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aiiiiiiii! Saber tooth Bambi

I cannot beLIEVE the Daily Mail would do a feature on highway strikes by muntjac deer without mentioning the lurid fact that these adorable critters HAVE GINORMOUS HORRIBLE SLAVERING FANGS. Well, the males do.

Seriously, are there any other herbivores with huge pointy canines? I mean, other than that other Chinese deer with the pointy teeth? It’s a male aggression thing, like horns. I mean, they don’t roam the countryside tearing the throats out of unsuspecting hikers.

Muntjacs are an import. They got away from a wildlife park in 1925 and, like so many accidental imports, they’re loving the temperate climate of England. Multiplying like bunnies (which are also imports, by the way).

Also, Wikipedia tells me “The Indian Muntjac is the mammal with the lowest recorded chromosome number: The male has a diploid number of 7, the female only 6 chromosomes.”

Okay, I just threw that last bit in to get Oceania’s motor running.

October 18, 2011 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 41

I have this little dream

O, what would I give to see Men of Color, Drunk/Sober, LGBT Youth, The Homeless, The Mentally Ill and Muslims all together in one place. And none of those gosh-darned policemen!

October 17, 2011 — 1:16 pm
Comments: 30

ZOMG! Totally like 99% of Americans

The caption reads: Transgender Anarchist Natalie Kobra Puke, from Russia. Go on, click. You know you want to see this one in color.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement: totally like 99% of us.

— 1:03 pm
Comments: 31

My favorite sign so far

Heh. Here’s somebody taking Occupy Wall Street with an appropriate amount of seriousness. Also, she’s going to get her wish.

If you’d like to join me bobbing for nutcakes on Flickr, the official keyword is occupiedwallstreet.

Or if you’d rather indulge in a little light reading, Breitbart is crowdsourcing some of the 49 megs worth of #ows emails that mysteriously turned up on Mediafire.

It’s adorable watching hippies community organize in real-time.

— 12:56 pm
Comments: 5

Twinkle on, you crazy minions!

Okay, because I love you guys, and because I sold you short last night, I made you a toy to play with. Yes I did!

I made two new emoticons for use in the comments, the twinkle and the down-twinkle. Apparently, when hippies congregate in large groups and struggle to make decisions, they wiggle their fingers at each other to signal approval or disapproval. No lie.

Here, I’ll let this young lady explain.

I didn’t actually call the emoticons twinkle and down-twinkle, because I’d have to tinker with the WP code (something I wouldn’t mind doing, except I’d have to REdo it every time I patched WordPress), I piggy-backed two existing built-in emoticons instead.

To invoke the twinkle, type the word “shock” with a colon on either side, or make a ‘shock’ face with an 8 followed by a capital O.

To invoke the down-twinkle, type the word “eek” with a colon on either side, or make an ‘eek’ face with a : followed by a lowercase o.

There ya go, wingnuts! Happy disapproving of stuff!

October 15, 2011 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 63

Oops!

Oh, hi. You didn’t wait up did you? Oh, you did? Because I told you I’d be…

Look, I was only…

But the bus was…

GROUNDED?

That is so totally unfair!

-=SLAM=-


Sorry. We went to see these guys. Which are sort of these guys. At least, they play their old material and include that guy who played the Flying V in the original band. But the old bass player has formed these guys under the same name and there’s lawsuits and bad feelings and all kinds of shit.

Anyway, they were really good. And it’s really late.

Have a great weekend!

— 12:05 am
Comments: 9

Liking the man, the plan…not so much

Point? I don’t need no steenking point. Seriously, I saw the one picture, and the other popped into my head. ‘Sall.

About this here 9-9-9 plan Cain’s got: I don’t like it. It stands for 9% flat tax on individuals, a 9% flat tax on businesses, and a 9% national retail sales tax.

Apparently, the numbers work, but it’s that last one I don’t trust. The mechanism required to collect any national sales tax is exactly what’s needed to impose a VAT. And a VAT, ladies and gentlemen, is bad. (Read that article I just linked).


I’ve lived under Britain’s (20%) VAT for years now without really understanding how it works. Wikipedia has a good but brain-hurty explanation. Weasel version: everything here is really, really expensive.

Check out this helpful graph (from the Wikipedia article). This is what happened to Denmark’s VAT after it was introduced in 1962. See, the problem is, VAT is pretty much invisible to you, the consumer. You know shit is really expensive, but you don’t see the tax.

You think our pols could resist this upward-creeping fustercluck? It won’t be Tea Party guys yanking the levers of government forever, you know. Sadly, two party system, Barney Frank’s going to get a turn at the controls again.

I’m still leaning Cain, though. I don’t like his plan, but at least he put a solid, plausible one out there for us to kick around.

 

 

October 13, 2011 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 24

Don’t jump!

First lady Michelle Obama is trying to help set a world record for the most people doing jumping jacks in a 24-hour period. Mrs. Obama led about 400 elementary and middle-school students from Washington, Maryland and Virginia in one minute of continuous jumping jacks on the South Lawn on Oct. 11.

Michelle looks a little drawn, doesn’t she?

Did you watch her on the campaign trail in ’08? Funny thing; she was ten times the politician her husband is.

Barack always had that thousand-yard stare and the styrofoam columns and that faraway, fakey accent, like he was reciting the I Had A Dream speech to himself in the shower.

Michelle connected with people, spoke without a ‘prompter and worked the room like a champ. I didn’t agree with a word she said, but she wasn’t a creepy robot like her hubs.

Man, she must have had a Hillary Clinton-style, you want me to make COOKIES? moment when they slipped the muzzle over her face.

Jumping jacks on the lawn. Wow.

October 12, 2011 — 8:09 pm
Comments: 27

Shhhh…you’re scaring the straights…

I was going for stink lines and flies, but I think I ended up with “smoldering tire fire struck by plague of locusts.” Oh well. Don Martin I ain’t.

Anyhoo, now is probably a good time to remember that most everything you’ve read about the politics of the Sixties/Seventies was written by someone who was there, in the streets, possibly wearing a giant papier-mâché puppet head. Someone who LOVED it. Who looks back at the period as the high point of his/her miserable life. (High point. Heh).

I was ten in 1970 and experienced the era as a giant national everything-lurching-out-of-control. I remember the Kent State shootings, and was most surprised to read this in the Telegraph today:

Shockingly, the public had little sympathy. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent blamed the students for the deaths, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion.

Would you have guessed that was the reaction? The writer adds that two years later, Nixon was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in election history. American politics didn’t actually lurch left until a few of those hippies got a haircut, put on a suit and ran for office. The normos — the people who get up and drop the kids off at school and go to jobs — they don’t really cotton to this violent street theater shit.

So to the peoples of Occupy Wall Street, I say — carry on, chaps! Don’t lose heart now!

October 11, 2011 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 27

The cheese stands alone

Ohhhhh…how do I love this NY Post article about President Lonelyheart mooching around the White House scuffing his foot (if you’re fussy about your news sources, here’s the Washington Post pushing the same story line).

I mean, no. Probably, on balance, it would be better if the most powerful man in America wasn’t bugshit insane. Or, rather, resentful, sulky and damn well inclined to lock himself in his room, chain smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Joni Mitchell albums all day.

Still, I had to watch the Obama blimp make its great gassy rise above the political landscape, and it feels so damned good to see it sink back to earth.

For all the chanting and styrofoam columns in the world, it will never rise again.

October 10, 2011 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 42