Missing Mary Road

from left to right – Han, Vader, Chewie, Leia, Luke, and Artoo.

the super bad ass new trailer for the new tron movie is out. it looks super awesome.

check it out.

It’s been bad for folks living in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, for some time. The monsoon season has failed to deliver the goods. Crops are dying. People are starving. Wells have run dry. Naturally, the God’s are to blame. So the men folk and farmers have resorted to Plan B: All the area’s unwed, single girls are plowing the fields naked. Will the sight of these lovely ladies (I’m sure a few are hot) doing manual labor in the buff be enough to embarrass the God’s and make it rain? Hard. Only time will tell.

Said one local official: “Villagers believe their acts would get the weather gods badly embarrassed, who in turn would ensure bumper crops by sending rains.”

This naked plow tradition is not new, and has been practiced for years with coincidental results. Sometimes God’s send rain. Sometimes weathermen come to town and slap some sense into the townsfolk. But droughts are droughts and they suck. So desperate folks will try anything, no matter how crazy.

i love google’s hidden sense of humour. try googling recursion. (un-nerds may not get it).

so my namesake and i have come up with the idea that kids today don’t know much about anything anymore. so we’ve decided to try and educate them about it one step at a time. read all about it at http://abbasbytwo.wordpress.com

Extreme economic problems require extreme solutions, and Wells Fargo Bank has come up with a good one. They have decided to sue themselves. Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium that is going into foreclosure. As holder of the first, they are suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is Wells Fargo. It gets better. The company has hired a lawyer to defend itself against its own lawsuit. The defense lawyer even filed this answer to the complaint, “Defendant admits that it is the owner and holder of a mortgage encumbering the subject real property. All other allegations of the complaint are denied.” On the website The Consumer Warning Network, Angie Moreschi wrote: “We’ve apparently reached the perfect storm for complete and utter idiocy by some banks trying to foreclose on homes.

goal of the year.

and since we’re on the topic here are some stills of some of the best saves in history.

since we’ve been talking about ants so much, why don’t you zoom into this one and get real up, close and personal with it.

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum”
– Arthur C. Clarke

In recent years, we have seen a number of countries disappear, along with their flags. The Soviet Union came to an end, to be replaced by a multitude of new or revived republics, all with their own flags. Czechoslovakia split into its two component parts, while Yugoslavia splintered, as the individual nationalities all asserted their independence. All this happened very recently, but many states have vanished from the map before over the centuries. Here’s a look at some flags of those long gone – and in many cases forgotten – kingdoms and countries.

The Holy Roman Empire, which existed from 962 to 1806, was famously said by Voltaire to be neither holy, Roman nor an empire.

Keep reading. It gets better. The images are fascinating.

And while we’re on the topic I love FOTW too.

so it seems like the ants really do have a plan. check this out. along with the lord of the ants.

More than 500 employees of Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan will be subject to “smile checks” every morning. Software will evaluate the quality of their grins, and alert them if they aren’t looking happy enough.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like “You still look too serious,” or “Lift up your mouth corners,” will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.