Part of a series, with Dan Rather Listens Earnestly to a Banana. I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. <sobs into her hands>

<sits up, wipes her face with her palms>

Okay, we have a winner — Steve takes the dick with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. Poor Fawn was in first with Robin Gibb, but he died between Dead Pools, thus depriving her of her rightful dick. Nope, never gets old.

See you here Friday at 6pm WBT for Round 29!

I love this picture, which probably is not accurately depicted by the caption. Probably.

I nicked it off this National Review article. He says Oprah started her long decline after choosing to endorse Obama over Hillary, shocking her (mostly white, mostly female) fans by choosing the black thing over the girl thing. Hilarious if true.

Identity politics is hard.

Early in our relationship, Uncle B treated me to a lecture on The Problem With Americans: we sit around watching opera all day and take our marching orders from opera and only think what opera tells us to.

And I was, like, “that’s just so weird and wrong and unfair. I mean, my dad quite likes Verdi, but he’s the only American I know who’s really into opera.”

I have, of course, stepped on my own punchline here: he meant Oprah, he just can’t talk right. He’s English.

Which is really weird because, here again, my dad is the only American I know who’s really into Oprah.
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PSYCH! Good weekend, everyone!

Thursday is market day, and for once we were out early enough to catch it.

I don’t know if we have the equivalent of these open air markets in the States. Maybe we do and I somehow missed it. I spent many happy hours in flea markets, but that’s not the same (the flea market equivalent here is the car boot sale, and we’re never out early enough to catch those).

This is all new stuff. Some of it scruffy and cheap. Some of it not so scruffy and cheap. Some of it not so scruffy and not so cheap. Some of it from local stores at pretty much their regular prices.

There’s food and clothes and jewelry and shoes and tools and pet food and incense and household goods. There’s a Persian parfumier and a fake Indian (feather Indian, not dot Indian) selling dream catchers. There used to be a baker who came over from France. There’s cheese and crabs and rutabegas (which they call swedes). There’s a big book stall and a guy with a wok and statues of the Buddha and flowers. It’s a pretty Dickensian day.

The market seems to fill an important niche in the local economy. Buses full of bluehairs turn up on the day. In a land where everything is very, very expensive, it’s a place to go to get cheap garbage bags and wooden clothes pins.

Anyhoo, as we were leaving, I said to Uncle B, “gosh, that guy looks like Tom Baker.”

And he was, like, “that’s probably because he’s Tom Baker.”

So, there you go, vintage Doctor Who fans. Wot I saw in the market today.

So I was searching Google images for an old comic strip and I turned up the image on the left. Hilarity ensued when Google Ads decided to pair it with the broad on the right.

Well, I LOL’ed.

BTW, the thing on the left is a publicity shot for The Romance of Helen Trent, the longest-running radio soap opera evah. It ran for 7,222 episodes from 1933 to 1960, during which time widow Helen Trent never remarried nor aged a day over 35.

You can listen to many of them online.

Oh, and the aged tart on the right looks even skankier in the original color ad.

Did you see this today? Some bright spark at Heritage noticed that TeamObama has been diddling the presidential profiles at WhiteHouse.gov, inserting Obama’s accomplishments into the biographies of his predecessors.

As Commentary discovered:

Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

It’s pretty weak stuff, like “On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.”

It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. He didn’t really “insert himself into” the biographies, he tacked his talking points at the bottom of the page in a little bullet list. (I checked it against the Wayback Machine and the biographies themselves appear unchanged). Adding a little modern addendum doesn’t seem like such a sin, until you think of Obama and his huge throbbing ego.

But it’s like, once you figure out what drives you crazy about somebody, it seems like every damn thing he does is that thing that drives you crazy.

Oh, hey, Bob just got back from China. Go look at his vacation pics. If there’s a Sinophiliac bone in your body…I recommend penicillin.

Whoa. When Redd pointed me to That Newsweek cover, I thought it was a P’shop.

Nope.

Obama may (or may not) have picked up a few votes by declaring his (nonbinding, verbal) support for gay marriage. But being declared the first gay president? Yeah, probably not helpful.

So the question is, did Andrew Sullivan (who is, let us remember, bugfuck crazy) call Obama gay because he just couldn’t contain his excitement (“…when I watched the interview, the tears came flooding down…), even if it might be politically damaging in 2012? Or does he think that the culture wars are finally won — in his favor? Or is he — eh, I dunno — bugfuck crazy?

Burned my usual post-creating time cruising this random collection of John Buscema drawings. I suppose it’s kinda, sorta timely, since he did a lot of the iconic work on the Avengers comics (now a major motion picture!).

Me, I spent the long Summer between the end of High School and the beginning of college with Conan the Barbarian. Hey, when you’re going away to art school, you can do this and call it studying. Score!

Now don’t you feel silly about that stupid law or engineering degree, Sir or Madam?

Lookit the pictures, and have a good weekend!

Wait, if you haven’t seen the Hating Breitbart trailers, go and do that thing also.

There are two important things you need to know about this photograph:

1. It has not been Photoshopped. Not by me, anyway.

2. It was hand picked by campaign staffers to be uploaded to Obama’s Facebook page and website.

Okay, three things:

3. It’s not the only embarrassing shot they chose to publicize. No sirree bob.

Go on, click the link. It’s not an icky old Obamalink, it’s from David Stein at Republican Party Animals (who’s written some funny captions to go with).

Hey. Well. So Obama took a stand on gay marriage that may or may not be slightly more popular than unpopular nationally, will make the people who were going to vote for him anyway somewhat happier with him, will make people who will never vote for him somewhat unhappier with him and won’t affect actual law or policy in any way.

Surely I can get a good post out of that.

No?

Huh.

It’s a funny thing, being a furriner. The familiar crops up in the damnedest places.

Like — wait, what? What is this famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld gurning at a geisha doing on a packet of wasabi peanuts?

Apparently, Tyrrell’s just liked it. In fact, their headline over this image is “English Eccentrics.” Cheeky.

Whew, that got Time magazine’s panties in a wad.

One [unknown] remains: whether the hawkish neo-con, whom many Britons remember from the misadventure of the Iraq war, truly reflects the light-hearted and slightly eccentric view of life Tyrrell’s wishes to associate with its brand. Whichever way you look at it, it’s nuts.

Well, anyway, they got the story right. It was during President Gerald Ford’s 1974 trip to Japan. Rumsfeld was the WH Chief of Staff. He was passing a chopstick scrunched under his nose to the Geisha next to him. As you do.

This was apparently a competitive event, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger won, thanks to superior physical endowments. His nose, people.

The peanuts are delicious.