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Check out these hilarious Texas Homegrown Dope Seeds:

Planting instructions: Using a silver spoon, plant in a shallow hole. Protect from draft. Feed with loads of family and soft money.

Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the disaster at the Chornobyl’ nuclear power plant (Chernobyl is more properly transliterated from Ukrainian as Chornobyl’, in case you’re wondering about my spelling). CNN reports that “Ukraine opened a week of commemorations … as international radiation and health experts gathered for a three-day conference to discuss the lessons of the Chornobyl’ accident.”

NPR reports on efforts to contain the facility:

The ruined Chernobyl nuclear facility still contains some 200 tons of radioactive fuel. A “sarcophagus” – a steel and concrete shell built soon after the disaster to contain the radiation is increasingly unstable.

Engineers plan to slide an enormous Quonset hut-shaped cover over a breached reactor to keep more radiation from reaching the atmosphere.

Although the BBC reports that the “exclusion zone around the Chornobyl’ nuclear power station is teeming with life” despite the lingering high radiation levels, the human toll of the disaster continues to be disputed. NPR has a very moving story entitled Voices Of Chornobyl’: Survivors’ Stories, among several other features commemorating the disaster.

Slate magazine, in collaboration with Magnum Photos, has a somber Flash photo essay entitled Chornobyl’ Legacy that is narrated by photographer Paul Fusco. Der Spiegel has several photo galleries by Igor Kostin, which include some of the first pictures taken at the site as well as pictures documenting some of the horrific effects of the disaster.

The web site Chernobyl.info is an “international communications platform on the longterm consequences of the Chornobyl’ disaster” that allows different organizations to submit their information into a central repository, with the goal of coordinating research and aid efforts.

Graham Rournieu’s photo essay Coming Attractions: Improving the modern movie experience is pretty funny…

Check out this horribly cheesy video, starring none other than born-again Kirk Cameron, that contends that “a well-made banana” proves the existence of God. Amazing!

GasBuddy.com presents the USA National Gas Temperature Map, which plots average gas temperatures for the United States by county. Here in Maryland we don’t have the worst of it (yet), but we’re not far from it…

I’m The Decider, Koo-Koo-Kachoo (embedded MP3; beware…).

The BBC reports that “A California woman is going ahead with the construction of a house made of elements from a 747 Jumbo jet:”

Francie Rehwald wanted her house to look “feminine”, have curves and be eco-friendly. Her architect’s answer was: “Let’s use a 747!”

The wing of the Boeing jet will be used for the roof, its nose as a meditation temple while its trademark “bulge” will serve as a loft.

The plane’s parts were obtained from an aeroplane scrap yard in California.

I guess this takes recycling to a new extreme…

Stop The Madness is allegedly the only ‘80s music video to be sponsored by the White House. As you might have guessed, the video is a 1985 anti-drug spot spearheaded by Nancy Reagan and is eerily familiar to We Are The World in certain sections. With that in mind, you would expect lots of guest stars, and they are certainly there. They include: New Edition, Whitney Houston, LaToya Jackson, Toni Basil, Boogaloo Shrimp, Lyle Alzado, Kim Fields, David Hasselhoff, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Casey Kasem, Stacey Keach, David Keith, John Matuszak, Gerald McRaney, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, among others.

Too cheesy; here are YouTube and iFilm video links.

Inspired by The J-Walk Blog’s random Blogmeister images and thanks to A List Apart’s random image rotation script, I’ve added a “random image from The Mind Of Driko” to the right sidebar (and to the right in this post).

The image pool consists of all kinds of pop culture references that I’ve come across over the years, which is quite a lot, believe me. 🙂 I’ll continue to add images to the pool to make it slightly more diverse, as it’s a bit biased toward imagery from the ‘80s at the moment (go figure). Let me know what you think!

After over three years of saying that I’ve been working on my ‘80s homage, I finally finished the next portion, the seventh “pane.” The image above is a small version of that section; click on it to go see the entire image. This particular section is mostly ’80s personalities that have died recently, although you’ll see many of their colleagues from TV shows, movies, and musical groups along with them in the homage. See if you can name them all (a tall order, I know), and let me know what you think!