Hither and thither 7/9/10

Good morning! We made it to Friday! Hope the weekend looks bright to you. Me, I'm dreading jury duty next week. This whole Responsible Voting Citizen thing can be a drag. Ah, well. Now to our collection of varied variouses (there will almost certainly be many unnoted updates, until noon PT).

• Another serious public health service announcement as we enter summer: drowning does not look like drowning. This was a real eye-opener to me. Rang true, as well. The toddler I rescued once was quietly floating out towards the deep end, only the top of his head above the water. Read and heed.
• Next, an important cautionary announcement of another kind.
• Horrible title, but imparts a bitterly golden observation: Women Who Force Their Husbands to Cheat. You scoff. "No woman has ever forced her husband to cheat." Totally agree. The article is actually about Japanese women who hire professional seducers, to lure husbands whom they want to divorce into an affair, so they can get a financially better settlement. The sagacious observation? It comes from one of the professional seducers, herself. Listen up: "You don't need brains to be a professional seducer," she laments. "All you need is for the man's brains to be in his pants, and nine times out of 10 they are." I don't know if there's a corollary for women; but brothers, read that one again.
• Okay now, let's lighten up for a bit.
• Reader jmb found a way to make climbing stairs fun.
• An experience only for Star Wars supergeeks: detailed plans for the Death Star.
• Staying with the theme, reader Matt Gumm found some Victorian-style Star Wars illustrations.

• Courtesy of reader Joel Griffith, here's one Star Wars action figure I'm pretty confident our boys won't want for birthday, Christmas, or any other happy occasion.
• Sci-fi, fantasy and horror characters drawn on Etch-a-Sketch.

• We enjoy Bear Grylls around Casa Phillips, insanely watching him eat rotting meat and larva, and getting (and ingesting) water by unspeakable methods, during our dinnertime. Read long ago that Grylls was a Christian, so have been bit dismayed as he seemingly uses God's name in vain, "Hell" casually, and refers to rocks that are millions of years old. Nonetheless, here is a warm but nonspecific profile of Grylls' faith.
• Want to see what a $790K bath tub carved from a single crystal looks like? Sure you do.

• And now we find our Title of the Week in these sage words: Never Slaughter a Chicken in Front of a Monkey. Now, you remember that, hear?
• Michelle Malkin is an articulate, forceful, conservative commentator. She's also a pretty little Filipino lady. I say all that to say this: I am not linking to her post in which she (not for the first time) prints some of the hate mail she received, this time after appearing on TV to speak in favor of Arizona's border-securing law. You simply cannot — or I hope you cannot — imagine the foul, vile, obscene, hate-dripping language of the emails (which Michelle delightfully reprints with the senders' names and email addresses).  LaShawn Barber could equal Michelle's tales.My points are three. First: when liberals call us "haters" because we disagree with, say, Obama's policies, they don't know what "hate" is.  Two: this is another current to which the MSM is blind, or there'd be features and series on liberal racism. Three: the T-shirt I saw on an off-duty teacher who told stories to kids at Borders, which said "Love is what separates us from the Republicans," was a delusional lie.
• It's... it's a... well —

• Professed Christians who voted for Obama must accept blame for yet another pro-abort extremist (like Obama) sidling her way towards a lifetime Supreme Court appointment.
• On a similar theme, Lloyd Marcus, who calls himself "a black tea party patriot" and a "proud unhyphenated American," writes movingly of his beloved elderly father who, in spite of being a Christian pastor, supports a president who opposes his values — because of their shared skin-color. Because of his deep respect for his dad's character, experience and life, he hasn't tried to dissuade his father from the false messiah, but now he feels burdened to try.
• So, you're the Administrator for NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Do you count, as one of your main goals to " reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering"? Huh? Well, you do if you're appointed and charged by this president. See now, I would have gotten that wrong. I thought the job was to explore space and stuff. Silly me. (HT reader Neil Shay.)
• Reader Bryan Morgette overhead the Red Shirt pep-talk...

• "Furious" and "fuming" wouldn't begin to describe what my dear wife and I might feel in a situation like this. Yet another dark and insane fruit of our darkened and insane culture.
• Reader Berry Davis found a new meaning to the term "Bacon Burger."
• Yikes. This hominid's parents apparently did not tell him what we've told our boys. Or if they did, they didn't mean it.
• You've heard of M. C. Escher, famed artist of the impossible? I suppose it was inevitable that ambitious souls would try to reproduce his art in Lego.

• Or you can see Dallas in Lego.
• There there's this:

• And finally these: