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Dead Pool Round 76: Dog Dayz Edition

So they finally let the poor kid go. The commenter Formerly Known as Skeptic wins dick with Bobbi Kristina Brown. A short, sad story and not much good to come of it.

Except, you know, Skeptic won dick.

Okay, you ready?

0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.

3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.

4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.

5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.

6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.

7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.

8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.

The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.

July 31, 2015 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 105

compare and contrast

armadillo

It’s an armadillo, haterz. It won first prize in the “named animal made out of vegetables” category, so there.

The Summer fete season is at its peak. I haven’t posted much from our adventures because it’s all the same every year. That’s the pleasure of it: it’s all the same every year. I get the feeling it has been the same going back decades. With a few minor changes, centuries.

Contrast this with the news. About two thousand migrants a night are still storming the Channel Tunnel. Some make it through. There are supposedly women and children in the camps in Calais, but all we see are strong, young men, swarming over fences and onto goods lorries.

Oh. Excuse me. David Cameron has been slapped for using the word “swarm” — it’s dehumanizing, apparently. The UN has told us to shut up and take our fair share of Syrians, Afghanis, Libyans, Gambians, Kosovars. It’s worth asking what our fair share is, and why.

An awful lot of the people I know here are reflexively liberal (that’s what having a huge monopolistic state media will do for you), but I don’t know anyone who isn’t horrified by this scene. There’s an instinctive understanding that the world of armadillos made out of squashes is not compatible with…that.


‘Member, Dead Pool Tomorrow. 6 WBT. Be here or be somewhere else; I’m not the boss of you.

July 30, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 12

That cat is so happy

heppyket

From an illuminated manuscript of Jean Tinctor’s Invectives contre la secte de vauderie. “Vauderie” being an old French word for sorcery. This is Satan inviting his disciples to lick the cat’s butthole.

LOOK HOW HAPPY THAT CAT IS.

This is from a series of Medieval manuscripts showing cats licking their assholes. My old friend iamfelix sent me the link, which she said turned up in Iowahawk’s Twitter feed.

July 29, 2015 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 14

Now THAT’s how you Photoshop

johansson

I’ve seen bits of this guy’s work around, but I never bothered to look him up until today. His name is Erik Johansson. He’s a Swedish photographer who works in Berlin.

There’s no modeling or 3D, it’s all multiple of his own photographs artfully cut together. There are thousands of people out there bashing photos together, badly. This guy is really good.

Go look.

July 28, 2015 — 9:03 pm
Comments: 4

Bohemia, yo

vavra

This happy chappy is Daniel Vávra, a Czech video game developer. Long story short, he had an idea for a videogame, tried to get funding, was told all anybody wants is puzzles to play on iPhones, took his idea to Kickstarter. He was trying to get half a million to start, he got nearly $2.5 million to date (he has another corporate backer, as well – it’s a big team and a long lead time).

The game looks gorgeous. It’s set in a meticulously recreated 15th century Bohemia. They’ve consulted historians and architects, rotoscoped sword fighters, bought topo maps of the area, really trying to nail the era down as fully and accurately as they can. No magic (their slogan is “dungeons, no dragons”). You have to eat and sleep and make homemade medicines.

It’s called Kingdom Come: Redemption. I know most of you aren’t gamers, and I don’t usually recommend early access, but these guys are the real deal. They’re professionals and they’ve hit all their deadlines. The game is currently in early alpha (they’re calling it “technical alpha”; they’re mostly looking for basic playability glitches. Flying horses and chickens that walk through walls). Due out for reals in a year.

The t-shirt? Vávra is under heavy fire because there aren’t any people of color in the game. In 15th C Bohemia. He doesn’t seem too bothered.

Don’t think this is a bit of SJW fluff. This is a thing now. The Witcher — a popular series of games based on Slavic myth — has been dinged recently because everybody in it is Slavic.

And some silly grad student at the University of Leeds has written a paper — or put together a presentation, it’s not clear — on how ‘medievally-themed video games are a space where whiteness can be anchored, in a “happy history” where a world is free of multiculturalism and white guilt’.

Unfortunately for her, she picked the worst possible game to illustrate this. Skyrim is a great game in a fantasy medieval Nordic setting, but it’s completely multicultural and, at times, annoyingly preachy and 21st C about it. Her research seems to have been entirely interrogating players without investigating the game at all.

May Talos smite her in the ass for it.


Oh, yeah: the commenter Formerly known as Skeptic has won the dick with Bobbi Kristina Brown. They finally unplugged the poor kid and let her go. See you back here on Friday for Dead Pool Round 76.

July 27, 2015 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 19

Got this badass coming up the Channel

storm

England top left, France bottom right, we’re somewhere under those big black blobs in the middle. Thunder, wind, the whole schtick. A lifetime’s worth of rain in ten minutes, or however it was the Mail drama’d it up.

I shall wish you a good weekend and sign off, I think. Good weekend!

July 24, 2015 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 7

Big bird

emu

Artist unknown. I did try.

An emu shut down the A21 in Sedlescombe today. They got it penned in a field, but they still haven’t found who it belongs to.

Used to be a flock near us, now gone. I wonder if whoever it was sold it on.

Anyhoo, the article makes a remark about Rob Hull. He was a British comedian of the Seventies who…had an emu. You kind of have to see it.

Here he explains how to groom an emu. Here’s something a bit more camp, if you like that. British talk show host Michael Parkinson once bitterly remarked that, for all his long career, he would mostly be remembered being knocked out of his chair by emu.

Fun fact: later in life, Hull came to resent emu bitterly. Because that’s what people who perform with dummies always do.

In 1999, Hull climbed up on the roof to adjust his TV aerial, slipped and fell through a greenhouse and died. He was survived by emu.

July 23, 2015 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 6

Can I just get the t-shirt?

templars

I was banging around the web today — following a link that led to a link that led to another link, deeper and deeper into the forest — when I was startled to find myself invited to join the Knights Templar.

“Oooooo!” went the little rogue braincell that plays Skyrim and yearns to LARP.

They’re vague about who they are and what they’re doing. The news on site is topically British, but the domain was registered out of Arizona. They’re equally vague on what they want to do, though it’s obviously pro-Christian and anti-Islam. It’s £60 British or $90 Murican, which seems steep for something I don’t know what the hell it is all about.

I poked around a little. According to the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH), there are 1,700 groups calling themselves Templars. Which they are perfectly entitled to do. This includes the branch of the Masons that is explicitly Christian.

So, is this one a genuine grassroots movement of some kind or an opportunistic scam? Who knows. Love their t-shirts, though.

July 22, 2015 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 11

Hail horsecow!

horsecow

I am equal parts fascinated and frustrated by the archaeology of pre-Roman Britain. Frustrated because (apologies to the silly hippies that dance around Stonehenge twice a year) we’ll never know much about them other than the glimpses we get from their garbage dumps. Fascinated because what we do know is often really very weird.

Like this. There was a people in southern England in 400BC who dug pits in the chalk to store food (it would keep it slightly cool). After a couple of years, they would abandon one pit and dig another. The abandoned pit would be filled in with…stuff. Archaeologists describe them as offerings to the gods, because that’s what archaeologists always do.

Some of the pits held the usual. Whole pigs. Dogs. Goats. A woman with her throat cut. Same old, same old.

Then there was the six-legged sheep. The horse with cow horns. The cow with horse jaw. The headless sheep with the cow skull on its butt.

These were frankensteined together from multiple animals. They know the animals were intact when they were buried, with skin on, because the bones are anatomically placed, correctly articulated. It’s probably too much to hope they were stitched together into fabulous monsters. Is it? Isn’t it?

I’d like to think these weird people are my ancestors, but (like native Americans) we’re talking many, many genetically and culturally distinct peoples.

Nah, these ones are mine.

July 21, 2015 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 12

Unbecoming a lady

bobtur

Bob Tur is probably the most famous helicopter newsman ever, thanks to two events. He’s the guy who hovered while Reginald Denny was beaten to a whiteman smoothie during the LA riots of 1992 and he was also the guy who followed OJ’s white Ford Bronco two years later, during the world’s slowest police chase.

Half a year ago, I read a long article in Los Angeles Magazine about Tur flying to Thailand for a sex change op. It’s a sympathetic article and makes Tur sound frightened and shy. Because I read too much lefty journalism and I guess I’m super susceptible to Stockholm syndrome, I caught myself thinking, “awww, that’s nice.”

Bob Tur is also the guy in the video above (screw calling him “Zoey” or using his preferred pronouns, for reasons that will be clear in a moment). You may have seen it linked around the web over the weekend, but you may not have wanted to sit through it to the relevant bit. And you’ve probably been misled about the relevant bit.

Well, weasel to the wescue. The full clip is from some dreadful HLNtv(?) panel show called Dr Drew, the usual seven lefties and one designated righty whipping boy — in this case, Ben Shapiro.

The topic: whether Bruce Jenner deserves the Whooptido Award for Whatever. Shapiro explains that no operation can change the fact every cell in Jenner’s body still says he’s male. At this point, Tor leans in, puts his hand on the back of Shapiro’s neck and says, “you cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance.”

Click here to download the relevant eight seconds as an avi, if you care.

The point is, the leftosphere is all about how very, very much Shapiro provoked Tor. With basic biological facts. I guess. And I’m over here, like, that is the most stereotypically hyper-masculine overreaction on TV since William Buckely threatened to punch Gore Vidal in his goddamned face.

Woman’s brain in a man’s body? Ehhhh…not so much.

July 20, 2015 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 20