Give Me Your Pop-Tarts Yearning to Breathe Free

Although I feel strongly that Nyan Mitt yearns for freedom beyond the starry background I'm not sure how to end the rainbow trail yet. There's fun in pretending it's a long flag.









...And of course...



Show me the science-fiction writer who imagined we could do this. SHOW ME.

There We Go

Nothing but the best for my readers.

Vancouver Represent

I am really really enjoying the Best of Craigslist feed.

Penis Measuring

---

Date: 2010-03-02, 6:01PM PST

---

A friend of mine and I have been having a long-standing argument about whose penis is larger. We've tried having our girlfriends confirm to the other the exact size, but neither one of us buy it. I don't want to see his penis and he doesn't want to see mine. I don't want my girlfriend looking at his penis and he doesn't was his looking at mine.

So... We just need a girl to look at both of our penises (individually) and then to both of our faces say which one is bigger. We can't pay much. $50.

• Location: Vancouver
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
• Compensation: $50

And if that didn't make you all misty-eyed...

Originally Posted: Tue, 23 Feb 17:49 MST

Totally AWESOME Kimball Organ

---

Date: 2010-02-23, 5:49PM MST

---

Dude, this thing is sick. You need this organ.
Find out why this does not turn on and then you will be ready to rock out, or play some hymns at your local church!
Make an offer, any offer! Any trades considered!
Would love to trade for a cute puppy like this:


Check out this video of what you could be doing in just a few short weeks of practice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE8Mv5ww4BM&feature=related

Here is a picture of the glorious beast.


There is a good chance that it stopped working because we brought it out in the snow to play while we snowboarded in our front yard..

Come get it before this weekend and I'll throw in a free high five! Yeah dude!

• Location: Lakewood
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 1614955019

Mitt Romney Will Lick America's Problems

Gotta get back on to Zombie Paul Ryan.

Hypocrisy!

Charles Country and Western Cooke on the case:

I sent a few e-mails yesterday inquiring of Gawker’s staff how it felt about working for a company whose Cayman Islands–based finances are, as John Cassidy of The New Yorker put it, “organized like an international money-laundering operation” when they are nonetheless content to run a piece knocking Mitt Romney for tax avoidance. John Cook, who wrote the piece, responded, as did both Cord Jefferson and Hamilton Nolan. Cook informed me that Gawker’s Cayman connection has been common knowledge since 2010 and that I was late to the “scoop.” (A funny accusation, given that I wasn’t claiming a scoop, but Gawker, which touted Bain files that were almost all in the public domain, screamed “exclusive.”)

“I, too, was disappointed when I first learned those details from Reuters’ Felix Salmon and the New Yorker’s John Cassidy back in 2010,” wrote John Cook. Cord Jefferson added: “Way to crack the case on a fact openly linked to in the original story.* My comment is this: Nice job, Woodward.” This came in the midst of a very Gawker-esque barrage of sarcasm, which included descriptions of me as a “dimwit” and “f***ing idiot” and basic instructions as to how I might read pages on the Internet. I’d have been disappointed with anything else, I suppose.

I'm pleased too. EVERYONE should aspire to the Ben Shapiro level of self-pwnership. Apart from Cooke's desire to show how stupid people think he is, the post boils down to this:

If it is wrong to arrange your finances through the Cayman Islands, it is wrong to do so whether you are Gawker or whether you are Mitt Romney.

I am grateful that my membership in the left-wing groupthink cabal does not permit me to write I AGREE COMPLETELY THAT BOTH ROMNEY AND GAWKER SUCK FINANCIAL ASS in big bold text on a website for surely the whole socialist house of cards would collapse.

Blowing in the Wind Can Get You Killed

Well:



Via, which I guess should be added to the list here.

In further Catholic Schoolgirls Gone Wild adventures we have this from Maggie Gallagher:

But Tony Perkins has a point, too. It’s not just one instance of labeling the Family Research Council a “hate group.” It’s the persistent refrain among major gay-rights groups that opposition to gay marriage is in itself not only hatred but discrimination and a violation of basic human rights. This is the rhetoric of de-legitimization and ultimately dehumanization. Your opponents aren’t just wrong; they are evil.

Heavens!

That brings this to mind from Waking Up Now:

Then we get this statement from Maggie Gallagher:

I’m not surprised that Miss Beverly Hills, Lauren Ashley, opposes gay marriage — after all 45 percent of young Californians voted for Prop 8, as did 7 million Californians generally. But I have to say, I am impressed with her courage in coming forward and for speaking up for Carrie. The elected officials of city of Beverly Hills are not demonstrating tolerance or kindness by continuing the avalanche of hatred against supporters of Prop 8. [emphasis added]

Some interpret this as a total endorsement of Lauren’s statement [which, dear reader is "The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman,” said Ashley. “In Leviticus it says, 'If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.' The Bible is pretty black and white." -McG]. I try to be factual here, so I did the obvious thing. I wrote to Maggie.

I recently read your comments about Miss Beverly Hills on the Fox news website:

[And here I inserted the quote directly above.]

I feel certain that this cannot be your entire quote, since you’re responding to Lauren Ashley’s statement that gays shall surely be put to death. Could you please let me know the full version of your quote, so that we can all be clear on where you stand on the “surely be put to death” portion? Thanks.

And Maggie wrote back. Here’s her full response:

No i’m not. Maggie

Thank the Lord for incoherent responses.

Seek, Hippies, Seek

Hmm, Hanna-Barbera might approve of that method of file-size shaving if it wasn't so much work. The crappiness of the work is acceptable.

The Blues

News of Republicans:

Tampa, Fla. — Greetings from the Sun Dome at the University of South Florida. Ron Paul will hold a rally here in a couple hours. His son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, will speak, and John Popper of Blues Traveler will play a few tunes.

If you're a guy who names his band after a form of music black folks invented should you be hanging out with Ron Paul? Or is the pot that good?

Movie Title Stills

Once again via H&F-J we have the Movie Title Stills Collection, a boon to photoshoppers all over the world.

Kissing the Organ Goodbye

It's old and unwanted.



Look at the layout: open the top and you get diagrams on what the various modules are doing, and there's a second flip-up circuit board with more diagrams...I weep at the effort. But even Freecycle won't have it and it's too big and too-little used to justify the space it takes up. It's going to leave in lovingly disassembled pieces. I may save the spring reverb: plug those into an amp and they're Neubauten-style percussion instruments.

Black Humorism

Nicholas Eberstadt is outraged at the lack of bloodthirsty monsters in Norway:

Norway’s one-man Rassenreinheitseinsatzgruppe (Google translate it), Anders Behring Breivik, was just given the maximum for his crime in Norway: 21 years.

That’s right: 77 murders (mainly at a summer camp for immigrant children), 21 years.

The demographer in me has to do the arithmetic: This works out to less than 100 days per murder. That’s right: less than a summer per murder.

Bloodthirsty monster Mark Krikorian:

Nick: It’s not much consolation, but the Norway mass murderer (whose name, like the names the Sikh temple shooter or Gabby Giffords’s shooter or the Batman shooter, should be repeated as little as possible, since public exposure is what they crave) will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, since Norway apparently has “preventive detention” after a sentence has been completed. Though, of course, “the rest of his life” should last only until the authorities finish preparing the gas chamber or the gallows.

Or the skullcrusher or chestsmasher or what have you. We can argue about favoured methods of death all day! But here it gets weird:

But “Rassenreinheitseinsatzgrupp” isn’t the right epithet in this case. I have no doubt the creep hates foreigners, but the site of his crimes was not “a summer camp for immigrant children” nor were the victims mainly “immigrant children” — it was a camp for the socialist youth organization, and only a handful of the dead were of non-Norwegian origin. The names of the 77 victims, which should be publicized whenever possible, are listed here.

The absurd sentence did not stem from the fact that Norway “evaluate[s] its own immigrant children’s lost lives as being worth so very, very little.” Rather, Norway, like the rest of the developed world, has become so decadent that it can no longer take the vigorous measures any society needs to defend itself. A self-confident society that wasn’t apologizing for its ancestors and guilty about it success would, in an orderly, law-based fashion, put this fiend to death. He’s laughing all the way to the jailhouse.

Would that I had a komikal kwip to go with this but I don't because what I read there - Krikorian being the lead writer on the Mexican Menace and next in line for Derbyshire-style firing - is Dead Brown People = White Children Saved.

I honestly feel soiled for reading and writing the above. Is it me? Might vigorous defense of a society self-confident in its ancestry mean puppies and cotton candy for everyone?

Basics of Fur Farming and Dog Breeding

Via Hoefler and Frere-Jones

Smelling It

Jonah Fucking Goldberg:

Every now and then I watch the actual broadcast-news shows, just to see what they’re up to. Last night I caught NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams In their story on Augusta admitting women Stina Sternberg of Golf Digest said:

This is a momentous day for the game of golf and sports in general. It’s like the Berlin Wall of discrimination finally coming down in golf.

We could be here all day finding new insights into the absurdity crammed into this soundbite. I have no doubt it is a momentous day for the game of golf. And, I’ll leave it to others to argue how big a deal this is for sports. But the Berlin Wall of discrimination? What the hell?

First of all, the Berlin Wall kept people in, not out (a simple fact countless people still seem not to understand when it comes to, say, the Israeli defense barrier). It kept poor people and rich people alike in (though East Germany’s supply of rich people had a rapid half-life). Was Augusta keeping female golfers locked up in the club pantry?

The Berlin Wall was also a symbol of systematic evil and geopolitical nuclear brinkmanship. Augusta was a symbol of . . . well it was a symbol of various sorts to various people. But in no way was it a symbol of anything like the Berlin Wall save to the very dim or the very ignorant.

Also, let it be known that

THE WHITE MAN IS THE JEW OF LIBERAL FASCISM.

Maybe Stina Sternberg graduated from Swarthmore.

What a Difference Two Hours and Forty Minutes Make

One crazy nitwit:

Polarized News, For Better and Worse
By Stanley Kurtz
August 20, 2012 10:37 A.M.

Newsweek’s cover shocker feels like desperate cry from a dying icon. The magazine long ago discredited itself as a common national source for news, taking leftist opinion-reporting to unprecedented extremes. This brief reversal will be too little, too late for conservatives, merely confirming that Newsweek has lost its bearings. General interest news magazines are so much a thing of the past that serial partisanship is what passes for neutrality now.

A second crazy nitwit:

The Stupids Step In It
By Michael Walsh
August 20, 2012 1:18 P.M.

Honestly . . . just when Newsweek hands the conservative movement a major victory in the MSM wars, along comes Todd Akin to throw the Left a life jacket and change the course of the conversation.

Newsweek is truly a magazine for everyone.

Old Posts About Typography

Hoefler & Frere-Jones have a rarely updated blog, but the RSS feed contains every post back to 2007. If you use Firefox they all load at once. Fun! And clearly in defiance of their design sense.

Blemetheus Brings Fire to Cook Forty For Humans

Beach Zombie

A rare breed.




Flickr here.

Gum

Gum from Cartoon Brew on Vimeo.

Hmm. Vimeo's embedding is kind of sucky. Just click the gum link. Or maybe don't.

Beats a Rock on a Trench

Go here for more.

ITEM! TPM ON THE CASE!

Was it not that?

Just Because

It's not that it's genius or even interesting, but it reminds me that Pearl Jam were always lame.

Search Results Don't Want Jizz All Over Them

Conspiracies Are Our Business...and Business Is Good!

The whole of an item from Big Hollywood (less a picture with a double-neck twelve-string combo of a kind I have not seen before):

Megadeth lead singer Dave Mustaine just uncorked the mother of all conspiracy theories.

The singer told a Singapore concert audience that President Barack Obama is behind the recent rash of gun violence, from the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo. to the Sikh temple shooting which took the lives of six worshippers, in order to support a new gun ban.

The president, Mustaine said, is "staging all of these murders, like the Fast and Furious thing down in the border, in Aurora, Colo. all the people that were killed there, and now the beautiful people in the Sikh temple."

"I don't know where I'm going to live if America keeps going the way it's going," he continues. "It looks like it's turning into Nazi America."

Cue the heartfelt apology via Twitter in 3 ... 2 ...

Gosh, it's difficult to tell what the editorial position on this is. Maybe they'll sort it out in the comments thread.

Bus Projects

I've never followed a Photoshop tutorial closely before, but what the heck. Might as well get started.

Initial silliness:



You know, I still have the makings of this around...

TOO-DARK UPDATE:

I tell myself I'm gonna stick with the tutorial and I start adding layers and layers of shit.

Help a Brother Gentleman Out

Participation!



I LOVE TO HELP.

Drink blue pus?
Clink brew thus?
Dink-chew Gus?
Stink poo plus?
Think you suss?

Nonetheless, I love that UndocuBus rhymes with incubus, given what illegal immigration is doing to our country.

Oh fuck off.



TIGRIS AWESOMENESS UPDATE:

"UndocuBus?
An incubus!"
"He raises such a stink," you fuss
"It forces one to think, 'Jealous!
If instead a succubus
were riding his l'il dinky-bus
He would be in the pink, I trust!'"
You recognize a fink and plus
You give the jerk a link, I cuss!

__

I believe we now require the verse tag.

Weathermen Required

Christian Schneider:

Romney’s ideological malleability is well known. As governor of Massachusetts and then U.S. Senate candidate against Ted Kennedy, Romney took politically advantageous positions that seemed to belie his inner conservatism. Whenever he had an argument with himself, it seemed like the other guy always won. As a conservative friend of mine rationalized, “At least he was tricking the liberals, not us.”

But with Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the era of questioning Romney’s conservative credentials feels like the Mesozoic Era. He delivered conservatism’s most attractive antidote to the Obama economy, which speaks volumes about Romney’s dedication to free-market solutions to the nation’s ills. This glorious flip inoculates him against any previous flops.

I suspect the really annoying uncle is going to GET CHRISTIAN'S NOSE AGAIN!

NO NO NO

Google appears to have upgraded again and Latvian Google now returns English cognates when you look up a guy's name in Farsi.

FUCK

YOU

GOOGLE.

Keeping An Eye On Those Riddled Folks

I Guess I Need Some Animated GIFs of This Guy

Breathtaking and Obvious

Good old Jonah:

As Noah Glyn noted the other day, apparently Nancy Pelosi is not content to let Harry Reid win the title of shabbiest congressional leader uncontested. She says Republicans want to poison children with E. coli. Or something.

“I say to [Republicans], do you have children that breathe air? Do you have grandchildren that drink water?,” Pelosi asked. “I’m a mom and I have five kids . . . as a mom I was vigilant about food safety, right moms? If you could depend on the government for one thing it was that you had to be able to trust the water that our kids drank and the food that they ate. But this is the E. coli club. They do not want to spend money to do that.”

The dishonesty and/or stupidity of all this is really quite breathtaking — and obvious. First of all, you could cut government funding down to 1950 levels and still have money for food safety. But this is what liberals do. They metaphorically lash children to the fenders of government so that the budget cutting blade must slice through them first. Then, after insanely putting them in harm’s way, they proclaim it is the sane budget cutters who seek to harm children. In fairness, sometimes liberals hold the young human shields in reserve and put firehouses, historic monuments, and old-age homes outside the budgetary walls of the fiscal keep. And, again, they declare that the fiscally sane want to get rid of firefighters and the Washington Monument — and not, say, the Export-Import Bank or agricultural subsidies.

Jonah knows from breathtaking dishonesty and/or stupidity:

Arguing that the U.S. food supply is 99 percent safe, House Republicans cut millions of dollars Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, denying the agency money to implement landmark food safety laws approved by the last Congress.

Saying the cuts were needed to lower the national deficit, the House also reduced funding to the Agriculture Department’s food safety inspection service, which oversees meat, poultry and some egg products. And lawmakers chopped $832 million from an emergency feeding program for poor mothers, infants and children. Hunger groups said that change would deny emergency nutrition to about 325,000 mothers and children.

Winning the Kids Over

Katrina Trinko notices that young Republicans give far less of a shit about what naughty bits go where than they should.

I’m 24, and I’m used to being the odd one out among my peers in opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage. But I also get the impression that very few young adults have heard a good argument for why it should be opposed.

Maybe you should give them that good argument! Next sentence:

It’s not that they’ve heard the argument that marriage should be tied to procreation – delivered charitably, with an awareness that many young adults have gay friends and/or family — and have rejected it so much as they simply have been emotionally moved by the case made by gay and lesbians who wish to be married.

There you go: people who are not having children are not allowed to be married. Good one! Follow the link she gives to the NRO editorial on gay marriage and after some moaning about being called bigots we have Liberty:

What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment. These days, marriage regulates sex (to the extent it does regulate it) in a wholly non-coercive manner, sex outside of marriage no longer being a crime.

Now THERE'S an argument that college-age kids of libertarian bent can appreciate: applause for the government regulating orgasms with a wistful nod at anti-fornication punishment.

David French responds:

Katrina, thanks for your post. I particularly liked this statement:

But at the same time, it’s foolish to ignore the social issues — and to give up on changing anyone’s mind. Social conservativism has a compelling moral vision, one centered on human dignity and the preciousness of life. That case deserves an airing, particularly to young adults, who may be more familiar with the routine mockery of social conservative values than with the arguments for those values sincerely and thoughtfully delivered.

This is exactly right. Implicit in many reports like the Times story you link to is the notion that young voters are somehow showing us the way. (This notion rightfully drives Jonah crazy.) We social conservatives have a good case to make, we should make it, and we shouldn’t turn generational responsibilities upside down by letting juniors lead their elders.

College Republicans who are, say, 24 need guidance from elders like David French, who is surely in his mid 40s and must ache to pass on his wisdom as death approaches. Will the youngsters listen or has the Ladies-Wearing-Pants Revolution gone too far already?

I Figure This Won't Last...

Some algorithm'll spot the samples.



The idea was sort of musical trolling. Initially I just wanted to loop those opening Led Zep bits and never start the song. UNFULFILLED EARWORM. As it turns out Magic Bus is near the same BPM and it makes my ears perk up like a busy little terrier in about the same way. Same with Fopp. So I figured I might try to make something out of beginnings only.

The result is that I pretty much trolled myself and needed something that sounded final. Thus the 99 Problems bit.

Stupid Names on the Internet Are Safe

This via Boing Boing is the end of an interesting story:

But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.

But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I’m angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there’s Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on.

One of the major factors in figuring out this guy's information was that he consistently used his name for email addresses. I think I might reorganize some accounts to refer back to other fictional accounts rather than things attached to my name. I have a pretty cool but unused email address I could use as a contact, and then set up some mail forwarding to get alerts from it (and also to keep it live).

I actually feel kind of dumb for sending something to a USian via Amazon recently just because Amazon's protocols seem so stupid. And then there's Apple binding everything to an Apple ID...

ALTERNATE TROLLY TITLE:

Gosh Darn It That Cloud Didn't Help At All.

Priorities

FOR GREAT JUSTICE:

TEXAS — Two young students in Hood County have been arrested for creating a fake Facebook account using the name of a classmate, and were taken to a juvenile detention facility on felony charges.

The girls, ages 12 and 13, were each arrested July 16 on a count of online impersonation, a third-degree felony, said Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds.

Deeds said the victim’s mother alerted authorities June 28 after she discovered the site. The victim, a girl who did not have a real Facebook page, did not know about the site until it had been active for more than a month, he said. The account had 63 friends before it was shut down.

Imagine if a banker had done something so awful.

Puppy Water

Follow ye link:

At first I thought it was a joke when I read a recipe for “The Puppy Water” in a recipe collection compiled by one Mary Doggett in 1682. “Take one Young fatt puppy and put him into a flatt Still Quartered Gutts and all ye Skin upon him”, then distill it along with buttermilk, white wine, pared lemons, herbs, camphire, venus turpentine, red rosewater, fasting spittle, and eighteen pippins.

Although Mary Doggett’s recipe does not specify purpose, puppy water was a facial treatment – as immortalized by Jonathan Swift in his poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732):

There Night-gloves made of Tripsy’s Hide,
Bequeath’d by Tripsy when she dy’d,
With Puppy Water, Beauty’s Help
Distill’d from Tripsy‘s darling Whelp.

Swift also, however, refers to another canine usage: gloves made from dog’s hide. As noted in Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1718), “little puppy dogs” (and various other animals, such as hedge-hogs, snails, foxes, moles, frogs, or earthworms) “may be made beneficial to your sick bodies”. Robert James’s entry for “Canis” in his Medicinal Dictionary (1743-5) explained that Europeans “generally abstain from Dogs Flesh, till Necessity… obliges them to use it.” But use it they did: the flesh, fat, skin and excrement could all be incorporated into medicines recommended even by renowned medical practitioners.

Not quite what I was looking for:



I think it was National Lampoon's Terrier Water that was "sparkling water from the center of the dog."

Something to See

You might want to go look at some photos by Peter-Paul de Meijer.

Vanilla

Jay Nordlinger:

“Vanilla,” they say. [Ohio Senator Rob] Portman is “vanilla.” What a bizarre putdown, in more ways than one. First, as I’ve said before, vanilla is one of the best and most beloved flavors in the world! Any yogurt-buyer knows there’s a big difference between plain and vanilla. Couple of months ago, I was in the grocery store, hurrying, and mistakenly picked up plain instead of vanilla. After the first bite, I almost curdled and died.

WAIT UNTIL THE TOFU DISASTER.

Furthermore, isn’t this charge of “vanilla” a kind of . . . hate speech, as the Left would say? Where are the language cops? You also hear, “Can’t have two white guys on the ticket.” Oh? What if someone said, “Can’t have two black guys,” or, “Can’t have two Hispanic guys”? Would that be kosher? Why can’t people simply be people, without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex?

Or boringness? I think it's in the constitution.

Completely Lazy

There is just too much summer relief going on. Going out to drink this evening and it's an open question if I can get prepared in the seven hours left to me. It's bliss.

Your Friendly Anonymous Representative

This is an interesting video:



Story here.

Assuming it's real I guess I don't have a problem with these guys making life hard for a somewhat jerky little company, but it's only a jerky little company. And hey, do Anonymous look like your pals in videos like this? I appreciate the amusement value in it, but does it help them get the online freedom they want or does it help governments justify cracking down on anonymity?