I don’t usually go for the overly cute, but these two pandas made my day.

Nature doesn’t care about humans. Humans are dicks to each other. QED suffering.

A color film of London, circa 1927. (It’s the next best thing to time travel.)

Pictures of spice. Yes, it cries out for a Dune joke, but still very pretty.

Mouse logo fail. And how.

Leopard hanging out of car window. I don’t know about the driver, but the cat looks pretty cool with his mode of transport.

This, ladies and gets, is Wonder Woman. Accept no substitutes.

Make paper bows at home (lifehacker). This looks like fun.

Mamihlapinatapai

Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. (via Best of Wikipedia)

This has me in a contemplative (maybe maudlin) mood.

On 11/09/1989 I was 14, watching history happen on TV.? The Berlin wall was suddenly no more, and I remember thinking that the whole world was wide open. If the cold war (having gone on longer than I had then been alive) could possibly end, anything could happen. A few months later, Jesus Jones would come out with Right Here Right Now (This was before they turned it into a damn marketing jingle.). It’s one of the last times I can remember being truly hopeful about the state of the world, in the way that only an adolescent can be.

The 90′s did one hella number on my faith in the world. The wars in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf were waiting in the wings, though I didn’t know it at the time. My heart broke early that decade,and I’ve never again trusted that all will be right just because one bad leader is swept away. There are far too many others, waiting their turn.

20 years go by, and (as happens to every generation) my childhood has become history. I look back on that hopeful kid, and smile to myself.? I still (on my better days) have a measure of idealism, but the fresh-faced hope of youth melts irrevocably into the past. If we’re lucky, we catch a passing glimpse in memories.