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First photo taken with my new Sidekick II, Mr. Cartoon Special Edition:
Interpretive grafitti on a lightswitching box in Pasadena. Alls I know is I went to see the Passenger, came out in a daze, and came across this message. Sounds like the motto of a guy I used to know a guy in Santa Cruz.
As usual: paleoanthropology is on the freaking move. Just as the latest issue of Yeti Researcher hit the shelves comes a flurry of related news. First off, all them playa-hatin' Indonesian anthropoligists need to recognize: there was little tiny hobbits, OK, contemporaneous with modern humans, on the Isle of Flores. Homo Floresiensis is no microcephalic modern pygmy, and you know what's the proof? Because they found more of them. Next up: Gigantopithecus Blackiis the 12-foot prehistoric ape that is 100% real, and which, say some, accounts for the Sasquatch story (or maybe even Sasquatch himself).
There's Giganto, as the big feller is lovingly called by his admirers, fending off some enterprising Home erectuses, the only human predecessors the ape would have known had he gone extinct by a million years ago as previously thought. But wait: new spadework reveals that Giganto was around as recently 100,000 years ago, i.e. alongside Homo sapiens sapiens, perhaps even like so: 
Cryptozoologists will surely take heart. And so will the dino-creationists, who have become the latest monster-hunsters, driven by the belief that discovering Nessie and the Mokele-mbembe and the rest of In Search Of list somehow helps to prove biblical literalism. It's true.
My bro sent me this pleasingly bizaare video. Do wait for it to load. I promise full fun. Note the guy in the back playing Half-Life or whatever. And the precious, but brief moment when the guy on the left reveals his love for the guy on the right with a longing look. Don't miss it! This video is out there already (an early dubloon unearthed by Google's treasture-finding algorithm applied to video) but no one seems to have picked up on the obvious geopolitical implications: this, of course, is how we will beat China, with our avalanche of irresistably lowbrow culture. Guess the world is flat afer all. Sure, China may seem scary with their economy surpassing ours in 2050, and 2 billion plus people by then, but not if those 2 billion people are obsessed with the Back Street Boys and the Houston Rockets and spending all their new capital on equipment to record home videos in their dorms. That Atlantic cover story from a few months back needs to be revised. As usual, Robert "epic struggles" Kaplan misses the trees for the forest. Navies, Pacific Theater -- feh! The battles of the future will be fought on TRL. Talk about soft power -- kill 'em with culture, the generals should be saying. Get on it, DARPA. Sadly, this is our one ace up the sleeve: cheap sports wear and Justin Timberlake.
