bomb — Wow. (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)

The Sarcastic Fringehead — Really? Curious video of undersea life. Also possibly the name of my next rock band. (Via willyumtx.)

Captured deep beneath the waves: Giant squid filmed in natural habitat — I've seen the specimen on display at Te Papa, the national museum in Wellington, NZ (though I think that one might have been a colossal squid). These things are amazing.

Release the kraken! 2,000 years of tall tales (and a smattering of truth) — veryone from Pliny the Elder to Tennyson has written about giant squid.

Earth-Sized Planets Widespread in Galaxy — The rate at which our knowledge of the universe changes amazes me.

Consumption of sweet and diet drinks could lead to depression — Huh.

The Reverend Hall, America Hero — Comes word that the National Cathedral, an Episcopal Church, will start to perform same-sex marriages. Good. The public face of American Christianity needs to be about something more than bigotry, hatred and willful ignorance. Everything from evolution denial to the Mormon Church's shameful support of Proposition 8 to practically every word that comes out of the mouths of Evangelical leaders further stains the image of religion. Nice to see some movement in the other direction

Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice? — A wrenching piece on murder and forgiveness. Though given current events, I was quite struck by this line: “If that gun had not been in the house, our daughter would be alive.” There's a lesson here, that no one in the gun culture will ever acknowledge, let alone learn. The rock solid truth of the fundamental immorality of wholesale death is incompatible with gun owners' view of themselves as good people. (Courtesy of wild_irises.)

Alex Jones Pitches Government by Boxing Match — [T]he fact that Jones responds to a disagreement over government policy by telling his interlocutor "well how 'bout we take this outside" is illustrative. Jones spends much of the interview ranting about the evils of government use of force, without much attention to the kind of individual violence with which he threatened Morgan. That's one of the deep problems with our gun culture. It valorizes violence that the gun owner sees a defensive, just or retributive. Do we really want 100,000,000 people with powers of summary execution which depend on their casual judgment regardless of mood or circumstance or the objective facts of the situation? Because that's what this country has with widespread private gun ownership.

Giffords and Kelly: Fighting gun violence — An important effort that will sadly most likely be a failure, as Americans' love of guns trumps any number of deaths. As a culture, we prefer killing machines to the morality of life, and make endless excuses to maintain the illusion that this is the right thing.

?otD: Ever been to the Land of the Lounge Lizards?

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1/9/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (stress)
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 217.4
Number of FEMA troops on my block teaching critical thinking skills to the children of conservatives: 0
Currently reading: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks