I figured “link thump” sounded better than “link dump”, because eww.

Thursday again. Seems like only yesterday it was… Wednesday. (But a different one than actual yesterday).

May or may not have people coming over tonight. Getting a little tired of the runaround re a project my friends and I are trying to develop. I sure as hell do not want to invest my time, energy, creativity, and belief in another project that is just going to die with a whimper because people are flakes and there is nobody in charge to make sure the center holds and everything keeps moving forward.

But to heck with dark thoughts. Let’s share some awesome links instead!

Like this story that is making the rounds of not just the Internet but all the late night talks shows, showing it is truly a story with staying power.

It is the story of a dear sweet little old lady named Cecilia Gimenez who took it upon herself to restore a painting of Jesus in her church, and did not quite succeed.

Ecce homo ergo ick.

From left to right, the original painting (Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez), the deteriorated version that Cecelia Gimenez started with, and the “Seventies Tom Jones squished between two plates of glass” monstrosity that was left when she was done.

The “restored” version has become an overnight sensation, and ironically, tourist traffic to the small church in Spain where this picture hangs has never been higher. Everyone wants to see the famous ruined picture of Jesus.

After all, now it is unique. Terrible, but unique.

But from the perspectives of art and history, it is a tragedy. Cecilia claims that she did what she did with full permission from the priests of the church. They disagree.

I imagine she asked “if she could help restore it”, they figured she meant by donating (who would have thought an eighty year old woman with no art restoration skills would take a brush to it?), and they said “Yeah, sure you can help!”, and that was all the permission she needed.

Next up, this hilarious story of midirection and confusion from far off Iceland.

Picture a small tour bus on a tour of Iceland’s rugged and majestic coastline. They make a rest stop (all those crashing waves probably make people need to pee more often) and one tourist decides to get off the bus to freshen her makeup and change clothes.

The unintended result is that when she gets back on the bus, nobody recognizes her as being the same lady who has been on the tour with them all this time.

Thus, people start wondering. What happened to that other lady who was on the bus with us earlier? Concerns rise about the “missing woman”. After all, this is rough country, far from civilization. Could she have gotten lost, or gotten into trouble?

Pretty soon, a search party forms to go looking for this “missing woman”, which our friend, the lady who changed clothes at the rest stop, naively joins.

Thus, a woman ended up joining her own search party. About 50 people searched until the wee hours of the morning to find her, and she was one of them. They even were readying a helicopter to aid in the search.

Then, at around 3 am, they suddenly realized she was among them.

That… must have been quite the moment of shock and embarrassment. I can only imagine that whoever figured it out had to shout “Um…. I found her. ” and tell everyone else that they had been searching hard for someone who had never been lost in the first place.

Oh well, no real harm done. Consider it a drill. Next time, it could be the real thing.

Meanwhile, in India, justice for women looks like this.

Would you mess with these ladies?

They call themselves the gulabi gang, or Ping Gang, and they are a group of women who have banded together to fight abusive husbands, corrupt officials, and a society which offers women no protection from rape and abuse at the hands of men.

They started out as just five close friends, but now there are over 20,000 Ping Gang members, who wear their bright pink saris with pride and who brandish laathis – bamboo sticks of the same sort used by local police – as their symbols of power and defiance.

Like I said yesterday, mob justice is not the best justice, but it is far far better than no justice at all. The Pink Gang are vigilantes, and normally I do not approve of vigilantism outside of a fictional setting, but when official justice fails and fails badly enough, mob justice has to take its place.

And so I am a big fan of the Pink Gang. If India was not such a horrible place to be a woman, with all the nightmarish problems of rampant physical and sexual abuse of women that are endemic to the kind of moral wasteland that patriarchy inevitably creates, the Pink Gang would never have come into existence. There would be no need for it.

But in parts of India, women are still thought of as property, as less than men, as less than people. Couple that with terrible, terrible poverty, and you get a lot of angry men taking out their anger on women, and because the system is run by men for men and corrupt as hell to boot, the women have no recourse to law or justice except that which they make for themselves.

So go for it, Pink Gang ladies. Show the men that women can be a forced to be reckoned with. In a perfect world, it would never have had to come to this.

But in the real world, sometimes the only way to protect yourself from oppression is to band together with people in the same situation as you, and fight like hell.

Someone has to fight for those who cannot defend themselves.