Salon has a heart-rending feature on the ubiquitous, eternal plastic bag. These things last forever, and they're piling up so fast, they're choking us. Americans throw away 12 bmillion oil barrels' worth of plastic bags every year.
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Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. "It's an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look," says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which studies plastics in the marine environment. "Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there."...The problem with plastic bags isn't just where they end up, it's that they never seem to end. "All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces," says Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation, which has undertaken a Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. That means unless they've been incinerated -- a noxious proposition -- every plastic bag you've ever used in your entire life, including all those bags that the newspaper arrives in on your doorstep, even on cloudless days when there isn't a sliver of a chance of rain, still exists in some form, even fragmented bits, and will exist long after you're dead.
Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland is probably the single weirdest graphic novel I've ever enjoyed (there's weirder stuff out there, but it overshoots enjoyability). Talbot is a "Mackem" from the Sunderland region of England, and he is thoroughly steeped in the rich lore and history of the region, stretching all the way back to prehistory. He is also a giant, galluphing Alice in Wonderland nut (as am I), as well as an accomplished (near-legendary) comics creator. Alice in Sunderland is a skillful weaving-together of these disparate threads into a sprawling, meandering non-narrative about, well, Sunderland. And Alice. And Bryan Talbot.
Master steampunk maker Richard "
(HOAX -- see 
Video -- Happy 3rd Birthday, PCL Linkdump! 
Video -- "For the last several years, a Washington D.C. area local cable access station has run the hippest kids show on earth: Pancake Mountain." 
Dateline, Utah: "A widow and grandma spent the morning in jail, arrested for refusing to give a policeman her name when he tried writing her a ticket for failing to water her yard." 
The art of Disney animator Ward Kimball. 
Video -- National Geographic investigates coulrophobia: "an overwhelming fear of clowns." 
Chinese dentist will put your extracted teeth in an amber necklace charm. 
"A Chinese man has reportedly found flowers growing from a steel pipe in his vegetable garden.
Grandpa Ding told Sohu News: 'I was cleaning the pipes, then my hand touched something fluffy.'" 
Video -- Man sports a tail (sadly, not prehensile). 
Since its participation in the president's illegal wiretapping program came to light in late 2005, AT&T has desperately tried to avoid accountability.
Steel kegs are remarkably versatile industrial junk -- they make great flower tubs, steel drums, robot suits, and garden tables. The only problem is that they're a pain in the ass to cut open. Instructables user Fredan has come up with a $30 design for a "keg lathe" that makes the process fool-proof (or at least less idiot-prone!).
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