Christopher Hitchens submits himself to waterboarding and confirms how torturous it actually is.

Fox News aired altered photos of an editor and a reporter of the New York Times who published this article about the dubious news channel.

Beautiful images of Golden Rays in the Gulf of Mexico as they migrate to the Yucatan. Reminds me of the large school of similar rays we saw during our recent boat ride at Myrtle Beach.

Just in time for the Fourth, George Washington's childhood home has been found.

Ned Cobb was a good man who hid his name for no good reason when a white college kid paid a visit in the middle of his busy season and said

"I'm recording the voices of poor ol' boys and maybe you'd like to be heard."

"Yes, sir, the voice of the blowin' wind is too soft for Tallapoosa."

He'd been bewildered and confused by three hundred years of abuse. Cursed into the womb by his worn out father, Ned was taught to go no farther than the plow at his shoes. So he pushed the dirt, but also plucked the feathers from the absurd Jim Crow bird.

"I'm not afraid of Alabama! Hear the howlin' train that carries my new bosses home! Walk in the sullen field they gave me in the corner! In the corner turn around and listen—my masters' tongues whip and moan.

"My cotton was stolen for a fistful of nickels by those foul, fickle bastards. The Union helped us weave ourselves some dignity from the tatters of our dusty, brown souls. So we did, and my loyalty to anything else ain't never comin' back.

"And now I'm old. By the same rail track, in the rusty arms of this wooden barn, I remember. The white men said, 'That nigger ain't a thing more than his daddy was, but a displaced slave too bold.'

"But I came up. I don't hold anything against those who treated me ill, though they might hate me still. I was the man I wanted to be. The man my masters didn't want to say was real. I became the man I needed."

---

Ned Cobb (1885-1973) was a black man in Alabama. He is also known as Nate Shaw. Ned succeeded in life despite mistreatment and the horrible racism of the American South during the Jim Crow years. He fought constantly against the blackguards who hated his skin. The man is an inspiration.

The college kid I mention in my above free verse is Theodore Rosengarten, who wrote a most interesting biography of Ned. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw is about 600 pages, but I wrote a much shorter summary of Nate's struggle, which can be read here.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Through the Fire and Flames" rendered in Mario Paint. Man, I invested hundreds of hours into that game as a kid. Never made anything this cool, though. There are lots of others.

Lilypad, an amphibious city designed to house 50,000 people, may be a solution for future climate refugees. As Pruned points out, Lilypad could be a viable option for Kiribati, a Pacific island nation that might be submerged within a century. The president of Kiribati asked for help last month with the relocation of its citizens.

Old and erroneous mathematical models are to blame for incorrect estimations of extinction rates. "The older models could be severely overestimating the time to extinction. Some species could go extinct 100 times sooner than we expect." Those species may only have a few years or even months left.

Lightmark displays some beautiful photos from a German project. Be sure to check out the "making of" section.

Skeletal studies of cartoon characters. The exaggerated traits of the bodies make for some very cool, uniquely distorted skeletons.

Cornstarch on a subwoofer. Watch and be amazed.

Oh, baby. I found this music video for a Russian metal band's "tribute" to Mikhail Gorbachev quite hilarious. Zombies, boobs, guns, guts: everything you could want.

Simple flash game that lets you play with falling sand. There are some great submissions in the gallery. Update: awesome.

Thanks to Kottke for linking us to a short piece about writing style by Kurt Vonnegut. I feel as though I've read this before, but it's more important that I read it now. I started writing again recently. Not in this blog, but on paper and in Microsoft Word. I started four different novels last year. Ideas were coming from every source and orifice. They've resumed.

Vonnegut gives the best advice with brilliant brevity. He always has. For instance, when speaking of the arts in A Man Without a Country:

They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

That is something I constantly repeat to myself or else I would stop writing very soon after starting.

The children, now dead, had turned into obese hard-boiled eggs. He lifted one of the smallest but couldn't support it with all his strength. The former child hit the tiles with a vile splash. No matter how gently he touched any egg, each cracked and spilled its milky innards.

That's a dream one of my characters has. After reading Vonnegut's suggestions, I have to reread my writings and ask myself: Is this really the way I write? Is it clear? Is it necessary? Another literary genius I know once told me that sometimes the very thing that needs to be cut is the thing you most want to remain.

Who knew that writing books could be so complicated?

I'm amazed that someone not only thought to create a game within a favicon (the tiny 16x16 pixel icon in the address bar) but was able to pull it off: Defender of the Favicon. It doesn't work in Internet Explorer.

After 50 years and 110 million record sales, The Ventures were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. It's about time.

Woodrow Wilson, white supremacist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was on the $100,000 bill. What does that tell you about the world?

Beginning on August 9, you can seek a wide, personal view of George Orwell over at the Orwell Diaries. Published online 70 years to the day after they were written, his diary entries will allow the reader to follow Orwell into World War II.

Orwell was a big critic of English writers. He thought too many authors use vague language that renders prose abstract and impotent whereas it could be concrete and meaningful. In "Politics and the English Language," he listed six rules for writers to reverse such habits:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
  
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Excellent rules to follow. Incidentally, I take this opportunity to recommend Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I read for the third time last year. If you haven't read it, please do. There's also a decent movie, a free online edition of the text, a comic, and an NBC radio adaptation from 1949 that's available for download. There are rumors of a new film to be released in 2009 or later, with Tim Robbins as director. He began directing the play at the Actors' Gang in 2006.

It's Lovely! I'll Take It! is a blog about poorly chosen photos in property listings.