Do not try this at home. A small collection of DIY projects for future Darwin award nominees. more inside

The US obeyed an order from the Iraqi PM to withdraw from checkpoints around Sadr City in Iraq yesterday. Sadr City is controlled by the Mahdi Army militia run by radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The checkpoints were established last week as part of a search for a missing soldier, kidnapped by the militia and held in the city. The Iraqi PM told the US to scram, and our bold leaders acquiesced without a fight, abandoning one of our own. more inside

Curious George: Doggie Dilemma I live in a neighborhood of townhouses. There are no fences, and no one really has a yard, but there's a lot of common open space with walking trails going between and behind the buildings. I have several neighbors with dogs. Most of them are responsible dog owners, but one couple insists on letting their two large mutts run wild right beside my house. After what I thought was a reasonable request to keep their dogs on leashes, I continue to see the dogs run loose, and now I get piles of dog shit left on my lawn most mornings. more inside

CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Good for a brief chuckle. (Or corporate espionage.) via bb.

The Yes Men "have impersonated some of the world's most powerful criminals at conferences, on the web, and on television, in order to correct their identities." Yesterday, a federal housing official spoke to the attendees of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit. The topic of his speech was his department's mission to ensure affordable housing is available for those who need it. "This year, in New Orleans, I'm ashamed to say we have failed," he said. That should've been their first clue that the speech was a hoax. more inside

That only makes eleven (plus one mislaid) and not fourteen, unless wizards count differently to other people. But now please get on with the tale. Recently (sometime between May and July depending on who you ask) people started receiving spam messages that slipped by filters by containing random bits of prose from the works of JRR Tolkien. Dubbed "hobbit spam," these emails contained nothing else- no links, no images, no advertisements of any kind. more inside

Curious George- DIY 101 Does anyone have any tips for someone (me) with a budding interest in building stuff? more inside

Bush: God told me to go invade Iraq. I pass this link on without comment.

Donate $100 to Katrina victims, get a call from Brian Wilson.

Awesome. Also awesome. I used to think I was good at javascript. more inside

Fetal tissue heals burns. An experimental therapy that uses skin cells grown from an aborted fetus successfully healed severe burns in eight children, sparing them the need for skin grafts. Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of Bill Frist's head exploding.

Pay attention folks. In 2012, this guy will be the Republican candidate for president.

How to fuck a donkey.

Microsoft has a google-style map site too. The only difference is that in Bill's world, Apple doesn't exist. Dun dun dunnnnnn...

Don't they teach kids ethics anymore? When I went through school, they taught us a little something about ethics. Between Tom Delay Jr here and our own experience with moooshy I'm starting to wonder if this was the exception rather than the rule.

Download music from around the world at Smithsonian Global Sound. I hope I don't come off like a shill for the site. It's like iTunes only with cultural music from around the world. 99 cents a song. Get some free samples here. Search by geographic area, or by instrument (like conch shell, or sumpotan).

Weather and nature photos from weatherunderground.com. User submitted photos organized into categories and easily searchable. more inside

Curious George: iPodder Is there a way to use iPodder (or any other application) to automatically download mp3's, given an RSS feed of an ordinary mp3 blog? iPodder, as far as I can tell, will do this only if the blog entry is a podcast. I'm not sure what that means exactly, and after spending some time with google, I've decided that neither do most people on the internet. I hope some monkey is more enlightened than I.

Mom's Cancer. This comic tells the story of the author/artist and his family as they face his mother's illness. The comic had been taken offline at the request of the publisher who'll be printing it. It's back online for a limited time as it's been nominated for an Eisner award. (Sorry, couldn't find a page listing the 2005 nominees.)

Ben Stein invokes Godwin's Law- Godwin's Law, for the uninitiated, is the act of comparing people who disagree with you to Hitler and/or the Nazis, and is generally considered bad form, even on the internets (unless of course your opponents are literally participating in genocide). more inside