Friday, September 28, 2012

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Office Life



Visitors to the office are rare and somewhat camera-shy.

Division

Jeff Jacoby:
At every milestone in Obama’s journey to the White House — from the keynote address in Boston that put him on the national radar screen to his inaugural address in 2009 — he held himself out as a healer. Skeptics might note that partisanship and rancor were as old as American democracy itself, but Obama insisted that would change when he was president. The toxic style of politics wasn’t inescapable. Give me the highest office in the land, he assured a rapturous crowd in Ohio two days before the 2008 election, and “we can end it once and for all.”

Millions of voters believed him. They took to heart his vow to transfigure American public life. They looked forward to the uplifting leadership he promised. What they got instead was the most polarizing and divisive presidency in modern times.
Hmm...divisiveness... That reminds me of something, but I can't - Oh wait, it reminds me of this:



On with the argument:
The civility and goodwill that were to be Obama’s touchstone? “I haven’t fully accomplished that,” he concedes. “Haven’t even come close.”

As the 2012 campaign heads into the home stretch, a story in Politico notes that “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.” The man who won the presidency by decrying “partisanship and pettiness and immaturity” now seeks reelection by deploying slurs and aspersions with abandon: A key aide suggests that Mitt Romney’s financial filings may amount to a felony. The vice president claims that Republicans want to put voters “back in chains.” An Obama campaign video likens Romney to “ a vampire.”
Ha ha! Good one! Yes he is very much like a vampire as he is so very bloodless. But as we are patting Jeff on the back for spreading valuable and fitting slurs from the Obama campaign, notice this:

Romney Obama poll hentai

Mathemagically speaking accusing all Romney supporters of common buttchuggery MUST BE LESS DIVISIVE than Romney's campaign by um, [serious calculation involving full-tongue extension and substraction from forty-seven] a BILLION.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Almost-People Skills

There once was a stuffed suit called Romney, a
Guy who'd emote like a zombie,* a
Big piece of wood, a
Stiff but up-stood, a
Contemptible cure for insomnia.

Via Pupienus Maximus:



*Yes yes, go on.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Girl Group Dolly

Going through the library for the unheard stuff...and here we are in D and E:



There's an iffy production decision in the backups in the chorus - I mean yikes - but in an alternate reality Dolly got signed by Motown.

PLUS:





Maladroit



Monday, September 24, 2012

Prairie Fire

Here is an interesting URL. None of the content mentions "prairie fire" so I assume someone consulted the weathermen to see which way the wind was blowing just before/immediately after pushing the "publish" button.

Anyway:
Parents are shipping them to their kids in college. People are dragging their “undecided” friends to theaters on weekend nights by the thousands to watch… documentaries. There hasn’t been anything like this in movie theaters since "An Inconvenient Truth" or "Fahrenheit 9/11"—though these two new movies are outselling those two liberal chestnuts. In fact, they are breaking box-office records, too.

[...] The two top-selling documentary DVDs in America are both conservative exposes of radical leftist ideology on the march: "2016: Obama’s America" and "Occupy Unmasked."

That’s right: In an election season when the mainstream media is already writing up news accounts of President Obama’s acceptance speech, the liveliest action in theaters and online media purchasing is taking place on the right.
And I'll be damned, it's correct. In fact the Amazon list is somewhat loopy:
4.4 out of 5 stars   (16)
Release Date: September 25, 2012
Price: $14.99

List Price: $149.95
22 used & new from $63.89
Screenshot from the Breitbart DVD page:



It serves as well for the D'Souza page but the Real Father bit breaks the trend:



So... I can think of all kinds of insulting reasons for such things, so why not be insulting:
1. Conservative book-club type thingie.
2. Kooks and shut-ins buy DVDs while everyone else is streaming them.
3. Scientology-style cult pumping figures (Catholicism box set at number ten?).
4. People just aren't buying DVDs so 2 & 3 operate with few purchases necessary.
That, though, doesn't really explain the Box Office Mojo chart for 2016.



Mind you the Netflix popular picks don't reflect that lunacy, but there's probably less of a frightened-senior-citizen component going on.

Documentaries That Document the Wrong Thing

The Weird World of Blowfly was hard to watch. I've never understood why Blowfly might be funny so I thought I'd give it a shot, and it turned out that the film didn't have much history but instead followed the now-fairly-infirm Clarence Reid around as a hipster white guy tried to make a buck off Blowfly by being a terrible manager/drummer in a new Blowfly band. And let me put it in a sentence: Tom Bowker is a leaden and uninspiring drummer. Off-stage Bowker comes off like Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to be unfunny and pathetic, which Philip Seymour Hoffman is quite good at but looks very sad in a real person. I don't know what the financial arrangements actually are - maybe Reid comes out ahead (there's a scene in which Bowker complains of his debt and Reid doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to incur more of that).

This was somewhat amusing because the excerpt in the film stuck with the part that sounded like straight soul except for the words, so the chorus, uh, came as a surprise:



Later on the song becomes just way too obvious.

Apart from such brief surprises - which isn't actually a surprise in context - he's about as unfunny as Frank Zappa.

Like Zappa, though, Clarence Reid had musical talent:



It's also a reminder that I don't know much about TK Records beyond KC and Anita Ward, and I should do some listening.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Slumming in Time

Best of Craigslist:

Time Travel


Date: 2010-09-24, 10:09AM MDT


I have a functioning time machine (i know it sounds unbelievable, but I assure you it works) that I need a 2nd person to operate with me.
I'm looking for someone who is adventurous and reliable. Preferable a male; or a female that can do heavy lifting.
I am leaving on September 30th, 2010, in the morning and plan to return October 2nd, 2010. I am going to June 1983 to handle some business.
If you are serious about time travel and are reliable, then please contact me. You do not have to pay anything, but you would have to provide someone to watch my cat for the time we are gone. The only qualifications needed are that you are reliable and that the circumferance of your head is no more than 64cm.

We will be leaving from Bozeman, MT. Let me know if you want to go with me.
Bozeman?

Saturday, September 22, 2012

The Art of Criticism

The first sentence of a review:
Well, here's an album I certainly did not expect to like so much.
You guessed it: it's a review of another Iron Bonehead production, this time a hot new platter from Bestial Holocaust called Into the Goat Vulva.

Bestial Holocaust - Into the Goat Vulva:  TAKE THAT GOOGLE!

Friday, September 21, 2012

The Marketplace

Competing blogs do not offer bidirectionality without muttering barely audible excuses regarding youthful experimentation and instead try to redirect the customer to cheap pulp novels whilst ordering their lab monkeys beaten once more.

NOT SO HERE.*

Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.
Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.
Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.
Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.
Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.
Nyan Mitt Romney but younger.

...And of course...

ANNE GEDDES CUTE BABY


*In fact beatings at Substance Labs™ have dropped a full 18% and do not often involve lab monkeys.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Feel the Darkness

There is apparently demand for a darker Mitt, so darken to taste and add personality.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

BWOF!

Mitt Romney is totally a licky thing with a poptart body flying through space and trailing a rainbow.

Hmm, don't think the divs work for that, so drag and drop it is.

Justice in retribution.

Distraction and Blegging

Work is very distracting.

Anyone know a cheap and easy database that's good at automatically gathering information, can contain both text and files, and can serve them up safely on a website? All I can think of at the moment is Filemaker.

Monday, September 17, 2012

A WHAT Looser?

Jay Nordlinger, in an aside in an entire career of asides:
P.S. Why is there a “Hispanic Heritage Month”? Can’t we be Americans and be done with this malarkey? (I hope readers appreciate the way I class up my language for the Corner. In my column, Impromptus, it’s often a speck looser.)
Get this man a Romney campaign position ASAP!

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Lazypost

All hail our snaky saviours:
"Virgin birth" among animals may not be a rare, last-resort, save-the-species stopgap after all.

For the first time, animal mothers, specifically pit vipers, have been discovered spawning fatherless offspring in the wild. More to the point, the snakes did so even when perfectly good males were around.
Native GIMP on OS X. There's a zipped collection of plugins here. More over here.

Women are soulless whores until I dress them properly.

Nickelback have their own meme.

The bee was gonna retire by the weekend!
The parasite could be controlling the honeybees and making them abandon their hives—or perhaps the infected bees are "committing altruistic suicide" to protect their hive mates, said entomologist John Hafernik of San Francisco State University.


The looped sheep goes well with this:



Many clever GIFs to steal. I was trying to get at this sort of partially animated still with the bit from The Trip but my patience needs work and I should have made the middle post of the washing machine stay still on the Y axis.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Dreams of Orbital Death Platforms

Bloodthirsty monster Mark Krikorian demonstrates Poe's Law:
Tempting Advice from 1972
By Mark Krikorian
September 14, 2012 4:44 P.M.

Satire though it was, Randy Newman’s “Political Science” has lyrics relevant to recent events:
We give them money
But are they grateful?
No they’re spiteful
And they’re hateful.
They don’t respect us so let’s surprise them;
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.
Any objections?
That is the whole of the post.

To go all kooky for a moment, if I was some crazy war-loving Muslim fundamentalist I'd be doing my damndest to fuck things up before the election to boost the Mittster, who's more likely to go bananas and invade Syria and Libya and Iran and Egypt.

Living in Hell



Over here is a list of aphorisms submitted by a whole bunch of people who have nothing better to do. It's in the nature of such a page that kooks "improve" upon whatever folk nonsense they've heard, mangling it and adding ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! as they see fit, or simply coming up with their own hopeful motivational-poster wisdom. Then of course there are other people who begin never-ending projects using those brain-droppings and those people are Noble and their projects are Uniformly WONDERFUL!!!

He who is not a sugar substitute to himself doesn't know himself.
He who is not a freak to himself doesn't know himself.
Nobody can make you feel abnormal without your queen.
The bean is out there.
No president can make you feel x-rated without your shot.
Nobody can make you feel egocentric without your thing.
It's not what we prick that shows us up, it's what we don't prick.
It's not what we offend that shows us up, it's what we don't offend.
It's not what we rub that shows us up, it's what we don't rub.
The great-aunt is out there.
It's not what we terminate that shows us up, it's what we don't terminate.
The spider is out there.
Harry Truman can make you feel wasteful without your metaphor.
Congresses are signs of God's work.
Nobody can make you feel ugly without your mink.
Nobody can make you feel ecstatic without your moron.
Ray Charles can make you feel bashful without your specialist.
It's not what we whip that shows us up, it's what we don't whip.
Nobody can make you feel guilty without your terrorist.
The rabbi is out there.

Current JanusNode is 3.14.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The American Exception

Mitt-blower Kevin D. Williamson:
How to respond to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic interests in the Muslim world? One especially appropriate tool we have at hand involves the State Department itself: the issuance of visas. If the Egyptians cannot bring themselves to behave like civilized human beings, then there is no reason to extend to them the benefits of international norms that they have no intention of respecting.

[...]

To my mind, the best thing about using visas as a sanction tool is that doing so hits the ruling elites in a very sensitive area. They want to send their children to Stanford, attend conferences at Harvard, do business in Houston, and send their mistresses shopping on Fifth Avenue, just like members of any other ruling elite in the world. We should categorically cut them off. Let Egypt’s best and brightest spend their days in their dreary and backward homeland; perhaps that would provide them with an appropriate incentive for improving the place.
Oh yeah, everyone wants to do business in Houston. I guess this would work because there are no other countries or schools or business districts or shopping opportunities in the world that are attractive to rich people.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Testing Patients



Oh sure, running juice through a squid is fine if you're some kid in a lab coat dicking around, but the grown-up scientists know and remember that the Goal of Science is to run electricity through people. To this end we at Substance Labs™ have procured a tiny slice of Ann Althouse and let the experiment run its course.



Okay, the eye got stuck and the orb filter was obviously on the blink but I think what we have here is a genuine Science Smackdown. You may send grant money via registered mail only.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Oops

David French:
I’ve said this before, but if there is one lesson I learned during my own deployment, it’s that our enemy is far more evil than most Americans imagine. Their evil should trigger rage — a controlled rage — and it certainly does for our soldiers downrange. A morally depraved country attacked like we were on 9/11 would lash out wildly and indiscriminately, annihilating its enemies and anyone in their proximity.


To be fair, David French is an evangelical Christian and deep in his heart he knows that Jesus would invade the wrong country.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Fuck You Jason Kenney

Good lord, there might be Iranian terrorists in our midst!
Canada is carefully screening Iranians seeking to move to Canada, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said today.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced in a statement last Friday that Canada was closing its embassy in Tehran and kicking out Iranian diplomats.

Staff with the Canadian Embassy had already left Iran and Iranian diplomats in Canada had five days to leave, he said.

Immigration services had been removed from the embassy months ago. Speaking Monday in Ottawa, Kenney said that was in anticipation of the embassy's closure.
So fuck you too John Baird. And of course Stephen Harper, but everyone knows the proper greeting for him is fuck you. One of the things about Canada is that, internationally speaking, we're somehow "nice" and therefore get to continue on the path of diplomacy and be the intermediary for peaceful solutions involving yadda yadda yadda.
Canada is joining the U.S. and Britain in cutting off diplomatic efforts.

Speaking to Evan Solomon, host of CBC News Network's Power & Politics, Kenney said the mission in Ottawa was being used for illicit purposes.

"There is licit listening, there is diplomatic listening and then there is national security violations. And there is harassment and intimidation and monitoring of our own community by forces of a dictatorship," Kenney said.
Here's a list of embassies. Shouldn't we be pulling out of a few more countries or something?

These are the people who will be hurt:
Iranians arriving at the newly closed embassy in Ottawa have expressed frustration with the move.

Kiana Alizadeh, an Iranian-Canadian student from Montreal, said the government should have considered the needs of Iranians living in Canada.

"These are the political things. I think it's not fair for the Iranians that are living here. They have to think of these people. So what should we do now?" she asked.

"I don't want to go back for living in my country but I have family there. You know, I have to go, for example, to see my parents."
It's a bunch of bullshit that's going to make things harder for a large group of people living here and an even larger group of people that want to get out of that place.

MORE BECAUSE I SAID SO

John Mundy:
Canada’s reasons for acting so suddenly are not convincing. The Prime Minister has listed Iran’s terrible human rights record, its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, its provocative nuclear program and its repeated threats against Israel as reasons to leave. These are actually reasons why we should stay. When the going gets rough you really need your diplomats. Canada’s tradition is to be one of the last countries to leave in a crisis, not the first. Iran itself is a perfect example. After the Iranian revolution, the Conservative Government decided Canada should stay on in Iran and under the courageous leadership of ambassador Ken Taylor we saved several American hostages.

There is one good reason that could explain our action and both Foreign Minister John Baird and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have referred to it. Iran could have put our diplomats at risk. It is possible that Iran has made some specific threats against our diplomatic personnel in the last few weeks and the government felt it had no choice. However, the reaction of the Iranian government suggests that this is not the case. Iran seems as surprised by our action as other countries are. If the Canadian government is acting because it has received specific threats then the Canadian public should know about it and I think our action against Iran would be better understood.
Brief biographical note on Mundy:
John Mundy is a former Canadian ambassador to Iran who was expelled in 2007.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Yes, You Are Correct.

Hair Hitler

It's Hair Hitler.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Artweek

I don't have anything to add here, I just wanna collect these because they're all around at the same time:

One:

Paul Ryan very close to Mitt Romney's bum.

Two:

In context isn't a plane flying into the UN building a GOOD thing?

Three:

The Apostles:  Divided By Jesus

Of the three the clear win is the left side of the top image, painted by probably-no-longer-welcome-at-the-National-Review Roberto Parada. You are likely to have seen his work before.

WAIT! SOMETHING TO ADD UPDATE!



I am not sure when The Tyranny Blog has looked so inviting.

Creepiness

Jay Nordlinger - the Andy Rooney with less focus - writes:
I believe it says something creepy about America that [Sandra Fluke] is famous — famous and adored. (She is pretty, true.) Her shtick is, “Other people should pay for my birth control, even if it violates their conscience,” right? What a strange Joan of Arc she makes.
Some Might Say the creepiness in America is expressed in the reliability of its creeps jumping at the chance to say SHE FUCKS AND IS FRENCH.
As I was listening to Sandra Fluke, I thought, “The ultimate spokesman for the hook-up culture.” But then came Bill Clinton, later on...
Catch that? She fucks and fucks! And then introduces the fucky guy!
One of the creepiest lines of her very creepy speech was the one that dreamed of an America “in which we decide when to start our families.” What the hell is stopping you now, sister?
"We" is one of those funny words that applies to more than one person, and therefore might include people in this situation.
She acted like it was a crime equivalent to the Holocaust that she has been “verbally attacked” for her views — her public advocacy.
Here's the speech. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say "No she did not."



Goodness, I’m “verbally attacked” every day, and why not?
Indeed sir, for you say something creepy about America.
Why is Sandra Fluke so sacrosanct?
I dunno. Just how many people do you call a slut at the office anyway?
I thought of a fairly recent expression: “Get over yourself.”
I thought of a doughnut. Mmmmmmmmmm, doughnuts.
When I saw the great and the good rise to their feet in admiration for the gibberish this woman was speaking — her moral nonsense — I felt almost physically sick. I’m talking about Joe Biden, Michelle Obama... These are people with considerable power in our country. And this is what’s in their hearts and minds? It is.
"I'm reading their minds...and they are thinking about...SLUTS."
A rude question: If Sandra Fluke were fat and pimply, would she be famous, a national political star? A prime-time speaker at the Democratic convention? Oh, come now...
All sex, all the time. Thanks for playing your part Jay. Any interest in signing on to the Romney campaign to handle press?

127강 The Farting Daughter-in-Law

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Amusements

Kevin D. Williamson:
I have a question for Ted Strickland: What in hell is “economic patriotism”? More specifically, what in hell does perennial ward-of-the-state Ted Strickland mean by “economic patriotism”? Both Strickland and his wife spent a great deal of their lives on the public teat, in publicly funded institutions and in elected office. So far as I can tell from his biography, Strickland has not worked for a profit-oriented enterprise in his adult life, and his only nonpublic paychecks have come from a Methodist children’s home and a fellowship at Harvard’s Institute for Politics. He spent most of the 1970s and early 1980s desperately trying to climb aboard the federal gravy train, unsuccessfully running for the House three times. People who have spent most of their lives supported by taxpayers probably should be more circumspect when criticizing . . . taxpayers.
Is it possible, then, to refer to Paul Ryan as a perennial ward of the state? COMMENTS SAY NO.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Statistics

The University of Milan has a statistics program:



Don't trust it.



VIDEO UPDATE!

Fake Likes

The horrible Facebook has a problem:

Facebook might be one of the most uptight sites on the internet, requiring everyone to log in with their name and picture and birthday and to generally behave themselves like a nerd in study hall. Yet it still has a slimy underground where people do slimy things, the company conceded Friday. Facebook says it is removing fraudulently generated “likes,” which helped make some businesses on Facebook appear more popular than they really were.

In a post on its security blog, Facebook wrote that it “recently increased our automated efforts to remove [fake] Likes” on business pages. In other words, business pages were previously puffed up thanks to shady clicks from fake or hijacked Facebook accounts.

Facebook is dumping this news at a time when few people will read it, on a Friday before a holiday weekend. And no wonder: The implications are disturbing. Facebook’s advertising system is built on the idea that consumers will be willing to build closer relationships with advertisers, “liking” the advertiser’s pages, reading the advertiser’s status updates, and circulating content about the advertiser to friends. If an advertiser’s popularity is exaggerated by fake “likes,” it makes the business less trustworthy and less likely to be engaged by real consumers.

None of that's surprising. When you can build attention into dollars someone's going make dollars trying to game that. That's advertising. I wouldn't be the #3 provider of Cars 2 hentai without such shenanigans. The Facebook post on it is interesting:
On average, less than 1% of Likes on any given Page will be removed, providing they and their affiliates have been abiding by our terms. These newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes. While we have always had dedicated protections against each of these threats on Facebook, these improved systems have been specifically configured to identify and take action against suspicious Likes.
Please like things sincerely or you may be treated with suspicion. Similarly your account may be valuable enough to be stolen and it will be sent around the Facebook environment like like liking things that SHOULD NOT BE LIKED. More interesting to me is the trail of comments that follows any post to the security blog:
What has better comments?

YOUTUBE.