What it probably feels like to him…
Poor Barack. He’s not having a very good time of it these days. Sometimes, it sucks to be the most powerful man in the free world. Folks won’t let you alone to enjoy your damn waffle.
And now Drudge is leading with this.
Which is just mean.
And petty.
Hilariously, delightfully mean and petty.
June 22, 2010 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 21
And a czar, too!
Yeah. Somehow, this was funnier in my head. Oh, well.
You can go back to talking coins. I’ve been trying to disentangle copyright issues surrounding currency all day. You’d think I’d be safe putting hundred year old coins on junk, but Zazzle is an absolute pain in the ass on intellectual property issues, so I’m not using anything until I find official statements from the relevant mint first.
Anyhow, in the course of that, I found this interesting article. It claims that, per US case law, you don’t hold copyright on your photo of a coin or painting, provided it’s simply a faithful copy of the original. Huh. I did not know that.
I guess it means when I run out of coins, I can go around the internet pinching other people’s junk.
Pinching people’s junk. That did not come out right.
June 16, 2010 — 10:50 pm
Comments: 16
Ding dong
Helen Thomas, nasty old leftist hag, retired today after inexcusably saying something she really meant: that Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine and “go home” to Germany and Poland.
I’m puzzled by those, particularly those on the right, who think this is just Crazy Aunt Helen being crazy and that firing her wouldn’t be necessary. Blurting out that Israelis should get out of Israel and go home is crazy auntie stuff, on a nuttiness level with “blacks should go home to Africa.”
Specifying they go back to Germany and Poland, where they were murdered in their millions, knocks it right off the nut-O-meter. It’s where “crazy auntie” meets “nursing home.” It’s “whisk you away with a butterfly net” time, right down there with old dudes who won’t stop playing with themselves in public.
And you’d better BELIEVE the left had to purge her fast, lest we wonder how many of them agree with her.
Anyway — goodbye, Helen, you hideous old leftist hobgoblin. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya — which, from the look of things, was your face.
June 7, 2010 — 5:29 pm
Comments: 28
Welcome to the internet! First visit?
Someone wrote and asked me for a unicorn-shitting-skittles graphic (yeah, pretty sure opportunities like that are why my folks sent me to art school). I didn’t have time to build one from scratch but, as it happens, I have a unicorn-farting-rainbows graphic in the works for a t-shirt, so I just threw in some Skittles. (If you yearn to know how that looks in color, yearn no more).
First, though, I had to do a Google Images search for Skittles, since I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell they look like, other than real small specks of color raining down on the upturned faces of stoned children on TV (are there really no blue Skittles? What, were they afraid people would use them to mend spinal cord injuries?).
Anyhow, that image search is how I found this heartwarming story of life with the new media: about a year ago, Skittles decided it wanted itself a piece of that viral marketing, social networking thing all the cool kids were talking about. So they launched a web page that would essentially be a live Twitter feed. Every time somebody mentioned #skittles, the page updated.
Yes. They really did that.
With a straight face.
Never heard the scary there’s an escaped lunatic undead shark in the basement AND IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE music playing in the background.
Soooo…how long do you think it was before somebody tweeted “On the skittles thing? Bollocks arse fuck soapy titwank cunt wankstain piss frenulum shit twat motherfucker toss Rick Astley…”
And from the sound of that inspirational outpouring of cusswords, it was tweeted by a Brit. I’m so proud.
June 2, 2010 — 10:43 pm
Comments: 28
Good news, ladies!
Have you seen him lately? Al Gore looks like shit. Pale and pasty with little red eyes. He’s aged ten years in the last two, godnose why.
I’ve missed the mark here. He looks like captain of the football team — too beefy.
I was aiming for more of an Uncle Joan kind of thing.
I’ve never heard the slightest suggestion of anything…untoward about Al, but something about him has always given me the creeps. The sexual creeps. He’s got a real ‘aging drag queen’ vibe.
Maybe it’s the non-existent eyebrows. Or the flared nostrils. Or the little cupid’s bow of a mouth.
It’s something.
Oh, well. With any luck, Tipper will write a tell-all and I’ll find out.
June 1, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 25
Happy EDM day!
I don’t actually approve of this, you know.
I went to a particularly flaky art school (the Rhode Island School of Design) during a particularly flaky era (the late Seventies) and I’ve seen enough mental retardation masquerading as art to last a lifetime.
There was one egregious kid in my year — I’ve just Googled his name, and I’m delighted to report Google knowest him not — whose whole schtick was sit around thinking up offensive shit. For his end-of-term project in 3D design, he went down to a slaughterhouse and got four bloody severed horse legs, piled them in the middle of the studio floor and called it “Goodbye, Mister Ed.”
Offensive is for people who desperately want attention but don’t have the talent to get it the usual way. Offensive is the “moon, June, croon” of the post-Modern world — it’s dumb, it’s formulaic and it’s so fucking boring.
In a free world, we have to tolerate offensive but we don’t have to celebrate it. Or for chrissakes give it government arts grants. You hear me lefties? I have to put up with Piss Christ, but you shouldn’t oughta have made me pay for it.
When offensive is aimed at the same groups over and over again — people who can’t do much about it but wave a sign or boycott an advertiser — that’s just plain bullying.
Bullies. That’s the word for people who only pick on those who can’t or won’t fight back. “Courage” isn’t even in the same zip code.
So, sorry Muslims — have a little sacrilege. It’s only fair. You want SUV’s, cell phones and dialysis, you’re going to have to put up with stupid offensive shit, too. Freedom is the common denominator.
When you have to live in a world where some things make you crazy angry, my advice is — don’t go looking for them.
Picture was EZnSF’s idea. Dude, I wish you’d said something earlier. I’m tight for time this week; I could’ve used a couple more days to have fun with this. Here’s a big color version just for you. Kidding — it’s for anyone who wants it, but EZ can have the FaceBook honors.
Update: Since EZ doesn’t seem to be around, I posted the illo to FB. But I gave you a shout-out!
May 20, 2010 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 39
One. Last. Time.
I gotta run, guys — I have beaucoup stuff to do today. But I couldn’t go out the door without posting the classic weaselgram of Benedict Arlen one last time.
As an aside…have you ever wondered why it is most men and women who have had long, passionate, productive careers in, oh, engineering or policework or architecture or soldiering seem delighted, when the time comes, to hang up their kit and grow roses for the rest of their lives? But politicians, judges (and doctors) cling on to their jobs with their fingers and toes until they mummify in place?
I don’t have answers. I only have questions.
May 19, 2010 — 12:14 pm
Comments: 17
Machs grün!
Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
So what you’re supposed to do is, you write a blog post about this, you put a link to them in the sidebar using their “my blog is carbon neutral” graphic, they plant a tree in your name, it soaks up 11 pounds of CO2, and — violoncello! — your blog IS carbon neutral.
So let’s point out the utterly fucking obvious, shall we? There is no relationship between blogs and trees. Nobody is waiting around for a pingback before they go stick a spruce in the ground. This is an ongoing reforestation program (by the Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest. In California) and these German greenie-weenies have just latched onto to display, once again, their weak (or dishonest) grasp of cause-and-effect.
The trees will be planted regardless.
Do you know, China is set to pass the US this year as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide? I say, let’s get on board that campaign! For every blog displaying a colorful “my blog belches carbon” icon (small sidebar version here, pointlessly large version here), China will build another inefficient coal-fired electricity plant or smoke-belching industrial smokestack. Why, your humble blog could be responsible for spewing thousands of extra tons of carbon dioxide (along with unknown quantities of other, real pollutants) into the atmosphere every year!
Okay, not really, but it makes as much sense as that Green bullshit.
UPDATE: whoa! Small Dead Animals ‘lanche! That’s one of Weasel’s favoritest blogs. Y’all be sure to come back Friday for the Dead Pool. Everyone’s welcome — and you might be the lucky winner of Aunty’s Spotted Dick!
March 11, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 44
Happy b-day, P’shop!
Adobe Photoshop turns twenty today. And, oh, what fun we have had!
Actually, the image editing system I learned on predated Photoshop by several years. Several years was a millenimum in early computing days; desktop computers couldn’t do shit in 1987. They certainly couldn’t do shit graphically. But my machine was stuffed full of a hundred grand worth of special bits and it could do shit. The image editing software it ran gave P’shop a run for its money for years.
An important part of my job in those days was a sort of vaudeville routine where I demo’ed that big boy for clients in real-time. So they’d know what a righteous, bad-ass research and engineering firm we were.
Can you remember a time when people said things like, “photos don’t lie” (and really believed it) and Leisure Suit Larry was a cutting edge computer game? Well, that’s when I was taking snapshots with a video frame grabber, lassoing bits and moving them around before a customer’s very eyes.
You shoulda seen their faces! (Particularly after I erased their noses and replaced them with supplemental eyes). Many thought it was some kind of trick we were playing with video. Computers couldn’t do things like that!
Anyhow, I know I’ve told all my war stories before (blogger’s privilege, telling them again). Happy birthday, P’shop — and here’s to the next amazing technology nobody ever saw coming.
February 19, 2010 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 20
I hear you, I hear you! But first — health care!
Did you guys see this bit in Politico?
Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.
“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”
That’s Marion Berry talking. No, no…not the crackhead mayor of D.C. — Representative Marion Berry, Democrat of Arkansas, who is retiring this year. Apparently in a cloud of anger, hopelessness and pants-peeing terror. Them Arkansas boys know when to run for the hills.
And speaking of Arkansas boys — when that gem gets back to the Clintons, they’re going to be thrilled, aren’t they? I wonder how much of the Democrat machine they can still influence?
It’s been a spectacle this week, watching the Obama folks scream, “I get it!” while manifestly not getting it even a little teeny bit. I particularly enjoy those pundits who have decided the Massachusetts election went Republican because Democrats didn’t juke far enough left and ram hugely unpopular eye-wateringly expensive transformative legislation through the legislature hard enough. Yeah, people always vote for the Republican when the Democrat isn’t Democrat enough.
I’d be enjoying the hell out of this clusterfuck, if there wasn’t some chance these guys will find a procedural diddle to flick the health care bill over the finish line before they slink off and commit seppuku.
January 25, 2010 — 3:49 pm
Comments: 26