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Discuss among yourselves

We’re going to the neighbors’ for New Year’s Eve, so I’ve left a casserole in the fridge for you. All you have to do is pre-heat the oven to 350º and give it forty, forty-five minutes. Until it’s brown, anyhow. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve left their number on the hall table. We’re right next door, so we’ll know if you have anybody over, ‘K?

Love you.

Mwah.

December 31, 2009 — 1:20 pm
Comments: 28

You guys are the swellest!

Look what you got me for Christmas!

See, I brought my muscular desktop computer across the Atlantic, but not my funky old monitor. I promised myself a nice big flatscreen — as soon as I made enough money to pay for it. And now (thanks to what Uncle B laughingly calls my t-shirt empire) I have.

I intended to wait a little longer, but the big P’shops I’ve been doing for print are straining my poor old scruffy Thinkpad to its limits. Oh, and umm…sorry if I burned out anybody’s retinas. The screen on this laptop is so dull, I had NO IDEA how painfully I’ve been super-saturating color on the merchandise. Thank goodness the blog is in monochrome.

Anyway, thank you all very much. I’ll lay off’n you guys now. My next store is going to be aimed at crazy cat ladies.

Oh, yes. Yes, I am that low.

December 30, 2009 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 28

So how about this: increased scrutiny for goofy-looking loserboys?

I mean, Jesus — look at these two! Wouldn’t you get up and move if Richard Reid sat next to you on a bus? To be perfectly fair to Abdulmutallabambalambabooboo, it’s the angle makes him look so goofy. Maybe that’s the photographer’s fault. Or maybe he really was gazing into the camera cocked sideways like a doberman staring down a kazoo.

Okay, fine. If they don’t want to profile Muslims — or, god forbid, foreign brown people — can we please profile young men with an obvious screw loose?

I got pulled out of line once, just as I was boarding a flight to London. I think it was my new aviator sunglasses (it was six in the morning, but I’d been up all night shuffling around Logan airport). Anyhow, I took them off and chatted with the nice security man for a while, showed him my passport and he let me on the plane.

Me. Middle-aged middle-class middle-American Wonder-bread old broad, me.

Is there any doubt if they’d pulled either of these guys out of line for a chat, he’d’ve rattled to pieces on the spot? Why didn’t they? Is there something like an inalienable right to be young, male and loser-y?

Okay, I take the point that the bad guys would go all out trying to recruit bombers who don’t fit the profile. But judging from these guys, they’re having a hell of a time recruiting the usual splodey-dopes who fit the profile exactly. What’re the odds they could convince a blue-eyed Scandihoovian grandma to slip into a panty bomb?

December 29, 2009 — 8:56 pm
Comments: 21

Captions?

Hmmm. I don’t know. My best so far is:

Only YOU can prevent Muslim crotch fires!

December 28, 2009 — 5:48 pm
Comments: 64

It was excellent, thanks!

Please join us in front of the virtual fire at Badger House for a…no, wait — keep the hell away from my whisky, you!

Yep, I got whisky. And books. And socks (no, exciting technical socks). And a woolly Mike Nesmith hat (Huh. I thought I looked fetching and not at all Muslim with my scarf wrapped around my head). And dominoes (does anybody remember how to play dominoes?).

And one of those neat little Flip USB video cameras. Except I haven’t figured out how to drive it yet, so I offer you this lame .gif animation instead.

What did Sandy Claws bring you?

December 25, 2009 — 4:58 pm
Comments: 59

It’s the Christmas thread!

Eh. So the Senate passed Obamacare this morning, 60-39. Still, if the White House is back-burnering it until after the State of the Union Address, we’ve got a hope they won’t get this shit sangwich reconciled before the campaign season revs up. And then they (please god) get their majority trimmed, at the very least.

Mostly, I wanted to post the picture of Santa flipping the bird.

Merry Christmas, everybody! Here we go!

December 24, 2009 — 1:59 pm
Comments: 27

Geoff’s famous chart, now with 100% more commercial exploitation

If you hang around the Moronosphere, you’ve seen this chart. Or this chart’s baby-daddy, anyhow. This is what happened when geoff (who usually posts at Innocent Bystanders) took the wishful thinking unemployment chart the Obama administration used to sell the dreadful porkulus and plotted actual unemployment figures on top of it.

It reads better in color.

Anyhow, someone recently came to geoff and inquired if he could get the chart on a shirt or a mug or something and geoff thought to himself, “do I know anyone venal, desperate and masterful in the construction of line charts?”

Me! Yay! I give you: geoff’s famous unemployment chart merchandise.

Notice the postcard and greeting card. I hope sending one to your Congressman becomes all the rage, because every one of those represents twenty American cents of cha-ching in my little piggy bank.

It’s through November, 2009 — the most recent period we have numbers for. I have a bad feeling we’ll be updating that chart a time or two. I can’t see the red line coming down to touch either of those blue lines for quite a little while.

December 23, 2009 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 20

If the science were real, they wouldn’t have to be so tricksy

The Associate Press published this interactive map today. You click the little buttons at the top, and you get to see the map turn from cool blues and grays to scary-hot oranges and yellows as average global temperatures get warmer.

Then I read the key.

They are comparing warm seasons (May to October) of four recent periods (1891-1900 to 1945-1954 to 1970-1979 to 1997-2006) to the averages for 1951-1980. Prithee, allow me to inquire — what the fuckity fuck? Here that is on the calendar:  

 

 

Why those four particular nine-year clusters? And why compare them against that particular overlapping 29 year stretch? And why just the warm seasons? They don’t explain, but we suspect we know why, don’t us?

Comparing four random chunks of time to another random chunk of time may make for a colorful, scary-looking picture, but it sure as shit isn’t science, folks.

But wait! There’s more! Remember our old friend the Greenland ice cores from a while back? Taking the earliest period versus the latest period on their map, this is what their cunning stunt looks like plotted on that:

 

Pff! Lovely settled science there, guys.

Oh, and the little stars on the map? You’re supposed to click them — all six of them — to learn what adorable, doe-eye animals are endangered by this obvious runaway warmening. Click the star for Sweden and you discover that climate change means filthy, disease-carrying ticks can survive there now.

So it’s getting warmer in Sweden, and the most striking consequence of that is…ticks!?!

December 22, 2009 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 12

More bloggy boringness…

Sorry, y’all. I got wadded up tonight trying to figure out what’s wrong with my RSS feed. I think the hinky feed my be screwing me up with some listing and tracking sites.

I got, like, twelve thousand hits on the WordPress support forum for “broken RSS feed” but none seem to match my conditions exactly (no error message, okay in some readers but not others). I’m working my way down the list.

So far, the most common problem seems to be that blank lines at the beginning and end of some .php files kill the feed and must be removed, file by file. WordPress is made up of dozens of .php files. Somebody wrote a plug-in that cleans up everything automagically, but that person let his or her domain registration lapse at the beginning of December, so it’s undownloadable.

Why does fixing glitches always go like this?

The main problem is, I find the whole business unbearably dull. And my brain is like Teflon™ for boringness.

December 21, 2009 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 35

Nopenhagen

servingsuggestion

The hippies, they are not happy.

John Lanchbery, Birdlife International: “It sounds very vague. There’s no next step, nothing to link through to how to get a final deal done.”

Heh heh.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club: “President Obama and the rest of the world paid a steep price here in Copenhagen because of obstructionism in the United States Senate.”

Say what?

Kate Horner, Friends of the Earth: “This is the United Nations and the nations here are not united on this secret backroom declaration. The US has lied to the world when they called it a deal and they lied to over a hundred countries when they said would listen to their needs. This toothless declaration, being spun by the US as an historic success, reflects contempt for the multilateral process and we expect more from our Nobel prize winning President.”

But he means well. And he’s got a fabulous crease in his pants.

From what I can glean, they’ve agreed that the earth shouldn’t be allowed to warm more than 2°C, but how they’re going to bully the planet into that unclear. There’s no set target, oversight or enforcement involved. It’s less a treaty than a serving suggestion.

I love this quote from Obama: “We are confident that we are moving in the direction of a significant accord.”

We’ve agreed to take the first steps toward talking about a framework for considering the implications of actually doing something.

Thank you, O Lord, for the incompetence of our enemies.

December 18, 2009 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 25