Monsters

Have a Lucky New Year

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

Holiday Stories

Need Man to Splain

Caved In?

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

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

That last looks pretty good sideways:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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

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

Merry Christmas!

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

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

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

Kitty Mental Powers

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

Someone Should Sue Google Translate

People With Money Making the Right Decisions

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

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!

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

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

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