Nothing to add

We all know that magazines touch-up their photos, no allowing of any extra skin, wrinkles, or blotchiness, so that everyone has perfectly even skin tones, everything smooth, contoured, and perfect. Well, check out this site that showed up in my inbox this morning. On the main page click on the "Start Here" and then as you go through the photos run your cursor over them to see what they looked like before they were touched up. Some didn't have much work, others.... the Glen Feron retouching portfolio

While we're at it, why not enjoy some celebrity awful plastic surgery

Ah, what the hell.....I didn't do anything yesterday so I might as well divulge my, well I wouldn't say fondness, but interest in celebrity. Especially the parts that show just how normal they are like the fact that they don't wear makeup all the time. Yay! Normalcy!

Oh well, that's enough invasion for one morning.

And a few fun things:

Save the Sheep - a mindless flash game

D-Film Moviemaker - kind of a neat little online flashmaker. Make a film and then force all of your friends with email to watch it....er, I mean....Nicely send it to their email and suggest that they enjoy your cleverness.

And while I'm at it....hold on, need to drag the BIG soapbox out here......I haven't said much about Katrina and the aftermath because I like to reserve this part of the internet to play on not angst over and there is certainly enough fretting going on - and a lot to fret about (please consider donating to a reputable organization). But, as I was going through some articles this morning I came across a piece by Thomas Friedman, a writer whom I genuinely enjoy if not always agree with - he has a talent for grasping issues in perfectly clear, engaging prose. Enjoy:

via NYTimes:
Osama and Katrina (9/7/05)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town. [read on...]

And lest there be those who still doubt whether the devastation to New Orleans could have been prevented, consider that the New Orleans levee was *known* to need work but that this administration deprived that needed project of funds:

via The New Yorker:
Under Water (9/3/05)
by David Remnick

[...] the President'’s priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23millionn less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.

Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million. Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, "All of us said, 'Look, build it or you’re going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.' And they didn't, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water." [read more]