Bits: Wildflower Decapitation Edition

Awesome.

-A video from a random episode of the old Batman series has been making the rounds of the YouTubes because it appears to offer commentary on the 2008 election... 40 years in advance. There are several parallels that can be seen in this clip alone, which features Batman and the Penguin engaging in a debate prior to an election for Mayor of Gotham City. Of course, this campaign has become such a caricature of itself that it's no wonder it reminds people of a campy 60s TV series.



-Unsettlingly, anecdotal evidence increasingly suggests that early voting sites across the country are being targeted by angry protestors, specifically anti-Obama protestors. This article describes an incident in North Carolina, and features video. So... you're protesting voting? Why not protest Obama by going into the early voting place and voting against him? And I especially like the comment that "Sundays are for church, not for voting"... by the person who's spending her Sunday protesting instead of in church.



-All over the news today... the discovery on the Arizona/Utah border (within Vermillion Cliffs National Monument) of what is being termed a "Dinosaur Dance Floor." How did it get this name? To quote Newswise.com:

“Get out there and try stepping in their footsteps, and you feel like you are
playing the game ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ that teenagers dance on,” says
Marjorie Chan, professor and chair of geology and geophysics at the University
of Utah. “This kind of reminded me of that – a dinosaur dance floor – because
there are so many tracks and a variety of different tracks.”

The find apparently includes thousands of dinosaur tracks in a very small area, in some places a dozen per square yard. There are least four different species represented. The scientists are theorizing that the tracks were formed at an oasis in what that time was a huge area of sand dunes, larger than today's Sahara. I have to throw in one more quote here:

Seiler envisions the dinosaurs were “happy to be at this place, having wandered
up and down many a sand dune, exhausted from the heat and the blowing sand,
relieved and happy to come to a place where there was water.”

Ah, yes, poetical scientists.



-Rather interesting news from Switzerland today, a nation always on the cutting edge when it comes to government. A new law bans the humiliation of plants. Recently, the Swiss Parliament asked a special committee of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists, and theologians to determine the meaning of dignity as it pertains to plants. They have issued their report, which says that it is morally wrong to participate in "the decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason", and it appears that parliament is acting on those guidelines. However, one wonders what the actual extent and/or enforceability of such a law would be. More here.



-Free TV On the Internet: Check out this past week's new Family Guy episode, "The Road to Germany". It's already infamous because it has Nazis wearing McCain/Palin buttons, which seems like an unlikely thing to have fixated upon in an episode that revolves around a port-a-potty time machine (which I suppose makes as much sense as a phone box) and a baby dressing up as Hitler.