Sins of our Mothers

Fact: Birds raised in cigarette butt nests are 78% more likely to smoke as adult birds.

Home is where you make it

Fun fact to know and share: Birds that build nests using cigarette butts have much healthier chicks. The reason being lack of parasites, as no mite or tick dares cross the chemical monstrosity that is butt nest.

Does it hurt the birds? Studies so far say not at all, but the opposite - cigarettes help birds live healthier lives.

Ever Smaller

Check out 80's guy with his rad collection of electronics. Believe me cuz I was there, and all that stuff was rad, back in the day. Yo! But all of that and far more (the Internet) can now be found on a pretty little thin slab of black glass.

Like everyone here has, except that dude. The world in our palms, like some Star Trekkian perversion.

F that S says Queen Nadia, beatbox of the desert. Gonna kick it old school. Cut this rug!

DL's down wit it.

Asteroid sweet home

IF - that's the BIG IF, by the way - we manage to actually start mining asteroids in space, a logical leap would be to use the asteroids themselves as bases. Consider Ida, below. You could use Ida as the base, and mine Dactyl. Why not? You're already digging, you've got raw materials, water, air, energy, and perhaps most importantly of all, the interior of an asteroid would provide perfect shielding against radiation - something we have little hope of stopping with our current or even near technology.

It would start small, of course, with the space miners themselves living in some burrowed out cave, but with time, and effort, and the fabulous gazillions of dollars space mining will create, things will get bigger.

And groovier.

Check out future space plow, and the old asteroid fishing hole. But bigger still - really, the scale would only be limited by available asteroids. And not just for habitats, but for space ships:

And why not? Once you're in space, mass doesn't matter so much, and there's no aerodynamics to worry about. Thus:

To the future!

Another Inconvenient Truth

Homeless people dying in our streets all the time. Do we care? As a society? Above, an abandoned Detroit tenement elevator shaft. Dude fell in, died, then got frozen over. Hope they buried/burned him later, right?

Right? Everyone deserves a certain standard of life, and death. Right? Or is it that this truth is only true for Fox News viewers?

LOL, right? What do you want to bet that dead frozen dude is African American? And what do you want to bet a majority of white America doesn't care? We're the land of Slavery in its worst incarnation. What do you think the former slaveholders would be saying but a 100 years afterward?

Spitting venom - are we purging it? Or is it surging?

Back The Way It Used To Be

A tidy Hooverville, 1922 Seattle. Looks cozy and inviting, right? Oh for those good old days when you knew your neighbor and lent a hand, after a good day of honest work for honest pay. Every man had his castle. His luxury penthouse in Hollywood.

The shack with stove is a pretty common housing choice around the world, even today. It's affordable and Green. Time to bring it back to America!  Or if you're truly a Fiscal Conservative, simply live out in a tent in the middle of the prairie - that will stretch your dollar for luxury items like tea, and socks, and awesome gowns.

Vote Tea Party! They'll solve America's housing crisis!

Meanwhile, inside

Who knows what lurks behind the walls of your neighbors? Unless you go inside of course.  They may seem outwardly "normal", but inside, where it counts, they're all kinds of crazy. And sad. This lad here clearly is suffering from several addictions - alcohol, ya think? Nicotine too, and maybe he's doing some other drug I can't see. Also, the internet - it's true, now, I realize: It can be a drug that takes over your life. Your internet reality becomes your true reality, the fleshbag can have the "real". But what is real, Neo?

Also, is that some fancy expensive lamp, that IF I knew what it was I'd be all "OMG! That's a Murcato Ruby from 1924, with the original lacy edges!"? That kind of fancy?

Home is what you make it

In this case, a giant rice farmer. Awesome, right? Also not for sale.

If I did buy this place though, somehow (lottery?), I'd install flame throwers from the guy's mouth, raining down upon the driveway. Now that's home defense! It's our Constitutional Right, after all. As Korean rice farmers.

Not Haunted

Yeah, no doubt. As there's no such thing as ghosts.

Indian Summer (Winter is coming)

Indian Summer is defined in Maine as any warm day past September 1st. Why it's called "Indian" is not for the curry. It's easy to forget, in the Summer, that Maine is cold, and way up North. And kinda weird. But boy, in the Summer - it can be perfection. I had the BEST Summer in quite some time, due to the fully operational New Gondolin. Take a look - 

Due Northwest. That's my favorite corner.

From the great wall of Redshirt, newly constructed. It was amazing to see the change in the wall and the leaves this past week - from nothing to full on. Some change I like, other change I'm not so keen on. I'm going to miss the Summer and I know I've forgotten: Winter is coming:

Brrr!

Home is where you sleep on a regular basis

Osaka Japan. I'm sure it seems fairly normal when you live there after awhile - yah, I'm down over by the Pesky Pole. Or maybe not - as the old koan goes, how can you go home when it's already been stolen?

Also, good zombie proofing potential for a whole town - you'd have lots of internal storage space and good infrastructure (water, sanitation, etc). Just lock up them doors!