This is just too funny not to share. From Superdickery.com, check out this photo of a Batman squirt gun. They way the figure is shaped into the gun, seems you give him an enema, then pump his crotch until he projectile vomits.

Hello friends! Happy New Year!

It's been an interesting one here. For those of you I haven't seen in a while: my father had heart surgery this spring (to replace a bad valve), has recovered nicely. We finally settled my grandfather's estate, selling his house; an emotional burden resolved, and a financial resolution we needed (my father having been unable to work for a while, due to the surgery and the condition that necessitiated it). I felt 50 pounds lighter the day after we settled on that house.

This year I traveled to San Francisco for the AOBTA convention; Chicago for the 20th anniversay tournment for the Seido Karate branch there; and Osaka to see my friends Robin and Eric and, well, it's Japan, enough said! I'm now scheming if I might be able to get back to Japan for a longer stay.

With all the energy going into the family stuff, my shiatsu practice has been slow to start, but it is getting moving. (That website again, www.EarthTouchShiatsu.com...tell your friend with the stiff neck or the aching back...)

My music seems to be picking up some momentum, too. For those of you local, I'll be playing the first and third Wednesdays of the next few months at Leadbetters' in Fell's Point (selected Baltimore Magazine's "Best Dive Bar" 2005) from 4-8pm. I'm also looking at finally getting off my butt and recording a CD of my originals.

Z Magazine (or at least it's on-line project "Z Net") interviews Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement. RMS discusses globalization, power, and freedom:

If you are against the globalization of business power, you should be for free software....

People who say they are against globalization are really against the globalization of business power. They are not actually against globalization as such, because there are other kinds of globalization, the globalization of cooperation and sharing knowledge, which they are not against. Free software replaces business power with cooperation and the sharing of knowledge.

Globalizing a bad thing makes it worse. Business power is bad, so globalizing it is worse. But globalizing a good thing is usually good. Cooperation and sharing of knowledge are good, and when they happen globally, they are even better.

If you don't know Futurama, your TV could use some fixin'.

Could it return? Maybe so. Here's hoping.

T. Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, sets the record straight about the phony "War on Christmas and the ACLU's role in protecting religious liberty.

How do things look for democracy? Overall 57 percent of Iraqis prefer democracy to either strongman rule or an Islamic state. That's a pretty slim majority for such an important idea. It's bad enough that 43% of the people don't prefer rule by the people, but it's even worse that the pro-democracy side makes a majority only because of strong favorable number in Kurdish and in mixed Shiite/Sunni areas. In Shiite areas and Sunni areas, only a minority (45 and 38 percent respectively) prefer democracy.

Forty Santas, many drunk, went on the rampage in Wellington, New Zealand.

Apparently there's a growing "Santarchy" movement, though most participants decry the sort vandalism that occurred in New Zealand. Wikipedia says that the first "SantaCon" was put on by The Cacophony Society - the loose inspiration for "Project Mayhem" of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club.

Remember that the 9/11 murders killed fewer than 3,000 Americans. And remember that Iraq has a population of only about 1/10 that of the U.S. In proportion, then, Bush's illegal, immoral, and stupid invasion has inflicted between 100 and 300 9/11s worth of deaths on Iraq (and about 2/3rd of a 9/11 on American troops).

The Earth's North magnetic pole is moving south at an accelerated rate, meaning that Alaska could lose the "Northern Lights" inside of fifty years.

And a 37-mile long fissure that split open in September in the Afar desert in Ethiopia could be the "birth of a new ocean basin," though that will take millions rather than tens of years.

These are reminders that our planet is on the move, that what we think of as "solid ground" is just an illusion of short timescales.

Richard Pryor has left us.

Just last Friday, I was watching Stir Crazy, the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor comedy about two New Yorkers who end up in a southwestern prison rodeo. It's one of those films that my whole family loves and quotes, such as Wilder's line about an ax murderer: "No one has ever just sat down and talked with that man", or Pryor's "That's right, we bad."