Well. I'm away this weekend, so I may publish this list a bit early this week. Either way, enjoy the distractions.

Found magazine, things discovered: find of the day. (About found: "We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles - anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes...") I need to find things, or at least take pictures of them. I love everything behind this concept.

Color infrared x-ray gallery.

TV dinners. I used to love them when I was a kid. Everything from the thing slices of knife resilient turkey breast and bizarrely textured mashed potatoes, right down to the burn-your-mouth sweet cherry cobbler. It was that whole... anticipation thing. Peeling back the foil lid from the little tray and smelling what seemed to be food. You never knew what you'd get. We only had them when my mom was away... I'm remembering loving them. I wonder what they really tasted like? I imagine my hind site perspective is a bit skewed. I'm actually salivating. Weird eh?

If you have never seen the original movie of Shaft (1971), you really must. If just for the campiness of it all and the fact that someone says, "Who's the chick with the groovy boobs." Here a "the making of" for Shaft, about blaxploitation, and some riveting lyrics from the academy award winning theme song:

Who's the black private dick / That's a sex machine to all the chicks? / SHAFT! / Ya damn right!
Who is the man that would risk his neck / For his brother man? / SHAFT! / Can you dig it?
Who's the cat that won't cop out / When there's danger all about? / SHAFT! / Right On!
They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother... / SHUT YOUR MOUTH! / I'm talkin' 'bout Shaft. / THEN WE CAN DIG IT!

We are here, the pale blue dot:

Carl Sagan's commencement address used as the text for the movie:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

And finally, some music.

Labels: friday, links, other people's stuff, wasting your time on a friday