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The problem was onions.

Also, Tintin banned. Tintin?

September 26, 2012 at 4:57PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Things that were banned this week, if you're keeping track:

Insulting lingerie (if you're at work, don't click. Nothing NSFW, but c'mon. Lingerie.)

Things about to be banned: fried chicken in New York hospital cafeterias

The list grows ever longer. Good news, though: Tintin was unbanned quite quickly.

I hope that's an inelegant translation, because "Afro-phobic" is a stupid word. We have to stop equating ridicule or criticism with a "phobia." The images of Africans in the book are racist, if you want a more useful word. It's bone-in-the-nose stuff. If you want to remove them from a library because the artist used contemporary conceptions in his work, you remove history.

It's also preposterous to remove all Tintin because of the images in a few. Unless you want to make the argument that Thomson and Thompson were engaging in Syldaviaphobia by showing up in stereotypical ethnic garb:

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

SCIENCEIf your mind is need of boggling, this is boggleriffic: the most zoomed-in photograph in the history of mankind.

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Here's a tiny portion.

This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009). The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.
(NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Ma/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Those dots are galaxies. They are far, far away. So one of them has Darth Vader. Well, his ashes; if you remember, Star Wars took place "a long time ago," which means everyone in it was dead. Which is slightly depressing until you realize that includes Ewoks.

HISTORY Today's editorial cartoon from the 1900 Minneapolis Tribune album features that stand-by of the era, Thoughtful Uncle Sam. Hey, the Cuban situation is better now!

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Apparently he took to walking around the outskirts of town, followed by a small dog, when international tensions increased.

ART Graphic designer Saul Bass - trust me, you've seen his work, if only in movie credits - did a children's book, and Brain Pickings has some excerpts. It's been lost for a while, and now it's been found.

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

I suspect graphic designers may have loved it more than children.

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CRIME "'Since he ate the quarter pounder, McDonald's would not refund his money, sending Mr. Leon into a McFury,' said Sgt. Claudio Grandjean, Gresham Police spokesman." The problem was onions. Mugshot:

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Maybe it's just me, but I thought of this:

(The Minnesota Star Tribune)

I got the link from Fark. Now I'm going to the comments to see if anyone else thought the same thing.

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