plasticbag.org

When you are bored and have nothing to do, you do stupid stupid things. This is actually the result of following a tutorial on teaching oneself complex Photoshop operations (although god knows you can’t tell by looking at it):

Lie of the Day

Today on Barbelith: New York: On the Ground – “I could feel the heat three hundred yards away; everything on four or five floors, people and office equipment, came raining down on the crowd. We all ran north while it fell and got away before it hit because it was high up. As I glanced back I saw the contents of the floors: all on fire, people and building, killed without a second to reconsider their life. George Minarik was in New York.”

Fray.com: Missing Pieces.

From the Guardian’s letters pages, via linkmachinego: The omnipotence of American culture and childhood innocence ended in our house on September 11. I sat with my young son watching the images from the World Trade Centre. Suddenly we saw people hanging from the windows at the top of the stricken tower. “Mum,” he said, “where’s Spiderman? He could save them.” Later, as I tucked him up in bed, he asked sleepily, “Is Spiderman not real, mum?” [link]

8.30am: Tom awakens on the sofa in the sitting room. He has spent the night there and feels stiff, cold and creaky.

Pete, The Cat That Looks Like Hitler.

Check your level of mental health.

The terrifying lunacy of America’s fringe manifests itself: Falwell blames gays, liberal groups for terrorist attacks [Metafilter]. This is why it is not simply enough to mourn – people must investigate the background of these events before they can make sense of them. Otherwise the extremists in the west will make this battle their own. [song of the moment?“>Song of the moment?]

Don’t inflate the size of the enemy to fit the crime: “Searching for parallels to help them understand what has happened and what they should do next, Americans cite Pearl Harbour. A better reference would be the Cuban missile crisis. Then, as now, the United States had a new and untried president, John F Kennedy, and faced a danger that the wrong moves could turn a bad situation into a worse one.”.