I want these!

Joan Jett, Debbie Harry and Cyndi Lauper in Barbie form.

Those would have been such an awesome addition to my all-blonde Barbie collection.

Everyone look at the xkcd website today

Even if you normally read it through a feed reader, make sure to click through to the main page today.

It's beautiful!

More later

I have multiple posts festering in my brain and in my drafts folder, but I'm too cranky today. I spent the whole day feeling disproportionately pissed off at non-immediate assholes and my make-up feels heavy.

So here's a kitten who thinks her food is yummy:

For Python fans

Live Monty Python Q&A at 9:00 pm! Click here!

Wherein I nag you for the last time to sponsor Eddie Izzard

September 15 (which is just starting right about now in the UK) is the last day of Eddie's run. He's going to end up in Trafalgar Square, where he left way back on July 27.

Donations are still being matched, Eddie's still injured, Eddie's still going for a personal best tomorrow, the kitten still has a home. In just a few hours this complete act of lunacy will be a fait accompli.

Eddie has over a million Twitter followers. If he doesn't manage to raise 100,000 pounds with this incredibly excessive act of human endurance, that will be a blemish on the honour of humanity. Now is the time to stop procrastinating and donate.

You can follow the adventure on Twitter, the blog, the Eddie Izzard forum, and this running forum.

Godspeed Eddie!

Donate here.

Update: HE DID IT! 43 marathons in 51 days, personal best on the last one, and totally upstaged the plinth lady on the way in (here at 31:15). Congrats Eddie!!! Hope you can sleep well soon.

In case you're thinking "Crap, I meant to donate but I missed it!", as of right this minute they still seem to be accepting and matching donations here.

Y.E.T.A.N.O.T.H.E.R. reason to sponsor Eddie Izzard

To recap: Eddie Izzard (who is hilarious and generally above and beyond) is engaged in a ridiculously epic feat of human endurance to raise money for charity. And rescuing lost kittens along the way.

In case you needed just one more reason to donate, there's now an anonymous donor matching the next £43,000 of donations. If you've been putting it off, now's the time.

You can donate here and follow Eddie's adventure here and here.

Update: Plus, Eddie now has a rather serious-sounding ligament injury.

In case you needed just one more reason to sponsor Eddie Izzard's run

In case the fact that Eddie Izzard is running a marathon a day for a month (while injured and insufficiently trained) to raise money for charity isn't enough to move you to donate, it seems he's also rescuing lost kittens as he goes along.

You can donate here.

Awww of the day

This makes me grin like an idiot.

Eddie Izzard once again raises the bar for both awesomeness and lunacy

In January, Eddie Izzard raised the bar for human awesomeness everywhere.

Now he's just outdone himself. He is running over 1,000 miles around the entire UK to raise money for a charity called Sport Relief. That's a marathon a day for over a month.

The man is well into his 40s, has been in training for only four weeks, and apparently already has a hamstring injury going in.

He's a looney.

I must send money.

This is particularly interesting as a fundraising strategy because it's so excessive. If Eddie hadn't done anything at all for this charity, no one would have noticed. If he had donated some money or done a benefit gig or autographed some spare merch and donated it to be auctioned off, people would applaud his generosity. If he had run a single marathon and tweeted a sponsorship link, he would have gotten a huge wave of donations (he has half a million twitter followers and a marathon is inherently impressive) and that would have been considered above and beyond in and of itself. But instead he's Terry Foxing it (plus one leg, minus cancer, plus 25 years of age, minus years of athletic training = you do the math) with insufficient preparation. This is ridiculous. He's going to be miserable. He probably already is miserable. He might do permanent damage.

And this is why I feel moved to donate.

Not because I want Eddie to suffer, but because I like Eddie and I don't want his suffering to be in vain. I'm not so very into athletic charities, and I never feel particularly inspired to donate when people (even people I know personally) are running marathons or climbing the CN Tower. That's suffering too, and I don't want those people to suffer either, but it's a reasonable amount for self-inflicted suffering - a few hours and then you can go home and go to sleep and never run again in your life if you don't want to. But Eddie runs a marathon, then has do it again the next day, and again the next day, for an interminable month.

So he's getting a donation out of me (and I'll probably donate more out of sympathy if he ends up having to quit early), but I'm also going to have to reflect carefully on my donation standards. I don't want to make a world where you have to do something this crazy and painful to move people to raise money.

Which, now that I think about it, might be the intention behind this lunacy in the first place.

You can stalk follow Eddie's progress here and here, and donate here.

One of these things is not like the others

I don't know the story here, I just found the pic on that list of random articles on the log-in screen of Google Reader, and I thought it was funny.

The other problem with all this anti-labour sentiment

It's draining me. I'm just getting so tired of hearing from all these loud people wanting to sentence others to poverty, hearing between the lines that they want to sentence me to bugs crawling out of my walls, that I'm starting to avoid news. Especially since so many other things in the news and politics also seem to be people wanting to ruin other people's lives.

Everyone should have a bug-free home, dental care whenever they need it, and to be able to grocery shop without budgeting. People's human rights should be respected. People with power should act with noblesse oblige. People should give others the benefit of the doubt, especially when it doesn't hurt them any to do so.

I don't want to be blogging about these things. They should be so obvious and inherent that they don't even bear thinking about. I should be inventing stuff, not blogging about why garbage men deserve to live above the LICO.

So here's a squirrel eating a lemon, shamelessly yoinked from the always-awesome Malene Arpe

Half of all marriages end in divorce? FALSE!

Statscan data (emphasis mine):

According to General Social Survey (GSS) data, divorced Canadians represented 7% of the total population aged 15 and over in 2006. In fact, divorce affects more people than what recent data leads us to believe: about 13% of Canadians aged 15 and over had experienced at least one divorce during their conjugal life, and nearly half of them had remarried.

More Statscan data (again, emphasis mine):

In 2006, more than one-half (51.5%) of the population aged 15 and over was unmarried, that is, never married, divorced, separated, or widowed, compared to 49.9% five years earlier.

If 51.5% of the population has never been married, that means 48.5% have been married. And, as is clearly stated in the first quoted paragraph, 13% have been divorced.

This means that 26.8% of all marriages end in divorce.

Look at the baby sheep!

BAAA!

Nostalgia!

You are SO not getting to third!

♥ BEST FRIENDS......UP TO A POINT ♥
by funnytoo

Yoinked, as usual, from Malene Arpe

This will make you melt

(yoinked from Antonia Z)

White House Photostream

I'm really enjoying the White House Photostream. I've never been huge on photography as an art, but looking at these pictures I'm really appreciating the photographer's sense of composition and eye for interesting details. Each picture is its own little story and they make life in the White House look vaguely fun.

It's also fun to guess which of the "candid" photos are and aren't staged. It's a bit unfortunate that the people in the comment thread don't seem to see the careful and deliberate spin, but that might just be how the comments are moderated.

Friday schadenfreude

I hate the existence of hair extensions. They're worse than breast implants, because the untrained eye can't tell if hair is real or extensions. I'm doin' it for real, yo, with all the imperfections that that entails, and it's irritating that people can just buy the length that I'm working to achieve, theirs looks better, and no one can tell.

So I hope you'll excuse me if I'm petty and small enough to enjoy this:



I'm also petty and small enough to enjoy the fact that a millionaire whose job description is to look good on stage (and therefore can reasonably spend most of her time working on that) still needs extensions to reach shoulder-length.

Most fascinating PostSecret ever

Yoinked and re-upped from PostSecret France because I couldn't get it to post otherwise.

Interesting study

A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calculating how much taxpayer-funded public services we receive based on income and household configuration.

While it is interesting, it's a dense study (at least to economically semi-literate people like me) so I haven't read it thoroughly yet or analyzed the methodology or looked for other research on the topic (although the study says that there isn't much out there). But in any case, it's worth at least skimming through and seeing where you fall on the various charts.

(Via the always awesome Linda Diebel)