Friday

Where Are The Robots?

I resisted wandering around the office asking that question the other day. Also where are the robots in Japan?

IMPORTANT!

Current headlines from Big Hollywood:

Dick Size

American disasters are the awesomest and you will have to kill more Japanese before you beat the masters:

Washington (CNN) -- Energy Secretary Steven Chu told members of Congress Wednesday that the rapidly unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan may be more serious than the situation faced by U.S. officials during the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979.

All Hail the Free Market

It brings blessings to everyone:

A disgruntled Chinese millionaire who clearly had enough of his expensive, but problematic, Lamborghini Gallardo took out his frustration by hiring a crew to destroy the posh car in front of stunned spectators.

I am sure his comrades feel for his loss.

Out Through the Out Door

The anus is an exit, it is not an entrance. NO PLAYING BACK THERE. Unless I have been especially bad.

I don't think this is good or anything, but if I unleash it maybe I'll stop listening to it and giggling and move on to, you know, preachers talking about butts and I can giggle at that. (Seat to myself on the bus AGAIN! What luck!) Mind you the solo sounds like one of Thundra's ducks if it was singing sweetly like ducks do sometimes when nobody is listening but me.

Video lifted from YouTube with this.

Easy

Apparently.

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment.

King was shot there a few days later.

Then I Saw His Face

John P. Hanlon might be the most sincere and honest of the lot at Big Hollywood. He seems to really try hard to do a good job in spite of the limitations of the site and the book-report style of his written output. All this is just to say I LAUGHED.



I miss Gene Shalit. No really!



I wish there was a decent YouTube compilation of Shalit being unfuckingbelievable but you'll have to make do with this shitty MSNBC video. THE WRITING!

Mind you this kinda thing makes me laugh too, even recycled:

Pretty Smart On Their Part

Here's an interesting post over at The Corner:

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal hypocrisy manifested itself most acutely in their practical choices about minorities, for instance sending their own kids to exclusive private schools while supporting forced busing for middle-class families of lesser means. This was best memorialized in Phil Ochs’s classic folk tune, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” —

. . . and I love Puerto Ricans and negroes,
As long as they don’t move next door!
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.

Ah, the people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame.
Now I can’t understand how their minds work,
What’s the matter — don’t they watch Les Crane?

But if you ask me to bus my children,
I hope the cops take down your name.
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.

Hmm, yeah, well-placed ellipsis there.

Phil Ochs earned his conservative cred by opposing the liberal Richard Nixon.



The post itself is about this Times piece which to the poster appears to demonstrate that Liberals Я Dumb, but then he's the guy quoting the "classic" (his word and mine too) Phil Ochs song. Sleep well, conservative!

I guess I shouldn't complain: you know that some dim bulb out there is going to pick up something by Phil Ochs and get a nice surprise.

Penis Rasp Users Weep Silently

The Defective People

Over at TPM:

"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," Rep. Martin Harty told one of his constituents. "I mean all the defective people, the drug addicts, mentally ill, the retarded -- all of them."

Bye Rush!

Fascist Nitpick

Glenn Greenwald:

So according to The New York Times, it's journalistically improper to call waterboarding "torture" -- when done by the United States, but when Nazi Germany (or China) does exactly the same thing, then it may be called "torture" repeatedly and without qualification. An organization which behaves this way may be called many things; "journalist" isn't one of them.

I make no claims to perfect prose but I don't think I'd use the word "pundit" for any organization either.

I Just Can't Get Off God's Ass

Nothing new here except for the last third. I just can't leave a good butt alone. Even the background is stolen from some poor granny. Preachers'll do that.

Look at these tags YouTube suggests:



Fucking pigeonholing bastards. Hmm, pigeonholing...

Playing

Caught Red-Handed Being Honest

Guess who's still a legitimate newsmaker?

“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared [Ron] Schiller, the head of NPR’s nonprofit foundation, who last week announced his departure for the Aspen Institute.

In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give up to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”

Well, I guess The Daily Caller will give him play. Do they count?

Good work catching a guy calling obvious loons loony a week before he left for another job. That there is news.*

UPDATARINO!

This is a sad little follow-up. Well done anti-jihad jihadists.

*Also I predict Bouffant beat me to this. Let's see if I'm right. Maybe he's still asleep. Oh, hey, it was Brendan with pretty much the same fucking joke.

Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dog

Whatever Happened to Mark Noonan?

Freebie available apparently. Being a reader of the House of Substance PAYS.

Professional Advice

Below is Ann Althouse being chased by an awl:



Now, here are the tags you could steal if you were of a mind to either appropriate this mad dash to pricktory or make Ann get chased by something else:

<marquee scrollamount="17" behavior="scroll" direction="right"><img src="http://i52.tinypic.com/24boyv6.gif" border="0" height="150" /><img src="http://i51.tinypic.com/a5byw9.gif" border="0" width="75" /><img src="http://i52.tinypic.com/t8ndip.gif" border="0" height="120" /></marquee>

The marquee tag is the start: it has a speed of 17, and scrolls to the right. It needs closing.

What follows are three image tags, images hosted elsewhere so you don't need to worry about whether or not the tags refer to some local copy of the image: they don't. If you steal these tags - cut and paste the whole lot - they will work. [In comments below it has been noted that some folks have CSS that slaps borders on images: set those borders to zero if you can find 'em in your template.] At least until people who code browsers finally get rid of the much-despised marquee tag itself. Some curmudgeonly bastards won't even let you see this sentence blink.

The first image is the awl which I gave a height of 150 pixels. Image tags will shrink or enlarge images proportionally, so I didn't have to specify a width: what I was concerned about was the height in proportion to Altstone.

The second image is a wide but short transparency: it's invisible and provides space between the awl and Ann. I adjusted its width and since I made its height negligible it won't affect the height of the line it's on. I guess I could have constrained the height of a perfectly square transparent GIF by using a height attribute but in one of those strange quirks that defines me I didn't want to type an extra twelve characters in the tag. How long was that last sentence?

The third image is Altstone, and she's been squished a little shorter than that menacing awl.

Close the marquee tag and you're done. Or you can substitute any of the image URLs within the tags for another.

So Ann can be followed by the LOLBUS:



Don't die in an ASCIIdent Ann! HAW! HAW!

In a more realistic usage we have Mark Noonan with blinking eyebrows followed by a cute pirate. You know, I think Mark's eyebrows were my animated GIF inspiration, as sad a thing as I have ever written, although I think I posted a Malkin cheerleader thing first, as sad a thing as I have also ever written.

Sometimes a Cigar is a Big Wang

In The Air Tonight

What passes for news:

[Phil Collins] lives in a small town in Switzerland now, attempting to distance himself from the music scene. The report that he's calling it quits from the music business just seems to make his actions official. “I don't really belong to that world and I don't think anyone's going to miss me. I'm much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely,” he told FHM. Today's world of MTV Music Awards and artists who care more about celebrity status than making music make the choice easy, he says.

Here is Phil Collins casting aside his ego to work in the shadows of Phil Collins and Phil Collins:



Really, though, apart from that business of ripping off the chorus of a good song to make a whiny one we have nothing against Phil Collins...um, that we don't hold against plenty of other people too. Enjoy life, Phil! And maybe some good can come of this as the many millions Phil has earned can be spent on MEANINGFUL RESEARCH:

And then there are the photographs. He's got them stored on a laptop upstairs. He has a ton of them, taken by him and some of his Alamo buddies. They're odd. They've got unworldly things in them. "Do you want to see them?" he says. And then adds with mock fright in his voice, "It's some absolutely chilling stuff." But then he goes upstairs, pets his Jack Russell terrier, Travis (named after William Barret Travis, the Alamo commander), and sits at a laptop, where he pulls up picture after picture of the modern-day Alamo and related battle sites, various angles and times, and in the majority of them, soft little glowing balls, whitish in color and semitransparent, sometimes a few, sometimes a great many, seem to be hovering in the air.

"They're orbs," Collins says solemnly. "I'm not sure what the scientific term is, but it's paranormal energy. See this one? Now this one is at Goliad, where, after the Alamo, 400 guys were executed. You've got to be careful. You can talk yourself into this stuff. See how many there are here? I get chills just talking about it. All of those orbs! They're all over the place! If you believe this, then you have to rethink everything you've been taught. That's what freaks me out."

Phil, EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW IS A LIE.

Solidarity

Happy International Women's Day, international women. Off to march with the darling daughter.

Let Me Quote Someone Famous

Someone's mad at Fred Phelps again, using some interesting language. Guess who?

Anatole France once said (sarcastically) “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” A similar principle applies here. These laws forbid the Shriners, the Knights of Columbus and the Teamsters from harassing private funerals, but such groups don’t care because they would never exercise such a right.

Yes, that is Jonah Goldberg breaking out the Anatole France plus much-needed parenthetical enhancement for the squares.

The NRO, in its majestic equality, allows the good and evil alike to write in its pages about the laziness of those who sleep under bridges, who beg in the streets, and need to steal their bread.

Vandalism

Go* see Roger Ailes for something more substantive.

*Yes Mr. Bouffant this word is very very really totally necessary.

Distractions

Ever try to fulfill a request and get kinda distracted? Me neither.

Among the many lessons animators must learn is how best to harmonize the elements of the human form to convey their message. A face, for instance, can, with a few subtle strokes of a brush, change from sinister to innocent, inveigling to ignorant. Once these elements have been worked out to one's satisfaction, how is one to then unite that carefully-worked-out and perfect-in-itself encapsulation of human experience with the rest of a human frame that is both well-proportioned and believable and still continues to carry the grace of the composition forward?

Yes, friends, SUCCESS.

Well anyway I guess I can add some demons.

Also jetpack grannies.

Oh, hey, isn't this the ideal use of the insanely annoying marquee tag?

.oOOoo..

Once more with demon:

.oOOoo..

Sowellgrannies are just a menace:

.oOOoo..

Awl's well that ends well.

I Miss Gavin

That whole Fixing the Internet thing was fun.

Unveiled Threats

Ramesh Ponnuru proving a point:

One of the chief arguments against Governor Walker’s proposal — maybe the chief argument — is that strong public-sector unions are necessary to offset the political power of plutocratic elites and thus achieve sensible, balanced public policies. This is the argument of Paul Krugman, for example. I find it a little odd. The argument can only be persuasive to someone who is already committed to contemporary-liberal economic policies. The vast majority of liberals already are. So is this an argument directed solely at those few liberals who have reservations about the power of these unions, the Richard Cohens of the world?

Is it me or is it a weird omission to just gloss over the "political power of plutocratic elites" bit? I mean, that's honest, but I thought Ramesh was supposed to pretend such power was an expression of the will of the people, however bullshitty.

I've chopped off his answer, so let's let him explain further:

And it’s also odd because the argument is so often made by people who think there is something objectionable in Governor Walker’s support for legislation that will weaken his political opponents and thus strengthen his allies. The countervailing-power argument is precisely that the law should boost the power of one side of the political debate. (Again: Nobody who makes this argument can expect Walker’s supporters to respond, “Well now that you point it out I suppose our conservative agenda is destructive and it would be good to throw up obstacles to it by strengthening our opposition.”)

Again: plutocratic elites? Hello?

Rollover Test

There once was a cowboy from Plano
Whose come was redolent of Drano
So your dad learned to throat him
Right down to the scrotum
And never did taste him againo.

Hmm, can't figure out what the rollover text wants to move to the next line. I'm just throwing spaces and returns at it but it seems to vary per browser. I give up.