I'm Gina Smith

Elephant paints eerily accurate self-portrait with trunk.

After watching this, I am not sure I will be able to sleep now. Well, elephants do have huge brains. Click below.

This will blow your mind.

Will a new particle accelerator destroy the world? (New York Times)

You couldn't pay me to make this stuff up. Abstract from the New York Times today below, full article at this link.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

Man Pronounced Dead Feels "Pretty Good."

This wild story ran on the AP today ...

Four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant, Zach Dunlap says he feels "pretty good."

Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested. NBC News / AP Zach Dunlap, 21, was pronounced dead in November after an all-terrain vehicle accident, and his family approved having his organs harvested.

As his loved ones paid their last respects, Dunlap moved his food and hand. As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his recovery.

On Monday, he and his family were in New York, appearing on NBC's "Today." "I feel pretty good. but it's just hard ... just ain't got the patience," Dunlap told NBC. Dunlap, 21, of Frederick, said he has no recollection of the crash. "I remember a little bit that was about an hour before the accident happened. But then about six hours before that, I remember," he said. Dunlap said one thing he does remember is hearing the doctors pronounce him dead.

"I'm glad I couldn't get up and do what I wanted to do," he said. Asked if he would have wanted to get up and shake them and say he's alive, Dunlap responded: "Probably would have been a broken window that went out." His father, Doug, said he saw the results of the brain scan. "There was no activity at all, no blood flow at all." Zach's mother, Pam, said that when she discovered he was still alive, "That was the most miraculous feeling." "We had gone, like I said, from the lowest possible emotion that a parent could feel to the top of the mountains again," she said.

She said her son is doing "amazingly well," but still has problems with his memory as his brain heals from the traumatic injury. "It may take a year or more ... before he completely recovers," she said. "But that's OK. It doesn't matter how long it takes. We're just all so thankful and blessed that we have him here."

Dunlap now has the pocketknife that was scraped across his foot, causing the first reaction. "Just makes me thankful, makes me thankful that they didn't give up," he said. "Only the good die young, so I didn't go."

Says Wallace Stevens (on Easter)

"Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol.  It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood. " Wallace Stevens, 1916

30 reasons to be more like me (at least in one regard)

PETA has asked me to post on my blog 30 reasons to be a vegetarian -- because you can't really call yourself an environmentalist if you're chomping on your fellow animals.

My favorite reason is -- It is guaranteed that every time you eat chicken, there's a little poop in it. AGH!

This is interesting, enlightening and well worth viewing. Click here. Even if you don't have the slightest desire to be more like me. : )

The Red Army sings Sweet Home Alabama

with a little help from a Finn punk band. If you click on one video link today, this should be it. As one commenter said, you know you've won the cold war when ...

Thanks to Steve's joke list for this one.

Just click below to help end the annual baby seal slaughter.

The video at this link is awful and bloody and graphic. But if you can't stand baby seal carnage and want to add your name to a petition to end this annual kill-fest, you can skip the video. Adding your name to the petition takes all of four seconds.

Again, the link is here.

Save Shoreditch (narrated by Matt Johnson of The The)

An area of London is about to be bulldozed and replaced with huge towers. The bones of London will lie beneath.

Check this video out, narrated by none other than my favorite poet/lyricist ever, Matt Johnson.

My little boy lost his first tooth today.

A day that will live on in history. Today, a month to the day before his fifth birthday, the first bottom tooth exits. Enter the tooth fairy.

Says Sir Paul McCartney on being weird.

    “I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.” Sir Paul McCartney.