The photo at the top is a picture of an abandoned missle silo in North Dakota(link in in Spanish) that was supposed to be part of a defense program called Safeguard. The silo was only operational for four months in 1976 before the program was cancelled and has since become a bit of a tourist attraction.

A number of news outlets ran this AP wire story the other day: clothing retailers are beginning to target fashions for short men. It’s about damn time! Now will the shoe retailers PLEASE join this movement?

A funeral home in New Hampshire is the first in the country to apply for a permit to use a process that dissolves human remains in a sealed container of lye. The technology is already used for disposing of non-intact body parts and by places that use human remains for research. Most of the tissue is completely dissolved and can simply be poured down the drain, while some bone fragments remain (not unlike cremains). Needless to say, there are those who object to the process on so-called “moral” grounds, but they’re the same people who have no problem sealing their loved one’s formaldehyde-riddle corpse in an airtight metal box and burying in a sealed concrete vault where anaerobic bacteria reduce the remains to liquid in a matter of months. That’s SO much better!

Do you remember the double-amputee who runs on those high-performance prosthetic legs and wanted to compete in the Beijing Olympics? Initially he was denied that opportunity, in part because it was felt that his prosthetics gave him an unnatural advantage. Now, the Court of Arbitration for Sport has decided that he CAN participate in any sanctioned event, which opens the door for him to try out for the South African Olympic team. The court’s decision was based on a pair of analyses performed by MIT and Rice University.

So, they’re making a movie based on the book “Julie and Julia”, written by a food blogger who cooked every single recipe in “Mastering The Art Of French Cooking” and blogged about it. The blog made a minor splash, but the book drew a lot of attention from angry (and jealous) food bloggers because Julie Powell, the blogger/author, made no bones about doing it just for the publicity. A few weeks ago, Ed Levine, the food blogger and mastermind behind the food site Serious Eats, wrote about his experience of being an extra in the film during its New York shoot. The film version will actually be sort of a two-fer, incorporating an adaptation of the very successful posthumous memoir by Julia Child and her nephew about her years in post-war Paris. Julia studied cooking at the Cordon Bleu, being one of the very first female students permitted into the program by the notoriously misogynistic chefs, and also wrote “Mastering” during those years with her two collaborators. I guess they felt that neither story had an entire movie in it. Personally, I think the blogger part will be lame and would much rather see an entire film about Julia Child than some pretentious fame-whore. The film will star Meryl Streep as Julia Child (which is worth the price of the ticket right there) and Amy Adams as Julie Powell.