'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
Penguins!
By Baron Dave Romm
Shockwave Radio Theater
Podcast now up and running!
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All podcasts also on the Shockwave Radio audio
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Sorry, it's been a while since I've updated the files;
been busy with these pictures.
I went to Antarctica last month, and returned with a lot of pictures. Herein are some (some!) of the pictures of penguins taken at Aitcho Island, Bailey Head and Neko Island. I'm slowly but surely adding all the pictures taken by me and/or my mother at Porpoising To Antarctica, a Shutterfly site, which is not nearly complete. Far more pictures will be uploaded later, as I organize and rename the files. The pictures on Shutterfly are uncropped, unedited and uncompressed. The thumbnails are fairly small, but my pictures average about 850K and my mothers' about twice that. Hope you have a fast connection.
All pictures here taken by Baron Dave except the first one and the last sequence which were taken by my mother Ethel.
Read the Daily Expedition Report on Aitcho Island.
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| Baron Dave, taking pictures on Neko Island | Chinstrap Penguins, Aitcho Island |
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| Gentoo Penguin, Aitcho Island | Gentoo Penguin, Aitcho Island |
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| Gentoo Penguin, Aitcho Island | Gentoo Penguin nests, Aitcho Island |
Read the Daily Expedition Report on Deception Island (Bailey Head is the outside of the volcanic caldera where we went first).
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| Chinstrap Penguin, Bailey Head | Chinstrap Penguin, Bailey Head |
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| Chinstrap Penguin, Bailey Head | The March of the Penguins, Bailey
Head (fortunately, they only had to walk a few hundred yards, not 70 miles.) |
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Read the Daily Expedition Report on Neko Island.
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| Gentoo heading to feed, Neko Island |
Gentoo heading to feed, Neko Island |
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| Gentoo heading to feed, Neko Island |
Gentoo heading to feed, Neko Island |
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| Gentoo swimming, Neko Island |
Rookery at rest, Neko Island |
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| Encounter with egg-stealing
Skua, Neko Island |
Encounter with egg-stealing
Skua, Neko Island |
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Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia with a radio show, a Live Journal demi-blog, a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E , and you can hear the last two Shockwave broadcasts in Real Audio (scroll down to Shockwave). Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
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Tonight
Erin Hart Show
Please join
Erin Hart
9pm to 1am PST tonight on 710 KIRO .
The year in review from law to justice to war and peace, entertainment
to culture, religion to secular, political and business, local and far.
Media in it's mass, is it too much to absorb? And a recruiter and a war
protestor sit next to one another in MN. Are they able to co-exist in peace
during war?
Audio streams live - 710KIRO.com.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Michael Jensen: It's Laurel Hester's Wonderful Life (biggaypicture.com)
I had the great privilege ... to speak with Laurel Hester, the woman whose terminal cancer has embroiled her in a domestic partnership benefits controversy with the local government in Ocean County, New Jersey. Apart from a brief interview several weeks ago with the NEW YORK TIMES, this is only the second time Laurel has spoken to any media, and the first time at length, about her life and the situation in Ocean County.
Ryan James Kim: Keeping LGBT youth alive (advocate.com)
The Trevor Project runs the only national 365-days-a-year hotline for LGBT youth-or any adolescent-who's considering suicide. Logging 1,000 calls a month at 866-4-U-TREVOR, the help line is a vital resource at the holidays and all year long.
Christopher Stone: John Waters: The Sultan of Sleaze Finds Mainstream Success (afterelton.com)
In all phases of his forty-year career, John Waters has championed the underdog. Little wonder. Gay, obsessive and rebellious, John Waters always believed himself to be among their number. Or, as he told a press conference before Hairspray 's Broadway bow, "The real reason I'm praying that Hairspray succeeds is that if it's a big hit, there will be high school productions, and finally the fat girl and the drag queen will get the starring parts."
ASLAN BROOKE: Marlene Dietrich: Grand Illusionist (frontierspublishing.com)
Dietrich also had quite a tongue on her. At one point during the Hollywood years she said of actress and devout Catholic Loretta Young, who wrapped herself in a facade of sweetness and piety, that "every time she 'sins,' she builds a church. That's why there are so many Catholic churches in Hollywood."
Sarah Warn: The 2005 AfterEllen.com Lesbian and Bisexual Visibility Awards (afterellen.com)
In our second annual AfterEllen.com Visibility Awards, we recognize those that have most positively or negatively influenced lesbian and bisexual visibility in American entertainment during the year. So here's our pick of 2005's best and worst celebrities, TV shows, movies, musicians, and more.
ROGER EBERT: My Fair Lady (1964; A Great Movie)
"My Fair Lady" is the best and most unlikely of musicals, during which I cannot decide if I am happier when the characters are talking or when they are singing. The songs are literate and beloved; some romantic, some comic, some nonsense, some surprisingly philosophical, every single one wonderful. The dialogue by Alan Jay Lerner wisely retains a great deal of "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw, himself inspired by Ovid's Metamorphosis. ... It is unnecessary to summarize the plot or list the songs; if you are not familiar with both, you are culturally illiterate, although in six months I could pass you off as a critic at Cannes, or even a clerk in a good video store, which requires better taste.
From the Founder: An Interview With Maulana Karenga (beliefnet.com)
Is Kwanzaa a replacement for Christmas? Why is it in December anyway? Beliefnet talks to the founder of the holiday, Dr. Maulana Karenga, about its origins, its aim, and its future.
Fundamental Questions About Kwanzaa: An Interview
5. Can people who are not of African descent participate in Kwanzaa activities?
Q: Kwanzaa is clearly an African holiday created for African peoples. But other people can and do celebrate it, just like other people participate in Cinco de Mayo besides Mexicans; Chinese New Year besides Chinese; Native American pow wows besides Native Americans.
Jenny Kinscy: Principles for Sale: The Commercialization of Kwanzaa (beliefnet.com)
Has Kwanzaa succumbed to commercialism? Major corporations and advertisers have already cashed in on Christmas and Hanukkah. Now that Kwanzaa's going mainstream, will it survive without losing its meaning?
Kwanzaa (beliefnet.com)
THE OFFICIAL KWANZAA WEB SITE
Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network
Suicide Prevention Hotline
Hubert's Poetry Corner
Listless American Zombie Youth
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Dreary rainy day.
No new flags.
Hurricane Troubadour
Arlo Guthrie
Legendary folk singer Arlo Guthrie is becoming the troubadour of Hurricane Katrina.
First, Guthrie rode into New Orleans on Amtrak's City of New Orleans train two weeks ago to raise money and round up instruments for musicians who lost everything to the devastating storm.
Then he returned for New Year's Eve to entertain revelers in Jackson Square as they said goodbye to a painful 2005 and welcomed in a new year.
"I always had a kinship of spirit, you might say, for the music that came out of here," the 58-year-old singer said Saturday night.
Arlo Guthrie
Most Memorable Phrase of 2005
Heckuva Phrase
Call it the wrong phrase at the wrong time but "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" was named on Thursday as U.S. resident George W. Bush's most memorable phrase of 2005.
Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that monitors language use, says Bush's statement in support of the then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency may be remembered for years to come.
Although the resident did not originate any new words this year, he had several notable statements, Payack said, citing the following:
-- "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," Bush said in explaining his communications strategy last May.
-- "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said in Brussels last February.
Heckuva Phrase
Ends Lifetime Programming
Dish Network
Dish Network customers stopped receiving two Lifetime Television channels Sunday after the company and Dish parent EchoStar Communications Corp. were unable to reach terms on a new contract.
Dish Network's contract to carry Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network ended Saturday.
EchoStar said Lifetime had requested an "exorbitant" 76 percent rate hike for Dish to carry the channels.
Lifetime countered on its Web site that the increase was a fraction of what EchoStar has paid for less popular channels and urged viewers to contact Dish.
Dish Network
Jazz Up New Year's Logs
Military Officers
In the first hours of every New Year, the nation's seafaring officers take up an endearing naval tradition: writing wordplay, doggerel and poetry in their log entries.
With the turning of the calendar, officers get down to business and try to find ways to pull a ship's location, ammunition, engine status and speed into a poem that flows with rhyme and wit.
The tradition of dispensing with the standard log entry goes back to at least before World War II, but its origins are unknown, said Thomas Cutler, an editor at the U.S. Naval Institute.
In a way, the custom is the midwatch officer's way of getting revenge for having to pull the least desirable of watches - while everyone else is partying.
Military Officers
Student Recants Story
Sabina Nakajima
A music student who told police a $175,000 (102,000 pounds) violin was stolen from her car has recanted her story and the rare instrument has been recovered, police said on Friday.
A music shop had loaned a violin made by 18th-century Italian craftsman Nicolo Gagliano to Sabina Nakajima, 24, while she said she was considering whether to buy it. Nakajima told police it disappeared from the trunk of her car, which was towed away after she illegally parked it.
After looking crestfallen in local television interviews on Thursday, Nakajima recanted the story, a police official who did not want to be named said, and the instrument was recovered on Friday in good condition on the steps of a Catholic church 15 miles (24 km) south of San Francisco.
Sabina Nakajima
Grips Malaysia
Bigfoot Fever
Bigfoot fever is gripping Malaysia, with local newspapers and the official news agency reporting sightings of a huge ape in southern rainforests.
In one reported sighting, an indigenous man claimed he saw a 10-feet-tall (300-cm-tall) ape standing on two legs beside a river in heavy rainforest in Johor state, the director of the state's national-parks service told Reuters on Sunday.
"He said it was hairy all over, like a gorilla," said Hashim Yusoff, director of Johor National Parks Corp.
Bigfoot Fever
Chicago's Bootcamp For Reporters Closes
City News
The journalistic descendants of novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh gathered at one of Chicago's venerable watering holes on New Year's Eve to mourn the loss of another storied institution.
City News, a just-the-facts wire service that covered Chicago's cops and courts 24 hours a day, seven days a week for more than 100 years, was about to file its last story on Saturday night.
As they waited for the bulletin to appear, more than 100 current and former City News staffers crowded into the Billy Goat Tavern, a nearby bar popular with journalists ever since it opened in 1934, one year after Prohibition ended.
Yellow crime-scene tape hung from the Billy Goat's ceiling, substituting for black crepe. Against the wall, the mourners draped a banner bearing the wire's hard-bitten motto: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."
City News
In Memory
Richard De Angelis
Actor and comedian Richard De Angelis, who played Baltimore police Col. Raymond Foerster on the HBO crime drama "The Wire," has died. He was 73.
In addition to his recurring role on "The Wire," De Angelis appeared in "Homicide: The Movie" and the John Waters films "A Dirty Shame" and "Cecil B. Demented."
De Angelis also appeared in plays, TV commercials, radio spots and print advertisements in an acting career that spanned four decades. He performed standup comedy for many years under the name Ricky Roach.
Born in Boston, De Angelis served in the Navy during the Korean conflict and worked as an accountant for 14 years. At 38, he quit smoking, became a vegetarian and enrolled in acting school. He received a master's degree in 1983 from the University of Maryland's theater arts program.
Richard De Angelis
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