http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2008/12/australians-see-sm...

37 days ago in The Fate of the Artist · Authority: 118

Australians See Smiley Face in Night Sky Eddie Campbell too. Australians are getting a big hello from the heavens as Venus, Jupiter and a waxing crescent moon combine to create a celestial smiley face. Unfortunately, because North Americans are on the other side of the equator, they'll view the phenomenon another way — as a sad face with downcast mouth. The best time to see the friendly phenomenon is about 20 to 30 minutes after sunset in both hemispheres, report the News Corporation's Australian newspapers. (my photos. Lights at bottom are the lamps along our street. Better pictures at the link, but I wanted you to know I was paying attention.) meanwhile: Happy Face on Mars Exposed : "Spotting things that don't exist -on Mars or in clouds- is called pareidolia. A study last year found that humans are particularly susceptible to seeing human faces where there are none, because our knowledge of the human face is so ingrained in our brains." Best Pareidolia Ever Have you seen Jesus today? ******** in other news: 'Olympic Village' sex turns toads into athletes Professor Rick Shine from the University of Sydney studies the pesky creatures and believes the toads are evolving to become faster. When introduced to Queensland in 1935 in a bid to kill the cane beetle, toads generally travelled at a rate of about 10 kilometres each year, Professor Shine said. "Now that movement has increased to about 50 or 60 kilometres per year, and those at the front of this invasion have become marathon runners in a sense," he said. The gene mutation that drives certain toads to venture from their local area has been caused by constant selective breeding between the speediest of each generation. "Within the first generation, the quickest toads - the athletes - were on the western front and they bred with each other... we call this the Olympic Village effect," he said. However their new legs and need for speed end up being their downfall. "A vet in Darwin noticed spinal arthritis and it looks to be the result of toads having pushed the envelope as far as they possibly can," Professor Shine said. *********** This chap is having trouble separating his reality from his fiction: Cartooning and story telling are difficult things in themselves, nonetheless trying to write something funny on top of that. Author Eddie Campbell confesses in his short graphic novel The Fate of the Artist the desperate lengths he went through just to be witty in his comics: “I found myself listening to catch ideas from the conversations of my friends and then I became a harpy, a moloch, a vampire. Anxious. Haggard. Greedy. Let a piquant phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound.” Campbell professes that his life is much easier since he stepped out of the comic business just a few years ago. Art drains the honest artist. Or perhaps it is the act of being honest which is so exhausting.

• Author unknown

  On a Lighter Note

  http://graftedones.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-lighter-note.html
  36 days ago in Grafted Ones · Authority: 1

  Smile! The world looks up as a astronomical grin smiles down upon it. This picture is particularly fine. In the midst of trials, we cannot help but appreciate the aesthetics of God's creation.I recommending enjoying every Astronomy Picture of the Day, each taken from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. It is one of the best things NASA has done. We had might as well get something from our tax dollars!

  • Photo of UppityFemale

    The dawning of the age of precarious

    http://www.uppityfemale.com/2008/12/dawning-of-age-of-precar...
    37 days ago in Welcome to One Uppity Female · No authority yet

    When Jupiter aligns with Venus ... properity and good fortune will guide the neighborhood Sunday night at dusk, I happened to look up into the sky. There it was, the Thanksgiving sky, aligning Jupiter, Venus, and our moon so closely that its brilliance is startling. They were said to be closest on December 1. After that, the planets would part, not to realign so perfectly until 2052. The media's made a big deal out of it, possibly because all the weather guys got together and begged them to do it, so the guys in Roswell wouldn't start getting kooky again with the aluminum foil helmets. I'd read about it the week before Thanksgiving and had been looking forward to it, but forgot about it. Living in northeast Texas, you don't get a lot of geographical thrills except in the nighttime sky. I was excited that I still had enough time to remind friends. I posted a note on my myspace page and also sent an e-mail to friends. Several friends responded that they, too, had forgotten about it, and thanked me for reminding them. Several others said that they hadn't heard about it. One very good friend sent me a Fox story he'd read about the Australians' take on the viewing: Upside down Aussies saw, rather than a Russian flag (plus one), a happy face. Damn Aussies, always mocking what is good and pure. One friend said she was sure she would forget, and so I texted her at around sunset to remind her. I walked my dog a little later than usual. En route, as I typically do, I passed out treats to the neighborhood dogs as I went. (I know more of my neighbors' dogs names than my neighbors' names.) Walker is an uncanny judge of character; although, with my coaxing, he can accept almost anyone, he has judged harshly certain people who have played a role in my life. Now, I closely observe when Walker accepts someone without reservations. Tonight, he noticed a neighbor who he approached last Saturday as if they were old friends, wagging his tail and relaxing his ears against his head as he approached him. Tonight, the neighbor was one sharp-dressed man, though, but Walker obviously remembered him. I warned the man to be careful, because Walker's good at jumping up on people he accepts. Although the neighbor was dressed and groomed as if he worked as a banker, he reached out with both hands and ran his fingers deeply into the fur of Walker's neck, saying, "Hey, hotdog." I was more concerned about the man's expensive slacks and while he seemed to want to linger and chat, I was eager to get my sniffing mutt away from those slacks. I left in something of an awkward hurry, looking, as my nephew would say in complete political obliviousness, "like an R-tard." Two houses later, we were in the park and the gorgeous southwestern sky spread open above us. With the enormous Texas sky as their theatre, Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent moon were already in their enthusiastic opening act. Belatedly I wished I'd thought to tell Banker Neighbor. We continued our marveling, although Walker was more interested in scouting for late-night rogue squirrels than interplanetary alignment. I scrutinized the sky, wondering if it was really as amazing as I'd made it out to be. I glanced around the rest of the sky which appeared empty by comparison. Yes. It inspired awe. We continued our walk through the million-dollar green neighborhood facing the bike path near my house. Occasionally I stopped as the sky darkened to do more marveling. We passed a next-block neighbor I recognized, just arriving home with his two sons. Although I know he had to be tired and frazzled, considering the hour and the boys, he greeted me happily. The words came tumbling out of me in a rush: "Have you seen the stars?" "Oh, yeah, they were talking about that on the radio, but I forgot. Where can you see them?" I was excited now, pointing. "Oh, you can't miss them! They're right there. The one on top is Jupiter. The other is Venus." He called over the boys, who behaved so well, they might've been named Wally and Theodore. But you'd have thought they were watching Santa's sleigh cross the sky, they were so enraptured. I moved on while they marveled. When we got back to the corner that looped back toward my house, I thought again of Banker Neighbor. It had been a long day, though, and Walker was yanking my sore shoulder. I turned toward home. Not long after I made dinner and ate, I got a text from the friend I'd reminded: "I saw it! Wow!" Later that evening I got an e-mail from a good friend in Florida who I haven't seen in many years. She mused on the majesty of God's creation, thanked me, and said she was pleased that when she thought to look, she was in the Wal-Mart parking lot -- and got to point it out to strangers nearby, who also enjoyed it. Again, Banker Neighbor crossed my mind. Even then, I considered going back out to tell him about the sky; the sight was no doubt still striking. Of course, the actual doing would probably catch him off-guard .... um .... "Hi, it's me, the dog lady! Want to come out and see the stars?" I thought of the father's enthusiasm, and his boys' excitement, and imagined that there's a little John or Wendy in all of us. Someone with whom Walker had enjoyed such a warm, mutual welcome was probably John Darling personified. This morning I received numerous e-mails from people telling me their experiences about the stars. The first I received at work, though, was from a friend telling me something I hadn't known. These two planets apparently signify prosperity and good fortune, and their alignment so close to Christmas is seen as a hopeful indication of better times. She attempted to tie it to the recent election (which could have really pissed me off if not for this persistent Pollyanna streak in me). Instead, I thought of all of my friends, who thought enough of me to have taken the time to scribble down their awe and appreciation -- much more intelligibly and succinctly than this, of course. And I knew it was true, despite the bleakness of the more mainstream headlines. This is a time of prosperity and good fortune. Tonight, I'm going to stop and say hello to Banker Neighbor, and apologize for not ringing his doorbell last night.Subscribe in a reader

    • Author unknown

      We could all use a smile in the sky!

      http://alidotes.blogspot.com/2008/12/we-could-all-use-smile-...
      37 days ago in alidotes · Authority: 4

      Check out what the Australians are seeing.

      • Author unknown

        Australians See Smiley Face in Night Sky

        http://2daysdailyfunny.blogspot.com/2008/12/australians-see-...
        37 days ago in Funny & More · Authority: 10

        Celestial Smiley Face Planets, moon form friendly face in skies. Australians are getting a big hello from the heavens as Venus, Jupiter and a waxing crescent moon combine to create a celestial smiley face. Unfortunately, because North Americans are on the other side of the equator, they'll view the phenomenon another way — as a sad face with downcast mouth. The best time to see the friendly phenomenon is about 20 to 30 minutes after sunset in both hemispheres.

        • Author unknown

          Smiling from Heaven ???

          http://theinginwai.blogspot.com/2008/12/smiling-from-heaven....
          38 days ago in သိဂႋီႏြယ္ရဲ႕ မွတ္စုစာအုပ္ · Authority: 2

          မေန.ညက ၇-နာရီေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္ေလာက္ ရံုးကအျပန္.. ရာသီဥတုကလည္း ေအးလာတာ နွစ္ရက္ သံုးရက္ေလာက္ေတာ့ ရွိေနၿပီေလ..။ ထံုးစံအတုိင္း ေကာင္းကင္ကို ေမာ့ၾကည့္မိေတာ့ ငုံ.ၾကည့္ေနတဲ. မ်က္လံုးတစ္စံုနဲ႔ ရယ္ပ်ပ် ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေလး...။ ဒါနဲ႔ ကေလးေတြကို ျပလုိက္တယ္...လရယ္ ၾကယ္နွစ္လံုးရယ္က smiley face နဲ. မတူဘူးလားဆုိေတာ့ ကေလးေတြကလည္း သေဘာေတြက်ၿပီး ၾကည့္ေနၾကေလရဲ.။ KN ကေတာ့ ကားေမာင္းရင္း က်မတို႔ကို ျပံဳးတံု႔တံု႔ လုပ္ေနတယ္။ က်မကေတာ့ အိတ္ထဲ အျမဲပါတဲ႔ ကင္မရာေလးကို လွမ္းေတာ့ စမ္းမိလုိက္ေသး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘာပဲ ေတြ.ေတြ. ဓာတ္ပံုရိုက္ဖုိ.ျပင္တတ္တဲ႔ က်မကို သူက ေလွာင္ခ်င္ခ်င္ရယ္...။ ညဘက္ၿကီး အဲဒီေကာင္းကင္ေပၚက ပံုကို ေရေရရာရာျမင္ရဖုိ႔ကလည္း က်မမွာ ရွိေနတဲ႔ olympus အေပ်ာ္ရုိက္ ဒစ္ဂ်စ္တယ္ ကင္မရာေလးက စြမ္းနုိင္မယ္ မထင္တာနဲ.။ မထူးပါဘူးေလဆုိၿပီး မရုိက္ျဖစ္လုိက္ပါဘူး။ အိမ္ေရာက္ေတာ့ အင္တာနက္ခ်ိတ္ေတာ့မွ.. ဗီးနပ္စ္ရယ္..ဂ်ဴပီတာရယ္.. လရယ္ ဆံုၿပီး smiley face ကို ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၁-ရက္ေန. တနလာၤေန.မွာ Australia မွာ အေကာင္းဆံုးျမင္ရမယ္လုိ႔ ဆုိထားၾကပါတယ္။ က်မကေတာ့ ကိုယ္ဓာတ္ပံုမရိုက္ခဲ႔မိတာကို နွေျမာေနမိတာပါပဲ။ Australian ေတြကေတာ့ သူတုိ.ကို heaven ကေန hello လုပ္တယ္ဆုိၿပီး သေဘာေတြ က်ေနပံုပါပဲ။ က်မတုိ႔ ျမင္လုိက္ရတဲ႔ပံုကေတာ့ နဲနဲ ေစာင္းေနတယ္.. သူတုိ.ေလာက္ အခ်ိဳးသိပ္မက်လွဘူး။ Mumbai မွာ ျမင္ရတဲ႔ ပံုနဲ. ပိုနီးစပ္ပါတယ္။ အင္း..မြန္ဘုိင္းမွာ အခုျဖစ္ေနတဲ႔ ကိစၥေတြအတြက္ မဲ႕ျပံဳးျပံဳးသလုိ ျမန္မာျပည္ႀကီး ကိုလည္း ရြဲ.ျပံဳးျပံဳးလုိက္ပံု ရပါတယ္။ သူတုိ.အဆုိအရေတာ့ ဒီလိုအျဖစ္မ်ိဳးေတြ.ရဖုိ. အႏွစ္ေလးဆယ္ေက်ာ္ေလာက္ ေစာင့္ရတယ္..ဆုိပဲ။ အဲဒီလို ဗီးနပ္စ္ရယ္၊ ဂ်ဴပီတာရယ္ လ ရယ္ ဒီေလာက္နီးနီး ေနာက္ထပ္တႀကိမ္ နီးကပ္လာဖုိ.က ၂၀၅၂ နုိ၀င္ဘာလ မတုိင္ခင္ထိေတာ့ မျဖစ္နုိင္ေသးပါဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ၂၀၁၂- မတ္လထဲမွာေတာ့ ၿဂိုလ္နွစ္လံုးကေတာ့ အေနအထားတမ်ိဳးမ်ိဳးနဲ႔ နီးကပ္လာနုိင္တယ္ လုိ.ေျပာပါတယ္။ ထူးထူးဆန္းဆန္းေတြ..ဒီႏွစ္ထဲ တယ္ျဖစ္တာပဲ။ (source: http://sciencemode.com/2008/12/01/how-to-see-tonights-jupiter-venus-moon-show/) ပို.စ္ကိုေတာင္ မနည္းတင္ေနရလို. ပံုကိုေတာ့ မတင္ေပးလုိက္နုိင္ပါဘူး။ တကယ္လို. ဒီေန.ညမ်ားမွာ ဆက္ေတြ.ရဦးမယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာ့ ေသခ်ာေပါက္ ဓာတ္ပံုရိုက္ထားလိုက္ပါ့မယ္။ စိတ္၀င္စားတဲ႔သူေတြ.. ၾကည့္ခ်င္တဲ႔သူမ်ားအတြက္.. လင့္ခ္ေလးေတြ ေပးထားပါတယ္။ ***sciencemode.com! ***Smiley Face Moon - Jupiter & Venus aligned! ***smiling-moon-hope-shines-down-mumbai-1! ***conjunction-moon-venus-and-jupiter! ***foxnews! ဒါကေတာ့ youtube ကပါ။ က်မတို႔ကြန္နက္ရွင္အျမန္နုန္းအရေရာ..ဘာဘာညာညာေၾကာင့္ေရာ မၾကည့္နုိင္ေပမယ့္ ရတဲ.သူေတြၾကည့္လုိ႔ရေအာင္ပါ..။ ***youtube.com!

          • Author unknown

            Wink;).

            http://annehammond.blogspot.com/2008/12/wink.html
            38 days ago in From my perspective... · Authority: 11

            Venus, Jupiter and the moon winked at me Monday night in Thailand.... I love when the Lord does stuff like that and moves planets and stars into place!But I'm sorry for you folks in the States:Unfortunately, because North Americans are on the other side of the equator, they'll view the phenomenon upside down — as a mono-browed frown over a pair of eyes.It was still pretty neat to see!

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