South Koreans first to clone dog. Will this make Korean restaurants cheaper?

For those riding the London subway:
http://anextraordinarymachine.blogspot.com/2005/07/scary-notice.html

Keep an eye on this:

Webcomics Nation is meant to do for online comics what services like Blogger have done for personal journals, or Flickr for photo-sharing: enable anybody and everybody to reach a large audience with his/her ideas and creations — in this case, in comics form. WCN tames the latest and most complex online technologies (like, say, XML, RSS, and “web services”) and puts them to work for you, easily, invisibly, and in an automated way.

I miss being in love with a city. Walking its streets, surrounded by its people, falling in love with its sounds, knowing there’s a potential pal on the street with me and we could pop into one of those bars that are on every street, holes in the wall really, thats been owned for years by the same guy or the same couple, with the usual bar staff that don’t water down the drinks. It’s usually dark in there, with all sorts of stuff on the walls, a little dirty, a little grimey, but with character, you know.

Cities smell, both good and bad. The good smells are made by the cousins or brothers of the bar owners, cooking up the food of their people, gryos or fried rice, or Mexican or the hot dog vendor or bread and cookies, all of cooked daily, though maybe not sold daily. Sometimes it’s fresh flowers or fruits, ripening under a spring sun, served by a lazy breeze.

The bad smells are dirt and pollution, concrete burned with the smell of piss from bums and drunk partiers, dank sweat and exhaustion from those who were born there and never left. But it’s ok, ‘cause the bad smells make it all seem real, make the city seem alive, ‘cause you can’t love it all the time, not 24/7. It gets on your nerves sometimes, when it gets too cold or too hot, too wet or too dry, too noisy or too quiet. It’s ok. You love it because the city doesn’t belong to you, it does its own thing. But when you need it, when the bones ache for home, its there, changed perhaps, new buildings here, new owners there, but its heart still is there. If you listen closely, you’ll hear it beneath chatter of cars and the blaring people.

NASA officials said space shuttle Discovery was probably traveling too slow to sustain any damage when a bird slammed into the craft’s fuel tank nose cone seconds after liftoff Tuesday, according to Local 6 News.

Watched Over There last night, the new series from Fox. I’d link to the website, but it’s one of those overproduced Flash sites, so forget it. NPR had done a story on it Wednesday afternoon, including an interview tih series co-creator Steven Bochco that sounded kinda interesting and the premise itself seemed novel enough to check out, namely that it’s a series about a war while the war is going on it.

I couldn’t stand to watch the whole thing. It wasn’t bad per se, just uninteresting. We got brief glimpses of the soliders before they shipped out and then we’re dropped into their first firefight, which alternated between stupid, boring and intensely deadly. But it all felt flat, flushed, forced and predictable. While the series is purposefully staying apolitical and focusing on the soliders themselves, I didn’t care for the characters. I didn’t dislike them, I just didn’t care whether they lived or died. The one instance where a solider gets shot is easy to see from a mile off. and the soundtrack for emotional cues was annoying. No need to finish watching it and no reason to return.

Overheard about Supreme Court nominnee John Roberts: “Well thank god white men are finally getting ahead!” While funny (assuming you have a sense of humor), give it 50 years or so and white people might indeed be a minority. Which might be really funny, if you have have no sense of humor.

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god: pure cartoon geek goodness is on the way. Fantagraphics is releasing “Willie & Joe The WWII Years” in March 2008. Willie and Joe (previously mentioned) is one the greatest comics ever made, done by Mill Mauldin, it captured the war through the infantry’s eye, boring, nerve wracking and tiring, criss crossed with moments terror.

I can’t wait.