Blue Lantern Ganesh

(Via Love and Radiation.)

via snegopad.net

Environmentalist and conservation have been important to Americans for almost as long as there’s been an America. The goals are consistent, only the means have varied from decade to decade. Witness this “workfare” program proposed in 1926:

“Scientists believe that the monkey, in addition to his use by investigators in the fields of evolution and medicine, can be taught to do simple manual labor, and list him among the eligibles for continued existence”

Go to Paleo-Future to see the entire article from the 11/11/1926 Galveston Daily News.

The Library of Congress received 24 pages of Amazing Fantasy #15 from an anonymous donor last spring, and they’ve got some cool pictures of the artwork posted. The pages include the first appearance of Spider-Man, drawn by Steve Ditko.

Probably a good thing Marvel didn’t ever return the originals to Ditko, given the stories about him using returned original art as cutting boards.

Bonus Ditko worm:

They win just for their logo: Lucha Libre Gourmet Taco Shop, San Diego CA

Found at the home of all things unicorn, unicornwolflazersfuckyou.

Courtesy of ericsaysfuckyou.blogspot.com.

The story of Flxible is classic rust-belt stuff. Among other things, Flxible pioneered buses with a flexible midsection. If the bus you’re riding has a bellows section in the middle, thank (or blame) Flxible. They dropped the E to make it trademarkable. Friend of mine worked the assembly line in the 1980’s. Often wondered if he had anything to do with the cracks in the buses that were such a problem at the time.

The scat bus:

This post at Golden Age Comic Book Stories got me thinking about the late great Virgil Finlay. Here’s a smattering of his work. First up is a painting that you can actually buy if you’ve got a spare $11,500 sitting around. I think the title is “Sean Connery takes the brown acid”:

Here’s a couple of covers from Famous Fantastic Mysteries:

The B&W spaceman illustrations below are from the Golden Age Comic Book Stories article (click here to see the full set).

So the venerable G5 tower of power has been having some disk issues lately. Program hangs, system hangs, general weirdness. Did a little troubleshooting, and it went beyond what disk utility or even Disk Warrior could fix. Finally cracked the case so I could move the drive to a firewire enclosure for more testing, and found the retainer clip for the drive broken off, and the drive itself sticking out 1/2 an inch or so from the bay. Here are some pictures of the broken retainer after I removed the drive:

Here’s the drive bay area at the back of the machine. The add-on drive in bay B is just fine, and shows what the retainer should look like. The retainer above shows what you don’t want to see inside your machine. Here’s a closer shot of the retainers:

Did some searching around and didn’t find any other reports of this issue out there. My biggest question is whether it was a catastrophic failure (drive seizing up and busting the retainer in one violent blow), or a long term stress fracture from the drive vibrating under normal use? Anyone else seen this happen to their older G5 towers?