Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

Photographer Delphine Fawundu-Buford is a smart, worldly woman, with a masters degree from NYU and solid commercial assignments. (Her picture of asha bandele and bandele’s daughter, Nisa, forms the cover of the author’s new book, Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story, right, for example.)

But she’s also quite youthful. So, as she’d not heard of it before, it was bracing to connect to her horror and outrage, in a recent post for her blog, And She Don’t Stop. There, she describes how, last year, she encountered an archival photograph, then, subsequently, what seems like the entire history of racist ephemera, above, depicting African-Americans, especially infants, as alligator chum.

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Before you lose one of ’em by looking too closely, feast your peepers on those shiny adamantium claws, and on this new advance, double-sided poster for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman, out May 1.

Some of you will recall my recent rave about the trailer for the upcoming movie, so, you can guess I’m convinced that, marketing-wise, 20th Century Fox / Marvel are doing everything right. From Movieposter.com, $20.

Fellas, sometimes words just aren’t enough, and with Valentine’s Day upon us, you may still be searching for just the right gift, expressing just the right sentiment.

LoveIsLame.com may be exactly what the doctor ordered. Their “Shit Bitch Bear” lets that very special, certain someone know how much they mean to you; that, in your opinion, verb tenses are fluid; and that, hey, you feel comfortable calling them a bitch. At $12.99, the fact that it’s only 6″ high may be the least of your problems.

Needless to say, I can only imagine the cataclysm that would ensue were I to bring this under my roof…and my wife is, indeed, fine.

Also available, right, in innocent polar white!

Gangsta Babies dolls proves it’s never too early to model crass materialism for your tykes. Plus, those Exorcist eyes should have the little ones completely captivated.

As the site says,

Comin straight outta crib-town! Each of these 10-inch hooddlers is A-Listing in the play ground. Rockin fabtastic clothing and so much baby bling that other rug rats can only catch their vapors.

“Pookie,” above, is

the green-eyed baller. But dont make him cranky… ya wouldnt like him when he’s cranky. Featuring a thermal shirt, t-shirt, dew rag, ring, and pimped out pacifier necklace.

Don’t hate the baby. Hate the crap.

Thirty-two-year-old Londoner Emily Cheetham, founder of handbag proprietor Cheet London, never studied design in school. As she says, on the excellent Handbag Designer 101 blog, “I worked in media & PR and studied Art History and Italian at university, so my skills are largely self-taught!”

She taught herself well, indeed: Her $175 Wallace Clutch, above, fashioned irresistibly in mint from lambs nappa, catches the eye with chroma, only to soothe it with classic styling and details. Perfect for the lady—or perhaps the First Lady!—in your life…wouldn’t you say?

Check out this lovely portrait of Kahleefawnyuh Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, taken after waking him from a twenty-year sleep.

In fact, it’s an entry in FreakingNews.com’s “Beards Pictures,” part of their ongoing series of advanced Photoshop pictures contests.

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As Moth said on Missbehave, “There is something really familiar about the new Pepsi logo,” left, “but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Me, either, but every time I see it, I wanna run for President.

I’m not clear on the cause of this optical effect, but talk about subliminal messaging.

That is, was it just me, or, when you look at this completely unretouched video still of Amy Goodman, above, host of news show Democracy Now, from yesterday’s broadcast, does she have a halo encircling her head?

By now, you’ve seen a billion pictures of Barack Obama. But if you’ve got a good eye or visual memory, you’ve already noticed something unusual, something familiar, about this one, above.

The image, by photographer Mannie Garcia, was, as he notes on his blog, taken of

then Democratic Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama, when he was with actor George Clooney at the Press Club in Washington, DC in April 2006. They talked about human rights and Darfur.

But the association with Clooney, or Darfur, is not what makes this image special, or unique. Or controversial.

This is:

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By employing astounding technique, colored pencil artist Don Simon deftly visualizes a mournful and demoralized world. It’s one where man’s increasing industrialization of the biosphere has not only pushed humans and animals into ultradirect contact and competition, but where the natural landscape has begun to frustratingly morph into the mechanized metalliscape. As a New Jersey native, where some of the nation’s most gorgeous terrain borders some of its most hideous, he knows of whence he speaks.

In “Industrial Forest 1,” above, for example, from his Unnaturalism I series, deer dart between and attempt to hide amidst a thicket of silver metal pipelines. (The grove’s absolute density becomes more clear in the triptych from which this image is taken.)

By mankind literally doing to the creation what Simon does figuratively, “We are forcing other species to deal with compromised, damaged or destroyed ecosystems,” says the artist.

Yeah, well, as U. of Texas prof Robert Jensen reminds us, quoting a friend, “Nature always bats last.”

[via Paper ‘n Stitch]