Don't work late

I have been terribly busy of late, which explains my absence from blogging for the past three weeks. I'm sure this has caused much dismay for my reader(s).

There are many matters on which I could opine, but for now here is a totally fake but effectively creepy video from Singapore depicting an "elevator ghost":



I was expecting it to be a trick of light or something. Turns out it's just viral marketing. There's a video explaining how they did it (SPOILER: It's computer editing), but it's not in English (possibly Singlish--I'm not too familiar with the languages of Singapore).

To get an idea of how effective something like this can be amongst the public, check this out:

Has it been worth it?

I wonder:

Thomas Insel — director of the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher — said today that “the number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care.”

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Does anyone else think...

...that this whole Miley Cyrus topless thing is some sort of publicity stunt? I mean, she's supposedly shocked, shocked and appalled at photographs for which she posed, probably for hours, but now she's all over the headlines. I for one, was only vaguely aware of media personalities by the names Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana, but I didn't realize until this week they were the same person (or that Billy Ray Cyrus had procreated). But really, this is waaay more interesting than, say, the ongoing Iraq war, the reconsituted al-Qaeda force in Pakistan, or Russia and Georgia's brewing war in Abkhazia. Just to name a few yawners.

It's called a fact-checking department, folks

Fox News, in covering Clinton's proposal that she and Obama throw down some old-school Lincoln-Douglas debates (h/t Pandagon), ran this graphic:



Stephen Douglas...Frederick Douglass...what's the diff, really?

And civilization sinks a little further. Enjoy the ride.

The God-stick and the shame-cave

The Daily Show tackles the failings of abstinence-only sex education with far more delicacy and panache than I could hope to muster, so I'll leave it to them:



I especially like the Tennessee Republican who doubts that experts, with research experience in the field of sex education, somehow know better than parents. No parody required.