Big Sole Blog (BSB)

When I wrote The Cylons Cometh at BlogHer, I had not yet heard about the caravan of driverless vans (video below).Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometer) test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo's journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.One of the engineers in the MSNBC video talks about how

Yes, I did see Tricia Helfer, who played Caprica Six on Battlestar Galactica, in her guest role on Fox's Lie to Me, Season 3, Episode 4, "Double Blind." While she is a talented actress, I was more curious about character Cal Lightman's reference to the Monarch and Viceroy butterflies. So, I looked up how butterflies use mimicry to confuse predators. (Tim Roth plays Lightman)As explained at

Wills has also argued in the past that Obama is willing to buy a second term with the blood of young American soldiers.Historian and Pulitzer-prize-winning author Garry Wills says to Stephen Colbert that "of course" the Tea Party is racist (video below). Wills better watch his back. Remember when the NAACP called the Tea Party racist? One of its media henchmen hell bent on teaching the NAACP a

According to a new Newsweek poll, President Barack Obama's approval rating has jumped by six points, from 48 percent to 54 percent. His disapproval rate has dropped to 40 percent, "the lowest disapproval rating in a NEWSWEEK Poll since February 2010." These results do not mean that Democrats will win much next week, says the poll article, but some races may be closer than previously thought.The

The Virginia "Ginni" Thomas story last week about wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas calling Anita Hill almost 20 years later to ask for an apology had me feeling like we'd been hurled into Bizarro World. So, I needed a laugh. Thanks to Andy Borowitz, I got one. Blogging at New Yorker, Borowitz tells us "Three Things to Do When Clarence Thomas’s Wife Calls You." Number two begins, "

Related: What to do when Ginni Thomas calls youEmbedded above is video of Anita Hill in 1992 after the infamous Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The late Ed Bradley interviews her on CBS's 60 Minutes.I believed Anita Hill when she accused Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991. I watched the hearings as did much the rest of the country. It was the greatest show on Earth," pre-O.J

My dad told me yesterday that he heard Wal-Mart was going to stop building mega stores, to get away from big box monstrosities and try to look more like the "little guy." I thought that maybe he had confused the news, but he was fairly accurate in his report.Wal-mart will purue urban areas with smaller stores. That will be good for some communities that grocery stores have abandoned.And its

Right now on CNN, Joel Burns, an openly-gay council member in Fort Worth, TX, is being interviewed. His emotional appeal made Tuesday night, October 12, at a city council meeting has gone viral. It's posted below the CNN video here in its entirety and was aired earlier today on the network. Burns gave the speech in response to the rash of suicides resulting from bullying in general and

Why I keep paying dues to AuthorsDen is probably worth some reflection; however, until I do that I keep my own words on the bio page: "Life is a winding road of lessons and opportunities. Wear good shoes." Those words are working through my life more than ever right now since I'm in graduate school. About once a week I panic and ask myself, "Why are you doing this? You're too old for grad school

This FORA.TV video that includes Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook talking about defining the self online is old. I know it's old because Twitter's not there and the moderator makes MySpace sound like it's bigger than Facebook, but the video's discussion still may intrigue some. Zuckerberg stresses that on Facebook, people communicate as themselves rather than as personas.I suppose the video's being

The campaign to release the Scott Sisters of Mississippi is finally getting the mainstream media attention it deserves. As I wrote at BlogHer this summer, a judge sentenced the the two young women to double-life after they were convicted in 1994 for alleged involvement in a roadside robbery. They were given harsher sentences than the young men, teens who testified against them, and the case is

O.K., while it's inaccurate to say the American government infected black men and women with syphilis at Tuskegee (failure to treat is horrific enough), it is clearly accurate to say the U.S. "purposely infected" people in Guatemala with STDs in the 1940s. Shameful! And some of us are shocked to discover that some people of color don't trust the USA.The U.S.A. has apologized to the people of