Swollen Stamens

Spending the weekend with scientists is fun. They can explain anything. They can come up with unbelievable ways to pimp dragonboats. And from our viewpoint on the "summit" of Mt-St-Gregoire on Saturday afternoon, it looked like Montreal was burning down. But no, that was just parallax.

They can even make strawberries sound dirty. I've decided that my next rock band will be called the Swollen Stamens.

Some links for the day:

- Ed Broadbent's NDP rap
- the funniest mime
- "COPS"-style Star Wars spoof, if you have 10 minutes

And I love all these photos in the media of cardinals... who look like they're being stalked by paparazzi. It's kind of funny, because normally the photos are interesting due to a salacious tinge, because of a sex scandal. If you think about it, it's like photographing the board members coming to a shareholders meeting, there's nothing glamourous about them. But the disheveled nature of paparazzi-style images imbue the cardinals with that seedy glamour.

There's also a magnificently forbidding image of the cardinals at mass in today's NYT.
Does it remind anyone else of the emperor reviewing the imperial guards? Man, scarlet robes are scary.