The Food and Drug Administration ruled Thursday that it is safe for humans to eat meat and milk from cloned animals.  Although the meat and milk from cows, pigs, and goats will probably not hit supermarkets until 2008, I must say I am a little weirded out.
Okay, so the likelihood of me ever eating beef [...]

James Brown died this morning at 73 after being hospitalized with pneumonia in Atlanta. He was one of the greatest bandleaders, performers, and tastemakers in modern music. As he put it: “Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I’m saying?”
The man had run-ins with the law, drug [...]

One thing you can say for Heat Miser, he wasn’t a denier. Global warming was for him both philosophy and policy. He never shied away from his designs to put an end to moderate temperatures on earth. He knew it would all end in tears. He never pretended he didn’t want to dramatically alter life [...]

Two of the great non-stories of the year: “Bush To Consider Iraq Study Group Recommendations” and “No Rap Artists Among Grammy Nominees.” The second was the jumping off point for a thousand (gleeful) stories on the death of rap, all of which included, in the second-to-last paragraph, reference to the fact that, although evil rap [...]

What the hell is going on in Chicago? Holiday shoppers beware: the latest immigrants from Poland are each “about 9 feet tall, shell-like and frozen in walking movement.” They’ve been installed just off Lake Michigan in Grant Park, which has become the mayor’s (da mayor’s) public art playground, a sort of civic-equivalent of Edward [...]

MC, art-celebrity wild child, State Department terrorist-supporter M.I.A. got her feet on the ground in Liberia this week and is blogging her visit at her MySpace page. The entries are (what else?) semi-grammatical, rapid-fire transcriptions of her lit-up gray matter and read like an artifact of contemporary global-culture mashup, a mixtape of the transnational mediated [...]

Hunter-gatherer bushmen who had been forced out of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert found their way onto the Web before winning back the right to return to their tribal lands.
Displaced to settlement camps over the last decade, allegedly so Botswana could preserve the land and its wildlife within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, many of the bushmen [...]

Davey D remembers blood diamonds and apartheid, and he wants to know: What the hell is Russell Simmons talking about?

Lie down. Relax. I’m going to slip this slim piece of metal into your skin and inject nothing. It will help you find peace.

How bout that Bill Graham— the most famous concert promoter ever and a sixties-seventies rock-culture guru— scoring one from the grave for the hacker ethic, his people seriously allowing forty years of live rock shows— some very high-end ultra-commodifiable information— to roam wild in cyberspace, free to stream onto your desktop and into your ears [...]

Pushing Off:
“I’m getting married in three days! But wait, I’m already married…”

Yesterday former House majority leader Tom “the hammer” Delay unveiled his blogsite, TomDelay.com. His first post explains:
“I have created this blog in order to provide Americans with a new meeting place where such opinions and viewpoints might be better shared, discussed and debated; a place where conservative and traditionalist Americans might speak truth to power [...]

“Yo, my marriage just got arranged.”
“Hell no.”
A little film that lives large in the mind, chock full of scrumptious quotes. Check it out here, Noeman Samdani’s Reel Works short at Uth TV.

Web Reel:
A video camera, a small town, and a six-foot hot dog rubbing itself in condiments. But why?

Today is the 26th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, the performance-artist-peace-activist Beatle honorable enough to land on the CIA snoop list in a previous era of unpopular war and illegal wiretapping.
To mark the sad anniversary, Yoko took out a full-page ad in last week’s Times mourning contemporary war and suffering and calling on [...]