Dream of the future, and you’re sure to get something that tells you more about the past. Here is a set of postcards from 1900, illustrating what they thought life would be like in 2000. It looks like a kind of steampunk opium dream, with everyone dressed in Victorian fashion, either puttering about outside with parasols or standing about in cluttered drawing rooms. All of the inventions are weirdly off in a charming way.

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There’s more to invention than just slapping a new wrapper on an old device, and sometimes the superficial approach can lead to some funny results, like the Tampon Taser. The copy describing this device is weird: in addition to touting its absorbency, fresh floral scent and gentle glide applicator, it also has barbed probes and a range of 14 feet. Alas, it also warns that “It is not intended nor recommended for vaginal insertion.”

After reading my last day’s posts here, you might think I’m either a teenage girl, or obsessed with young girls, but really … it’s just what has drifted to the top of my email box lately. And really, my initial impression that here was a device that would allow women to fire debilitating high voltage sparks out of their nether regions did get me a little bit excited, so you can’t blame me for mentioning it.

How confusing: remember the story about the convert to Judaism who was trying to compel his adolescent son to be circumcised? I was persuaded by others that the story was almost certainly an urban legend, but now it turns out that there really is a pending court case that fits the particulars. The Oregonian reports the details, but leaves out the names of those involved (the accusation that this was faked was in part based on the similarities of the names to those in a work of fiction with a similar premise; could it be that the fictional names were used because they fit the story?) In addition, they have a quote from an Oregon lawyer defending the father’s right to put his kid through unnecessary cosmetic surgery.

But Julie H. McFarlane, a supervising attorney with the Portland-based Juvenile Rights Project, said that the child’s consent for a medical procedure is not required until he turns 15.

“I think the dad has the legal right as the custodial parent to make those kind of religious or medical decisions,” McFarlane said. “It’s not much different from cosmetic surgery.”

15??? Now they tell me, after my daughter turns 16. Maybe threats to carry out random weird cosmetic operations on her would have been a useful tool for getting her to do the dishes. Now she’s just going to roll her eyes and tell me she won’t sign the consent form, darn it.

I do wonder what has happened to the Hippocratic Oath, though. What doctor would carry out such unnecessary surgery if the child or mother were opposing it? Or is Dad just going to find some quack rabbi who will hack it off under the protection of his synagogue? That’s one easy way around ethical considerations — find someone who will use the imagined word of a god to justify violating them.

We’ve finally found something crazy enough to make a Utah Republican to back away. One of their district chairmen, Don Larsen, has proposed an interesting resolution.

“In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the Scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.,” his resolution states. “The mostly quiet and unspectacular invasion of illegal immigrants does not focus the attention of the nations the way open warfare does, but is all the more insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”

Whoa … he’s got Satan herding Mexicans across the border, a contention supported by Scripture, apparently (chapter and verse, please?)! To their credit, the Republican party seems to be a bit embarrassed by it all, but it still exposes this terrifying undercurrent of outright wacky theology that is lurking beneath us here.

(One thing I like about the SL Tribune site I linked above is that their comments have a reader scoring system, and the comments that try to endorse Larsen’s crazy rationale are getting lots of thumbs down. That’s somewhat reassuring — the literate sector of the culture is strongly against blaming Satan for social ills.)

I greatly admire their perseverance…it seems a shame to chop them up this way.

But life will find a way to eat just about anything.

This is too absurd to be true.

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Bwahahahaha! At least … we have a source for Kryptonite!

Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science.

Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral’s chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature – albeit fictional literature.

“Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide – and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

“The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.”

Wait … it’s white? Phooey. We need the green stuff. As everyone knows, white kryptonite only affects plants. Boring!