Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness

This styrofoam hammer will soon be replacing the old 2D hammer on the sidewalk sign for Roberts Hardware.

German and British scientists have discovered a fossilized ancestor of modern snakes that still has its four legs. The snake, named Tetrapodophis amplectus, lived during the Early Cretaceous, around 110 million years ago.

At the time, South America was united with Africa as part of a supercontinent known as Gondwana. The presence of the oldest definitive snake fossil on the ancient supercontinent suggests that snakes may originally have evolved there, and only became widespread much more recently.

The specimen is a juvenile and very small, measuring just 8 inches (20 cm) from head to toe, although it may have grown much larger. It lacks the long, laterally compressed tail typically found in aquatic animals, suggesting that snakes did not evolve from marine ancestors.

The front legs are very small, about 0.4 inches (1 cm) long, but have little elbows and wrists and hands that are just five millimeters in length.

The back legs are slightly longer and the feet are larger than the hands and could have been used to grasp its prey:

“It is generally accepted that snakes evolved from lizards at some point in the distant past. What scientists don’t know yet is when they evolved, why they evolved, and what type of lizard they evolved from,” said Dr Martill, first author of a paper published in the journal Science.

“This fossil answers some very important questions, for example it now seems clear to us that snakes evolved from burrowing lizards, not from marine lizards.”

Tetrapodophis amplectus would have lived on the bank of a salt lake, surrounded by succulent plants.

The snake would probably have lived on a diet of small amphibians and lizards, trying to avoid the dinosaurs and pterosaurs that lived there.

“Tetrapodophis amplectus is a perfect little snake, except it has these little arms and legs, and they have these strange long fingers and toes,” added co-author Dr Nick Longrich from the University of Bath, UK.

“The hands and feet are very specialized for grasping. So when snakes stopped walking and started slithering, the legs didn’t just become useless little vestiges – they started using them for something else. We’re not entirely sure what that would be, but they may have been used for grasping prey, or perhaps mates.”

Interestingly, the snake also has the remains of its last meal in its guts, including some fragments of bone. The prey was probably a salamander, showing that snakes were carnivorous much earlier in evolutionary history than previously believed.

“The preservation of the little snake is absolutely exquisite. The skeleton is fully articulated. Details of the bones are clearly visible and impressions of soft tissues such as scales and the trachea are preserved,” said German paleontologist Dr Helmut Tischlinger, co-author on the study.

If you had tuned into BBC Radio One on May 20, 1979 you would have heard David Bowie DJ his own two hour show, “Star Special,” playing his favorite records and jovially chatting up his audience.

Track listing

The Doors, “Love Street”
Iggy Pop, “TV Eye”
John Lennon, “Remember”
? & The Mysterians, “96 Tears”
Edward Elgar, “The Nursery Suite” (extract)
Danny Kaye, “Inchworm”
Philip Glass, “Trial Prison”
The Velvet Underground, “Sweet Jane”
Mars, “Helen Fordsdale”
Little Richard, “He’s My Star”
King Crimson, “21st Century Schizoid Man”
Talking Heads, “Warning Sign”
Jeff Beck, “Beck’s Bolero”
Ronnie Spector, “Try Some, Buy Some”
Marc Bolan, “20th Century Boy”
The Mekons, “Where Were You?”
Steve Forbert, “Big City Cat”
The Rolling Stones, “We Love You”
Roxy Music, “2HB”
Bruce Springsteen, “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City”
Stevie Wonder, “Fingertips”
Blondie, “Rip Her To Shreds”
Bob Seger, “Beautiful Loser”
David Bowie, “Boys Keep Swinging”
David Bowie, “Yassassin”
Talking Heads, “Book I Read”
Roxy Music, “For Your Pleasure”
King Curtis, “Something On Your Mind”
The Staple Singers, “Lies”

Via Wikipedia

News and photo via Hoodline
Bob Smith, the Robert in Roberts Hardware [family lore is that his immigrant German father didn’t know or understand English possessive grammar and hence there is no apostrophe] ran the family-owned Haight Street hardware store from 1960 until 1993.

During the 1960s he added things like flickering light boxes, strobe lights, Day-Glo paints, black lights, and Lava Lamps to serve the burgeoning new psychedelic market in the Haight. In those days you could see all the way to the back of the store across the 5′ shelves.
He hired local kids, mostly African American boys and gave them make-work tasks such as sweeping and the like. Those that worked he encouraged with more jobs and those who slacked off he let go, but only after explaining to them exactly why. Many of these now adult men, few who still live in the neighborhood, still stop by and ask after him. It will be sad to tell them the news.

In the early 1970s Bob weathered the neighborhood’s darkest days when the ‘hood was overrun with hard drugs and the accompanying crime. In the late 70s and early 80s the Haight was gradually coming back from those depths, largely due to many young gay men who saw these closed businesses as opportunities and opened boutiques, galleries, and cafés. The thriving business district we have today owes its rebirth to those men, many of whom were already infected with HIV and wouldn’t make it to the millennium.

He had long sold the house in the neighborhood and moved to the suburbs but kept the store alive to pass it to his sons Steve and Bruce who took over in 1993.
Both of them (and their sister) went to college but the boys discovered that they were much happier working in the hands-on environment they’d grown up with than working in an office.

They both became General Contractors and built the business that I have loved working for the last 17 years.
(The first week I worked there I came in and found my boss Steve mopping the bathroom floor. I knew then that I had found a place that I would like working)

Today on my tour I had a woman’s whose cousin was on Millionaire and was in the Hot Seat right before me!
She mentioned the question her cousin missed and I remembered it. The correct answer was “Hamburger University” and I was stunned that she missed it.

Over the last few weeks I have been creating an 8’x8′ (2.6mx2.6m) QR code mural on the 1200 block of Masonic Ave. next to where I live. Today I finished it and it works! The code will take you to a page on this blog where I have already loaded 200+ historical images of the Haight Ashbury with links to various other sites that have additional copyrighted images.

I generated the QR code at this site, a QR code generator that was a gift to the Internet community by Andreas Haerter and Andreas Wolf.

Here are the stages of the mural’s creation:

The metal wall I built to keep people from climbing the fence

Sanded and painted black

I’d done a collage here last year

Pristine work surface

Off white base coat

Only in SF are Wet Paint signs so multilingual

My technique for making chalk lines using magnets from a microwave

The QR (Quick Response) code, created from a QR generator site

The only single sheet of graph paper I could find is brown with ¼” squares

The transcribed code held up by my muse

I learned that the background doesn’t need to be white so I created this

I wanted something that was easily identifiable behind the code

The artist after adding the grid

The code against the background

Starting the grid

Excited by the work

I was eager to begin but it rained on two consecutive days off

Finally able to mark the squares to be painted black

Despite my double and triple checks I still made numerous mistakes in my marking

After two days, about 4 hours of paintying

3 days, about 7 hours

A last 2-3 hours. I was very nervous, I had no way of knowing whether it would scan before I finished

And if it didn’t I would have no way of figuring what was wrong.

Only when I was sure it would scan did I add this. I’ll replace it with an artist’s statement that explains how to get and use a QR scanner on a phone.
I will also be washing off or painting over the blue chalk lines and covering the surface with a few coats of urethane.

Only when I was sure it would scan did I add this. I’ll replace it with an artist’s statement that explains how to get and use a QR scanner on a phone.
I will also be washing off or painting over the blue chalk lines and covering the surface with a few coats of urethane.

So Donald Trump tweeted this image:

Notice what’s wrong? Let me enlarge the lower part to see if that helps:

Not enough?

How about viewing the original iStock photo of wehrmacht soldaten:

Of course they blamed it on an intern:

Thanks for the giggle GOP