The House of Substance

I Like to Post Disgusting Things

2012-01-28T21:22:00.001-08:00

Stolen from a fairly stupid item here. Note: Newt is not much of a historian.

You Are Being Manipulated

2012-01-27T17:37:00.000-08:00

You’re being manipulated. A well respected, highly influential news source has cast aside all journalistic integrity to shill for the liberal, GOP establishment candidate in this presidential race.

The New York Times, you say? MSNBC? The Washington Post? No. We all gave up on those “progressive” rags a long time ago.

OMG, the suspense is AGONIZING! Who is it?

Regrettably, the latest media outlet to assume a decidedly yellow hue during this heated primary cycle is the Drudge Report. It pains me to even write this. Drudge has always been both my first and last internet news stops of the day.

That's right, NOW YOU KNOW MATT DRUDGE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT THE TRUTH!

Ahem, Pinko…

2012-01-26T20:07:00.000-08:00

Okay, you can drag this down to the hat and the mic...and push play.

Snail's Pace Reading

2012-01-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

Various interruptions in the schedule of life have meant that I am still barely into Debt - HA! HA! - but it's still a lot of fun.

This makes me think that The House of Substance should develop some form of currency, perhaps the Groatsie. It's a Canadian tradition after all.

Methods of debt-cancellation dealt with below.

Theories

2012-01-25T09:56:00.001-08:00

This is gonna bug me:

Nancy Pelosi told CNN last night that Newt Gingrich would definitely not become president, whether he was the GOP nominee or not.

“He’s not going to be president of the United States,” Pelosi said. “That’s not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it. It isn’t going to happen.”

Asked why she was so certain by CNN host John King, Pelosi said, “There’s something I know,” but did not elaborate on what she was referring to.

What could it be?

Orders

2012-01-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

Me: ♫ Life's a happy song, when there's someone by your side to sing along ♩
The Lovely Daughter: Stop it!
M: I can't stop it. I've got it in my head.
TLD: You put something else in your head RIGHT NOW.

Things You Can and Can't Do

2012-01-24T11:20:00.000-08:00

Apple is being jerky again:

Apple's end user license agreement for the iBooks Author app has generated extensive controversy among authors and publishers. Namely, the agreement restricts paid distribution of "works" created with the software to the iBookstore only. Technical limitations may make the restriction a moot point for the time being, as only Apple's own iBooks apps can even read the files generated by iBooks Author. But forcing users to sell content through the iBookstore, governed by a separate contract with its own terms, might not survive an antitrust challenge in court if it were to come up.

A point:

But the control issue is mooted by the fact that only iBooks 2 on the iPad can even read the files generated by iBooks Author. As it currently stands, iBooks Author can only generate an "iBook," not any sort of standards-based e-book. While the format largely relies on the ePub 2 standard for text and images, the interactivity and advanced layout capabilities are added via proprietary extensions that only iBooks can interpret,. And, for now, iBooks made with iBooks Author can only be "experienced" on an iPad—we confirmed that trying to open such iBooks files on an iPhone only generates an error message.

That might be true for now, but I don't know many useful file-types that didn't make a jump to another machine somehow.

Designer Babies

2012-01-23T17:01:00.000-08:00

Gee the baby from that other thing looks great in Sketchup. Unfortunately exporting it from Sketchup again makes it not like images as textures. Hmm.

Baby initially made by playing with sliders in Daz 3D, which is also free, but hobbled like Sketchup. The Daz 3D business model is to sell you some basic tools, then keep trying to sell you more 3D files to populate your animated universe because making that shit is still an enormous pain in the ass.

The Bizarro Voter

2012-01-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Terence P. Jeffrey gets to the heart of the matter:

Newt Gingrich routed Mitt Romney in South Carolina because he routed the media first. A Public Policy Polling survey of likely South Carolina primary voters completed on Friday revealed that 77 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of the media. Among the most conservative South Carolina primary voters, fully 89 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the media. The same poll showed Gingrich beating Romney in the primary, 37 percent to 28 percent — fairly close to the actual outcome.

Conservatives not only resent the liberal media for trying to pick the Republican nominee (n.b. the media prefer Romney) but they also resent Republican politicians who, once elected, spend their careers appeasing the media while abandoning conservative principles (n.b. the supine leadership of the Republican party in the House of Representatives). Conservatives want a president whose attitude toward the media matches the attitude Gingrich has shown in recent debates. A president with that kind of attitude, they hope, might actually govern as a conservative.

It's not really about the candidates, it's about sticking it to those jerks in the media, who promote some bizarre world in which rich people have lots of power and fuck anyone they like AND NO REAL AMERICAN WANTS THAT WORLD. Vote Newt!

Important Lab Work

2012-01-21T23:34:00.000-08:00

Take note: babies do not much like the scramble suit, but the more you shake them the less they complain.

Lazy Blogging

2012-01-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

This combination of excuse and slur is hard to beat.

Hmm, Large File

2012-01-20T22:26:00.000-08:00

For this.

Responsibilities

2012-01-19T21:02:00.000-08:00

Oh WELL DONE. Someone decided to leave the autocrank running on the chip machine and it's raining potatoes.

YOU clean the floor. Not me.

All I have to say is

Also:

These are requests. It's as plain as day.

You people BEG for it.

Regrets

2012-01-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays I gave some of my dexedrine to a relative.

Thinking back about what I have done, I feel I was wrong not to charge her so that I could say I sold drugs to my little sister.

Competition for the Lord of the Wasteland

2012-01-17T16:58:00.000-08:00

"Governor of the Valley of Propellants."

Infotainment

2012-01-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

Belle Waring:

Oi, this is so dumb and irritating that I pretty seriously considered not writing about it at all, in part because I worry the comments thread will develop a fetor of glib ev-psych nonsense. Uplift the human race, people, and surprise me with your intelligent thoughtfulness and concern for the feelings of other commenters. Who, I would like you to note, are actual human beings. Ya Rly!
Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this.

She then goes on to destroy said article in an entertaining way. Naturally there follows glib ev-psych nonsense of positively Jenniferian horror in comments:

First, we’re going to import the concept of a “gift” into some bit of spider-behavior. Does this make any sense? Who knows! But why stop to think?

OK —stop to think—of course it makes sense. The food ‘gift’ (or resource, or whatever the hell you want to call it) has value (or rather the female expects it to). It is costly for the male to provide (he has to find it and wrap it and can’t eat it himself). The female—if she discovers she’s been tricked and there’s no food in the package—sends the male packing. If this is not an exchange of food-for-sex, then just what the hell would you call it?

Then, we’re going to reapply what we seem to have already established as spidery “gift-giving behavior” to “explain resource-exchanges!” in human sexual relations

No, we’re not. What we’re saying is that males accumulating resources of some sort (food, territory, a finely constructed nest) to attract females is seen in various species. We cannot extrapolate this to humans in any simpleminded way (humans are too complex and too weird in assorted ways for that), but this is the most common pattern, and it is one that’s not exactly unheard of in humans, isn’t it?

That obviously doesn’t imply that resources-for-sex all there is to human mating (and that if you understand spider sex then you understand human sex), but the idea that it’s purely coincidental that ‘males providing resources to females they hope to mate with’ is the most common pattern both across species and human cultures seems…pretty far-fetched, no?

How could he have forgotten about Spider-Man?

All of the foregoing, entertaining as it is, I reproduce in order to heap praise on this by Jenna Moran:

Another example from the natural world is trees and the wind. Often when a tree wants to mate with the wind it will expend considerable biological resources to generate a dead leaf “gift” which it detaches to swirl in the wind. (The opportunity cost is mostly genetic, since a single modern tree has very limited control over how fast its leaves die, but over time their mating behavior with the wind has selected more for leaves that die more quickly than they otherwise would. Note that those leaves, if they did not fall off to allow the wind to blow them around, would have helped the tree consume energy from its secondary polygamous association with the sun; blowing dead leaves around, which doesn’t actually add much directly to the wind’s survival prospects, can be looked at as a signaling behavior where the wind requires the tree to make a biological commitment to it—-”if you liked it you should have put dead leaves on it,” as it were—-in order to secure a relationship and demonstrate a certain baseline health and strength.) Afterwards, the wind or the wind’s descendants will carry the tree’s pollen or seeds this way and that—-it’s like those male spiders that will carry around the female spiders’ offspring on their back to impress potential future mates, or like a woman carrying around a hunter’s credit card on the savannah. Interestingly, though, when trees are not looking you will often see the wind carrying around the gifts of dozens of trees, blowing them about in a circle to decide which trees to have further pollen-wind-sex with in the spring. I think you can probably extrapolate this basic behavior to polygamous and monogamous relationships throughout the animal, vegetable, and elemental kingdoms.

There is a follow-up post entitled "Dear Guys Who Would Like to Make Stuff up About Sexual Relations a priori on the Basis of, Like, Spiders or Something" which is of course worth reading.

By all means explore the hot car-on-spider hentai possibilities below:

ORAL-SEX-ENABLING UPDATE!

New Forms of Abuse

2012-01-16T18:12:00.001-08:00

Via an aside in a comment at Crooked Timber, this paragraph about a building:

[Antoine] Predock's design philosophy is very concerned with how the structure interacts with its surroundings. He has called his style "abstract landscape"; thus he blends the structure in with the surrounding landscape. The building also interacts with the people who use it. It was supposedly designed on purpose to be confusing. Visitors are often forced to talk to someone to find out how to get to where they need to go. Doorways that you need to pass through will sometimes be locked, forcing you to find a new way. The doors that get locked rotate every so often, further confusing the situation. The idea was to force human interaction because it houses the social sciences. The building also has a number of Emergency Buttons, colloquially referred to as "Panic Buttons" located throughout.

That amused me greatly, but the Wikipedia informs me that the architect is also responsible for the still-unfinished Canadian Museum for Human Rights which, when I was in Winnipeg, struck me as a notably scary erection. Will it, in fact, be torture to enter this museum?

People of Pallor

2012-01-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

Over here we have a discussion of an article featuring the usual cranky white man complaining about Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

From the article itself:

The man who campaigned on the theme that there was no "white America" or "black America" has used his powers as President to practice identity politics on a scale never before seen in America. Barack Obama has overtly chosen top officials on the basis of their skin color and not on the content of their character. Moreover, he has enacted policies that overtly favor "people of color" over "people of pallor" regardless of the merits of the individuals impacted by his programs.

I am gonna be using "people of pallor" for a long long time.

Culture

2012-01-15T22:40:00.001-08:00

Apparently:

Ulfuls (ウルフルズ Urufuruzu^?) is a Japanese rock band from Osaka. The band name Ulfuls is derived from a misreading of the word "soulful," found on the cover of one of the band members' favorite records.

Misread, you say?

Decay Spreads Over the Tottering Kiddies

2012-01-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

The Bastard had a post on Cthulhu-related program activities. As you may know, The Lovely Daughter likes funny words and therefore the Cthulhu mythos cracks her up.

For instance:

Undeniable laffs. But it's not new to her: she's been through the bookshelves and pored over this with its Cthulhu section, which is her style as she likes lists of things more than stories. Not that there isn't some terror involved; over the last year she's been talking about horror stories and bought a version of Frankenstein. So over Christmas we fiddled with a Cthulhu game and this morning after I told her about reading The Call of Cthulhu she wanted to look up more stuff and we found this:

His voice is wiggly enough to convince me this is authentic folk music, gosh darn it, and the "noggin" rhyme is good.

A note to parents: Shub-Niggurath might be a funny-looking name but it is not funny-sounding when uttered out of the blue among people who don't know what you're talking about.

Geez, that Metallica thingie could have used a little Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn so here it is again for remix purposes:

SOMEWHAT RELATED UPDATE:

Via an unlinkable comment from BigHank53 at alicublog:

In her house at Galt's Gulch dead Ayn Rand waits dreaming.

A Song I Like

2012-01-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

There are some lyrics here. It's totally politically correct, pinkos!

CHINESE SLAVE LABOUR SCANDAL!

2012-01-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

Communist bastards!

The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show. The great majority of those contracts are with other federal agencies for services as diverse as laundry, construction, data conversion and manufacture of emergency equipment.

But the program also markets itself to businesses under a different name, Unicor, providing commercial market and product-related services. Unicor made about $10 million from "other agencies and customers" in the first six months of fiscal year 2011 (the most recent period for which official figures are available), according to an msnbc.com analysis of its sales records.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don't break down which companies they do business with. But Unicor said inmates provide private call center service, including data review and sales lead generation, for "some of the top companies in America" under a federal mandate to help companies repatriate jobs they have outsourced overseas.

In a fact sheet, Unicor asserts that prisoners in the program are less likely to re-offend and are better trained for full-time work upon release. All revenue goes back into the program, which "operates at no cost to the taxpayer," it says.

The idea has filtered down to some of the states, among them Georgia, Arizona and New York.

Folk Phone Music

2012-01-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

Via Brendan we have been listening to Music From Saharan Cell Phones which is good stuff. Download volumes one and two at the link; volume one consists of two half-hour "sides" as grandpa used to call them.

Oh, and gmail sucks too now.

Just

2012-01-12T21:37:00.000-08:00

WW

A BETTER VERSION:

Sooper Sekrit Info

2012-01-11T15:14:00.000-08:00

The government here has various programs regarding immigration and who they want to come to the country. One of those programs is for skilled workers. My Google-something-for-a-minute-and-claim-it's-a-comprehensive-search diligence having been completed, here's a list of professions being targeted that doesn't seem to appear on the government's immigration site:

These all may change of course - this list comes prior to a lot of potential changes and it's 2012 and 2011 was SO LONG AGO - but it interests me to see what the government thinks we need. My own impression was that we were somewhat snootier and imported lots of experts just to fuck them on the labour market, but what's on the list isn't especially egghead-oriented. (While I feel we are blessed in Vancouver, I take no issue whatsoever with the importation of talented foreign cooks and chefs.) Here's a very boring evaluation of the program so far.

Looking for work?

A New Boss

2012-01-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

I ordinarily read nothing by Glenn Greenwald. Nevertheless, let us let him be mean because meanness is called for:

Yesterday, the White House announced Daley’s departure — he will now co-chair Obama’s re-election campaign, which basically means raising huge amounts of money from his Wall Street friends — and unveiled his replacement as Chief of Staff: Jacob Lew. In 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup. Here is what Lew was doing in 2008 at the time the financial crisis exploded, as detailed by an excellent Huffington Post report from last year:

[Lew] oversaw a Citigroup unit that profited off the housing collapse and financial crisis by investing in a hedge fund king who correctly predicted the eventual subprime meltdown and now finds himself involved in the center of the U.S. government’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs. . . .

[I]t is his few years at Citi — in particular the one year he spent at its then-$54 billion proprietary trading, hedge fund and private equity unit — that’s likely to raise the most eyebrows in the coming weeks as Lew faces a Senate confirmation hearing.

Especially his unit’s investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse — a reality suffered by millions of American homeowners.

In particular, the Citigroup fund run by Lew, Citi’s Alternative Investments, invested heavily in the hedge fund of John Paulson, “who made billions off the deterioration of the housing industry by making bearish bets on securities tied to home mortgages — particularly subprime home mortgages.” One of Paulson’s largest bets at the time involved Goldman Sachs, which the SEC has now charged with “defrauding investors by creating and selling exotic securities tied to subprime home mortgages in 2007 without disclosing that they were handpicked by a hedge fund [Paulson] that was betting on them to fail.”

Obviously there's more at the link because it's Glenn Greenwald but also because These Financial Instruments Are So Darned Complicated That Only Geniuses Can ~~rip you off with~~ understand them.

I search and search for The Whom but I can't find them to end this post. Maybe this will do:

These Aren't the Jokes We're Looking For

2012-01-09T17:27:00.000-08:00

Reliable bonehead Christian Toto:

The only thing more painful than hearing someone explain a joke is listening to the teller defend said joke.

The newest Entertainment Weekly lets frequent Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais do just, and it was as awkward and self-serving as you might fear.

Gervais, the star of “The Office” and a loud and proud athiest, used a guest column in EW [link not available] to defend himself against charges he’s a cruel, vindictive joke slinger. You’d think an edgy comic would revel in such a reputation, especially since all those mean jokes didn’t prevent him from securing yet another Globes hosting gig this Sunday.

There is a good chance that I may never touch an issue of Entertainment Weekly in my life, so tell me, person named after a cute little doggie and a sucker, why is this article by Ricky Gervais so awful?

Gervais says he “tends to explore contentious and taboo subjects,” one reason why so many people are offended by his act. “I like to take the audience to places they haven’t been before,” he boasts. But will his Sunday shtick really be so cutting edge? Will he dare poke fun at the current occupant in the White House? Will he mock those who wish to strike words out of the English language?

Doubtful.

That's right, the column is awful because of jokes he may not make in a few days. You know who else sucks? Christian Toto because he is afraid to make a joke about Christians and how dumb they are IN TWO WEEKS.

Also about people named Christian and how dumb they are in perhaps TWO AND ONE-HALF WEEKS or thereabouts. AND JOKES ABOUT THEIR LITTLE DOGS TOO.

Why would Gervais even bother to pen such a column? Is he responding to a culture in which saying the “wrong” joke can send a comic to humor purgatory or a GLAAD re-education camp?

YES, yes he is, and the GLAAD re-education camp is full-to-bursting with comedy genius Rush Limbaugh and the GLAAD Re-Education Camp II will soon accommodate the others.

Oh wait, let me use my new-found Google Sketchup skillz to illustrate both the "humor purgatory" and the "GLAAD re-education camp" AT THE SAME TIME:

Thank god for the metric template.

Or is it a preemptive strike against a real doozy of a monologue coming our way this weekend?

I don't know! IS IT??? HOW WILL WE FIND OUT? Maybe ask Brent Bozell a few weeks ago? Where is that time machine?

QUITE POSSIBLY RELATED:

This is not too far removed from Yakety Sax:

Cattle

2012-01-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Fairly standard dialogue with a fairly standard ending:

The Lovely Daughter: What's a monastery?
Me: A place where monks live.
TLD: What's a monk?
Me: A monk is a guy who just does religious stuff all the time with other religious guys.
TLD: I'm gonna be a monk.
Me: You have to be a boy to be a monk. You might be a nun if you're Catholic.
TLD: I'm gonna be a priest.
Me: If you're Catholic you can't be a girl and be a priest. They won't let you. Plus you have to believe in god. Do you believe in god?
TLD: No.
Me: Me neither. But you pretty much have to believe in god to be a priest. And be a boy.
TLD: I'm gonna be a priest in a new religion. The cow religion.
Me: Oh, okay.
TLD: And we're gonna have a cow temple and people are gonna come in and say the cow prayers out of the cow prayer book.
Me: What's the cow prayer gonna be?
TLD: Moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo moo [etc.]

Okay, The Lovely Daughter has nailed organized religion, but the important thing here is that I am led to think that a book consisting solely of "moo" would be an excellent project, as littler kids seem to love that shit and if you just deliver the "moo" differently on each page the kid is entertained and the parent might be doing something stupid and silly enough to be entertained as well. So, cow out in a field mooing: moo moo moo. Cow on a tree-branch mooing: moo moo moo. Ghost cow: mooooooooooOOOOOOOoooooooo. Cow stage forward near a show-card reading Beeflet: "Moo moo, moo MOO moo moo." And so on.

A Spot of Freedom

2012-01-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

Andrew Stuttaford:

Via The Local, a spot of language-washing in France:
A town in the north-west Brittany region has struck a blow for feminist campaigners by banishing the use of the title “mademoiselle”, or “miss”, from all official forms. The continued use of “mademoiselle” in France to refer to an unmarried woman has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. Regional newspaper Ouest France reported that the town of Cesson-Sévigné, which is a suburb of the city of Rennes, took the decision to get rid of the term from all official forms from January 1st 2012.

Stuttaford plainly thinks something important is being lost here - and hey, mademoiselle is a fun word to say! - but I'd wager Stuttaford would feel differently if there was a word preceding his name that indicated whether or not he'd had a boner stuck in him, or could be pursued by boner-bearing individuals.

Videos provided by Jennifer and the zombie. Sadly Thundra's boner is defective.

Professional Results

2012-01-07T22:45:00.000-08:00

Apparently Quartz Composer - free to you Mac types - accepts .dae files, which Google Sketchup - also free for the Mac and Windows people - will export. Thus we can make lovely words in beautiful three-dimensional Papyrus float through the stars. There's no need to watch past the first 30 seconds; I just wanted to see the words disappear. The soundtrack is a repetitive leftover.

What Did the Chicken Take Out of the Library?

2012-01-06T12:03:00.001-08:00

After the last debacle I thought "Perhaps these boocs are not for me." After consulting another booc called a dictionary I discovered I meant "books" of course. Silly me! Nevertheless, on I plunge into the homes of occasional silverfish.

I read this and it made me laugh a lot. There's a version here and it's relatively readable if you are the sort of person who can make sense of these people and their archaic gibberish.

I've just recently started on Debt which appears at the outset to be reasonably well-written, preaches to the choir - me and perhaps you too - and appears to be a pinko Golden Bough concentrating on the Unsympathetic Magic of turning credit into morality. Thus far it's been peppered with examples and lore from France, England, Japan, India, Madagascar and I'm not really out of the starting g— um, thing that has something to do with pepper. Follow the link to the book and you'll get that opening chapter, which has kept me reading. Yes, this funny symbol is in the index.

Dancing On Her Feelings

2012-01-05T21:51:00.000-08:00

Boy, adding heads on things is easy. Roy quotes Glenn Reynolds:

A lawyer-reader emails: “If Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, someone would file a qui tam action against him when he gets his first paycheck, and someone in Ohio would file a grievance with the Ohio Supreme Court’s Attorney Disciplinary Counsel seeking sanctions for Cordray’s clearly unconstitutional actions.” Well, not so much if Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, as if Republicans acted like Democrats. Maybe they should give it a try — the Dems seem to enjoy it. And they did manage to prevent a Palin candidacy through sheer harassment.

For Pinko Punko

2012-01-04T21:09:00.000-08:00

For this. Alt and title attributes to draw them Googlers.

Research and Ethics

2012-01-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

Shorter Warner Todd Huston:

A guy gave some money to a stem-cell research facility but not those dirty embryonic stem cells and this proves that beating off to green ladies is cool because that guy's dad INVENTED STAR TREK. Also is that automobile really going to fuck my head?

You've Got Troble

2012-01-03T09:06:00.000-08:00

Site Hosting Experiments

2012-01-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

Well.

Time for a holiday experimental chapeau.

Coolant leak on aisle 12!

Apparently Google Sites will host an animated gif...

Which fish insists should be crying:

Hmm, I suppose I should see if Andrew Klavan has said anything dumb recently to justify a four-wheeled skullfuck - but "Cars 2 hentai" is climbing the House of Substance search terms so is jutification necessary? NO. So consider this a totally free ~~boner~~ bonus:

You like movies about gladiators…?

Actually, I do. Is that so wrong??? In fact, Starz’s over-the-top gladiator series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, was capable of reducing me to an emotional 12-year-old every week. I would stare at each new gore-and-nudity-laden episode in a sort of mindless rapture, thinking, “Look… breasts… sword fights… also breasts…”

Hoping for a similar experience of ecstatic regression, I tried out the recent remake of Conan the Barbarian a few days ago. And let me add that I’m a big fan of Robert Howard’s original Conan short stories, which really are excellent entertainment. And let me also add that there was no shortage of beautiful naked women and good sword fights here as well. But the movie’s a dud. Conan the Disappointment. Not terrible or anything, just sort of flat and ho-hum.

What’s the difference between Spartacus and Conan? It’s the story, brother!

No, it's not an excuse if he meant it to be funny.

UPDATE!!!!

Okay sure, but there is important lab work going on:

Monsters

2012-01-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

Have a Lucky New Year

2011-12-31T17:35:00.000-08:00

Once again I got to go to Vij's for a meal. God bless December being three-cheque month, among other windfalls I am grateful for.

This is what I ate:

I drank a couple of cocktails - a whiskey charmer and a dark army and I wish I could remember what was supposed to be in them beyond pomegranate and edible silver and coriander - and a bottle of a really wonderful beer that I can't remember the name of. Good info, huh? The chai was excellent as well.

My god was this food satisfying, brought to the table by a team of people who said only what needed saying, and did only what needed doing. The tip for the nameless horde was big. My wish for you in the new year, gentle reader, is that you should have a meal like this. Note the few recipes available at the site.

Soon I drink, and I hope your celebrations went/will go well.

The Rules of Scrabble Prohibit Looping

2011-12-31T11:09:00.000-08:00

Holiday Stories

2011-12-30T13:24:00.000-08:00

Need Man to Splain

2011-12-29T13:33:00.000-08:00

Caved In?

2011-12-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Telepathic Ed on cats:

I saw Puss In Boots at "Tropicana Cinemas" at Trop and Pecos (buck fifty) enjoyable for all kids. I belonged to the Cat Lovers Club until it caved in after the death of our very capable President. One of her buddies and a member was Bill Bennett the Casino Mogul and Bill gave us money in 10 thou increments which was spent quickly as we'd give free shots and neuter to anybody's cat we minored in dogs, we only allowed loving people to adopt our stray cats.

Mandatory Churrocide

2011-12-27T14:50:00.000-08:00

Another of The Man's plans to keep the common people down:

Chile's Supreme Court has ordered a newspaper to pay $125,000 to 13 people who suffered burns while trying out a published recipe for churros, a popular Latin American snack of dough fried in hot oil.

[...]

Days after the recipe was published in the paper's "Woman" magazine in 2004, hospitals around the country began treating women for burns suffered when the dough boiling in oil suddenly shot out of kitchen pots.

Signs

2011-12-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

That last looks pretty good sideways:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-12-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

I went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as a holiday treat. I haven't read the novel.

The film is ferociously complicated: it's not cut in the modern speed-freak style, but if people are crinkling a candy-bag behind you you may miss what a character hears on a tinny tape; blink and you may miss some important context. It's a test of an audience's capacity to absorb information, which I suppose is a result of cutting down a complicated work but also involves the theme: in their way the operatives are heroic distillers of information, who see and pay attention in a way that normal individuals cannot, and at the same time are necessarily stunted in their relationships. Are you up to their abilities? Do you want to be? It was probably a half-hour before I figured what the scenes were supposed to be adding up to, and the various flashbacks and changes of environment made me think of the chronological mayhem of Bad Timing. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is better than that, go see it.

I've pointed to this interview before, but it's well worth it:

In the summer of 2010, Writers and Company host Eleanor Wachtel went to see John le Carré at his home outside of Penzance in Cornwall, England. [...] The interview with Mr. Le Carré won a Silver Medal at the New York Festivals.

It's not about the movie, it's about John le Carré, his work, and his art and what is in it that might be called true.

A Haul

2011-12-26T10:03:00.001-08:00

Look with envy upon the various hints contained in this glorious treasure.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T10:59:00.000-08:00

At Christmas time the family’s glad
As that’s when Santa fucks your dad.
But what’s that bag of presents for?
It’s because your mom’s a whore.

Please feel free to add scurrilous verse so I have more for next year.

More Picking on Architects

2011-12-24T12:04:00.000-08:00

Yes, that is correct, you can replace the head of the архітектура department with a handful of brightly-coloured balloons. The construction department still requires an actual person.

A Zombie Christmas

2011-12-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

Via the office photocopier, so um, it looks less appetizing? More appetizing? Anyway IT IS CHOCOLATE.

Kitty Mental Powers

2011-12-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

How many lame scheduled posts can you expect over the holidays? I don't know, but this is one.

Someone Should Sue Google Translate

2011-12-21T13:35:00.001-08:00

People With Money Making the Right Decisions

2011-12-20T20:53:00.000-08:00

Sometimes when you're writing you want to hold on to the funny thing and put it right at the very end of what you're doing where it will become an entertaining surprise BANANA. See what I did there? Look again closely if you are not quite getting the design of this elementary lesson in comedy BANANA.

In this case, though, it is to our advantage to blow an obvious punchline early because someone has written A Thing that gets more entertainingly excruciating as it goes on not just for the all-endumbening idiocy of the argument, but for the position of its finger-pointing author.

What do you know about Zachary Leeman? My guess is NOTHING, you lucky lucky person, but for you I will ruin the whole thing. Here is his bio:

Zachary Leeman currently serves in the Unites States Army Reserves as a truck driver in the 619th Transportation Company. He attends Southern Maine Community College where he plans on getting an Associate's Degree in political science. He is currently hard at work on his first novel. You can follow him on Twitter @writingleeman.

Okay, got that? Zachary Leeman is a public employee going to a public college where he's trying to get a degree involving public business. Oh, and HE WINS ALREADY:

Am I an official hater? I filled in the forms but I haven't mailed them yet.

Anyway Zachary Leeman has written a dumb column:

Bestselling horror novelist Stephen King recently helped out his fellow Mainers by holding a contest through his Bangor-based radio station: however much money listeners donated, King would match. The money would then be donated to lower-income Mainers to help pay for heat this winter.

King raised $242,370. Not too shabby. Clearly, this is a commendable and gracious effort on the part of King. It says a lot about his character. But when you bring it into context with past King quotes and his overall liberalism, it brings up an interesting hypocrisy in what famous liberals and 1 percent types do and say.

Okay person who drives trucks for the government and goes to a public college, what kind of hypocrisy have you identified?

In the past, King has stated that he thinks people who make as much as he does should be taxed as much as 50 percent. Why?

To pay for people who drive trucks for the government and for their education in public colleges.

Has King fully thought about a world where 50 percent of his money is taken by Big Government and then they decide where it goes?

Perhaps more people could get jobs driving trucks for the government and for their education in public colleges.

Just because it goes to the government with the “best intentions” does not mean it will help heat fellow Mainers’ homes.

It might, though, be something of a boon to people who drive trucks for the government and who receive education in public colleges.

Yet liberal entertainers like King continue to beg Obama to tax them more when they are fully capable as individuals who have found financial success to use their disposable income anyway they see fit, including helping those they see as needy.

Aha! HYPO— No wait, that's not actually hypocrisy, budding-writer-who-drives-a-truck-for-the-government-and-who-gets-educated-at-a-public-college-in-obvious-need-of-funding-for-dictionaries, it appears that Stephen King is willing to pay more taxes and that is that, and those taxes may or may not help folks directly with a heating bill, but you can bet they help people who drive trucks for the government and who receive education in public colleges.

How Stephen King has not connected his actions with his beliefs is really quite amazing.

Has he imagined a world where the government taxed him less?

No, he has never imagined an America without taxes. And my guess is that a person who drives trucks for the government and goes to a public college might also find it unfathomable.

Imagine how much more good he could do with that disposable income!?

Here is where, on the initial read, I doubled back and re-read what Zachary-the-Government-Truck-Driver wrote: the premise here really does appear to be that Stephen King could, if taxed even less, be oh-so-much-more generous to people who can't afford to keep the power on in their fucking houses in the greatest and richest country in the world. Not to mention that King might donate to public college endowments! The world would be a better place if zillionaires could keep more money away from the payrolls of drivers of government trucks and students in college because they could then in fact give all that money back to the people who don't have the money that was taken away from them! Nobody needs Robin Hood when Prince John is willingly giving all his money to the unfortunates, which I believe he in fact did which is why there was no Robin Hood legend in the first place.

Or not. It’s really his choice. When giving becomes forced giving, then the whole act has lost merit.

So if we imagine that Stephen King is giving charitably now, and then volunteers to pay taxes for things like public colleges and OMG TURN LEFT QUICKLY OR THE GOVERNMENT TRUCK WILL CRASH there we go JesusChristthatwasclose. Anyway, Stephen King volunteering to pay taxes is Stephen King forcing himself to give away the money he was giving anyway? O THE NOT-HYPOCRISY-AT-ALL.

And in a time of crushing student debt and an overstretched military slowly pulling back from two dumb wars, rising poverty and job losses and predatory foreclosure nightmares and empty strip-malls and idle factories precipitated by crazy rich guys trading bullshit paper they didn't even know how to measure the worth of, not to mention a time of people in Maine who can't pay their heating costs, Zachary Leeman provides a sweet little gift just for you and I:

Why is it liberals cannot imagine a world where people with money make the right decisions?

Thank you, gently-insulated-from-the-real-free-enterprise-world Zachary Leeman, for redistributing the gifts of the free time and the totally-serious-no-fooling book-learning the government has given you to we few participants on this little corner of the internet. And you know something, gentle reader? There's still more of the column left for you look at BANANA.

Holiday Advice

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Dear parents: Cars 2 is the only Pixar film I endured rather than watched. It is bad.

To up the Google juice for this post I wanted to add some Cars 2 hentai but after searching (!) I found I had to make my own.

Now I am become Rule 34, the destroyer of worlds.

OMG THERE REALLY IS AN AFTERLIFE!

2011-12-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

Over at Crooked Timber there's a link to some Ross Douthat bullshit all about how something or other God God God:

For Hitchens, those defenses stayed up till the end. His last word on the possibility of conversion was at once characteristically dismissive and characteristically protective of his hard-earned reputation as an Enemy of God: “Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice.”

Let us be clear: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS WOULD NEVER ABANDON PRINCIPLES. Especially if they would buy him a drink.

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

Oh for Christ— I mean oh for fuck's sake give it UP with the superstitious nonsense about the OH HOLY SHIT RUN RUN RUN!

Tweedlemark and Tweedlejonah

2011-12-18T17:49:00.000-08:00

Mark Steyn looks to Jonah Goldberg for guidance:

Amidst the torrent of commentary on the Second Coming of Newt, Jonah’s point is worth considering:

Mitt Romney is still the sensible choice if you believe these are rough, but generally sensible, times. If, however, you think these are crazy and extraordinary times, then perhaps they call for a crazy, extraordinary — very high-risk, very high-reward — figure like Gingrich.

This helps explain why Newtzilla is so formidable. In order to stop him, you need to explain to very anxious GOP voters that the times don’t require him.

I’m in the latter camp: I think these are “crazy and extraordinary times.”

Boy, that bodes well! But Steyn has more to say:

So, if these are “crazy and extraordinary times,” go with the crazy, right? Newt certainly thinks bigger than Mitt, but unfortunately he thinks in the same direction of unbounded micro-managerial faux-technocracy.

And if Newt and Mott are on the same path, the conclusion must be:

It’s a tragedy that the Republican nomination has dwindled down to a choice not worth making. Yet not a single real vote has yet been cast. Iowa and New Hampshire will do us all a favor if they look beyond the frontrunners and keep genuinely conservative candidates in the game.

Exactly Mark. Vote for a different loon because Newt Gingrich is NOT CRAZY ENOUGH.

UPDATE OF FREEDOM!!!

Crazy-related: Roy is summons the Ron Paul swarm.

In The Trenches

2011-12-16T05:53:00.000-08:00

A battle is being fought, of almost cosmically non-spiritual import:

Just a couple of weeks ago -- the weekend before Thanksgiving, in fact -- the annual Skepticon conference was held ... one of the largest gatherings of atheists and skeptics in the country ... owner of the ice cream shop Gelato Mio ... took offense ... And he put a sign on the door to his shop, reading, quote, "Skepticon is NOT Welcomed To My Christian Business." ...

Dear God!

So what happened?

Atheists brought the nuclear smackdown.

Someone took a photo of the sign, and within minutes it was Facebooked, Tweeted, G-plussed, texted, blogged, emailed, and probably sent by smoke signals and carrier pigeon. It raced through the atheosphere like a wildfire on meth. Gelato Mio was inundated with angry calls and emails; their ratings on Yelp and UrbanSpoon sank to the basement; on UrbanSpoon, their "most popular menu item" was quickly voted as "Bigotry."

...

And Drennan apologized.

Gelato for all atheists is secured!

Atheists will not be fucked with.

I dunno, maybe I should be more sympathetic to my godless brethren, but, uh, okay, this is the title of the article:

2 Shocking Attacks on Atheism -- And How Atheists Fought Back

No, not really seeing the "not to be fucked with" cred there. Or the shock or the attack for that matter...

UPDATE!

My error. Turns out the guy who ran the gelato place was ADOLF HITLER and he was working on a Pan-Skeptic Gelato Removal Ray*. Seems the ray itself was three seconds from bathing the continent in unearthly treat-denying radiation from its orbital platform when Glasses O'Fingerpoint somehow tweeted the shutdown code through an avalanche of licorice and caramel corn, thus saving the atheist community from potential having-to-think-of-a-different-snack. Also I think the second shocking attack I didn't mention was about a lampshade factory and missing atheists, so my apologies to the families and their little dogs too.

*ACME™ brand parts, may not work on road-runners

Old Things

2011-12-15T08:18:00.000-08:00

It was Thoroughly Middle Class Christmas Entertainment Night at the Orpheum last night. It was moderately enjoyable; Stewart McLean told a bunch of stories involving Christmas and ferrets and people going through car washes. The big musical guest was Hawksley Workman who I dislike. He makes me think of comedy open-mike night and that quiet guy you met once trying a "weird nervous comedian" shtick and failing, but in song. On the other hand I don't think I've heard too many passionate songs featuring soup so score one for him I guess; I'll remember someone going all Bono over parsnips for quite a while.

Being in the Orpheum always feels a little strange. Vancouver is a new town full of new glassy and spindly toy-like buildings; is there really something old here?

Hmm, when was the last time I was in that building? Wait, that long ago?

Wait, turn your sound off or maybe leave Laser Cannon Deth Sentence playing:

Yessir, some of the tallest buildings in the British Empire there.

McGravitas is Making Sense!

2011-12-13T21:40:00.000-08:00

An item at The Corner:

Former Delaware GOP senate candidate Christine O’Donnell announced tonight that she was endorsing Mitt Romney.

The Romney campaign e-mailed an announcement of the endorsement.

Dear Romney campaign:

Please send me $25,000, just because. Thanks in advance,

"Sincerely!"
S. McGravitas

P.S. You are great.

UPDATE VIA THE INDISPENSABLE J—:

The whole press release is here, including this:

Background On Christine O’Donnell:

Christine O’Donnell Has Been A Leader In The Conservative Movement For Many Years.

Must Remember To Put More Capital Letters In My Requests.

Sorry Epileptics

2011-12-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

I was gonna be more subtle but just getting it to work was a pain.

Hmm, this is somewhat pukey...

The pukey one plus yellow, BY REQUEST!

Oh yeah, problem solved.

AWESOME

2011-12-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

Up together in the constant song-shuffling:

A Book

2011-12-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

The free laptop is slowly becoming unusable, so I have read A Book.

Patti Smith's Just Kids won a National Book Award somehow. It's interesting if you like the era and the people involved but as writing it's all affectation and name-dropping.

Since hashish permeated the atmosphere of these stories I had it in my mind to partake of it.

Not smoke it? Or:

We would sit together on their Napoleonic daybed, and he would read me passages from Rimbaud's Illuminations in the original French.

No kidding? The ORIGINAL French? This Stallone fellow is more creative than I thought.

Every page has something like that, her "tapping open a door slightly ajar" and making me think of padding essays to get to 1000 words.

I would never serve as the source of his inspiration, though in attempting to articulate the drama of my feelings I became more prolific and I believe a better writer.

O the irony.

Trivia and its Opposite

2011-12-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

Now that is an awfully mean way to make an argument, and follow-up comments from Walt (who I like a lot as a commenter) take Wiley to task as it can be extended into this or that absurdity, and if you complain about the president you're killing grandma and so on. But look at this:

Yesterday I was out drinking with two friends, one of whom has been told by some doctors that she's gonna die. Those are nachos and pills, including, apparently, some methadone. Shoulda begged to try one: she's gonna get more! Anyway, it was a nice Sunday drink, and those pills are mostly paid for, not just through sociamalist Canadian government programs, but through extended health benefits at a union shop (though I don't know if she was union or exempt). Her partner, in the union at the same employer, has leave. She and he get to spend as much time as they like together in relative comfort, though not at full pay. And that is a pretty important thing.

People - myself included - can be as disappointed with Obama as they like, but a plan passed under him will provide more people with those pills. It falls short of what I take for granted here, but I am fortunate enough to live in a civilized nation where I can go out with my dying friends for a drink instead of despairing that I have to figure out how to hold a benefit for them. For a lot of people that health plan is gonna be a very practical matter with quick impact despite its piecemeal nature, and it's a step that you'd be insane to think would happen under a Republican. [Important caveat: getting money for autism treatment is a fucking bitch here.] There are of course other issues, but a step is a step.

Also we played some trivia:

He Who Smelled It Dealt It

2011-12-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

Shorter John Nolte:

People didn't want to go see The Muppets because the outrageously biased left-wing media let everyone know that Fox Business News did a segment that called The Muppets communist.

Pure Craziness

2011-12-09T22:56:00.000-08:00

Rich folks:

There’s been a constant stream of headlines about the widening gap between rich and poor for months now, but this is pretty remarkable: Just six members of the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, possess wealth equal to that of the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans.

Obviously if a poor person dies you can put 'em in a pine box and forget about it. But if a Walton dies the economy is stimulated, what with all the paper-shuffling and estate-selling and so forth. Food for thought.

Attention Fellow Cereal Freaks

2011-12-09T22:24:00.000-08:00

News you can use:

10 Worst Children's Cereals
Based on percent sugar by weight
1 Kellogg's Honey Smacks 55.6%

2 Post Golden Crisp 51.9%

3 Kellogg's Froot Loops Marshmallow 48.3%

4 Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! All Berries 46.9%

5 Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch Original 44.4%

6 Quaker Oats Oh!s 44.4%

7 Kellogg's Smorz 43.3%

8 Kellogg's Apple Jacks 42.9%

9 Quaker Oats Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries 42.3%

10 Kellogg's Froot Loops Original 41.4%

Eat up.

Abnormalities

2011-12-08T19:56:00.000-08:00

Jackie Gingrich Cushman:

This week, I'm writing a letter to my 16-year-old self. The letter is inspired by the book, "Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self," edited by Joseph Galliano (Atria Books, 2011).

Be assured that 16 is a shaky time for everybody. Nothing seems to fit, nothing seems easy, and life's future is unknown. On the bright side, life seems to hold much promise and possibility. As you grow older, hang on to the idea that life is full of promise and possibility.

No, you are not normal, but neither is anyone else. Everyone has something that makes them "not normal." Your something might be more visible (yes, your dad did run for Congress and lose twice before you were 10; he won when you were 11; two years later, your parents divorced). But everyone has a family member who is crazy, in jail, estranged, sick or any combination of those and other abnormalities. NO ONE is normal.

This guy will make a great president, right?

UPDATE FOR THE NERVOUS TEEN:

You're just sixteen so be assured
Your family contains a turd.
It might be mom or pop, it's true
But they might think that turd is you.

Leftists

2011-12-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

Hi Washington Times!

EDITORIAL: The USS Karl Marx
Leftists run wild politicizing Navy ship names

[...]

The Senate version of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act includes an amendment proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt, Missouri Republican, to “require a report on the policies and practices … for naming the vessels of the Navy.” The measure would require the secretary of defense to submit a report to Congress detailing current Navy policies for ship naming, the extent to which they vary from historical practices, and an assessment of the feasibility of establishing fixed policies for naming ships.

The catalyst for the amendment was the announcement last spring that the newest supply ship in the Navy’s inventory would be named after labor leader Cesar Chavez. This radical served briefly in the Navy after World War II but did not accomplish anything noteworthy while in uniform. His claim to fame was solely from organizing migrant laborers and agitating for the rights of illegal immigrants. Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, said at the time that naming a ship after Chavez appeared to be “more about making a political statement than upholding the Navy’s history and tradition.”

[...]

I am sure such a vessel would be too sissy to blow stuff up and soon men stuck at sea for long periods of time would start having sex with each other.

No Blood for Snake Oil!

2011-12-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

Item:

Sarah Palin told Fox Business Network today that she will not be endorsing a candidate in the next few weeks.

“Not before Iowa,” Palin said, in an interview set to air at 10 p.m. EST on FBN. “And Iowa’s not the end of the road. It’s the beginning of the road really. Newt Gingrich, I believe, has risen in the polls because he has been a bit more successful than Romney in reaching out to that base of constitutional conservatives who are part of the tea party movement. He hasn’t been afraid of that movement. He has been engaged in that movement most recently in order for them to hear his solutions and there’s been some forgiveness then on the part of Tea Party Patriots for some of the things in Gingrich’s past.”

“Romney and others need to reach out and convince Tea Party Patriots and constitutional conservatives that he truly believes in smaller, smarter government,” she added.

She said she was “most interested” in seeing in who Ron Paul, if he does not win the nomination, endorses, citing his strong record on “domestic spending issues.”

Let's Hear From the Experts

2011-12-06T17:24:00.000-08:00

The Travel Pavilion

2011-12-06T13:58:00.000-08:00

The Golden Age

2011-12-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

Andrew Klavan:

O’Sullivan’s Law says, in effect, that any organization that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. So it is with cultures too, I believe. And how could it be otherwise? All leftism is, really, is a form of decay, and all things made by man decay as time goes by.

That is an interesting law. Klavan's link leads to the Wikipedia, and not to an article outlining the actual law. It turns out that it doesn't say anything "in effect" but instead says it:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.

That is a warm puppy of a law for those who wait wait wait for the children to walk onto their lawns.

Oh yeah, also NO WAY WAS J. EDGAR HOOVER A FAG.

What's Left of Detroit

2011-12-05T13:22:00.000-08:00

Granted, it was after the bar closed. Still, getting a couple of shots taken with a ten-second timer by setting the camera down in the middle of the road makes for one lonely animated gif.

Here's a static shot of the Fisher Building's doorway from the median of another empty intersection:

The Bees of November

2011-12-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

The sign is relatively readable for a night shot, but the file's very very large to enable that.

Ask Not for Whom the Belle Trolls

2011-12-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

Here is the whole of a Rich Lowry post:

Cain’s exit yesterday was a wholly absurd spectacle. His suspended campaign is presumably still sitting on millions of dollars of contributions. Cain owes it to his supporters to endeavor to return that money to all those people who gave it to him in good faith..

Oh totally.

Comment-trolling then goes as expected:

I'm sure Sarah Palin (the one who gives Rich little zingy starbursts ;-) has given all of her contributions back. After all, it's not like Sarah teased money out her supporters under false pretenses, or anything like that...

Starbursty link added for the sake of completeness.

It's like America's Next Top Snake-Oil Salesman.

What? Is It My Turn?

2011-12-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

For the Sake of Preservation

2011-12-02T11:42:00.000-08:00

From Women for Cain:

Adrienne (Caos) Sinclair
California, CA

"Dear Mr Cain many years ago I find this not so unique for christians I knew a man Charles in died at 54 i knew him and and his wife and they were beautiful from the heart christians. at one point in my live i was going to lose my home and well he heard about it, so me at Maass and told me Adrinne I want you to go down to the bank Monday and there wil be a check for 40.000 dollars. I told him I dont know how in the world i would pay it back and he just said don.t worry you are young and you have your whole live to pass a blessing on to someone else, At any rate he died at 54 of a heart attack and when I went to the funeral I was not surprised to see at least 500 or more people at his funeral and I went up to his wife and she told me has helped so many people his whole life and I looked in those green eyes with flowing tears and I said I was one of those people! she looked at me and just hugged me and said you know he would always keep his giving between God and himself, I said yes not for others to see. That was a long time ago and it is funny and it is so normal men who have that kind of heart, My dad would give a waitress 100 dollar tips and I just thought since I was a child that was normal, giving unconditional that is true Christianity and I get Herman Cain and A president who will save the Republic, I wish there are more Herman Cains they don't show up at big benefits they give and only God can see, that is real to me,,, yes and I have had a life where I can give even when it hurt to women men children, that was a good lesson to learn where only God can see."

The attached picture:

Click for full size! Oh, and have these:

ALSO:

The LinkedIn profile makes me feel somewhat mean.

Best Eyes Contest for Females.

The Curse of the Hippies

2011-12-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Good ol' Mona Charen:

The always-engaging Michael Barone theorizes that Mitt Romney sounds corny because he “missed the Sixties.” Is that a bad thing? He was married and had two small children to care for in the ’60s. No time to occupy anything, smoke pot, or have casual sex. I can live with that in a potential president. Don’t you wish everyone had missed the ’60s?

ANTI-NEWT UPDATE!

The NRO knives are being sharpened.

A K-Lo interview:

LOPEZ: You write that “many 1990s GOP leaders still wonder whether Gingrich’s private conduct affected the way he carried out his public responsibilities.” Is it possible for private conduct to ever not have something important to do with public responsibilities?

OLASKY: I wrote an American history book in 1999 and concluded that the answer to that question is probably no, because everything we do affects our thinking in some way. But there’s another issue for prominent people like Newt: Secret activities do not remain secret for long, and those who find out may expose them, or may keep them secret because they find value in doing so. My probe into whether Dick Armey’s story made sense led to a bigger mystery: Since many Democrats, including Barney Frank, knew about Newt’s affair, why didn’t they out him? (They outed Henry Hyde, whose affair wasn’t even current.) What did Dems gain by not outing Newt? I don’t have the contacts or clout to find out the answer, but maybe someone else does.

The reliably racist Mark Krikorian:

If Gingrich is the nominee, barring a dead girl or live boy in the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama wins. However hard he tries, he can’t stop being Newt. And that’s not someone middle-of-the-road Obama voters now suffering buyer’s remorse are going to vote for. (And no, this has nothing to do with immigration, I’m not being paid by the Romney campaign, and I didn’t get marching orders from Kathryn.)

If only Newt hadn't bought into free love. Or paid love for that matter.

Positive Spam

2011-12-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

There are around 3800 more comments here thus far:

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The Right Way to Engage

2011-11-30T12:40:00.001-08:00

Henry Farrell:

Let’s imagine that we lived in an alternative universe where some of the more noxious nineteenth century pseudo-science regarding ‘inverts’ and same-sex attraction had survived into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Let us further stipulate that the editor of a nominally liberal opinion magazine had published one purported effort to ‘prove’ via statistics that same-sex attraction was a form of communicable psychosis, which invariably resulted in national degeneracy when it was allowed to persist.

The post goes on in that vein, and the target is Andrew Sullivan and his continued trumpeting of his intellectual courage in publishing racist bullshit when he is - quite rightly - upset when nitwit Republicans use similar bullshit against anything involving TEH GAY. What interests me is Rich Puchalsky's insistence on the right way to engage:

You don’t seem to be understanding what I’m writing. I already held up two cases that serve as models for how to acknowledge someone like Sullivan. 1) Steven Jay Gould (in his engagement with Sullivan’s source), 2) the Poor Man. In short, it’s best to either be so overwhelmingly expert and well-written that anyone who looks at your reply even briefly will suspect that the person’s wrong, or so mocking and unserious that it’s clear that you’re giving no respect either to the person or the process of deliberating with him.

This blog post doesn’t match the first model because it’s not really an expert attack. It doesn’t match the second because it still treats Sullivan as someone who could conceivably change his mind or be convinced by evidence or understand an analogy that it is not in his interest to understand.

It seems to me that Henry's post demonstrates that Sullivan is plenty awful and that Rich's demand is that Sullivan be made more awfuller or that Sullivan be crushed under a big safe full of statistics. Maybe Henry should say Sullivan's a piece of shit?

Bonus Pink Floyd Reference

2011-11-29T12:32:00.000-08:00

Rest In Penis

2011-11-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

Bye Ken.

The Fraudian Slip

2011-11-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a new word from the completely straight Michael L. Brown:

I have the utmost sympathy for men and women who feel they are trapped in the wrong body. At the same time, Western society is heading in the direction of what can only be called transgender insanity, or transanity for short.

Now hang on here for a second and have a look at this:

If I was a red-faced Christian minister with a giant handlebar mousetache humping - sorry, PUMPING - a book called A Queer Thing Happened to America I might want to be careful about my word coinages, especially as regards gender issues. Transanity doesn't sound all that bad, does it? I mean, OMG THE KITTEN APOCALYPSE shouldn't be shortened to the OMG THE KITTYLYPSE, right?

Ha ha, there were several places to go with that and you should be goddamned grateful.

Anyway, back to the MEAT. Of the COLUMN. Of MEAT.

Consider these recent examples.

1) In England, two married men (and fathers) divorced their wives and began living together as a gay couple, after which they decided to identify as a transsexual “lesbian” couple (yes, male “lesbians”), after which one of the men had sex-change surgery, which makes them eligible to be married as husband and wife, even though the husband still identifies as a woman.

2) Chaz Bono recently received criticism from the transgender daughter/son of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, born Kaitlyn but now, at age 19, known as Stephen. (Remember that Chaz, who remains female from the waist down, danced as a male on Dancing with the Stars, raising the legitimate question: What constitutes male or female?)

[...]

3) Dan Savage is a gay sex columnist and a vocal critic of traditional Judeo-Christian morals, best known today for spearheading the “It Gets Better” campaign.

Recently, he became the target of trans activists who glitter bombed him twice in November. He was branded a “transphobe” for using terms like “shemale” and referring to “freak tranny porn” (although Savage, on his part, claims that he was simply repeating words used by a questioner in his audience).

[...]

Does this qualify as transanity?

OMG three things happened - disagreements even! - and Michael L. Brown is confused and nobody got fired or ripped off or had a house reposessed or invaded a country or put their boner inside the wrong hole at the truck stop. So if it qualifies as transanity, GIVE ME SOME TRANSANITY!

Before you dismiss all this as totally fringe, remember that Chastity/Chaz Bono is a very public figure, that in 2006, New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority ruled that men who identified as women could use the ladies bathrooms at all subway stations, that more and more TV shows are normalizing (and even celebrating) transgenderism, and that, in one high school, a male teen was voted class queen while in another school, a female teen was voted class king.

Remember that "utmost sympathy" thing up at the top? Is being nice to people or letting them use the bathroom an especially large amount of sympathy? I feel that the "utmost" sympathy is here sliding down from ultimacy perhaps to penultimacy or perhaps penpenultimacy or penpenpenultimacy, whatever the proper amount of pen is.

And let’s not forget that Massachusetts just passed a radical transgender bill, according to which, “’Gender identity’ shall mean a person's gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person's physiology or assigned sex at birth.” (Yes, this is now the legal definition in Massachusetts.)

Transanity anyone?

Yes, there is more complaining about that which has apparently had zero ill effect on nearly everybody and a tiny positive effect on a small group of people who could stand a little help, but there are only so many pixels here and I do not want to go to the store for more. End column:

Should we have compassion on those who feel there is a “mismatch” between their body and their brain? Absolutely. But we should devote our energies to understanding the causes of their mental and emotional conflict with the goal of helping them from the inside out. Otherwise, if we craft laws and embrace social categories based on how people identify themselves, we had better get ready for more and more “feminist gay trans men” along with “pansexual genderqueer transdykes” – and that’s just the beginning.

Indeed, some lunatic might insist that all manner of kooky cults get preferential treatment somehow and pay no fucking taxes because Popsicle Zombie. I might call that TAXSANITY. Makes sense, right?

The Gift of Unlife

2011-11-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

Big Hollywood's Lauren Veneziani:

How about one of the biggest conservative values of all: Pro-life! Bella is completely selfless when it comes to her pregnancy in [The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part I]. She is willing to give up her human life, vampire life and even Edward for the life of her baby. Despite the fact that the baby is literally killing her, Bella wants to stick it out as much as she can in hopes that she will deliver a healthy baby. Bella says the baby is “a little miracle,” and she is ready to lose her life for her child’s. If that’s not pro-life, I don’t know what is.

It might be a good idea for parents to accompany their daughters to the film. The gruesome birthing scene may leave some teenagers a little queasy.

Moving on, we have Big Hollywood's Blake Seitz:

It all started subtly enough — so subtly that I imagine viewers of the non-political stripe missed it completely.

Not long into the episode, the Gang’s thoughtful proxy-liberal geriatric, Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn), confronts Hershel (Scott Wilson), a Colonel Sanders-type and the thoughtful proxy-conservative geriatric of the Gang’s charmingly Southern host family. As it turns out, the host family was—in true Faulknerian fashion—covering up a secret, keeping undead relatives (Attack of the In-laws!) locked in their barn. Dale wanted to know why, and the conversation that unfolded was strangely analogous to the fetal personhood debate…with zombies! It went something like this:

BUCKET HAT: With all due respect…I’ve seen people that I cared about die and come back, and they’re not people.

COLONEL SANDERS: My wife and stepson are in that barn. They’re people.

Although this exchange set off klaxon sirens in my well-conditioned, hair-trigger political mind, it wouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy had the balance of the episode not been devoted to Lori’s pained decision about whether or not to abort her pregnancy.

Since the lion’s share of the episode was about Lori’s dilemma, I feel my inference is well grounded. I find it illuminating that the writers chose zombies as a parallel to human fetuses (and not only because many proponents of abortion see the fetus primarily as a parasite, although that certainly adds another layer of interesting to the equation). Dale is, after all, the rational arguer in this case. In the zombie survival genre, zombies are distinctly the Other, not human persons. Hershel, then, is the ill-informed, emotional arguer. I think it’s clear that the writers view the abortion debate as divided along similar lines.

Conservatives: MONSTERS?

WAAAAAH!

2011-11-25T11:05:00.000-08:00

It appears that Sam Brownback is a big crybaby. Feel free to add tears.

YARN NEEDZ KITTENZ

2011-11-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Can Josh Marshall produce art? I SAY YES.

What I Have To Offer

2011-11-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

Look who enjoyed my article!

Okay then!

Validation of my ideas thus being taken care of, here is some advice to you, my late-to-the-table American friends: THIS IS THE WRONG END FOR THE TURKEY.

Also you may want to cook it in some fashion, perhaps removing the feathers and such.

Full of Sound and Führer

2011-11-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

Chuck Norris:

And those progressive agents are at it again right now in the series of GOP presidential debates. Does anyone really believe questions coming from MSM moderators aren't ultimately asked to trip up the candidates and then elevate and orchestrate the re-election of their furor?

So:

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never tried. Ever.
Chuck Norris does not sleep. He wades.
The chief export of Chuck Norris is panini.
If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris, you may be only seconds away from Duluth.
?

TOWNHALL IS FUN TODAY UPDATE:

CHUCK NORRIS IS FUNNIER TODAY UPDATE:

Who were those bastards tripping up various banana-peel-shod Republican candidates?

If you watched closely, the questioners at the GOP debate were like a walk down memory lane of the Bush foreign policy and national security team. David Addington, Paul Wolfowitz and more.

Adventures in Gingrich

2011-11-21T12:47:00.000-08:00

Trying to fly Callista in behind him...we'll see if we get there.

Gaah. Just can't git 'er done. Also FUCK TINYPIC AND GOOGLE.

Modern Music Should Be About Siouxsie and Cabaret Voltaire

2011-11-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

Also, goddamn this is good, but I feel like the oven should be of the authentic tire-and-trash burning sort.

POOP

2011-11-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

mikey said...: [...]

Hey, that makes me wonder. When the catholics eat jesus on sundays, do they poop jesus on monday? And if so, shouldn't their be some detailed biblical guidelines for handling that matter (heh) in some more, er, delicate fashion than a simple, perfunctory flush?
[...]; November 20, 2011 1:46 PM

Now I am forced to Google and OH FUCK YOU:

Google is getting worse. It doesn't help my search results if the stupid computer is trying to think on my behalf and return "stool" for "defecation". Can you just stop "improving" my results? The little plus sign in front of the not-quite naughty word used to mean that the word was required to be returned in a search, but evidently synonyms are okay because they could never have any other meaning, could they? Adding quotes does not help, adding a -stool seems to, in a way, but I would prefer to SEARCH FOR THE WORDS I AM SEARCHING FOR, FUCKERS.

Might have to revisit Bing.

Great, first result returned features the word "defection". Thanks computer geniuses!

The Least-Possible-Work Method

2011-11-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

Marquee tag and a little wiggling. Thank you Smut and Terry Gilliam.

INTERIM HEDGEHOG UPDATE!

Vote Evil Genius and Cut Out the Middleman

2011-11-19T08:21:00.000-08:00

Voting day.

MORNING AFTER UPDATE!

Alas, a near-shutout for COPE candidates. Evil continues to move at a snail's pace rather than thundering along like a, like a, searching for a comparison now... Oh yeah, like a Whiz Wagon.

Silly Fun

2011-11-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

Up Next: Apple Pies OF DEATH

2011-11-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

My friends, how can we ignore the evil intentions of a regime that would replace healthy all-American robot competitions with authoritarian totalitarian Robocop competitions?

The Creative Impulse

2011-11-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

Ann Coulter:

So now, apparently, we have to go through the cycle of the media pushing Newt Gingrich. This is going to be fantastic.

[Anti-Newt venom excised]

The mainstream media keep pushing alternatives to Mitt Romney not only because they are terrified of running against him, but also because they want to keep Republicans fighting, allowing Democrats to get a four-month jump on us.

Meanwhile, everyone knows the nominee is going to be Romney.

That is some potent and powerful bullshit that plays perfectly to nitwits right now, but DOUBLE-EDGED BULLSHIT, as Romney is, then, required to be the front-runner at some point in the future; can the always-lying media report such an event?

Your Daughter the Homofem Abortionist

2011-11-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Hagelin:

Instead of the Girl Scouts’ politically correct gobbledy-gook, the American Heritage Girls sees its mission as “building women of integrity through service to God, family, community and country.” (See this comparison chart for the Girl Scouts and American Heritage Girls).

Second, principles. AHG takes a stand for the traditional values that most families embrace: its principles emphasize integrity, service, stewardship, and—are you ready for this?--purity. When was the last time you heard the Girl Scouts encourage girls to be sexually pure? They’ve been too busy holding hands with the sex educators, pill-pushers, and feminists.

The American Heritage Girls have an altogether different sort of sash.

Sing Along With Mitch

2011-11-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

Part two features Bob from Sesame Street.

The Moral High Ground...Well, You Head Two Miles East, But Not Too Far Now, Just Stop When You See People That Aren't Imaginary and Bear Left

2011-11-15T20:24:00.000-08:00

I owe a debt to Mark Noonan. Although I don't think his was the first animated gif I did, his eyebrows were absolutely inspirational and they still spin or crawl into various pieces here. His were the first drag-and-drop eyebrows I am aware of* in The Whole of Christendom. Was this the last time I tried to pay attention to him? I didn't even find him and got Michael Voris and his toupée instead.

While we are feeling so charitable, let us discharge the debt and visit Mark Noonan, whose blog is positively hopping again:

The Lynching Continues-Racism in The Media

Herman Cain was featured on a Holly Bailey hit piece the other day about the video in which Cain pokes fun regarding Anita Hill.

Okay, precisely what nugget might a loon pull from a story about Herman Cain pursuing the worst possible jokes in the current context of his campaign?

But why am I particularly calling out Bailey’s piece as yet another media lynching of Cain?

Yeah, WHY, Mr. Two-Caterpillar-Head?

Look at the accompanying picture they decided to post to go along with the story:

You know, I find myself in agreement with Mark Noonan. It's pretty obvious that the story's image of Cain draping himself over the women is a cheap and unnecessary —

Will you take a look at that.. Herman Cain (with his wide-brimmed fedora) posing with two women, who just happen to be attractive..maybe even a little ghetto… My but if that doesn’t fit the stereotype of a black pimp, eh?

Um, okay Mark, I was not actually going in the pimp direction there...with the ghetto women bit and all...

*Thank you for the lessons Jonah Goldberg. This footnote would be longer but I have to walk the slave.

What To Say and When

2011-11-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

Telepathic Ed:

Everything that Herbert Hoover did in his life was superb until he became President. Herbert and Lou Hoover's graves are way out back and when I went to view them (I always say a few prayers) there was an educated-looking young guy trimming the grass and I ventured to say that it was sort of like the Peter Principle where you advance until you can't do it anymore and he agreed, looking back maybe I shouldn't have been discussing this at their gravesite.

Yes, Google News Sucks Now

2011-11-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

Apart from this (I use Googlebar Lite which gets around that problem) my Google News page got reorganized and now it shows me less than I want, for no good reason at all. I think I'll find my news elsewhere now.

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