Dowbrigade

An elderly resident of a small Florida town
has succeeded in creating a butterfly preserve on a public park in the
Florida panhandle. ”The chamber of commerce thought I was a crazy old
coot when I first proposed
it,”
said
Jack
Wetherell,
83.
”But
I’m persistent.”

Nancy
Greig, director of the Cockerell Butterfly Center in Houston, one of
the nation’s largest, noted ”People
get all dewy-eyed about butterflies. They don’t think of them as insects,
and there’s that whole metamorphosis thing going for them.”

from the Boston Globe

Arnold was shocked to learn that he was required to hold
actual positions on the controversial issues of the day. Here is the
bottom line:

Brothers Matt and Mike Chapman tried to make it big in
indie rock, and failed. So the brothers turned to Flash animation and
created a Web site, www.homestarrunner.com, that is a 180-degree turn
from the world of indie rock

Its influences are not the Velvet Underground, Big Star and the Stooges
but "Peanuts" cartoons, Japanese anime and Atari video games.
But Matt, 26, and Mike, 29, have
unexpectedly found themselves embraced by the musicians they admire.
The site, started in January 2000, is visited by some 300,000 people
every week.

from
the New York Times

Is it Invaluable or Worthless? The
problem for whoever stole Da Vinci’s "Yarnwinder",one of the most famous
paintings in the
world, is that it will be nearly impossible
to sell. Everyone in the (art) world knows
it is
hot,
so
even
showing it off will probably lead to long-term incarceration.

The 500-year-old masterpiece was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle
in Scotland on Wednesday. Edinburgh-based art expert Ricky de Marco said, "I
love this painting, it is one of the reasons I believe Scotland is a civilised
country."

Their spelling needs work, though…

from
the BBC

New York-based display technology company
Magink has taken a major step towards electronic paper.

By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles
that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light
in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like
paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution,
full-color
images without ink – or, as Magink executives like to refer to the
process, with digital ink.

from
the New York Times

Anyone who has even considered the possibility of Earthly
events being influenced by the heavens will take pause this week to consider
that Mars and Earth are closer right now than they have been at any time
since the dawn of human history.

Mars is usually about 140 million miles away from Earth, but on Wednesday
its orbit brought it about 34.6 million miles away, reaching the closest
point at 5:46 a.m. EDT. The planet will not be so close to Earth again
until 2287. Don’t wait up.

from the Boston Globe

I am still rather new to this blogging business (the
Dowbrigade has yet to celebrate its centennial edition), and so I take
it as a rite of passage that today I got my first "highly offended" comment.

Actually, it warmed the cockles of my heart just to get a comment at
all. For all of the thousands of page reads I have I have accumulated
a total of four comments so far, 3 of them from an extremely suspicious
individual who seems to be writing from the library of an institutional
setting in the midwest.

Anyway, the you-should-be-ashamed
comment concerned
a story I did back in July, during the early days of the Dowbrigade.

 
It was about a Massachusetts
English teacher who was killed in a collision with a moose. A friend
of the deceased objected – not to the text, which was accurate, heartfelt
and suitably somber – but rather to the illustration, which featured
personal favorite, Bullwinkle J. Moose.

i feel compelled to respond: Aaron, please excuse me, I meant no disrespect.  As
an English teacher and an animal lover, I felt deeply the double nature
of this tragedy, and my selection of a sympathetic cartoon moose reflected,
in addition to my reluctance to use an image of a real moose which was
not the actual moose in question, was due to my desire to graphically
communicate the difficulty of the search for meaning in the superficial
absurdity
of everyday events.

It reminded me of what happened to the fiancee of one of my college
roommates.  He was a Russian major who spent most of his time writing
dark, brooding humor for the Harvard Lampoon.  She was a bright
young registered nurse who decided to take a tour of the Americas after
getting her license.  She got as far as the Mexico City Zoo, where
she got too close to the elephant, trying to feed it peanuts, perhaps,
and was seized by the beast’s massive trunk, raised above its head, and
dashed against a concrete wall some 30 feet away. She died. The
last thing I would ever do is sensationalize a horrific tragedy like
that. 

So thank you for your offended comment which will hopefully be the
first of many, and the first milestone on the inevitable road to infamy
and disrepute.  I
look forward to reaching future additional anticipated milestones like
my first multi-comment article, my first real flame war, my first cease and
desist letter, my first real supoena…..So much to look forward to.