Hollywood is searching high and low for talent.

Filming of the new Doctor Who series has been hit by a shortage of midget actors.
Bosses wanted them to play tiny blue aliens – but most have been snapped up for the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie and to play Gringotts Bank staff in the new Harry Potter film.

You’d think that finding blue people would be even more difficult.
hat tip – Inoperable Terran

Just another reason that this is a better idea than this.

hat tip – Damian Penny

The Humane Society of the United States has a blog, detailing the efforts of these selfless people who are rescuing dolphins and breaking up dog fights in the tsunami flood zone.

I sent a text message to Jim Styers from Myanmar Dolphin Project to let him know the adult dolphin had been caught.�He wanted to know if anyone had taken any statistics� was the animal rehydrated, did it get antibiotics, etc?�I told him I didn’t know, but�thought probably not since the rescue was conducted by local fishermen who would�not have�had the resources.�Jim suggested that someone should be checking the beach regularly as stressed or tired dolphins�will beach themselves.�That made me think of what�Miranda said: that it was easy to catch the animal�because she seemed tired. I hope this is a victory.
Edwin Wiek from SOS Wildlife Rescue Center went to the site immediately when he heard the news, and�stayed until dark surveying from the shore to see if the other dolphin surfaces.

I spotted a HSUS blogad earlier today, soliciting donations for the relief effort.
The Humane Society of the United States is not the US Humane Society. They are not the people who rescue homeless strays and volunteer at animal shelters. In fact, HSUS doesn’t run any shelters at all.
They are yet another incarnation of the various animal rights organizations that are politically and legislatively oriented. Like PETA but with the added advantage of confusing nomenclature, they solicit donations exploiting big brown puppy dog eyes, and spend them forming PACs and lobbying for animal rights legislation and breeding bans. They are reported to be the richest animal rights organization in the USA.

Worth magazine rates HSUS among the worst-managed U.S. charities, noting that HSUS took in over $65 million in 2000, yet spent more than half of it to raise additional money. “We’re not saying they’re crooked,” offered Worth writer Reshma Memom Yaqub in November 2002, “but we do take issue with some business practices.”

Don’t send them a cent.

There is a right way and a wrong way to eat two-fingered Kit-Kats.
(hat tip – Gin and Tonic)

Beauty really is skin deep, according to the Florida Tomato Committee.

“These requirements serve to ensure customer satisfaction and improve grower returns. Not holding the UglyRipe tomato to these same standards defies orderly marketing and provides it unfair, undue marketing advantage…. The bottom line is that the Florida Tomato Committee is empowered to protect the standards of the Florida round tomato…”

Others smell a conspiracy. I don’t know… I’m kinda on the side of the Florida Tomato Committee on this one.

With today’s release of the Environment Canada’s Top Ten weather stories for 2004;

At Saskatoon, for example, the air temperature on January 28 dipped to -45�C, the coldest in 33 years. Add the wind and it felt more like -59. Exposed skin froze in less than 10 minutes. At times in January, even the planet Mars was warmer than Canada. The rover Spirit recorded a night-time minimum of -15�C on the Red Planet while in Key Lake, SK (some 570 km north of Saskatoon) it dipped to -52.6�C on January 29 making it the coldest place on Earth.

…this is welcome news;

A team of researchers at the University of Toledo has created petunias that survive in temperatures so low that other flowers curl up and die in two hours.

Because, I’d really miss my garden these days.

Joe Katzman finds this quote on the origins of the term “Toyota Taliban” at UN Insider;

In a letter from Kabul, British satirical biweekly Private Eye reported on the private life of international community members in the Afghan capital. It claims that only 16% of the $4.5 billion pledged at the Tokyo conference goes to the government; the rest in the hands of NGO; a term used to refer to “the well heeled” international staff of the U.N. and aid organizations who reportedly spend time shopping for wide screen tvs and laptops at a new Sony Centre. “Most other shopkeepers only ever glimpse them as they are driven past in one of the $75,000 Toyota Landcruisers most of them owned by the U.N. — known here as the Toyota Taliban,” the letter says, adding that the cruisers ferried them from office to restaurant to guest house. It continues: “There’s a swimming pool at a central U.N. compound and regular parties and barbecues. Memories of a party held by the DHL courier group last November, when an opium pipe was passed around by U.N. staff, are still fresh. If boredom strikes, aid workers might also sign up for Tai Chi and Argentinean tango lessons.”

In the Congo, UN tastes lean more towards Pimp My Ride;

the international operation in Bunia, home to about 16,000 refugees, threatens to become another monument to U.N. paralysis and failure. Investigators describe a “significant, widespread and ongoing” pattern of abuse at the camp–an astonishing conclusion given that many women are afraid to report sexual violence against them. At least one senior official in charge of security in Bunia is implicated in the scandal, and U.N. peacekeepers allegedly have threatened investigators with retaliation. According to the Economist, a U.N. probe is even considering the possibility that MONUC has been infiltrated by “organized pedophiles who recruit their friends.”

But neither have the panache of Kofi Annan – who eschews reality based transportation in favour of his own private Fantasyland ride.

Dhimmi Watch points to IslamOnline’s Live Fatwa page, and questions about aid to tsunami victims;

Question Can we give those afflicted people a portion of our zakah money even if they are non-Muslims? How about giving them charity?
Answer In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
Thank you. The receivers of Zakah money are clearly mentioned in the Qur’an. Among them, the poor and needy people. Looking at the situation of those people who are afflicted, one can conclude that the Muslims among them fall under the category of needy people.
In this regard, those Muslims deserve to receive a portion of Zakah. As for non-Muslims, they might deserve donation or any other form of assistance but not Zakah.
Thus, Zakah should be given to poor and needy Muslims. Some non-Muslims may receive a portion of Zakah if there is hope that by giving them Zakah that might lead to their conversion into Islam. They would be then considered under the category of mu’allafati qulubuhun or those whose hearts are inclined to accept Islam.

Hat tip – Kathy Shaidle

And don’t try to fool me with that Aspirin tablet religion, either.

hat tip – PUBLIUS

I have puppies who weigh more than 8.6 ounces at birth.
For all the general wonderment and talk of miracles, the brutal truth is that most extremely premature babies face a lifetime of disability and dependancy.

Back in February I wrote the following on the topic of same-sex marriage;

I have not found an argument to support the extension of legal marriage to include same-sex couples that I could not use in equal measure to demand the right to marry my sister.
Being of the same gender, society’s interest in the health of potential offspring is nullified – though it can also be argued that removing the ability to procreate as a defining property of marriage opens the door pretty wide. I don’t know how you can arbitrarily set aside something as fundamental as procreation to broaden the definition of marriage to include homosexual relationships, but stick it back in to narrow that same definition to exclude incestuous ones.
If it is discriminatory to deny persons the right to legally marry on the basis of same-sex orientation (be it choice or chance), is it not equally discriminatory to deny persons the right to marry on the basis of sexual ambivilance? Being homosexual or heterosexual is not a product of having sex with a person of the same or opposite gender, or having sex at all! Celibacy, whether voluntary or involuntary, does not affect orientation.
[…]
This is not a frivolous suggestion. It’s not uncommon for siblings to live their entire adult lives together, to share incomes, property, to support, comfort, care for, love and commit to each other. Why should such a couple be denied the societal benefits afforded to other such couples – pension benefits, spousal deductions. That they may or may not be having sex is no one’s business but their own.

Today, Colby Cosh points out that Alberta is proposing new legislation that accomplishes just that.

Alberta: enemy of “traditional marriage”? In today’s National Post I assess an odd claim made earlier this week by Premier Ralph Klein that Canada’s stubborn right-wing province has “probably the most advanced and forward-thinking legislation in the country as it affects gays and lesbians”. Hey, even I can only be so contrarian–the statement is a clear exaggeration if you take “advanced and forward-thinking” in its typical formal meaning (“liberals like it”). But there’s a little-known fact here, squatting in the background of the national gay-marriage debate: Alberta’s mysteriously obscure new law creating civil- union-type arrangements is, in one important respect, more radical than proposed federal law–it extends access to “spousal” benefits to non-conjugal life partners, including unmarried relatives living together. Same-sex activists actually dislike this because it’s too inclusive–its effect is to lump them in with single people in platonic cohabitation. In that sense, they’re serving as defenders of “traditional marriage”, amended so as to cover them, against the country’s broadest regime of practical access to spousal privileges. You can find the details on page A21 of today’s paper.

Good on Ralphie. Serve up the “inclusiveness” they’ve been clamouring for and then stand back and watch the demands for exclusivity roll out.
Nobody does hypocrisy like the left.

If instead of chanelling Martha Stewart and overhearing conversations inside Fallujah bunkers, Jeff Goldstein was an agent provocateur coding websites for the environmental movement on a unix-based text editor;
jeff@cellulose:~/www/seac.org/public_html/tampons/$ pico nothing.html
(added to the Beltway traffic jam)

If only I’d known, I could have observed the day by enlisting several small children to solicit door to door donations for the food bank my palace fund.
Before selling them into the sex trade industry, of course.
hat tip – Charles MacDonald

A reader sent along this item some weeks ago, and I didn’t use it at the time because I couldn’t think of an angle to approach it from . I still can’t. But it’s interesting, nonetheless.

Everything about Amir appears masculine: his broad chest, muscled arms, dark full beard and deep voice. But, in fact, Amir was a woman until four years ago, when, at the age of 25, he underwent the first of a series of operations that would change his life.
Since then he has had 20 operations and expects four more. And Amir, who as a woman was married twice to men – his second husband helped with the transition and remains a good friend – is now engaged to marry a woman.
[…]
After decades of repression, Iran’s Islamic government is recognizing people with sexual-identity disorders and allowing them to have sex-change operations and obtain new birth certificates.
Before the 1979 Islamic revolution, there was no particular policy regarding transsexuals. Iranians with the inclination, means and connections could obtain the necessary medical treatment and new identity documents. The new religious government, however, classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing under Iran’s penal code.
But these days, Iran’s Muslim clerics, who dominate the judiciary, are considerably better informed about transsexuality. Some clerics now even recommend sex- change operations to those who are troubled about their sex. The issue was discussed at a conference in Tehran in June that drew officials from other Gulf countries.
One cleric, Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, is writing his thesis at the religious seminary of Qom on transsexuality.
“All the clerics and researchers at the seminary encouraged me to work on the subject,” he said in an interview. “They said that my research can help change the social stigma attached to these people and clarify religious decrees on the matter.”

One part of me hopes that this may be a sign of more liberal attitudes towards women in this most repressive of Islamic societies… but another wonders if it isn’t just a clever ploy to confuse the living hell out of everyone.

Via a reader tip, this American Thinker portrait of sex “researcher” Alfred Kinsey – and the long term societal consequences of his fraud.

While Kinsey made no effort to correct for incidentally skewed data, he purposely skewed data and made every effort to make it appear correct. Amazingly, outrageously, unbelievably, fourteen-hundred of Kinsey’s male subjects were prison inmates and sexual offenders whom he classified as normal. Why? Kinsey’s rationalization was that the only difference between these reprobates and average men was that the former got caught.

After that, it was only logical to consult prostitutes to obtain data on female sexuality.

As shameful as the scientific fraud is, it pales in comparison to Kinsey’s blatantly immoral and criminal behavior with respect to children. Kinsey conducted research that supposedly demonstrated that young boys – as young as two months of age – could experience multiple orgasms. He claimed that the maximum number observed in a twenty-four hour period was 26 climaxes . . . in a thirteen-year-old and a four-year-old. Now, to again quote the Intercollegiate Review, “So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is collected on the sexual responses of children as young as five.”

There’s more.

Plus, lots of light for reading the sports section.

A magnetic screwdriver is an invaluable tool when draining carbs on your bike. It will prevent the necessity of using your fingers to dig about gasoline soaked surfaces in the gloom of an unlit garage in December, trying for the 4th time to find the tiny bolt that has again fallen into the bowels of your engine, while trying to replace it blind, from a virtually impossible angle.
Urgh.

In the basement laundry room of the family farm home is a refrigerator like the one pictured above. The International-Harvester deepfreeze is a few feet away, under the stairwell. A farm equipment company, IH began making refrigeration appliances in 1947, but only manufactured them for a few years before selling the division off. At $700 for a freezer, the price was out of reach for most households.
Both are at least 50 years old. My grandparents purchased the freezer used in the mid 1950’s and sold it to my dad in 1965. Its colourful history includes rescue from a house fire through timely intervention with a chainsaw through an exterior wall. Both appliances continue to function as well as the day they were built.

It is nearly impossible for a woman of my size to move an IH refrigerator by herself. The new Sears Kenmore I bought a couple of years ago (to replace the leaky harvest gold 70’s model that came with the house) weighs about as much as a styrofoam box. Then again – nobody ever had to move an International freezer because it quit working. Five decades of hard-won technological advances have cut the weight, energy consumption and functioning lifespan of kitchen appliances like these by two-thirds.

I don’t know that this is progress.

Via Jeremy Brown, who’s filling in for Michael Totten – Ali at Iraq The Model, discovers he doesn’t know as much about his country’s history as he thought.

[Juan Cole] also provide a link to another article by a professor of Arab studies in the university of Colombia and use it as a reference to back up his theory. What Dr. Cole was trying to tell us, as you can see in his article, is that Fallujah is celebrated in Iraq’s history as a symbol for the large rebellion/revolution against the British back in 1920.
[…]
After reading the two honored professors’ articles I scratched my head vigorously (I’m sure I looked stupid because I felt so!) trying to remember my country’s history as I read it in school. Well, my memory is not that strong to help me remember all those poets and decorated writings about our ancestor’s bravery that I read in the fifth grade, but I sure do remember the only Iraqi movie that was produced about that rebellion. The director of the movie used a huge budget (Iraqi standards) and hired some British actors including Oliver Reed. He (the director) was rewarded generously By Saddam for showing the truth about that historical event.
[…]
Anyway, I don’t know which is worse; that the two experts in Arab world didn’t know about Dr. Al Wardi and his writings or that they knew but chose Sadam’s version of Iraq’s history!?

I suspect there’s more of this than we know.