Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

You know, these deep catheterizations always freak me out (so does Samppa's gut skewer act; more), but they really do win the award for “world's deepest PA piercing”

Other than that I have a couple things to mention:

• END OF THE YEAR AWARDS - I wanted to remind people that the deadline for this year on images is December 14th (next Tuesday), and to ensure your experience is in as well… not that I'm expecting anyone to take out Uberkitty, but other than the top few slots there's still tons of competition. Prizes will be posted soon!
• BME, A PRINT MAGAZINE? - You haven't heard it here, but it is something that a majority of job applicants said BME should consider. So I've posed it as the current front cover poll. If I were to do it, it would subscription only (no newsstands) and be a collectable expansion on BME with fully unique content (ie. not just reprinted stuff).

First a picture of some of the tattooing that I had done yesterday; just some foreground touchup; making the landscape brighter, whitening the smoke around the souls, and so on.

I've decided not to write the funmail story I mentioned earlier. Basically Beckham's tattoo artist accused me of (and threatened me with a lawsuit for) publishing knockoffs of the work he'd done for Beckham. It wasn't true though — the piece I was being accused on was only similar in that it was the same subject matter, a male angel or an Icarus figure, rather than an actual copy.

So a general conceptual claim (ownership of the male angel concept) was being made, which I felt was utterly unreasonable so I told him he was a jackass, especially since he not only had copies of other people's designs on his page (Marvin the Martian, Tinkerbell, and so on), but that he'd actually had the gall to sign these pieces in tattoo ink as his own. So then he threatened to deal with me in person (oooh), and I told him he should apologize or I could play his game as well… So he apologized and I'm not going to publish the letters or article.

Anyway… As I'm sure you know, at a recent Rumsfeld “town hall” meeting in Kuwait, a soldier asked a rather direct question:

Q: Yes, Mr. Secretary. Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

SEC. RUMSFELD: I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I'm told that they are being — the Army is — I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.

Problem is, the companies actually making the armor say that there are no “production and capability” issues — they'd be happy to make more if the Army asked them to (more). To be really clear: Rumsfeld is (again) demonstrably lying and there is another reason for the troops not being fully armored. I'll tell you again what I said a few days ago about body armor: it increases injury rates, and thus the cost of running a war.

I believe Rumsfeld has made a cost-benefit analysis and has decided that the longer he can stall getting full armor to US troops, the better, as horrific and inhumane a scenario as that is. But let's be honest — we already know Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of them have zero issues with significant civilian casualties (let alone combat casualties) of the darker skinned sort if it suits their plans… do you really think they care about Americans dying if it puts a dollar in the right pocket?

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Code Update

The particularly astute may have noticed that there's an entry search link a couple paragraphs up. These links, if you're using FTP mode, assuming they're links to your own page, are now being converted into links to your FTP'd archive when working on your remote site, so non-members reading your remote site won't find themselves redirected to an “access required” page on IAM.