Caitlin Kiernan is trying to start a cultural revolution: Wear more T-shirts celebrating your favorite authors and books. Everybody wears their favorite band's T-shirt, why not your favorite author? Makes sense to me. How cool would it be to have a "Great Gatsby" T-shirt or an Edgar Allan Poe T-shirt? Or go more obscure and have the R.A. Lafferty T-shirt. If I wore T-shirts more often, I'd be jumping on this bandwagon.
(The fact that Kiernan is selling T-shirts at Species of One shop has nothing to do with this.)

My god, this sounds like a joke: Seven dead at kite-flying festival. But it's not: "More than 100 people had been reported injured since last night in various kite-related accidents, medical workers said."

The latest murder in Kentucky: "On Friday, Hutchinson, 45, said he killed his wife because she, like billions of other Earthlings, had been taken over by alien clones. He also rambled about cobras, 'panther-lions,' 'the tribe of the stick,' Armageddon and UFOs." (He has quite an awful looking mugshot too.)

Here are two articles on a family that lived away from humanity in South Africa for 20 years. The mother is apparently retarded. The children speak their own language. The father says it probably happened because they didn't have a "family snake" to look after them. The son has lived outside most of his life.

Doctors have removed the bullets from the head of the wandering sea lion. Now he's being treated for infection. No suspects have been found yet.

Here's a more web ready version of that squid page. Apparently it was taken recently.

I don't know how old this photograph is, but it's very cool. It's a photo of a squid. The squid took the picture itself by grabbing on to a probe being sent into deep southern waters.

According to a rumor posted at Monster Zero news, Toho is spending twice as much money and using US special effects studios for the next Godzilla film, which will be the 50th anniversary film. They are also "strongly aiming this one for the international market."
I would love to see Toho put more money into the film and get it released over here. I just wish they would also give these films more time. Do you realize they put out a Godzilla film a year? Directors are really pressured to get these things done for the winter movie season. The '90s Gamera films were given as much time as they needed, and they really are the best giant monster movies in ages. Why can't Toho do the same for its star?

Neil Gaiman writes about how the government is protecting the deaf from witches and cartoons by not close captioning shows like "Sabrina," "Justice League" and "Malcolm in the Middle." He's right that it's outrageous. Why should the government decide what deaf people watch?

Well, I hate to breaking this news to some of my friends, but Angel is being cancelled. There are only 9 episodes left. Here's part of theWB.com press release: "Like some of the great series that are leaving the air this year, including Frasier and Friends, the cast, crew, writers and producers of Angel deserve to be able to wrap up the series in a way befitting a classic television series and that is why we went to Joss to let him know that this would be the last year of the series on The WB. "

Scientist find evidence of a sun that has crystallised into a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond.

Principal: You know, our middle school isn't tortorous enough to students.
Assistant principal: Well what can we do about it?
Principal: How about we limit the number of bathroom breaks students can take to 15 a month.
Assistant Principal: You've done it again!

When one of the biggest attractions in your town is an event where people predict when a cement block will fall through the ice, well, you've live in a boring little town.

Vietnamese farmer builds helicopter from scratch. Now the government is taking it away because he didn't ask permission first. The farmer vows to fight!

Nostalgia alert! Check out this cool Jim's Jason of Star Command page. I remember loving that show on Saturday mornings. I couldn't wait for it. I remember very little about the actual content of the show besides the little square robots, the Wikis, they had. Also, listening to the sound clips, I noticed something odd. In this sound clip of Dragos vowing revenge, listen to the music playing in the background. They're ripping off Akira Ifukube's Godzilla theme! What a weird place for a Godzilla reference. The theme does sound suitably evil.

You can make an action figure of yourself at imatoy!

Here's a picture of a cow fish. It doesn't look like a cow, but then it doesn't look like anything else either. According to the caption:
"When scared it can release a toxic chemical which can kill many surrounding fish, including itself."
So apparently it's not real bright either. Fark is doing a photoshop contest about the fish here.

According to my giant monsters mailing list, a professor Bill Tsutsui is writing a book about Godzilla:
"I am a professor of Japanese history (and lifelong Godzilla fan) who
is currently completing a book entitled "Godzilla on My Mind" which
examines the Godzilla films and the monster's enduring popularity in
the United States. The book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan
in October 2004."
He's looking for photos of Godzilla fans with their collections. You can reach him at this address if you're interested: btsutsui@ku.edu
I don't have a large enough collection for that, but the book sounds fun. I can't wait for it to come out now. It's probably one of many that will be coming out for Godzilla's 50th anniversary this year. (That's the 50th anniversary of the film in Japan. Godzilla came out in 1955 in America.) I hope so, I'm always on the look out for new books about giant monsters.

FYI: May 7th is No Pants Day.

The BelGeddes No. 4 looks like it could have been the coolest airplane ever. (Found at the ever helpful Cylindrical Primate Storage Unit.)