Behold! Catherine's lovely new design for the site, which I stayed up waaaay too late last night implementing. There are a lot of pieces that still have to be done — archives, a different header, the about page, some fancy del.icio.us crap that Catherine asked for and I'm happy to oblige, plus who knows what else I forgot. But here we are. It's filled with XHTML goodness (although the entries' crappy, non-compliant HTML will usually prevent the page from validating). Plus actually well-written CSS (relatively speaking), some unnecessary Javascript, and Flickr integration. Woo!

Since parts of the design are still in flux I haven't yet applied the individual entry template, which means that as soon as you click on a comment or try to "read more" you'll be back at the old ugly blue site. I've got a few more things to wrap up before that goes away — plus, I probably ought to wait for a low-traffic time to do the rebuild, since we've already incurred the wrath of our host for taking more than our fair share of the CPU.

my favorite lede of the day, by far:

Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilised remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".

the article goes on to reveal these interesting finds:

Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.

"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

Vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said modern kangaroos look almost nothing like their ferocious forebears, which lived between 10 million and 20 million years ago.

The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh", Hand said.

The team also found prehistoric lungfish and large duck-like birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

awesome. via more patriotic than you, who's got a detailed illustration of the duck.

rob got linked on romenesko. cool!

jarvis cocker's new song is kind of good.

what's up with pulp, anyways? i had kind of assumed they'd just broken up since i haven't heard about them in so long, but their web site says they're "in a dormant state." they still remain the #1 band i want to see live in concert. i did kind of, when they played three songs to open for radiohead's secret 9:30 club show, which was, holy shit, eight years ago? and where i witnessed the unholy pitt-aniston alliance and freaked the fuck out. good times.

anyway, jarvis cocker somehow still remains the height of skeevy sexiness. just listen to "seductive barry" and say it ain't so.