This striking Japanese girl who goes by the name Glass Doll portrays a few of the characters from one of my favorite classic stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (Online version here).

Take a look at her main and schedule pages, and you'll also see some Engrish ("Plofile" instead of "Profile" and "Dead or Arive" instead of "Dead or Alive" to name a couple). Of course I'm sure she would get a greater kick out of my lame attempts at rendering Kanji or even just Kana.

Click through her various galleries and you'll see that her schtick is enacting movie and video game characters. Geek paradise.

Hat tip: BoingBoing.

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Truth in Advertising

Found at Spiced Sass. I love this one, especially since I'm a lawyer (I cannot stand those cheesy phonebook ads).

I know it makes my own Kerry p-shop look pretty amateurish, but in case you missed it, check out "Kerry Poppins" here.

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I think I just need to open a new category for this subject (earlier entries here, here, here, and here).

Yet more SF Babe resources:

• Women in Spacesuits in TV and Film


• Babes in Space


• Barbarella tribute


• The Ladies of Star Trek
(previously linked by me in this post)

• Orion Slave Girls
(transforms celebrities into the green-skinned OSG's from Star Trek)

(All above shamelessly hijacked from Gravity Lens).

Someone on a similar vibe has assembled this Amazon list of the Lovely Ladies of Golden and Silver Age Sci Fi/Horror.

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As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't going to let the latest release of the official LEGO Millennium Falcon kit go unpurchased, and my older son's recent birthday made a perfect excuse. I helped with a couple of the early steps, but he did most of the work himself:

I either laid a sloppy foundation or mishandled the model because it partly fell apart after taking that picture. Oh well, the fun of LEGOs is in the building, so I guess we will just have to rebuild.

My younger son came up with this prototype rebel alliance scout ship, all by himself:

Good job, boys!

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Check out this article. Or this one. Or this one, or this one. Gloomy, huh?

In fact, even a notable optimist's first reaction might be to replace the cowbell:

with the cow:

But the news may not be all bad, after all. First, obviously, is the fact that payroll employment increased (even if not as much as expected). Second, the number of unemployment claims declined over last month.

Finally, and most importantly, look at the unspun release from the BLS and try to interpret that as anything but positive. Overall household employment increased by 629,000 over the previous month. For better perspective, take a look at this chart:

(from this site).

That's right. July saw the largest increase in household employment since February 2002. And for only the second time since August 1994, more than 600,000 jobs were created in a month.

Why, then, the gloomy news reports about the increase of only 32,000 (versus the forecast of 240,000). Two words: old economy. These BLS surveys and predictions are all predicated on the 9-to-5, 5-day-a-week, clock-punching job sector. They miss the ever-larger numbers of self-employed workers who make our economy a vibrant example of Schumpeter's creative destruction.

Of course, I'm not the first to note this, by any means. This particular post was inspired by Dr. Jeffrey Cornwall of The Entrepreneurial Mind. And Virginia Postrel has lucidly stated and developed this theme repeatedly in the past.

Thank goodness we can so readily access the raw data to critique the common wisdom (or at least the "commonly-reported" wisdom) about the job figures.

Update: Reading through the above, I noted some sloppiness in the paragraph starting "Why, then, . . . . " Instead of saying "these BLS surveys, " I should have written "the BLS payroll survey." Sorry for the sloppiness.

For a well-written leftist analysis of the BLS report, read this EPI article, which goes through all the numbers and explains why more weight is commonly given to the payroll survey than the household survey. I don't agree with the EPI's ideological slant, but it does help explain the conventional wisdom.

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The Canuck da Vinci Project has thrown its hat into the X-Prize ring, announcing today that they will make an attempt at their first flight on October 2, 2004, just a few days after Scaled Composites' first attempt.

Rand Simberg has the goods (check his comments, too).

You can also find a good collection of links about this at the Ansari X-Prize Space Race News site.

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More linking tonight, as we head over to Don at Mixolydian Mode, who riffs on Esperanto and mentions a movement to replace Latin with Esperanto as the official language of the Roman Catholic Church.

I taught myself a fair amount of Esperanto in High School (no great feat, since I was taking Honors Latin all four years). Of course, nobody I knew spoke or wrote it, so it fell by the wayside.

Of more interest to the language geek in me, Don found this amazing Language Construction Kit.

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Again, forwarding information you would find if you only surfed Gravity Lens every day, take a trip down memory lane, circa 1978, through the pages of the Sears catalog, thanks to RetroCrush.

The pictures are great, but the commentary's even better. Enjoy.

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Der Commissar has rounded up the bios of all the cool (and attractive) kids in the blogosphere.

I obviously haven't sent enough linking-love his way, and he somehow missed my entry.

JohnL of TexasBestGrok - Latin Club 1,2,3 (President 4); Heinlein Appreciation Society 1,2; LEGO modelers' collective 3,4

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At 36, I've worn the same pant size since college, and, thanks to a fairly active lifestyle and good genetics, I haven't needed to work very hard to stay that size. But nature finally caught up last summer and I noticed my waistbands getting tighter. I never actually bought a larger size, but during the fall I did buy a couple of pairs of pants with an expandable waistband. Cheating? Maybe.

I made a resolution at the beginning of the new year to finally incorporate regular exercise into my daily routine, and began doing situps and pushups every day. Four months later, at my annual physical, I was happy to find my blood pressure at the lowest I can remember (112/52) but very shocked to find my cholesterol level in the 230s (with a bad LDL/HDL ratio). It has always been in the mid-100s. My doctor put me on Niacin for the time being and we will follow up soon to re-check the level. In the meantime, I resolved to improve my diet and incorporate some aerobic exercise.

Shortly after that checkup, Jake came into our lives, and he has been an angel. Every night since April, I have progressively gone from walking to jogging to running with that dog for thirty minutes.

Wanting to find an objective way to measure my physical fitness progress, I went Googling around today. Surprise, surprise, surprise. The USMC has posted a helpful reference to the physical fitness and swimming requirements for Marine Corps courses. Even better, it lays out the point scoring system and provides rankings by age. Perfect.

So tonight I administered my first USMC-style PFT. I managed a three-mile run in 21:35, 39 situps in 2 minutes, and 4 pull-ups. Scoring against that chart, I passed each component of the test and came up with 138 total points, putting me in the 3rd Class for my age (not great, but better than "Unsatisfactory").

Not bad for a civilian. Having an objective milestone is important, and up to this point I have merely been working on consistent exercise. Now I can work on improving that score.

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This NASA site is a great place to start your virtual exploration of the Red Planet.

I would love to go there in person someday. Not likely to happen, but I can dream.

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Not a unicycle, a monowheel. In many forms, including a proposed armored version for the military.

Hat tip: Gravity Lens (where does he find this stuff?)

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Got this idea from Chan, who read about it at normblog.

Paraphrasing Norm's criteria, these are not necessarily the ten most important works I've ever read (I suppose by some "objective" standard) but instead the books that have had a "marked and lasting influence on the way I think about the world." These are books I find myself re-reading periodically, as opposed to others that go straight to half-price books.

I'll try to follow Chan's pattern placing them in the order they entered my reading life:

1. The Bible, (I like the Jerusalem Bible translation)
2. Cosmos, Carl Sagan
3. Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein
4. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (does it count as 1, 3, or 6?)
5. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
6. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
7. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter
8. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
9. Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
10. The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell

Wonder what that says about me?

Update: I added links to Amazon, so you can check editorial and reader reviews.

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