Mapping the dark side of the web for fun and profit. Financial Times

This, from the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, shows a variant of the Green Flash. Usually it is not the sun’s disc that turns green but, for an instant, the horizon at the point where the sun has just sunken. I saw a green flash for the first time this summer (been looking for years) during a sunset out over the Pacific.

‘Singing’ Queen Elizabeth at Center of Fishy Tale. ‘Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has been entertaining guests at her Balmoral estate

in Scotland with renditions of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” in a duet with a rubber singing fish, Britain’s

Sun tabloid said on Thursday.’ Excite via Looka!

Update on voteswapping, as I wrote about below. The Voteswap site exists. 2344 votes have been traded as of my visit to the site. “Our Goal: To maximize the percentage of the popular vote that Nader receives, yet allow Gore to win

the national election.”

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC

Much of the intellectual criticism of Bush during this campaign attempts to persuade readers that they should not vote for him because he is an intellectual lightweight. I’m afraid that misses the point. His appeal to a segment of the American public is precisely that he is not smart. Chuck Taggart at Looka! quotes from an essay on AlterNet by David Corn:

At one Bush rally, a senior-citizen W. enthusiast — no

names, please, she said — told me that it was obvious that Bush could

not match Gore in terms of gray matter. But that did not faze her.

“Smart people don’t have all the answers,” she said. “And if you’re not

so smart, maybe you won’t tell the rest of us what to do.” Perhaps

after the past seven years, many Americans actually are eager to have

a president they do not have to take seriously.

I think it’s more basic than that, and it certainly can’t be blamed on the Clinton legacy. This campaign has made it clear to me that a large segment of the American public are afraid of thought and complexity per se. As has been said, they’ll get the President they deserve.

U.S. Plan Would Sacrifice Baby Eagles to Hopi Ritual. “The Department of the

Interior has decided

that Hopi Indians should be

allowed to use golden eagle

hatchlings collected at a

national monument in

Arizona in an annual, ancient

rite in which the birds are

smothered…But critics say the legal reasoning used by the agency to

justify its position, detailed in a rule the agency plans to

propose next month, is so broad that it could open the way

to much wider hunting and trapping by Indians in parks from

Alaska to Florida.” New York Times

Beautiful people ‘ruin’ lives. BBC