Angels from Another Pin
(Eschatological aspirations)


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30 April 2003 ::   He's jammin' down the pedal like he's never comin' back  
The Internet knows everything, part 53: Someone with a lot of time and an eye for detail has amassed a narrative of everything that is done from landing to liftoff to make the Space Shuttle ready for another mission, with near-obsessive elaboration. The footnotes for the site contain a link to NASA's online Shuttle manual, which has every tiny detail you could ever want to know about the Shuttle (as of fifteen years ago). Cool.

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I liked a number of the entries on this amusing list of alternate series for the anime Tenchi Muyo. I read through it, and was checking out the credits when I noticed than my friend Jesse Chang helped write it.

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29 April 2003 ::   We're gonna do talk shows and book signings and movie deals and then be taken by the CIA and dissected  
Found art: Photos from within a vertical mill's grinding chamber.

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Make your own New Age religion automatically! A three-season deal for a Crossing Over with [Your Name] series on SciFi Channel not guaranteed.
Note: cryptoclast.org takes no responsibility for occurrences of possession, religious intolerance, amphibian meteorological events, baseless feelings of guilt, angel attack, ego and/or moral inflammation, underage crusading, eternal damnation, acts of God, or any other deleterious effect which may possibly result from the use of our services. By pressing the "Create Religion" button you are acknowledging cryptoclast.org's immunity to any and all legal prosecution related, but not limited to the New Age Religion Creation site.
Any site with a "Create Religion" button is aces in my book!

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Telling you exactly what this is would ruin the impact of it. Suffice it to say it is Tolkien-related and completely G-rated.

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Amanda Babcock


28 April 2003 ::   It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you.  
There is a firefight inside a space cruiser in this page of A Miracle of Science. No, I'm not going to explain it here. Go read it. Mark slaved over a hot drawing table to draw it.

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It sounds like a cliche from a bad science fiction novel, but Leland Melvin really is an ex-football player turned astronaut.

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Klingon coding maxims. Yes, I am such a geek. Found while I was searching for the sentence (and I am not making this up) "Alexander the Great did not exist and he had an infinite number of limbs." This is probably a sign I am an even bigger geek.

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25 April 2003 ::   Ooh! I've always wanted one of those. Just not pointed at me.  
There is no reason for me to link to a large collection of pictures of old radios, except that old radios are cool.

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Someone at the University of Chicago is preparing a catalogue of the historical items lost in the looting of Iraq. The purpose of the site is a noble one: "It is hoped that it will be of use as a reference tool in the recovery of artifacts should they appear on the antiquities market."

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24 April 2003 ::   If there were referees around, I think spiking the ball into my head with evil superhuman force would draw a flag  
New A Miracle of Science! Now with more orbital mechanics!

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In the twenty-seventh century, Earth will have a quasi-satellite called 2002 AA29. Hopefully by that time astronomers will have decided on a cooler name. And hopefully that name will be more pronounceable than "Quaoar."

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Every morning, I have a big helping of Bowl of Integers. Part of this complete number line.

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Found art! View this JGI-27324-83 O-ring, ready to flee from a cartoon cat.

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23 April 2003 ::   Our house is a very very very fine house  
Please to be enjoying the newest page of A Miracle of Science, which occurs in orbit around Mars. Which is where my brain appears to be right now.

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17 April 2003 ::   It's inevitable, so there's no way to do it wrong  
Moving house this weekend. Expect the next update to this site on Tuesday.

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UPN Wed 9 PM A Miracle of Science: A weekend off interrupted by a dangerous mystery! 60 mins. (John Cusack as Benjamin Prester, Holly Marie Combs as Caprice Quevillion)

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16 April 2003 ::   Unless of course my calculations were a hallucination  
By the end of today, I will be the proud owner of slightly over one cubic kilometer of planet Earth, to include about six and a half billion tons of molten iron, silica mantle, and floaty continental landmass as well as approximately half a million kilos of atmosphere. In other words, I'm buying a house today.

As soon as I can figure out how to extract the two and a half billion tons of iron under my land, I'll be rich! (I will also have a hole down to the Earth's core, but you can't make an omelet without breaking a few planets).

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I'm sure you are wondering how you have gone your entire life without a source of online demographics data.

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15 April 2003 ::   Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it  
I think you will find that English comes pre-packaged with verb tenses for time travelers, who can use the absolute relative tense to explain themselves.

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Masked professional wrestler Masanori Murakawa has won a seat in the local assembly for Iwate prefecture, and vows to wear his wrestling mask to assembly meetings. "I won support from voters with this face, and to take it off would be breaking promises," the new assemblyman said.

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Joe Foering


14 April 2003 ::   If you send someone to save the world, you should make sure they like it the way it is  
Server availability notice: The server which hosts Angels from Another Pin will be physically moving this week. Therefore, this Web site may be down for anywhere from 12 to 72 hours this week. As the Lectroids say, "Do not panic, you are secure." AfAF will be live until the end of this week, and will be back up and functional by the end of next weekend.

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The graphics are amazing at this pictoral comparison of the sizes of various science-fiction ships. The comparison of Earth's Moon to the Death Star is particularly revealing...

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Spacecraft suffer a rash of mysterious failures in the next A Miracle of Science.

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This outline of phylogeny among flowering plants is pretty darned cool.

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Amanda Babcock


12 April 2003 ::   The Internet is better than TV: you can brainwash it back  
Angels from Another Pin now enters its third year. We began broadcasting into the ether (or screaming at the padded walls of the asylum, depending on how you view the Internet) on 12 April 2001.

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Rob Thom's 'Urgent' Jessica's cousin Rob Thom is the subject of a short profile in the Los Angeles Times which reads, in part:
Thom's three airbrushed images manage to be their own thing while resembling the addled offspring of Lisa Yuskavage's buxom women, Laura Owens' girly menageries and Richard Phillips' overblown centerfolds.

Photo-realism haunts all of Thom's cockeyed pictures, whose extreme shifts in scale create uncanny effects. In "God, I've Gotta Talk to You," miniature owls, wolves and antelope emerge from the portrait's nooks and crannies, suggesting a drug-induced hallucination.

The show [by Thom and cohorts Steve Canaday and Nick Lowe] hangs together loosely. The strongest link among its diverse works is the capacity to make sweet sentimentality curdle without turning bitter.

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Jessica Gothie
Cool. Have some free sprites to be used in developing video games and other such things. They are free to use for freeware games until January 2013, at which time they pass into the public domain persuming public domain hasn't been dismantled by the RIAA, MPAA, and Congress by that point.

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11 April 2003 ::   I wasn't about to argue with a guy wearing a Dubya mask and firing his own M-16 --Joe Foering  
You wouldn't expect an alternate history of Van Halen to be interesting, but it is.

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At The World of Cheese there are many weird and odd things, including goofiness aimed at Penn State's endemic loon Gary the Willard Preacher, Don Knotts worship, an entire army of Steves, and more! Go read it now. (Not recommended for people with a weak grip on reality.)

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Fred Coppersmith


10 April 2003 ::   Never put the words "diabolical master plan" on a resume  
Chess, romance, and 1953: a new page of A Miracle of Science.

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It is not likely to be sartorial advice you will be able to use in your daily life, but it may one day be important for you to know what to wear to a unicorn hunt. You never know.

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9 April 2003 ::   Two full pints of hot blazing aerosolized doom every time I twitch my little finger  
The Penn State Monty Python Society ran the Muppets' Swedish Chef for president of University Student Government. He didn't win, of course, due to rampant fraud, vote-rigging, and a partisan Supreme Court.

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Fred Coppersmith
Read a little about the propaganda and such surrounding cosmonaut and hero Yuri Gagarin. It's not his birthday or anything; I just like him. While you're at the site, enjoy the bombast of the fallen Soviet Union's national anthem.

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8 April 2003 ::   Looks like it's tenth and Baghdad. Will the Ba'athists let the Coalition run out the clock, or force them to punt? --Mitch Hagmaier  
A quick picture to restore your faith in humanity: An exoskeleton designed to help handicapped persons walk.

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You'd think that Army officials would have better things to do than badger the mother of a hip-hop musician, what with running a war and all...
Performing at protest rallies is nothing new for the politically minded hip-hop/soul band Spearhead. What made their March 15th anti-war concert in San Francisco different is that bombs started falling on Baghdad a few days later.

But first, on March 16th, across the country in Boston, the mother of the group's human beatbox Radioactive received a visit from two plainclothes Army officers.

"She'd spoken in an interview about her daughter who has been deployed in the Gulf, and her son who is in this band Spearhead," says Spearhead frontman Michael Franti. "They showed her a picture of her son wearing a t-shirt that said 'Unf--k the world' on the front, and 'Dethrone the Bushes' on the back. They told her that was an un-American statement. She said, 'That's free speech,' and they said, 'Well, things are changing these days.'"

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The political comic strip Get Your War On is way to the left of me, but this strip was right on target. (Warning: Contains profanity.)

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7 April 2003 ::   Housing insulation is just nature's way of saying cotton candy has gone bad. You think the nice fluffy yellow stuff is lemon flavored, but it's really insulation flavored. --Matt Smith  
The RAF is preparing to drop laser-guided, smart-bomb, weaponized concrete. You read that right - 1000 pound slabs of concrete, dropped from top-of-the-line fighters. Call it the catapult, third millennium edition.

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Welcome to the Future: The fictional birthdate of animated Japanese hero Astro Boy is today, April 7, 2003.

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You dare to defeat me, I who have played ping-pong at countless tacky resorts around the universe?! (New A Miracle of Science.)

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The idiot attorney general of Pennsylvania, Mike Fisher, is blocking requests for information about the Commonwealth's new online child pornography law, claiming that distributing lists of Web sites banned for outlawed images would violate the new child pornography law. Great. A law which is logically impossible to engage in civilian oversight. I'm sure I'm not the only person who sees that Fisher's stonewalling will set a very bad precedent if it is allowed to stand.

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Amanda Babcock


5 April 2003 ::   I think choosing the flying kung-fu monkey put me over the top --Mark Sachs  
Will Tom DeLay please pick up the white courtesy brain: "'Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,' the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, blithely told CongressDaily."

Why is this buffoon in a position of authority in any country on Earth, again? It's obviously not a reputation for an active life of the mind. I suspect he must have pictures of every single voter in Texas in compromising positions with sheep.

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Funding has been approved for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The probe could reach Pluto as soon as the summer of 2015, at which point I will still be a youthful forty-six years old.

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Betty Ragan


4 April 2003 ::   He's taken the admirable position of defending the terminally uncool to the insufferably hip  
The more I know about the behavior of the rich, the more disgusted I become. Observe, ye who still receive W2 forms, the 501(c)15 tax dodge.

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I don't agree with the method, as it is unnecessarily disruptive without spreading an actual message, but it is brilliant - and it spread like wildfire.
I also talked to a lot of people and found how disturbingly easy it was to convey the idea and its purpose.

This probably has a lot to do with the purpose being contained in the idea. The system is out of order. We're just identifying the problem. Written or printed, tacked or glued, almost everybody could imagine himself or herself doing it.

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From a British political site comes this page for teenagers. Too-hip-for-the-room irony or utter gormlessness? You decide!
We know that you're too busy fighting off your biological urges and being l33t hax0rs to Get Involved, but politics is cool, m'kay?

Nobody ever seems to do anything for The Kids! All the decisions are made by suits, man. That's so lame!!! We know you think of yourselves as responsible citizens, but what you wanna do is turn that thought into an action, dudes.

Get involved - to the extreme!

The BBC politics for kids/teens site is, like, totally wacked! Ditto for the Parliament education site, which even has a section for younger yoof. Fanta-stick!

YoungGov is totally the business for having your say, and there are even wicked Youth Parliament sites for the UK, Scotland, and Europe.

(Hey, chill with the anti-Europe vibes already! You totally won't be able to wear the word 'fcuk' on your shirt anymore if we break our connection with France, y'dig? ROFFLE!)

So, cut it with the bling bling and do something for the community, man. Join in and take action with any of the groovy sites we've listed, or just drop Tom a line for a quiet rap by the electronic e-mail. Tom's well-up on the Interwebnet, and he won't harsh your buzz or dis you down the line.

Click the "drop Tom a line" link. I dare you.

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3 April 2003 ::   See how the Ceramic Mushroom Family has gathered to show their children what happens to bad little mushrooms  
Behold! I bring to you a new page of A Miracle of Science!

I'm really proud of the dialogue between Chaucer and Dr. Haas, which probably is a sign of an overinflated ego or something.

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Make your own cool little road signs with the Java signmaker.

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Good grief, it's a wonder our civilization survived the Seventies. Gaze in horror upon the misguided, mackerel-ridden mess that is the collection of Weight Watchers cards from 1974.
Slender Quenchers
These are the saddest diet beverages ever.

The one on the right is skim milk and orange pulp. The one on the left is made with water, sherry extract, and two beef bouillon cubes.

No, really.

Well, there's also celery in it. Oh, and SELF-LOATHING.

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Mosh with the Savior in Dance Dance Resurrection!

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Jessica Gothie


2 April 2003 ::   I was distracted by the military chickens inside my head --Gloria Webber  
New and stronger state-level versions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are outlawing everything from NAT to proxy servers to remailers. Is there something in the water in state capitals that causes brain damage? Or did I just miss a series of bribes campaign contributions from a series of evil megacorps?

I feel like I'm living in a bad cyberpunk novel. By which I mean, any cyberpunk novel.

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Amanda Babcock
While it was a really, really bad movie, Deep Impact contained some reasonably good science.

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1 April 2003 ::   The /index.shtml on this venerable server has been denied [to] one such as yourself whose Chi is so far out of alignment  
Always a loyal ally, Japan is sending Godzilla to Iraq to search for nuclear material. It's poetic, really, sending an imaginary weapon of mass destruction to search for likely-imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

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(The Side of the Angels)

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