the link is a lie.

Here's a robot. And it's running. And if that wasn't enough, there's this quadrupedal pack robot. My favorite bit is where the guy kicks it and its rights itself, though that may make me technically a robosadist. Next stop? Michael Biehn shows up naked and with 80s hair, tells you, "Come with me if you want to live." You give props to him for best pick-up line you've ever heard, until it turns out he wants to save you from killer robots. Talk about disappointment.

Speaking of robots, here's text from a 1954 high school home ec textbook about how to be a good wife. I will warn you, it may make you want to vomit and/or throw your computer through a window. Seriously, the fact that women were putting up with this shit as recently as 1954 makes me want to weep. The fact that so many women still live this way causes my incandescent rage to reach critical world-destroying mass.

On a more deeply depressing note, this guy got six months in prison for yawning. No, that isn't hyperbole. He literally yawned and was sentenced essentially for contempt. God help the sufferer of Tourette's Syndrome who goes before this justice.

And here are some health-care-debate related links, in case you're interested. I wouldn't blame you for skipping them, though. Politics hurts enough; add something I actually have a vested interest in, and you have the perfect storm to make me cry like a little girl.

As you all know, the best system of health care is a free market system -- that is, allowing healthy competition to keep costs down. Like for instance, if your insurance company wanted to hike your rates by 16.4%, you might say to yourself, "Hey, fuck that noise!" and solicit bids from other insurers to look for a cheaper option. Fear of losing your business will prompt your original insurer to check themselves before they wreck themselves. It's a perfect system! You solicit your bids, you find a cheaper insurer, you switch to them, your old insurance company sues you for not liking them anymore, and everybody wins! I mean, you're not only keeping corporate health care alive, you're also contributing to the economy by paying lawyers and clerks and judges and a whole 'nother sector of the economy! Brilliant!

Meanwhile, an anchor on CNN takes an anti-reform health care CEO to the table and PWNs.

I like the pointers in this blog about how to handle "astroturf" hecklers at town hall meetings. I don't know how effective any of it is, but I like the "astroturf" part. It makes me lol.

The Washington Post offers an editorial on propagating falsehoods to stop health care reform. Preach it! There's another good editorial from Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

From commondreams.org: the health care debate has only just begun. Well, that's comforting. What happens when like... Janet Jackson dies this time and the whole country goes into mourning and suddenly we don't need health care reform so much as we need a ten-hour retrospective?

Obama open to health care cooperatives. It's an interesting idea, and certainly a step up, but I really don't think anything's going to pull us from the doldrums except a single-payer system. Which we'll never get, because we're idiots.

The health care debate makes me a sad panda. Mostly because I don't feel it should be a debate. But whatever. this is all way too heavy for me. Next I shall post something entertaining. For realz.

oh, animals. You're so cute AND so wacky.

Here now for your entertainment is a much more enjoyable form of the linkspam: bioblogging! w000000t!

Science has proved Aesop's fable, "The Crow and the Pitcher." Researchers offer crows a juicy worm in a pitcher of water, crows drop pebbles into the pitcher until the water level rises enough for them to snatch the worm. I fucking love crows, man. They're smart little fuckers.

Here's a cool bit of bio news: orangutans use leaves to fashion "musical instruments." Apparently the point of it is that using the leaves lowers the pitch of their call, making them sound like bigger orangutans than they actually are, and in theory making predators think twice about coming to eat them.

This one I have to link not so much for the information -- which is interesting, but I'm not really a botany enthusiast, so it's not interesting enough on its own -- as for the hilarity. The Fruit Is A Lie, a post about what is and is not technically a "fruit."

And while we're on the subject of plants, here are some fucking massive ones that eat meat. It's a pitcher plant so big it catches rats, you guys. Coming next week on the "SyFy" channel: Pitcher Plant vs. Venus Fly Trap II: Ultramegadeath Showdown! And for an added dose of cool? They named it after David Attenborough.

Something else to add to the list of cool: this venomous sea snake uses its tail to fake out predators. While it's got the business end of its venomy head down in a crevasse looking for noms, it holds its tail in a manner that makes the tail look like a head. You're fucking awesome, venomous sea snake. I mean, assuming you're not in league with the jellyfish.

By the way, if you didn't check out Fuck You, Penguin from the last time I linked it, you definitely should now. Not that anything significant has changed or anything, just that you really don't want to miss this. At all.

Big Bang II: The Revenge Of Big Bang

It's SPN/J2 Big Bang time again, which means at at last I am free of deadlines. FREE, I tell you! Well, this particular deadline, at least. Remind me not to claim two stories next year, because that was dumb.

Anyway, this one is for the Supernatural gen story "We Are Legend," by tru_faith_lost and chocca2. I'll update with a link to it when they post tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's the artwork; click for the bigger versions:

[EDIT: The story is now live; you can find the master post here! And my fellow artist xtinethepirate has more art for the story posted here! And today, I love exclamation points!]

HEADER

DIVIDERS

ICONS

Feel free to grab icons, like if you've been dying for a Dean-with-creepy-white-eyes icon all your life or something. Wooohoo!

Here's the story summary, in case you're wondering wtf is going on in this artwork. :D

They averted the Apocalypse, but getting Dean out of Lucifer's clutches wasn't the end of the brothers' nightmare--only the beginning. Now, Sam's a renegade. He has the power of the Four Horseman at his fingertips, but all he really wants is his big brother. Forever. And what Sammy wants, Sammy gets. Except Dean, still bearing the physical "scars" from his interlude with Lucifer, has plans of his own, and he won't back down, no matter what Sam throws at him. What he does, what they do to find each other crosses the line from creepy into downright macabre, but when have Winchesters ever done anything half-assed? This is Subject Two meets one determined sibling.

This is what happens when the Antichrist plays God.

Read We Are Legend