In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points. [...]

Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because "Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument."

"In fact, it's the strongest thing that creationists have got going for them because their science is dismal," Ms. Scott said. "But they do have American culture on their side."

Culture

New York: In a word, perfection. Concerts of every imaginable type by the famous, nearly famous, and infamous. The stuff you see on the streets is better than the acts appearing on stages nearly anywhere else. World-class museums that set the standards. Art out the butthole, sometimes literally. Every movie opens there first, and no musical or stage show is considered a real show unless it makes it to Broadway. [...]

San Francisco: You can wear denim and Chucks to the opera. And I’m talking Levi’s 501s, not Earnest Sewns. Wicked made its debut here for “tweaking” before moving to Broadway to become last year’s most successful bore. This year, they’re trying the same thing with a musical version of Anne Rice’s Lestat, with music by Elton John. I’m not making this up. David Mamet lives somewhere around here. I think.

Authorities all but surrendered the streets of New Orleans to floodwaters, looting and other lawlessness Wednesday as the mayor called for a total evacuation and warned the death toll from Hurricane Katrina could reach into the thousands.

The frightening estimate came as desperation deepened in the city, with gunfire crackling sporadically and looters by the hundreds roaming the streets and ransacking tiny shops and big-box stores alike with seeming impunity.

Fun little quiz on eight grade math...can you pass? I got 9/10 (got tripped up on what I thought was a trick question but wasn't...erroneous! erroneous!).

For years, forecasters have warned of the nightmare flooding a big storm could bring to New Orleans, a bowl-shaped city bounded by the half-mile-wide Mississippi River and massive Lake Pontchartrain. As much as 10 feet below sea level in spots, the city is as the mercy of a network of levees, canals and pumps to keep dry.

Scientists predicted Katrina could easily overtake that levee system, swamping the city under a 30-feet cesspool of toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins that could leave more than 1 million people homeless.

"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said Sunday afternoon.

Yes, behold the butt funnel. There was a sign next to it which said, "This is truly amazing! See the things which you have never seen before!" You know, you're right, I have seen a lot of things, but never the inside of someone's rectum. And is that really such a bad thing? Is that something I need to see? I'm not sure, but I bought the funnel, so the option is always there. That's one of those things that, if you really wanted to look inside a girl's ass via the butt funnel, how do you bring that up? "Hey, baby, so, I was thinking... Uh... You know, I just love you so much, and I want to see all sides of you.. You know, from the inside out... so, you know, I was thinking it would be really romantic if I, you know, spread your asshole open with a plastic funnel and shined a flashlight inside your gaping rectum. Would you like that, baby?"

Well, don't go shutting it down.
Stewart: We're not going to shut it down - we don't even know what it is. I'm having enough trouble just getting porn.
Karlin: If people want to take the show in various forms, I'd say go. But when you're a part of something successful and meaningful, the rule book says don't try to analyze it too much or dissect it. You shouldn't say: "I really want to know what fans think. I really want to understand how people are digesting our show." Because that is one of those things that you truly have no control over. The one thing that you have control over is the content of the show. But how people are reacting to it, how it's being shared, how it's being discussed, all that other stuff, is absolutely beyond your ability to control.
Stewart: I'm surprised people don't have cables coming out of their asses, because that's going to be a new thing. You're just going to get it directly fed into you. I look at systems like the Internet as a convenience. I look at it as the same as cable or anything else. Everything is geared toward more individualized consumption. Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV.

BOO! This fall’s sweetest – and scariest – benefit song is DO THEY KNOW IT’S HALLOWE’EN. This single features a star-studded ensemble known as the NORTH AMERICAN HALLOWEEN PREVENTION INITIATIVE. Both a trick and a treat, this song is a satire - as well as a charity-benefit song with all proceeds being donated to UNICEF.

An epic journey into the pulsating heart of fear, this song is a call-to-arms featuring:
Beck
Sum 41
The Arcade Fire
Sonic Youth
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Sloan
Peaches
Feist
Devendra Banhart
Wolf Parade
Postal Service
Buck 65
Comedian David Cross
Sex Pistols’ founder Malcolm McLaren
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
60s soul legend Gino Washington
Psychedelic singer Roky Erickson
Los Angeles 70s group Sparks
Inuit throat singer, Tagaq (a frequent collaborator with Björk)
AND MANY MORE!

RELEASE DATE: OCT. 11 2005 (IN ST0RES)

FORMAT: CD SINGLE and VINYL 12"

AVAILABLE DIGITALLY FROM ALL DSPs: OCT. 4 2005

Robert A. Moog, 71, who invented the Moog electronic synthesizer, a keyboard that became central to rock and electronica bands of the 1960s and 1970s, died of brain tumor Aug. 21 at his home in Asheville, N.C.

Measuring a monstrous 102 x 66 x 20mm this 20GB festering mess has a bigger footprint than a 20GB colour iPod and is fatter than the already portly 60GB edition. At eight hours, the battery life is hysterically and equates with where the industry was four years ago. Format support is rubbish, playing only MP3 and DRM protected WMA files, while Jpegs, bitmaps and gifs can be shown on the 2in screen, but why someone would want to frame their holiday snaps with something so horribly brick-like is solely a question for their councillor to guess.

The critically-acclaimed sketch comedy group Upright Citizens Brigade is bringing its signature improvised sketch comedy show, "ASSSSCAT: Improv," to Bravo this fall. The fully improvised one-hour special stars the Upright Citizens Brigade: Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh.

Special guest performers include Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Horatio Sanz and Late Night with Conan O'Brien's Kevin Dorff and Andy Richter.

Warner Music CEO calls for iPod taxes, levies -- twirls moustache and cackles, clatters away on tiny, ebony hooves

Edgar Bronfman, Jr, the Chairman and CEO of Warner Music, gave a speech about how the future of music distribution will be all DRMed, how DRM makes technology companies "innovate" by producing technology to record executives' specifications, and how great it was that the Canadian government was considering a tax on iPods. What a dipstick.

An unusual and noisy mystery has people in a small town north of Middletown on edge, worried and asking questions, News 5’s Brian Hamrick reported.Liberty, Ohio, is a quiet little community, except for one thing -- the scream.Jamie Young told Hamrick she heard it while she and her husband were walking one evening.“It scared me. I didn’t want to finish my walk,” Young said.

Sony was hanging out with Mike and they were talking about what it would be like to make up a new brand for Sony’s HDTV line. Mike called Larry and Paul and they came over with some weed and while they were smoking up when suddenly everybody was like “Where’s Sony?” And it turns out that Sony got up on the roof somehow, probably though the window in Mike’s room, and was on the roof yelling “BRAVIA! BRAVIA!” and somebody, probably Paul, asked what Sony was talking about. It turns out that Mike and Sony took some acid and somehow Mike said “Best Resolution Audio Video Integrated Architecture,” like totally out of the blue, and Sony took that as a sign that it could fly. I think Sony needs to go into rehab.

"I’m not one for making threats. So please excuse the awkwardness of this letter."

"If working for eight different employers in 14 months doesn’t illustrate my versatility well, frankly, I don’t know what else to say."

"I never thought it would come to this. Me, asking someone like you for a job."

"Clearly if I had something other than deli wrapping paper to write this on I would have used it so don’t even start."

We are willing to pay any individual *$250,000 if they can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

You may submit entries here. [...]

* Prize to be awarded with Intelligently Designed currency; void where prohibited by logic.

Challenge Grant Update: Recently converted Pastafarians are adding matching reward funds to the Boing Boing Intelligent Design Challenge. Jason Kottke of kottke.org (Link) and Sean Bonner of metblogs (Link) have each offered an additional $250,000. We've been flooded with still more donations, and have decided to cap the purse at $1 million -- in part because the number contains a lot of pretty, round zeroes that resemble holy meatballs. But also because many of you offered sums payable in "whisky and wenches," or "ho's 'n' blow," neither of which really count. Thanks all the same.

The President explains his Social Security Reform Proposal

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE:“I don't really understand. How is it the new plan is going to fix the problem?”

PRESIDENT BUSH: "Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers.For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table.Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases.There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered.And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed to wage increases.There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."

West says hip-hop was always about "speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers, but everyone in hip-hop discriminates against gay people." He adds that in slang, gay is "the opposite, the exact opposite word of hip-hop."

Kanye's message: "Not just hip-hop, but America just discriminates. And I wanna just, to come on TV and just tell my rappers, just tell my friends, 'Yo, stop it.'"

On Saturday, the current President Bush was pressed about how he could be taking five weeks to ride bikes and nap and fish and clear brush even though his occupation of Iraq had become a fiasco. "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life," W. said, "to keep a balanced life."

Pressed about how he could ride his bike while refusing to see a grieving mom of a dead soldier who's camped outside his ranch, he added: "So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so."

Ah, the insensitivity of reporters who ask the President Bushes how they can expect to deal with Middle East fighting while they're off fishing.

Suddenly Google local (and maps, and video, and so on) makes so much more sense—Business 2.0 reports that they’ve learned from “telecom insiders” that Google is hard at work on a nation-wide high-capacity data network, buying up unused fiber lines and cheap backbone access to really flesh out their capacity.

The movie stars Johnny Knoxville, from "Jackass," Seann William Scott, from "American Wedding," and Jessica Simpson, from Mars. Judging by her recent conversation on TV with Dean Richards, Simpson is so remarkably uninformed that she should sue the public schools of Abilene, Texas, or maybe they should sue her. On the day he won his seventh Tour de France, not many people could say, as she did, that they had no idea who Lance Armstrong was.

A new treatment strategy has shown promise in helping to transform HIV into a curable infection. Preliminary research published this week in The Lancet medical journal outlines how scientists used an anti-convulsant drug to awaken dormant HIV hiding in the body, where it is temporarily invisible but still dangerous.

HIV infection is incurable because current drugs only work when the virus is multiplying, which occurs only when it is in an active cell. However, HIV sometimes infects dormant cells, and when it does, it becomes dormant itself. [...]

Over the last few years, a handful of drugs have been shown to decrease the size of the dormant HIV pool, but they were subsequently abandoned because their effect was either too weak or the side effects too toxic.

The latest drug, valproic acid, shows more promise, said Dr. Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Institute for Virology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco.

"It's a first baby step, showing that maybe the use of (this type of drug) -- far more likely in combination with one or two other agents -- might be a viable approach for tackling this latency problem," said Greene, who was not involved with the research but is conducting similar studies.

Andrew, who's nom de mic is Soce the Elemental Wizard, raps about Bar Mitzvahs as well as cock-sucking. He blends hip-hop, reggae and classic Yiddish klezmer melodies. (His musical roots, by the way, are very traditional in the Jewish sense in that he is trained on both the piano and the violin.) One delightful example of this new musical manifestation of the gay Jewish ghetto is the name that was given to a Brooklyn Academy of Music Passover concert at which Andrew performed: Seder-Matzochism.

ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings died today at his home in New York City. He was 67. On April 5, Jennings announced he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

He is survived by his wife, Kayce Freed, his two children, Elizabeth, 25, and Christopher, 23, and his sister, Sarah Jennings.

"Peter died with his family around him, without pain and in peace. He knew he'd lived a good life," his wife and children said in a statement.

[A]dvertising, no matter how clever, cannot save you. Take online pet-supply store Pets.com. Its talking sock puppet mascot became so popular that it appeared in a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercial and as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. But as cute--or possibly annoying--as the sock puppet was, Pets.com was never able to give pet owners a compelling reason to buy supplies online. After they ordered kitty litter, a customer had to wait a few days to actually get it. And let's face it, when you need kitty litter, you need kitty litter. Moreover, because the company had to undercharge for shipping costs to attract customers, it actually lost money on most of the items it sold.

Unlike the other flops listed here, Kibu.com, an online community for teenage girls, didn't wait till the very end to wave the white flag. In fact, at the time of its October 2000 closing, the company had not run out of the $22 million it raised. And on a more bizarre note, the end came only 46 days after a flashy San Francisco launch party. Though Kibu had started to attract traffic from its target demographic (incidentally one of the fastest-growing segments of Web users), company officials said they decided to shut down because "Kibu's timing in financial markets could not have been worse." Kibu was backed by several Silicon Valley bigwigs, and they sent a strong message about the financial prospects of other dot-coms by bailing on Kibu so soon.

For every good dot-com idea, there are a handful of really terrible ideas. Flooz.com was a perfect example of a "what the heck were they thinking?" business. Pushed by Jumping Jack Flash star and perennial Hollywood Squares center square Whoopi Goldberg, Flooz was meant to be online currency that would serve as an alternative to credit cards.

When Apple gets things right, it's spectacular (think iPod), but when the company messes up, it's a hoot. The first popular pen-based PDA, the Apple Newton, was big, expensive, and too smart for its britches. Early models tried to interpret handwriting with often amusing results, making words out of users' scrawls that often combined into surreal "Newton Poetry." We miss the Newton because what it thought we meant was often far more interesting than what we were really trying to say.

Our recommendation: record your prized LPs to digital files while you still have a working record player.

Defecation,	by Betsy Ross
	by entire family on stage in unison
	by family dog on family
	by father into wife’s mouth
	by father on dead daughter
	by father on stage
	by man into woman’s vagina
	by mother and father on stage, with children frolicing in result
	by mother into metal bucket
	by mother into son’s mouth

Besides being, um, made in Israel, it displays in English or Hebrew, toggles between Hebrew and Gregorian calendars at sunset, and alerts you when it’s time to recite the Shema, light candles on Erev Shabbat, and other important events...

Soldier: What the f*** are you doing?
Banksy: You'll have to wait until it's finished.
Soldier (to colleagues): Safety's off

“Joan here had a worm living inside her leg,” I said, and Maw Hamrick threw a sheet of wrapping paper into the fire, saying, “Oh, I wouldn’t call that living.”

Coca-Cola have recently comissioned five talented young design groups from five continents to rethink their packaging with an eye towards hip urban flair, including The Designers Republic (U.K.), Lobo (Brazil), MK12 (U.S.A.), Rex & Tennant McKay (South Africa) and Caviar (Japan).

The project, named "M5," will serve as a visual rebranding aimed at discerningly creative consumers. Likely a limited-edition (and highly collectable) run, the bottles are currently moving from concept to reality. Expect a full site launch soon, along with a cross-promotional marketing campaign that incorporates new music from The Flaming Lips, Guided by Voices, Fischerspooner, Citizen Bird and Towa Tei.

Mixset recorded at Ourdisco Club Jul 29, 05. Trash says: Justice are "Two handsome young parisians are behind dance music's most exciting propect in ages. comparisions with daft punk have been made, mainly because they share the same manager, the legendary Pedro Winter". Get it now.

The world's second- and third-biggest sports goods companies said Wednesday Adidas would buy the outstanding shares of Reebok for $59 per share in cash, a 34 percent premium to Reebok's closing share price Tuesday. [...]

Nike holds an estimated 36 percent share of the U.S. market, followed by Reebok at 12.2 percent and Adidas at 8.9 percent, according to John Horan, publisher of industry newsletter Sporting Goods Intelligence. [...]

"The deal makes sense to us at first pass given Adidas' stated goal of increasing market share in the U.S. and its rivalry with Nike," Prudential analyst Lizabeth Dunn wrote in a research note. "On the margin this looks like bad news for Nike, which has dominant share in major retail accounts." [...]

Both boards agreed to the takeover, which will create a company with combined annual sales of some $11.1 billion. Nike's sales in its 2004/05 business year to May were $13.7 billion.

Reebok shares surged 32 percent to $58 on Instinet ahead of the 1330 GMT New York open, while Adidas was up 5.7 percent at 156 euros in much higher volumes than usual by 1153 GMT after it painted a bright outlook for the merged firm in a conference call.