Scientists Have Constructed a Virus From Scratch
The researchers made the [Polio] virus in the laboratory using data from the Internet and tailor-made sequences ordered from a laboratory supply service. They injected the virus into mice to show that it worked. The animals were paralyzed and then killed.”
“I don’t think we need to encourage people to take this up as a hobby,” said [CJ] Peters [director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Center at Galveston].“
Cruising Google image search, I ran across this home page called Second Skin: A Cosplay Site. The site explains that “cosplay (a Japanese word combining “Costume” and “Play”) is a meticulous, expensive, and very fun hobby of dressing up as anime, manga, and video game characters. ”
Apparently this is the hobby responsible for people dressed in Sailor moon costumes which I read about in various con reports.
On her site, she lists What every masquerade girl must carry with them at a convention, and in addition to the obvious (Camera, Safety pins/ Glue gun), recommends “A burly guy-friend to keep away the mouthbreathers. If you don’t see the necesity, you’ve never been to a con in a short skirt. “
An academic article (in Hebrew) discussing the identity of the Philistine god Dagon. It concludes that Dagon (the name related to the Hebrew for grain, dagan, rather then the Hebrew for fish dag – or nun, in Aramaic) was probably a version of the Aegean-Anatolian fertility mother goddess, Cybele.
In others words (for players of Call of Cthulhu, Dagon is really Shub-Niggurath…
Everyone’s blogging this, so why don’t I?
What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?
(For those of you who don’t want to go through the NY Times’ free registration – which is worth it, IMO – you can see what everyone else in blogdom is posting about this).
The Surrealist Compliment Generator and the first Surrealist manifesto, both via links posted by Richard Kadrey here.