The Good Fight

Click the photo for info on the documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of Americans who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I cannot stress how moving this film was. It's available on Netflix. Most, if not all, of the veterans interviewed are now deceased.

Stillborn suburb

Newsweek's slideshow of recent scenes of economic desolation. This is a nearly vacant subdivision in Rio Vista, California.

Holy shit

NASA space shuttle passing the sun. Via Alyssa.

Alan Thicke explains Twin Peaks

Everything

Free Floating

From a transcript of Oprah:

Dr. KAMLER: Well, people in that condition often do experience what they consider an altered state. When they're very close to dying, the little energy they have left, the body uses that to maintain the basic functions like respiration, breathing and heartbeat, and it doesn't supply energy to the higher centers of thinking and learning and emotion. So those parts are detached, essentially, from the rest of your mind, the rest of your brain. It allows your mind to sort of float free. And in those cases, people hallucinate and they have these very intense images.

WINFREY: Did you have intense images?

Ms. MELTON: I saw my kids. I smelled my kids.

WINFREY: He smelled his wife's perfume.

King of Kong

I can't believe I never mentioned how much I loved this movie. This trailer doesn't display how compelling this film is, but it's a start.

Snowflake

Snowflake the albino gorilla was just a baby once, and lived in the Barcelona Zoo veterinarian's apartment.

"I am a regular, simple person living a normal life."

"As she arrived at work one afternoon in April, Kermen Basangova, the director of a small academy here, was stabbed to death in her car, the police said... Members of the faculty and staff at the school, the State Polar Academy, expressed grief and confusion. They were even more confused the next morning, when Ms. Basangova returned to work. The killing had been a ruse. The police said they had staged her death to ensnare her deputy, who had been plotting to kill her."

More here.

Imagine Lexington Avenue as a River

A few interesting things I learned while reading The World Without Us

- There is enough steel wire in the three-inch main cables of the George Washington Bridge to wrap around the Earth four times. Every year baby peregrine falcons hatch at the top of the GWB's towers. Grass, weeds, and ailanthus trees bloom in metal niches high above the water and have to be weeded out.

- If New York City were abandoned and there were no people and no power to work the pumps that drain water away from the subway tunnels, they'd flood completely in days. 36 hours if a hard rain fell.