Fey Four

Fey Four: Beatles outed as gay icons Robert Booth -The Sunday Times - Britain

THE Beatles have been outed. The Fab Four’s first album, Please Please Me, has been named as one of the top 50 gay albums of all time. John, Paul, George and Ringo’s 1963 LP, featuring Twist and Shout and I Saw Her Standing There, is ranked alongside records by Abba, Elton John and Boy George in a gay pop pantheon published by Attitude, a gay lifestyle magazine. “That summer it was the gay album,” said Simon Napier-Bell, the former manager of Wham! who nominated the record. “Every party, every club, everywhere you went, Please Please Me blasted out. George and Paul singing into one microphone, their cheeks touching, was the gayest thing we’d ever seen.” The Beatles rarely wrote about homosexuality, although You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away is thought to have been about Brian Epstein, their gay manager. But the magazine claims the Beatles’ first album, ranked 30th in the list, represented “a turning point — the beginning of the modern gay era”, because it embodied a sense of sexual freedom and tolerance. drawing by blogho The top 50 includes Barbra Streisand, Take That and the Pet Shop Boys, but only one album dates back further: a 1961 recording at the Carnegie Hall in New York by Judy Garland, a gay icon whose role in The Wizard of Oz gave rise to the term “a friend of Dorothy” to mean a gay man.

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Such utter horseshit.
Who knew? Not me, I think war is gay.
The girls of Hamburg should speak up.

-Ib

Letterman on Clinton/Coulter

Busted

Waco Police arrest Secret Service agent

Watch Video

Updated: Jul 26, 2006 5:22pm
Waco Police tasered and arrested a US Secret Service agent at a downtown Waco bar after a scuffle.

Police say there were reports that in the early morning hours of July 21, 30-year-old John Scott Lewis was being rude to some customers at Cricket's Bar and Grill.

Lewis is a special agent with the US Secret Service and is from Crofton, Maryland.

The report and Police say Lewis got into an argument with the manager and when the manager asked him to leave, Lewis pushed open the front door so hard it cracked.

Two off-duty Waco officers working security tried to arrest Lewis; he resisted, and was tasered one time.

Lewis was charged with Public Intoxication, Reckless Damage, and Resisting Arrest.

Tour de Fat

Booming Dunes

The Secret of the Booming Dunes

A team of researchers constructs an experimental apparatus to explore the intonation of sand dune avalanches.

by Mason Inman • Posted July 26, 2006 @ Seed Magazine

Credit: Stéphane Douady

The bone-shakingly low bass notes that bellow during sand dune avalanches have captured the attention of explorers from Marco Polo to Darwin.

Likewise, people playing in sand dunes have found that pushing sand in different ways gives various notes: Scooting on your rump down a dune, pushing the sand downhill with your feet, triggers a low booming noise around 50 to 300 hertz (the low end of a piano scale). Pushing the sand around by hand or walking on so-called "squeaking beaches" yields higher-pitched squeals reminiscent of birds chirping or balloons rubbing together.

The causes of these sounds have eluded scientiests for more than a century.

McDubya's

Dr. McManus,

Thank you for your correspondence. Your suggestions for corporate sponsorship of The New Iraq^tm are brilliant. We suggest you set up shop immediately as a consultant to the Pentagon.

However, you should know that our sources indicate that the U.S. Department of Defense has already made closed-door deals with a group of leading American corporations to create a new fast-food chain, which will be granted a monopoly throughout Iraq.

The chain, to be called McDubya's, will be overseen by the military, and developed and managed by a consortium including McDonalds, Halliburton, and Archer Daniels Midland.

Primarily, this will serve as another way to get rid of the massive surplus of produce created each year by subsidized American agribusiness. This overproduction is already destroying the farming economies of Third World nations (as we dump our surpluses into their markets), and leading to the epidemic of obesity in the U.S.

But why shouldn't the Iraqi people bear some of the burden as well? It's the least they can do, in return for our liberating them!

For political reasons, McDubya's will serve only Mecca Cola and Freedom Fries. As a sop to Coalition members Spain, Poland, Australia, and of course Britain, select McDubya's outlets will also serve paella, pierogis, ostrich burgers, and bangers and mash.

(This last is conditional upon your prime minister, Mr. Blair, explaining to George Bush exactly what "bangers and mash" are.)

Perhaps this all sounds far-fetched -- "a few fries short of a Happy Meal," as we say here in the States? We offer the photo below as irrefutable evidence (as seen on Some Grrls):

We will forward any information we obtain about how to become a McDubya's franchisee. It should be a real growth business -- we hear there are exciting plans for expanding into new markets...

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Mecca Cola challenges US rival

Mr Mathlouthi says America must change its policies

By Verity Murphy BBC News Online

Coke is no longer it. Or at least it won't be if Tawfik Mathlouthi has anything to do with it.

-Ultimately it is the consumer who will make the decision- Coca-Cola

Mr Mathlouthi is the French entrepreneur behind Mecca Cola, a new soft drink designed to cash in on anti-American sentiment around the world.

He hopes to make Mecca Cola the soft drink of choice for Muslims everywhere and thus push out that icon of American capitalism Coca-Cola.

It is all about combating "America's imperialism and Zionism by providing a substitute for American goods and increasing the blockade of countries boycotting American goods," Mr Mathlouthi told BBC News Online.

Cataclysmic Evolution

Cataclysmic evolution

• 4-D earth grids
• 4D earth poleshift
• Omega bible-code
• cataclysmic trends
• AMNESIA of EARTH CHANGES
• Earth changes crises works
• COSMIC EARTH CHANGES
• CAUSES OF EARTHQUAKES?!
• Pole-shift potentials
• Our Last EXTINCTION?
• Fingerprints of the gods
• Hawaii ecotastrofy
• ATLANTIS RISING earth?!
• EARTH CHANGES sources
• EARTH poleshift blast
• Why prophecies fail?
• saving nature!

HOME

Dodging the Gallows

Is Bush Trying To Dodge the Gallows?

By Dave Lindorff @ This Can't Be Happening!
7-28-6

Could George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and maybe Alberto Gonzales all end up sucking poison gas?

That, apparently, is a concern now being taken seriously by Attorney General Gonzales, who is quietly working with senior White House officials and friendly members of Congress to do what murderous dictators in Chile, Argentina and other bloodthirsty regimes have done as their future in office began to look uncertain: pass laws exempting them from prosecution for murder.

At issue is a growing legal threat of the president and other top administration officials facing prosecution for violations of the U.S. War Crimes statutes, which since 1996 have made violation of Geneva Conventions adopted by the U.S. violations of American law, too.

Gonzales knows the seriousness of this threat. As he warned the president, in a January, 25, 2002 "Memorandum to the President" (published in full in the appendix of Barbara Olshansky's and my new book, The Case for Impeachment), "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section [the US War Crimes law]." In another part of that same memo, Gonzales notes that the statute "prohibits the commission of a `war crime'" by any U.S. official, with a war crime being defined as "any grave breach of" the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War or of the Geneva Convention's Article 3. That article extends protection to combatants in other than official wars or formal armies. Gonzales, in that memo, also pointedly notes that the punishments for such violations, under U.S. law, in the event that mistreated captives die in custody, "include the death penalty."

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The weasel factor

Medihoney

Honey helps problem wounds that won't heal

Medihoney more effective than antibiotics -- Bonn-led study to start soon

This press release is also available in Germany.

A household remedy millennia old is being reinstated: honey helps the treatment of some wounds better than the most modern antibiotics. For several years now medical experts from the University of Bonn have been clocking up largely positive experience with what is known as medihoney. Even chronic wounds infected with multi-resistant bacteria often healed within a few weeks. In conjunction with colleagues from Düsseldorf, Homburg and Berlin they now want to test the experience gained in a large-scale study, as objective data on the curative properties of honey are thin on the ground.

The fact that honey can help wounds to heal is something that was known to the Ancient Egyptians several thousand years ago. And in the last two world wars poultices with honey were used to assist the healing process in soldiers' wounds. However, the rise of the new antibiotics replaced this household remedy. 'In hospitals today we are faced with germs which are resistant to almost all the current anti-biotics,' Dr. Arne Simon explains. 'As a result, the medical use of honey is becoming attractive again for the treatment of wounds.'

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Dave Bones' New Band

Name pending...

Come Together

Frank Zappa For President

Burroughs on Paranoia

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on."

--William S. Burroughs, of course. Or was it "A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on."? Or: "Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts."?

I was thinking of a good Wm. Burroughs quote for our sidebar and remembered this one about paranoia, but when I looked it up, I found several versions. Most references via google turn up numbers 2 and 3. Perhaps it was an ongoing idea he encapsulated in several incarnations, or is it one quote twice bastardized? Number three seems most like a retelling, shortened for sweetness. But number one reminds me most of the first time I saw it in a used bookstore in mid-nineties Seattle on a postcard. Does anybody know the real background on it?

Or maybe you would recommend another quote from Burroughs which would grace our sidebar: I browsed this Wikiquote entry the most--I think many are apt.

posted by Dr. Menlo @ american samizdat

Anguish Among Artists

When Anguish Among Artists Became Both Respected and Expected

By ALAN RIDING @ NYTimes

LONDON, July 26 — When exactly did artists decide that they were different from ordinary mortals, that in all likelihood they were superior to the rest of us? Or, viewed differently, when were they granted such a privileged status? When did Western societies start venerating them as sensitive, misunderstood geniuses?

For a long time, it seems, being a great artist — a “skilled manual worker,” as Samuel Johnson put it — was enough. For Bach and Mozart, for Rembrandt and Titian, even for Shakespeare, their art was their job. Their output was valued, but in a social order dominated by church, royal court and wealthy patrons, their standing was not high.

Then came the Romantic movement, and with it, artists turned from pleasing the world to indulging themselves: they rebelled against conventions, proclaimed their uniqueness, disdained the bourgeoisie as philistine, savored their own melancholy and formed cliques. Many also chose a bohemian lifestyle to exhibit their otherness.

How this change came about is explored in “Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the 19th Century,” an entertaining exhibition at the National Gallery in London through Aug. 28. It addresses only painters (as well as Rodin), but the shadow of Byron, Goethe, Baudelaire and other writers is never far away. And, perhaps most intriguingly, it shows how the Romantic artist still influences the image of the artist today. “In our oh-so-civilized society, it is necessary for me to lead the life of a savage,” Gustave Courbet, the 19th-century French painter, noted theatrically. “To do that, I have just set out on the great, independent, vagabond life of the bohemian.”

Zap Your Wounds

To heal a wound, turn up the voltage

• 26 July 2006
• From New Scientist Print Edition.
• Andy Coghlan

It may sound like something out of Frankenstein, but electric currents applied to the skin could potentially speed up wound healing. Ironically, though the phenomenon was reported 150 years ago by the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond, it has been ignored ever since.

Now Josef Penninger of the Austrian Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna and Min Zhao of the University of Aberdeen, UK, have demonstrated that natural electric fields and currents in tissue play a vital role in orchestrating the wound-healing process by attracting repair cells to damaged areas.

The researchers have also identified the genes that control the process. "We were originally sceptical, but then we realised it was a real effect and looked for the genes responsible," Penninger says. "It's not homeopathy, it's biophysics."

Audio: Listen to Colin McCaig, also from the University of Aberdeen, discuss electricity and wound healing with New Scientist's Caroline Williams (mp3 file). Listen to all the New Scientist podcasts here.

Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. Penninger and his colleagues realised that it is the resulting altered fields that attract and guide repair cells to the damaged area.

Gore Vidal: Bush is a thug

Gore Vidal

By David Barsamian

August 2006 Issue of The Progressive

His aristocratic pedigree is evident not just in his artistic sophistication but also in his locution. In a war of words, few can contend with Vidal.

“I’m a lover of the old republic and I deeply resent the empire our Presidents put in its place,” he declares.

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He sees a certain continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last fifty years. “The management, then and now, truly believes the United States is the master of the Earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown,” he says. “We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

I talked with him on a hot afternoon in mid-April.

Q: In 2002, long before Bush’s current travails, you wrote, “Mark my words, he will leave office the most unpopular President in history.” How did you know that then?

Gore Vidal: I know these people. I don’t say that as though I know them personally. I know the types. I was brought up in Washington. When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.

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"The people don’t matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They’ve got the troops. They’ve got the army. They’ve got Congress. They’ve got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Let the chattering classes chatter. Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him."

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Dump Condi

Dump Condi: Bush allies in revolt over Mideast policy

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, left, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas gesture during a joint press conference after their meeting at the Palestinian President headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah on July 25. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito) Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda. The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict. "The president has yet to understand that people make policy and not the other way around," a senior national security policy analyst said. "Unlike [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell, Condi is loyal to the president. She is just incompetent on most foreign policy issues." The criticism of Miss Rice has been intense and comes from a range of Republican loyalists, including current and former aides in the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have warned that Iran has been exploiting Miss Rice's inexperience and incompetence to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They expect a collapse of her policy over the next few months.

Rotor House

Hanse Colani Rotor House

Compact four-rooms-in-one house.
Designer Luigi Colani has created a space-saving house with a six square meter cylinder inside that contains a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. The cylinder rotates left or right bringing the room you want into view of the main living room. There's a separate toilet and a small hallway, and everything is controlled with a remote. The house was designed for young professionals who need minimal space while they focus on career...

+ hanse-haus.de

View of the cylinder from the living room.

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via: aberrant news

The War is a Lie

Watch The Freeway Blogger Reach 100,000 People For Under $1.00...

IN BRIEF | comments (32) @ Huffington Post

Al Qaeda Declares Holy War

Al Qaeda Declares Holy War Against Israel...

From news.yahoo.com

ISRAELI-LEBANESE CRISIS TICKER: Time: Rice’s Diplomatic Language Carries “A Ring That Scares The Hell Out Of America's Allies In The Region”...Ze'ev Schiff For Haaretz: “At The Conclusion Of Two Weeks Of Fighting, Israel Is Far From A Decisive Victory”…9 Israeli Soldiers Killed… Hezbollah Leader: We Will Hit Israel “Beyond Haifa”…US Blocking Immediate Cease-Fire…Heavy Casualties Mounting…Annan: Strike On UN Post “Apparently Deliberate“...Israel: Annan's Statement ”Outrageous”...

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Anybody recall the truce they offered, not long ago? No? Our second banana dismissed the idea out of hand, saying we don't negotiate with terrorists. As long as they aren't on the payroll, or fighting at our behest, I reckon.
Where are the blessed peacemakers?
-Ib

Menudo

For the edification of Blog Ho

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menudo (soup)

For the Puerto Rican boy band, see Menudo.

The soup menudo is a traditional Mexican dish; a spicy soup made with hominy and tripe. It is often thought of as a cure for a hangover, and is traditionally served on special occasions or with family.

Menudo is an ethnic dish that has its roots firmly planted in peasant food heritage. Menudo is also a byproduct of conflict. Long ago in northern Mexico, the select cuts of a town's cattle would go to battle-weary and hungry Mexican soldiers while the leftovers went to the peasants. These leftovers consisted organ meats, tails, hooves, etc. Inventive and/or desperate peasant cooks created a soup that made good use of several of these ingredients -- the stomach (tripe) and calf's foot (hoof). Classic menudo is basically a slowly cooked stew of honeycomb tripe and calf's foot later infused with several varieties of chilli peppers, spices and balanced in flavor and texture with white hominy. It is presented as a soup and served with corn tortillas and white bread. Menudo is often a special menu item on Saturdays and Sundays in Mexican restaurants. Menudo is also made in the Philippines.

See also

• Wikibooks:Cookbook:Menudo
• One man's experience: [1]

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This is not the road to wiki, Ho. -Ib

Ignoring Congress

Nation Of Laws: Ignoring Congress

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

The Bush administration's disregard for the Constitution is showing.

An American Bar Association panel issued a report Monday on the administration's practice of negating new laws with signing statements that create so many exceptions the president turns congressional intent upside down. The panel, which includes prominent conservatives, said the administration has taken the practice so far that some actions are "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers."

As the White House argues, the practice isn't new. But the administration has turned the use of signing statements into a part of its broad attempt to restore presidential powers to pre-Watergate levels or beyond. By the panel's count, the Bush signing statements challenge about 800 provisions of law, more than in all U.S. history.

It's no coincidence Bush has only one veto. Panel member Bruce Fein, who served in the Reagan administration, told The Washington Post a signing statement "is an absolute veto, because the Congress has no power to override him." As another panel member, former FBI Director William Sessions, wrote in a P-I Op-Ed July 12, "Our country's framers intended that no single person would have complete and unilateral control over government." Disobeying that principle threatens liberty.

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Ignoring Congress sounds like my love life. -Ib

Birdy Nam Nam

via: aberrant news

Gigantic Wasp Nests

Giant nests perplex experts

By Garry Mitchell
The Associated Press

A yellow jacket nest engulfs the inside of a 1955 Chevrolet on Harry Coker's Tallassee property on Thursday. Gigantic yellow jacket nests have been found in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama. -- Rob Carr

MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests.

Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.

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via: aberrant news

Second DNA Code

Scientists find a second code besides genetics in DNA

RAW STORY

Published: Monday July 24, 2006

Print This | Email This

The New York Times will report on Tuesday that researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code, RAW STORY has learned.

The primary genetic code specifies the proteins that a cell makes. This second code specifies the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped and which control access to the DNA itself.

Biologists have suspected for years that certain positions on the DNA where it bends most easily might be more favorable for nucleosomes, but not until now has it been possible to analyze the hidden pattern.

If confirmed, this discovery could help explain higher-order functions of the genes, such as how each type of cell is able to activate only the genes it needs and not those used by other types of cells.

Hoose or a Morse?

Is Bambi a hoose or a morse?

Montreal - A rare mating of a wild moose and a mare resulted in the birth of a funny-looking colt with a big head and long legs, a rancher in French-speaking Quebec province said on Monday.

But veterinarians are conducting tests to confirm his claim.

Bambi, born 11 weeks ago in the Gaspe Peninsula after a mysterious conception, has the head of a moose atop a horse frame, Francois Larocque told AFP. "It's not an ordinary colt."

He told Le Soleil newspaper: "When the mare gave birth, my sisters said: 'It has a moose head.'"

Passers-by spotted more similarities to a moose in the foal: Bambi has elongated legs and likes to hang out in a nearby forest where moose typically venture, Larocque said.

"I have serious doubts because there has never been a birth from a moose and a horse reported, even though some have mated," he said. "It's more likely that it's a deformed animal."

The rancher insists he sterilised his only two stallions a month prior to Bambi's conception and there are no other male horses in the region, only a few moose in a nearby wildlife reserve.

Zappa on Crossfire

Frank Zappa on Crossfire Part II: The government does not belong in the bedroom!

By: John Amato @ Crooks and Liars

This is a second interview Frank Zappa did on the now cancelled Cross Fire back in ‘87. He was arguing against the ridiculous censorship movement pioneered by the PMRC that was going on at that time. So many people loved the first debate I posted a long time ago.

Video-WMP Video-QT-still loading (20 minutes)

Q: It’s called truth in packaging, it’s a simple concept.

Zappa: Yea, but it’s bogus. You know it’s bogus and everybody watching this show knows it’s bogus. There is no problem here. There is no need for this organization. It’s all fake.—First of all the government does not belong in the home. The government does not belong in the bedroom.

Does it remind you of anything? Frank just rakes these people under the coals with his well thought out and very simple logic.

Filed Under: Zappa

London Fogcutter

Tiki Bar TV episode 8 - London Fogcutter

Amazon Doom

Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon

Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the 'lungs of the world' will take your breath away

Report by Geoffrey Lean in Manaus

Published: 23 July 2006

Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, nine days' journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe.

He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had been entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.

It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For, as we report on page 12 today, new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.

Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose strange black waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental activism - that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would irreversibly start to die.

The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the planet's greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world - including Europe - to become hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.

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also: this

Gut Instinct

Going With Your Gut: Strengthening Your Sixth Sense

Sarah Mahoney
c. 2006 Rodale Press Inc.
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Photo: National Academy of Sciences via The New York Time "Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason," says David G. Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Hope College.

More Top Story Headlines: Going With Your Gut: Strengthening Your Sixth Sense Gates To Put $287 Million Into AIDS Vaccine Are You Addicted To Food? Neuroscientist Saw Gender Bias Firsthand US-Funded Program Fights Malaria In Tanzania

One morning last November, Tammy Turner, 36, woke up thinking about her Pap test, scheduled for the following month. Even now, she can't explain exactly what made her call the doctor's office and move up her appointment to that week. "It wasn't that I had symptoms, just this gut feeling that something wasn't right," says Turner, who lives in Lakewood, Colo. Her test revealed stage 1 cancer, and by the time she had a portion of her cervix removed in January, it had advanced to stage 2. Turner can't account for that feeling, but she's glad she acted on it: "My cervix has healed and everything looks healthy."

The word for Turner's vague feeling is intuition, and right now it's an American obsession. Maybe it's the book "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, which advocates the "power of thinking without thinking." Or the growing acceptance of alternative medicine and its focus on listening to our bodies. Maybe it's our addiction to TV shows such as Medium and House, in which intuition trumps evidence.

We've all had hunches -- moments in which we act without quite knowing why.

"Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason," says David G. Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Hope College and author of "Intuition: Its Powers and Perils."

The Lancelot Grail

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Vulgate Cycle

The Lancelot-Grail, or Pseudo-Map Cycle, is a major source of Arthurian legend. It is a series of eight medieval French prose volumes (in the edition of Alexandre Micha) that tell the story of the quest for the Holy Grail. The work is divided into five sections. The last three were actually the first to be written; the first two apparently came later. They are:

The Estoire del Saint Grail (The History of the Holy Grail), about Joseph of Arimathea and his son Josephus bringing the Grail to Britain.

The Estoire de Merlin (also called the Vulgate or Prose Merlin), about Merlin and the early history of Arthur.

o To this section is added the Vulgate Suite du Merlin (Vulgate Merlin Continuation), adding more of Arthur's early adventures.

The Lancelot propre (Lancelot Proper), the longest section, making up half of the entire cycle. It concerns the adventures of Lancelot and the other Knights of the Round Table, and the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere.

The Quest del Saint Grail (Quest for the Holy Grail), about the Grail Quest and its completion by Galahad.

The Mort Artu (Death of Arthur), about the king's death at the hands of Mordred and the collapse of the kingdom.

The work was soon followed by the Post-Vulgate Cycle, a work based on the Vulgate but differing from it in many respects.

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Reference: The Lancelot-Grail Reader (2000) edited by Norris J. Lacy ISBN: 0815334192

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python's Holy Grail (Screenplay)
Please Read This Bit Before Reading The Screenplay: This is the official 'Unofficial' Monty Python And The Holy Grailscreenplay. This file contains the script as it was on March 20 1974,before filming took place. There are many minor differences from whatappears here and what ended up on the screen.

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+ GALAHAD
+ I have seen the Grail! I have seen it - here in this castle!
+
+ DINGO
+ No! Oh, no! Bad ... bad Zoot!
+
+ GALAHAD
+ What is it?
+
+ DINGO
+ Bad, wicked, naughty Zoot! She has been setting fire to our beacon, which -
+ I have just remembered - is grail-shaped ... It is not the first time we've
+ had this problem.
+
+ GALAHAD
+ It's not the real Grail?
+
+
DINGO
Wicked wicked Zoot ... she is a bad person and she must pay the
penalty. And here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment
... you must tie her down on a bed ... and spank her. Come!

GIRLS
A spanking! A spanking!

DINGO
You must spank her well and after you have spanked her you may
deal with her as you like and then ... spank me.