not all bad

In a comment at FuturePundit, Steven Horrobin chides me for supposing — though all I said was that I hadn’t yet seen a counterexample — that all bioethicists are anti-life.

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a metaphoric diode?

In Ranma ½, Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki, Abstract Gender and Misfile, a boy finds himself magically transformed into a girl. In both The Wotch and El Goonish Shive, the cast includes a boy who sometimes becomes a girl for a lark. A number of webcomics including Venus Envy are about boys who yearn to become girls.

Are there no cartoons about girls becoming boys?

(See also.)

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not enough lampposts

Bastards.

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ever wonder what a Toon funeral is like?

scene cut from Who Framed Roger Rabbit

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another batch of miscellany

I was awakened this morning by geese. What do they talk about as they fly?

Flickr gallery capturing people’s reactions on seeing goatse for the first time. (Cited in a comment on Malfunction Junction.)

A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. I especially enjoyed the footnotes. (Cited by devnull.)

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a perfect caper

Today I watched Inside Man, my first Spike Lee joint since She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and, even more surprisingly, my first Denzel Washington ever. It’s swell. My housemate said after the opening shot, “Clive Owen is so great I’ll even watch him doing an American accent.”

I also watched an hour of Vermilion Pleasure Night, a Japanese cult tv show. Um. Imagine the most annoying of SNL’s recurring bits all strung together . . . .

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security theater kills

Fake identifying documents save lives in Iraq:

At any time, the relevant authorities in Iraq could have decreed that all people get (as near as possible) forgery-proof biometric ID cards and carry them at all times – a great way to batten down a country, right?

Doing so would have fed directly into the strategy being used by the enemies of peace and security in Iraq today: setting up fake checkpoints and killing people who arrive there members of the wrong sect. Identity cards had a role in the Rwandan genocide just over 10 years ago, as well.

(Cited by Bruce Schneier.)

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