Tag Archives: humor

I can’t help myself

Ok, this isn’t entirely fair picking on the Tea Party people because cognitively they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed but I saw this on the Book of Faces yesterday and I can’t resist posting what I assume someone actually thinks is a coherent thought…

Occult religions are roll-your-own religions and typically they combine a lot of different aspects of other religions. People should not spend too much time and effort trying to label Obama one thing, because he is a combination of a lot of different things, Muslim, Black Nazi, pseudo-Christian, Marxist/Communist . Ultimately, it is about self-worship. He believes he is a higher being with a divine mission to transform the world in his own image.

 

Ohh…I also bet he’s also vegetarian and puts empty milk containers back into the fridge!

And speaking of fridges…How about this link to a Daily Mail story.  Did you know Michelle Obama was on a secret mission to starve our children to death?

We’re hungry! Students revolt over Michelle Obama’s 850-calorie school meals with online video as First Lady faces growing anger

That’s right…Michelle Obama only wants to give growing children 850 calories…for lunch.  I suppose most families, living in free market utopias, refuse to feed their children breakfast or dinner as they are afraid it’ll make kids dependent on handouts.

This is a great story that really could only run in places outside the U.S. or in places where people have never actually seen American kids.  Apparently our biggest problem is a glut of  student athletes who “can burn through as many as 5,000 calories a day – but they are still entitled to no more than 850 calories for their lunch.”

Been to Wal-Mart lately?  Oh, yeah.  We’re awash in school age kids with Adonis like physiques.

And of course, this misses the bigger (excuse that) point.  These are people who hate government intervention complaining about…interference in their government run school lunch program.

Indeed…Get the gubmint out of my government run school lunch program!

Yes, and social security and Medicare are paragons of free market capitalism.

Shouldn’t the argument be…’Stop all subsidized lunches!’  Leave it up to parents to decide how much (or if) their kids should eat lunch 1.  That’s at least a position consistent with the modern conservative movement.

If it hasn’t already, the Right is in danger of becoming a parody of itself.  Oh, who are we kidding…it became that a long time ago.

 

  1. Of course, parents can still provide or supplement their kids’ lunches if they want so this whole thing is a bullshit issue…in other words, just what you’ve come to expect from these types of arguments.

Kvick Tänkare

I can’t remember the movie(s) but I do remember hearing anecdotes about weird experiments with victims of the guillotine.  Specifically, trying to see how long one could keep a head alive once it was separated from the body.  Well The Chirurgeons Apprentice tracks the rumor down and finds the truth behind it.  It’s kind of creepy.

A long time ago, I lived in an apartment and I just wasn’t able to own a dog.  I did, however, really want some sort of animal in my household and so I took in a ferret.  Eventually I had a small group of three of them and they really are great pets.  More social than cats and almost as trainable as dogs, I would continue to be a ferret owner if their life spans were not so short (about 6-8 years).

English: This is Vinnie the Ferret in the midd...

English: This is Vinnie the Ferret in the middle of a war dance jump. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In any case, recent research has indicated that ferrets are just about equal to dogs in terms of picking up social cues from humans.  It is assumed that this is the result of selective breeding, probably for other, specific traits, with the resulting side effect of greater social-cognitive skills.

 

Speaking of dogs, some Samurai dude in the 19th century decided to outfit his dog with a special set of armor.

And talking about warfare…Swords are pretty badass weapons as demonstrated by their use for thousands of years.  What would make them even more imposing?  Adding shark teeth, of course…

Finally, what would happen in a war broke out between the old school video games and the fancy-schmancy new ones?  Well, somebody thought of that…

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It’s back!

So, you’re probably sick of the election season already but there is one bright side to all of this…

Get Your War on is back.  How can you not love this stuff?

 

Kvick Tänkare

A little while ago I wrote about the power of fonts and that Baskerville was the most trustworthy font.  Well, Errol Morris has an excellent follow up to that piece about the originator of the guy who made the font.  My favorite quote:

Voltaire, when asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, famously replied, “Now is not the time to be making new enemies.” And when a friend tried to convince Baskerville that the plague of flies inflicted on Egypt was proof of the existence of God, Baskerville argued that all that it proved was a shortage of spiders.

Anyone who thinks socialism failed in America has never spent time on a military base.  Rosa Brooks is off to a good start in her new FP blog.

Lunghu provides some indicators to let you know if you’re working in a dysfunction organization:

  • Management places special emphasis on their purported role as “leaders.”
  • The enterprise “strategic plan” merely describes what the organization is already doing, not how it intends to respond to unexpected challenges.
  • Every level of the organization uses the complexity of the operating environment as an excuse to avoid planning for likely contingencies.
  • Hackneyed business cliches are used as a replacement for substantive communication.

I tempted to give up the internet forever after reading this headline.  After all, I think it’s pretty clear we now have, literally, seen everything.

Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn double Percy Foster dies in badger den

Sounds to me like these should be the default cars in congested urban areas.

Sadly, these vehicles do not function by farting out a loud stream of gas that propels them forth.

The author makes it sound like this is a bad thing but I suspect the manufacturers realized that their target demographic shouldn’t be 12 year old boys.

Swedish Story of the Day

I think any additional comment would diminish the excellence of this story.

A 35-year-old rubbish enthusiast is wanted by police in Motala, in southern Sweden, after hiding on the town’s garbage trucks and secretly filming the bin men at work.

 

Trapwire

H/T Geeks are Sexy

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You can tell it’s fake 1  because Congress isn’t tripping over itself to throw money at the project.

 

  1. Well, the Kickstarter part, anyway.  For more on TrapWire you can check here.

My acting debut

My reenacting group got (what seemed to me 1) an unusual request.  An aspiring film student is hoping to make a fan film surrounding the upcoming Assassin’s Creed video game.  The game centers on revolutionary America and he needed some grenadiers.  Here’s the official game trailer so you’ll see why he needs some redcoats.

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This sounded totally cool to me so I quickly threw my hat into the ring.  Somehow 2 I was selected to play a rebel who gets killed 3.  So, here I am in my uniform…hopefully the Crown will forgive me for dressing as a traitor.

I’d like to draw your attention to the canteen on my left hip.  That’ll be important later on.

So…the scene I had to do was run with the redcoats behind me. Once given the signal I was supposed to collapse to my knees (spoiler alert:  I die) and then, allowing the Brits to shoot me again I fall on my face.

Now, I’ve never acted before but I decided to throw myself into my role full force.  So, with some helpful tips on how to collapse to your knees from a fast jog 4 and then fall on my face, we were off to the races.

I believe it was on the fourth take (yes, each time crashing to my knees and then my face) that it happened.  Remember that blue canteen?  Here’s what it looks like, before being blue.  Well, everything was going fine.  I was running down the trail…got the signal and dropped…waited a second and got the second signal indicated that I should fall.  It was sometime around there that the canteen shifted from my hip to right in front of my sternum.  I then fell down with my full body-weight.  Right. On. That. Fucking. Canteen.

It was very painful.  But, never let it be said that I’m not willing to suffer for my art.  I did another take or two and then a few more hours of other scenes.  The pain grew most exquisite and I was convinced that I had cracked a rib.  Fortunately, after a trip to the ER I was diagnosed with just a really bad bruise or hairline fracture.  Still, it hurt like hell.

Once the trailer is completed (looks like we’ve got at least one more day of shooting that needs to be done) I’ll put it up here.  But, here’s a still from my death scene:

Feel free to compare/contrast with the death scene from Platoon and tell me I don’t deserve an Academy Award. 5

Or maybe I need to do a film about the Holocaust?

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  1. but what do I know, I’m new to this stuff
  2. the details are a bit fuzzy
  3. in addition to a redcoat…there weren’t many of us so some of us got drafted for double duty
  4. Hint: If there’s nothing to cushion your fall it really doesn’t matter what you do, it’s gonna hurt
  5. Or at least a Golden Globe

We are all Singaporeans!

We cancel our regularly scheduled blogpost for this work (courtesy of both i09 and Foreign Policy).

Singapore has one of the world’s lowest birthrates.  The city-state is trying to get its citizens to get busy and the people behind Mentos are helping out.  Since August 9th (today) is Singapore’s ‘National Day‘ Mentos is trying to encourage Singaporeans to make their own fireworks after the official celebration is over.  It’s being described as ‘awkward’ but I’m not so sure.  It seems to me like they just decided to own it and put a little fun into the whole thing.

Usually we only declare our solidarity with others when some tragedy strikes.  ‘We’re all Americans‘, ‘We’re all Georgians‘, ‘We’re all Sikhs now‘.   Well, ladies and gentlemen, today I call upon all of us to declare proudly to that special someone (or, that girl at the coffee shop or the guy in the…where ever guys hang out) ‘We’re all Singaporeans now!’.

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Feel free to get your freak on all and move about the cabin.

Slow down and see the light

From a reader…

A Dari version of the famous KCCO poster (using the national seal instead of the crown).  One native speaker told me this is correct (though another translated it as “slow down and see the light”…but hey, that works, too).

Kvick Tänkare

Really interesting views of ‘animal overpasses‘ or “structures that have been built over roads to allow wildlife to cross safely to the other side of the road.”

Interesting description of a medical research labs final days in the chimp testing business.  There’s a lot here to motivate you if you’re an animal rights activist and demonstrates the effectiveness of joint action by activists across the spectrum of legality.

I’m not an obituary reader but this one deserves a read, it’s brilliant (h/t to BoingBoing)

I AM the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June, 1971. I could have left that unsaid, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Also, I really am NOT a PhD. What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan at the U of U, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later, a PhD diploma came in the mail. I didn’t even graduate, I only had about 3 years of college credit….Now to that really mean Park Ranger; after all, it was me that rolled those rocks into your geyser and ruined it. I did notice a few years later that you did get Old Faithful working again. To Disneyland – you can now throw away that “Banned for Life” file you have on me, I’m not a problem anymore – and SeaWorld San Diego, too, if you read this.

Well, Shiloh is no longer with us but this picture would surely have driven him to apoplexy. This dog is about to have his membership in the canine race revoked. A deer AND a cat mere feet away and he’s laying about? That dog should be in full chase mode. Outrageous.

My poor Parwan…Well, it’s not really ‘mine’ of course but it was where I was stationed and I find it hard to reconcile this with the (relatively) peaceful province of 2003. The Taliban in Parwan…how much ground we’ve lost…