The event begins 54 minutes past midnight PDT (0754 UT) on August 28th when the Moon enters Earth's shadow. At first, there's little change. The outskirts of Earth's shadow are as pale as the Moon itself; an onlooker might not even realize anything is happening. But as the Moon penetrates deeper, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Around 2:52 am PDT (0952 UT), the color of the Moon changes from moondust-gray to sunset-red. This is totality, and it lasts for 90 minutes.

Night owls on the west coast and early risers on the east coast might catch this red moon...

NASA - Dreamy Lunar Eclipse

When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security ...
...
As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

Welcome to America | www.guardian.co.uk

He goes way to far, but he is trying to make a point.

Jim Cramer Blows a Head Gasket 8/3/07

Walking through the bazaar it takes less than 10 minutes for a vendor in his early 20s to step out and ask, "You want whiskey?" "No, heroin," I tell him. He ushers me into his store with a smile.

And this is winning???

It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan | Salon News

This may be my favorite Gibson book of all time. - Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow sure seems to have liked Spook Country. I didn't get into Gibson's last novel. Some of the marketing ideas were cool but for some reason it just didn't grab me. The linear style didn't build the suspense level that I sought. But I'm going to give this one a shot.

Gibson has a habit of writing physical places I've been to into his novels. I recall in All Tomorrow's Parties the main character walking down a street in San Francisco toward the location at which I was reading the book. Rattle tells me early on in this book a character checks into a Manhattan hotel that a number of MemeStreams users crashed in during the last HOPE, probably around the time the novel is set.

Anyone here reading it yet?

Boing Boing: William Gibson's Spook Country

Seriously. This is definitely above and beyond the usual. No crazy patterns, no violent blinkingness, no creepy face to spring out at you.

Go to the site, and check out the castle by putting your mouse cursor over the image. Notice that it's entirely black and white. Move your mouse pointer off to one side of the image. Now, just like it says, stare at the dot in the center for about 30 seconds, and don't move your head or look away. Relax your eyes even. Then without looking away, move the mouse pointer back into the image.

VIBRANT COLOR!

When you blink and it goes *pffT!* back to black and white is pretty trippy.

Really, really cool optical illusion

These little things look quite a bit like what they were using on that show, Eureka, on the Sci-Fi channel.

Apparently they're actually going to be available for sale here in the US next year, estimated at between $12,000 and $18,000 in price.

I could deal with that.

Teeny, tiny little car -- coming soon!

For tens of thousands of members of the National Guard and reserves who are called up to serve in Iraq, returning home safely may be the beginning -- not the end -- of their worst nightmare. Reservists lucky enough to make it home often find their civilian jobs gone and face unsympathetic employers and a government that has restricted access to civilian job-loss reports rather than prosecuting offending employers.

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) protects members of the guard and reserves from job loss, demotion, loss of seniority and loss of benefits when they are called to active duty.

The act is supposed to protect reservists' civilian jobs for up to five years of military service. But the government has made it difficult for veterans to enforce their legal rights. Service members who return to find their civilian jobs gone also find that the burden is on them to prove that their jobs were taken away as a result of their military service and that there is no other reason that they could have been fired.

This onerous burden of proof discourages many from filing formal complaints.

Amy R. Gershkoff - Saving Soldiers' Jobs - washingtonpost.com

(Disclaimer: I'm a major contributor to this project, but no one
else has posted it, so... whatever.)

For those Slackware users left out there, the Dropline GNOME team is pleased to announce the availability of the beta of Dropline GNOME 2.18 for Slackware 12.0.

Basically, after you've installed Slackware 12.0, grab the beta installer client, install it, and then run dropline-installer. The installer will then give you the ability to download and install all the wonderful packages necessary to use GNOME 2.18.3 on your Slackware Linux 12.0 machine. This means easy access to Inkscape, Evolution, OpenOffice, Ekiga, and all the other wonderful GNOME 2.18.x applications.

We can still really use testers, although it would be preferrable if you'd do this on a clean install of Slackware 12.0, since over half the bug reports on upgraded machines boil down to errors made while upgrading.

Dropline GNOME 2.18.3 beta for Slackware 12 now available

This is just an awesome T-shirt and I figured I'd point it out.

Oh, yeah, and there's also a ton of rather cracked out t-shirts in the same bizarre category. :)

(It beats looking at shill sites.)

Awesome War Shirt -- 'We're gonna free the s**t out of you!'