Link to article here.

I seem to be getting a lot of traffic from folks looking for lol cats.
Oh, well. Since I’m not doing much here lately, here’re some links for you accidental tourists. Enjoy!

The picture above is from Ape Lad’s Flickr set
The real origin of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats
I can has cheezburger?
LOL Cats, Volume 1
LOL Cats, Volume 2
Macro Cats
Rate My Kitten
Kitten War 
The Infinite Cat Project
LOL Cat Bible Translation Project 

“One cat just leads to another.” ~Ernest Hemingway

Happy Birthday, Dr. Jack. Welcome back.

More paintings by Dr. Kevorkian can be seen here.
The art used above (the one on the left is the mirror image) is titled Very Still Life. A detail from this painting was used on the cover of his audio CD (reviewed here).

July 2008 Update: Kevorkian has collected enough signatures to run for congress in Michigan’s 9th district.

November 2008 Update: Link to election results

Do we own ourselves? by Miriam Allen deFord
Published in The Realist, issue 41, June 1963
Page scans available at The Realist Archive Project:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

Post title borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut.
Transcript from WNYC’s On the Media of Kurt Vonnegut’s meeting (courtesy of Dr. K.) with Eugene Debs in the afterlife available here. There is also audio (includes a lot of extraneous crap) at that link.

KURT VONNEGUT: During what has been almost a year of interviewing completely dead people while only half-dead myself, I asked St. Peter again and again to meet a particular hero of mine. He is my fellow Hoosier, the late Eugene Victor Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President back when this country still had a strong Socialist Party.

And then, guess what? Yesterday afternoon, none other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader of the first successful strike against a major American industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far end of the blue tunnel.

We hadn’t met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of 71, when I was only [LAUGHS] four years old. I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures. “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. People snicker and snort, I said. He asked what our fastest-growing industry was. The building of prisons, I said. What a shame, he said.

And then he asked me, how is the Sermon on the Mount going over these days? And then he spread his wings and he flew away.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922 – 2007

Cold Turkey By Kurt Vonnegut

The Books of Bokonon

“Kurt is up in Heaven now.”

Monkey Gone to Heaven – Pixies
“we’ll all take turns”

Welcome to the monkey house.
Good night and good luck.

Lil Suzie and Atomic Energy, an animated gem from Virgil T. Crow, explores the wonders of radiation.

Update: The Virgil T. Crow sites are nomo.  Sorry. You missed a gem.

Scenes from the Fallout Shelter Handbook (1962)
presented by the Ward-O-Matic.

The cold war classic, Duck and Cover
is available at The Internet Archive.

Update: Comic books, If an A-Bomb Falls and Power For Progress.

Interview with Ray J. Mauer, former Archer Productions, Inc. in-house writer, about Duck and Cover. Here’s something about the catchy tune. I was surprised to learn that Dave Lambert (Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross) had a hand in that.

Less amusing content follows.

Here’re a few words about the use of depleted-uranium weapons.

The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm, a heartwrenching Life Magazine essay (with photos) on problems suffered by veterans of the first
Gulf War and their families.

UPDATE: No longer available at LIFE, but we still have The Wayback Machine:  The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm

Looking for the Lord in all the wrong places?
Jesus of the week might help.
As if the miracle of transubstantiation wasn’t tasty enough,
here’s s’more Jesus.

Update: Parable of the Pie postcards are available (wholesale) here.
Holy hotcakes! No more waiting for a miracle to occur. Serve them up daily from your very own Jesus Pan.

Q: What is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don’t carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens… us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Mother Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the eons. Good health will be restored to the Earth’s ecology… to the “life form” known by many as Gaia.

It’s going to take all of us going.

Carrot from The Musem of Food Anomolies.
Oil Painting (The Birth, 1994, 30 by 40 inches) by Mark Ryden
Postcard (Tuber Family) from Ken Brown’s postcard collection.

Dog, are you bidding adieu to your tender, lickable, dangly parts? Never fear, Neuticles are here.

To paraphrase the spiel: Neuticles are the revolutionary testicular implant procedure for pets. Over 100,000 caring pet owners worldwide have selected Neuticles as a safe, practical and inexpensive cosmetic option that allows your pet to retain his natural look and self esteem.

Can’t afford canine cosmetic surgery? Take solace in the arts:
Haiku for the newly neutered.

Good-bye, testicles!
I will meet you in heaven.
Now I gnaw on shoes.

- skot

From Michael Paulus’ on-line gallery:  Skeletal Systems.

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

Charles Bukowski

Frank Zappa On Crossfire, from March of 1986.
You can also view (or download) this at The Internet Archive.