Isegoria

It’s hard not to like Shaolin Rabbit.

Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro non troppo is an extremely uneven spoof of Disney’s Fantasia, but the Bolero sequence is riveting — particularly the second half.

Study: Office desks havens for bacteria:

Your office desk harbors far more bacteria than your workplace restroom, and if you’re a woman, chances are your workspace has more germs than your male co-workers’, a new research report shows.

Women have three to four times the number of bacteria in, on and around their desks, phones, computers, keyboards, drawers and personal items as men do, the study by University of Arizona professor Charles Gerba showed. Gerba, a professor of soil, water and environmental sciences, tested more than 100 offices on the UA campus and in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oregon and Washington, D.C. The $40,000 study was commissioned by the Clorox Co.

“I thought for sure men would be germier,” Gerba said. “But women have more interactions with small children and keep food in their desks. The other problem is makeup.”
[...]
The average office desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the average office toilet seat, Gerba said.

Ben & Jerry’s has announced a new flavor: Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream. It’s vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel — the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth:

“I’m not afraid to say it. Dessert has a well-known liberal agenda,” Colbert said in a statement. “What I hope to do with this ice cream is bring some balance back to the freezer case.”

The Discomforts of Home looks at “an innovative new housing project outside Tokyo” that “aims to keep residents sharp by throwing them off balance”:

Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort: a serene atmosphere, smooth walls and floors, a logical layout. Nonsense, says Shusaku Arakawa, a Japanese artist based in New York. He and his creative partner, poet Madeline Gins, recently unveiled a small apartment complex in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka that is anything but comfortable and calming. “People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline,” he insists. “They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses and invigorates their lives.”

With that in mind, Arakawa and Gins designed a building of nine apartments known as Reversible Destiny Lofts. Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall. Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist.

Completed in October, the apartments are now selling for $763,000 each — about twice as much as a normal apartment in that neighborhood.

Al Q. has collected some beautiful Engravings from St. Nicholas Magazine, a children’s magazine created in 1873.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

In The Price Is Wrong: Why Our Roads Are So Clogged, Joseph Giglio explains that congestion pricing — charging to use roads at rush hour, when they’re busiest — is not a liberal policy but a conservative one:

This [Communist] approach is the way we’ve always allocated access to most roadways in capitalist America — access is “free,” just like for a public park. But our real cost skyrockets when we consider the time we spend crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and with no option to pay extra for a faster trip.

And even without factoring in the cost of time frittered away listening to satellite radio, highways have never really been “free,” but subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Congestion pricing is not a tax increase, but a user fee, which, conservatives agree, is a better way to divide costs. Indeed, economists across the political spectrum have long waxed enthusiastic about the superior logic of levying market-based prices for access to roadways; but until recently it remained little more than an interesting classroom concept since there was no practical way to charge motorists directly.

The advent of Electronic Toll Collection technology changed all this. Now we can charge motorists for using roadways without forcing them to stop at toll-booths, or even slow down.

Americans lack Stick-to-it-iveness:

Currently, about 10 percent of new cars in the United States have manual transmissions, and this market share has been declining for decades. By contrast, some 85 percent of cars sold in Europe are manual, and throughout much of the world what was traditionally called the “standard” transmission remains in fact the standard.

When I first heard that stat years ago, I was shocked that the US percentage was so low.

In California Split, Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, asserts that America must divide or die:

Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale.

In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert, as farmers start to nurture, rather than clear, saplings — for a reason any economist would understand:

Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them to police a country nearly twice the size of Texas.

But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as their property, and in recent years the government has recognized the benefits of that outlook by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers make money from the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. Because those sales are more lucrative over time than simply chopping down the tree for firewood, the farmers preserve them.

I suppose we should expect Elton John to sing, Goodbye, Nikki Hart:

Celebrity Anna Nicole Smith’s tenth grade photo (L) is seen in a 1985 Mexia High School year book under the name, Nikki Hart, in Mexia, Texas February 9, 2007. Educators at the high school say Smith went by the name Nikki Hart during her brief tenure there. Smith was found dead Thursday in a hotel room.

Troy Hurtubise, the eccentric Canadian inventor, first devoted his time and money to developing a Bear-Proof Suit.

Now he has gone bankrupt building a full-body suit of armor for the troops in Iraq, which he calls the Trojan.

If you watch this old footage of two dancers dancing the Charleston to Daft Punk — someone dubbed over a modern soundtrack — you’ll know exactly where modern breakdancing comes from. Wow.

If you like acrobatic tap dancing, definitely watch Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers from Stormy Weather (1943).

In case you haven’t heard — Astronaut charged with attempted murder:

A married U.S. astronaut was accused on Tuesday of trying to kidnap and kill a rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut after a bizarre 950-mile drive wearing diapers to confront the woman.

U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, who has three children, was initially arrested on attempted kidnapping charges on Monday in Orlando after assaulting Colleen Shipman, a U.S. Air Force captain she considered competition for the affections of a male astronaut, police said.
[...]
Nowak drove to Orlando airport around midnight on Sunday night, waited for Shipman’s flight from Houston to arrive and then followed Shipman to the parking garage armed with pepper spray, a steel mallet and a BB gun, police said.

She also carried black gloves, a folding knife with a 4-inch (10-cm) blade, rubber tubing and trash bags, they said.

In a search of Nowak’s car, police later found diapers that Nowak told them she wore so she wouldn’t have to stop to urinate during her drive from Houston. Astronauts wear diapers during shuttle launches and landings.

Nowak tried to get into Shipman’s car and sprayed what may have been pepper spray through the window when Shipman refused to open the door, police said.

Nowak told police she did not intend to physically harm Shipman.

In her statement, Nowak described her connection to male astronaut Bill Oefelein as “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.”

I blame space madness.