Happy Earth Day!
April 19, 2008 — 10:17 am
Comments: 28
Ta, le pew: some days this is just too easy
Le Stink: England engulfed by terrible smell as freak weather blows in French stench
Pong in the air is ‘Euro-whiff’
I don’t even have to write anything, do I?
April 18, 2008 — 9:23 am
Comments: 30
And you thought the North Koreans were dangerous!
Behold, the Col-Pop! Yes, it’s for reals! Straight from South Korean food chain BBQ Chicken, who have recently set their sights on the American market.
Piping hot chicken goes in the inset, ice cold soda goes in the chamber below. Thanks to physics and that whole heat-rises thing, it apparently works pretty well. The reviewer at the first link said there was a little condensation after twenty minutes, but who takes twenty minutes to eat a handful of chicken poppers? A sister company is also serving spaghetti, french fries, and fried mozzarella balls in Col-Pop containers.
Yes, there’s video.
To see the future, look to the East!
April 17, 2008 — 8:31 am
Comments: 75
An equality of misery: the only equality government can guarantee
The downside of the new, expanded Moronosphere: I keep reading stuff I want to go back to and I can’t remember where I saw it. Here’s one I managed to find again, thanks to Andrew’s Dad.
You probably heard that Cuba is finally going to unban cellphones (legally, anyway — a lot of ordinary Cubans had cadged phones off tourists). Here’s the charming way the AP put it:
Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to cell phones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
Got that? To preserve relative economic equality, you must ban basic goods the rest of the world takes for granted. The equality of communism is an equal grinding poverty.
Why? Because you can’t make a poor man into a rich man by giving him money, but you can make a rich man poor by taking his stuff away and not letting him amass more. Rich and poor aren’t static qualities; they flow from attitudes and behaviors. The moment Cuba takes oppression away, some people — by fair means and foul — will manage to accumulate more than others.
You know the old saying: you could divide the world’s money equally among us and, five years later, we’d all be right back where we started. Me, I think there’d be some degree of permanent shift: good and bad luck are a factor in some fortunes. But the general principle holds.
You only have to look at the number of people whose lives are ruined by winning the lottery. Like these lumpen idiots who won £100,000 on a scratch ticket in 2006. They’ve pissed it all away, and now they’re back demanding government benefits.
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the reaction of posters on the site where I read about it: many said government benefits are a right and lottery winnings are a windfall that is supposed to be pissed away on luxuries.
An attitude of poverty.
April 16, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 37
Who’s been writing on my damn furniture?
This great walnut rhinoceros is from my grandparents’ bedroom. My grandfather died when I was a baby, so it’s kind of nice to have something personal of his: it’s striped with cigarette burns on his side.
“Morning, Grampa…you slob.”
I don’t know where it came from before that. I don’t know any stories about it or which side of the family it came from or anything. Grampy Weasel’s family was from Virginia; Granny Weasel’s were from Maryland. I think it’s Regency. I’m not good with furniture, but I think those thumping huge feet mean Regency.
The floor guys — a pair of wiry little scrawny dudes — took one look at it and shoved it in the bathroom door rather than carry it downstairs, completely blocking same. I didn’t get a real shower for a week (ha! ha! sun-ripened weasel!).
Anyhow, that’s the first time I got a look at the back of it. It’s been signed! In large letters with black paint and a soft brush. Writing with a brush like that means most characters take at least two strokes, all down-strokes. I can’t quite make out what it says.
The Col on the left is distinct, then possibly a second l, though there’s a raggedy glue stain down the middle there obscuring it. The next few strokes are hard: m or w most likely, but could be…something else. Then i or ii (which makes no sense) and rr, with the second r all long and weird like they used to do with double-f (just a guess, maybe it IS a double-f). Then…ord? Or maybe or and some symbol that’s not a letter?
Collmirrord. Collwiirord. Collmirford. Collwifford. Coll mirror’d. Coll wirrar D. The only hit I got was Colliford, which is a town in Cornwall on the edge of Bodmin Moor (as in the Beast of Bodmin), but that is so not Colliford.
Any ideas?
April 15, 2008 — 1:20 pm
Comments: 38
Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Meh. Stupid weasel. I had something I wanted to post about, but I forgot to upload the picture that goes with.
So I’ll post this thing, which is a sort of Incredible Hulkweasel.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s NO WAY that’s a lady weasel. I was going to say it doesn’t make much difference with weasels, but the truth of the matter is, I just really hate drawing women.
Seriously. They’re all squishy and wobbly and boring.
April 14, 2008 — 11:22 am
Comments: 59
Shattering my worldview, one dead hippie peace activist at a time
Okay, so this Italian artist — Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, known as Pippa Bacca — decides to hitch right across the Middle East to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Wearing a wedding dress. For peace.
I know: makes perfect sense to me, too. “She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.”
Okay, y’all aren’t going to believe this next part: it didn’t have a happy ending.
She was hitching with a friend. They separated in Istanbul and planned to meet up again in Beirut.
Then she vanished and turned up naked and stone dead under some bushes in the woods in Turkey.
A Turk named Murat Karatas was nicked when he tried to use her cellphone. He confessed he had picked her up at a gas station and raped and murdered her.
I know! Can you believe it? It’s like the ordinary laws of time and space don’t apply!
April 12, 2008 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 56
Doo, doo, doo, lookin’ out my back door
Okay, if you don’t let out a little squeak and fall over dead out of SHEER CUTE, you have no soul (it’s the out of focus dude in the background digging on the sunshine that lands the fatal blow).
— 7:34 am
Comments: 14
Heresy!
Okay, y’all know the temperature has been flat for a decade, right? And now it looks like, thanks at least in part to La Nina, it’s going to get substantially colder this year.
Well, BBC News did a fairly dismissive little story about it which included the line “A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked.”
That kicked off an email exchange between a Warmist true believer, Jo Abbess, and the reporter in question, Roger Harrabin. He argued with her a little, but eventually caved and weakened the article.
Okay, here’s the great part: Jo Wotsit was so proud of herself, she published the whole email exchange on the Web. Bee-yootiful.
The thread is worth reading, while it’s still up. It’s full of bluster and threat. If it gets taken down, the Junk Science blog has got it. I first ran across this at the Dick List. Our friends at BBC Biased are nattering about it. And here’s Mad Mel in the Spectator.
Have you ever wondered how much shit we would be in if the other side weren’t so damned stupid?
April 11, 2008 — 1:07 pm
Comments: 38
Y’arrrr! Get it offa me!
The Rules: 1. Write your own six word memoir. 2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want. 3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere. 4. Tag at least five more blogs with links. 5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play…
I was going to go with “This one time, at band camp…” which nicely captures my lifetime of lighthearted, cheerful inappropriateness. But I’ve never actually seen American Pie, I just know that one scene (and that other scene), so…probably not a safe pick.
Then I thought about, “Okay…one more won’t kill me,” but that’s really more the epitaph I’m hoping to have. Either that, or “oh, sure…it’ll hold my weight.”
“Screw it — I’ll do it tomorrow” is a pretty good pick. As is “living just enough for the city” and “any lazier and I’d stop breathing.”
But I think I’m going to go with “so much promise, so little accomplishment.”
And I’m not going to tag anyone, on account of it plinks my social
phobia something awful. I have this mental image of my taggee looking
down at my link in the dashboard and hissing, “you’re touching me!”
— 8:33 am
Comments: 3