It will explain nothing
So, the Benghazi hearings. This is one of those issues that make me feel like I have gone cracked, because nothing about it makes any damn sense.
• It looks like State systematically downgraded and denied security in Libya, even as diplomats in country pleaded for more. Why? When the call came for help, it was denied. Why? We’ve always beefed up security in the run up to September 11, but not in this hotbed of Islamism. Why not? (I’ve heard that byzantine thing about a plot to trade Stevens for the blind sheik. I don’t believe a word of it, but it is the only explanation that actually explains any of this screwiness).
• Our consulate was burned down and four Americans killed. An attack on a diplomatic compound is universally regarded as an act of war. So that stupid lie about it being a spontaneous riot, not a premeditated attack — why would that have been better? How was that helpful to the ass covering operation? The facility was still undergunned in a bad place and that was going to come out regardless.
• And really, MSM? Really? This thing is huge by any objective measure. You have the balls to call the investigation partisan? My, we’ve come a far piece down a dangerous road.
• Related: it’s tacky as shit to make Hillary’s presidential aspirations a part of this story. No doubt it’s going through her mind, but to write about the next election as though our biennial horse race is always a natural and important part of any major event is, ummm…excuse me: FOUR DEAD DIPLOMATS.
May 8, 2013 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 30
This guy.
Aw. Ray Harryhausen has been and gone. As Wikipedia put it, “The Harryhausen family announced his death via Twitter and Facebook on May 7, 2013.” He had lived in London since 1960. I did not know that.
I adored every frame of his stop-motion animation, but I think there’s a reason everyone points to this scene from Jason and the Argonauts. A slight jerkiness spoils the effect of an animated monkey or the sinuous snakes on Medusa’s head, but these bone soldier guys? They were splendid little models, and they moved exactly the way you’d expect an animated skeleton to move: all crouchy elbows and knees.
Here’s the fight scene. And here’s a short clip of Harryhausen talking about animating the skeleton fight in Sinbad.
(I’m sure the skeletons in Skyrim are an homage, but I love the fact they’re the biggest pussies in the land: lob a rock at them and they disintegrate into comical bone xylophones).
Anyway, RIP Harryhausen. And no, no-one had him in the Dead Pool.
May 7, 2013 — 9:47 pm
Comments: 20
Shit.
Near as I can tell from my FaceBook feed, all my old Boston homies are home and safe. So. Fine.
Does everyone have the day off for Patriot’s Day? I always did, but I worked in suburban Boston and my employer could expect some percent of employees to play hooky for the marathon if a day wasn’t provided.
I never went in person, but watched on TV often enough. I’m not into sports — certainly not marathons — but I remember this one because the third Monday in April is a real grab bag, weather wise. I’ve watched them run in blazing sun and in snow. Runners prefer the cold runs, for the obvious reason.
As far as speculation goes…too soon, too soon. We’ll have real answers in the fullness of time. Now back to watching Twitter twitter.
April 15, 2013 — 10:43 pm
Comments: 29
Bye…
Farewell to Baroness Thatcher (1925-2013).
You know what was really fun? After Reagan (PBUH) died, all the journalists pretending they’d had the utmost respect for him, always (subtext: “not like this current crop of pickled wingnuts”). That’s why we need to keep old people around; they know when the bastards are lying to us about the past.
I don’t think journalists here can QUITE manage pretend they for Maggie, but it’s instructive to watch them struggle not to smile and fist-pump the air today. Most of the obits have headlines that include “divisive” and “controversial” — words that generally mean “hated by the left.”
Oh, well. G’bye, MagOn, and thanks.
April 8, 2013 — 4:14 pm
Comments: 46
They’re real and they’re…well, presumably spectacular
Deep fried Mars bar. I always wondered if that was for real, but if the Scotsman is highlighting it as their Scottish Fact of the Week, then I guess it’s legit. They turned twenty last year.
Okay, I’m a fraud. I have been following the news. Oh, not American politics, which still makes me want to punch kittens. I’ve been watching, with an increasing sphincter-clench, the Far East hotting up fast. Wasn’t there a time when threatening to bomb the US mainland was an unequivocal act of war? But China has no intention of shutting Pyongyang up.
Meanwhile, they — China — are beefing up their drone arsenal, just as we have been telling everybody we’ll send our drones where we like and shoot whom we please. (Nice precedent, guys. Really, as an aside, we’d better litigate an individual right to shoot at drones before we don’t know whose drone that is over Mr McGregor’s barn).
Oh, skip all that and just read this one, an overview of how tetchy it is between Japan and China at the moment. All it takes is a slip of the finger in the danger zone and I smell history coming at us, fast.
So — fuck it! — candy bars it is. Near as I can figure it, a Mars Bar is what we ‘Muricans would call a Milky Way. Because — again I say, fuck it! — when you’ve got World War Yang coming at you, a 1,200 calorie snack doesn’t seem that big a problem.
March 26, 2013 — 11:12 pm
Comments: 36
Another week, another interesting corpse
That’s what I love about Britain — scratch the surface, find an interesting corpse. Or, in this case, dig down eight feet and find fifty thousand plague riddled corpses.
Yes! The Crossrail Project has dug up a plague pit! Well, they think so. They’ve only uncovered thirteen bodies so far, but if it’s the one they’re thinking of (really, they have so many 14th C plague pits to keep track of. What’s a capital city to do?) there are as many as 50,000 bodies to go.
Eight feet down. That really doesn’t seem good enough, does it? It’s in a part of the city that has seen relatively little development (no skyscrapers or anything), which is how it’s remained lost for so long.
It was all over the news tonight. Plague doesn’t survive long in the soil, but they think they may be able to isolate some Yersinia pestis specimens in the tooth dentin. Which doesn’t strike me as very bright, even if they do manage to sequence its genome.
This isn’t the first cemetery this rail project has accidentally dug up. They also unearthed three hundred former guests at Bedlam. Oh, and not long after construction dug up Richard III in a parking lot in Leicester, they’ve dug up a knight in a parking lot in Edinburgh.
It’s like some really twisted game show.
Have a good weekend! Sweet dreams, and don’t dig any holes!
March 15, 2013 — 11:32 pm
Comments: 46
She has worms. Or she’s a witch.
Must be the change of seasons; the cat is going through one of her periodic Ravening Pig phases. (Hm. Note to self: worming pills).
We call her Grizzel Greedigutt when she does this, from this charming woodcut of the Witchfinder General. Yes, yes…I know it looks like it says Griozzdl Greedigutt, but it’s given as Grizzel in the text.
The text! That’s right, you can read Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches for free! On your Kindle! Knowing that Matthew Hopkins would have had you hanged as a witch if he caught you doing such a thing!
Mmmm. You know, I realize there was a deeply nasty hysteria in the air, and lots of perfectly innocent ugly old crones and unpopular people with funny looking moles got whacked. But surely some of the people accused of witches were so because they believed themselves to be witches. I mean, this cuts both ways. People believed in witchcraft. Believed it could accomplish all sorts of wonderful things. Who wouldn’t be tempted?
I’m not talking the modern hippie notion of wise women and herbalists. From what I can tell, spells of the time were disease cures, love philtres, aphrodisiacs, money callers and getting back at your enemies. Basically, all the shit for sale that landed in your spam filter today.
We’re still the same old shaved monkeys, aren’t we?
March 7, 2013 — 12:07 am
Comments: 16
Gnarly Mummy Head!
Gnarly mummy head! It isn’t even my title – it’s Discovery’s title: Gnarly Mummy Head Reveals Medieval Science.
Neat story. This is the oldest surviving European anatomical dissection. It’s a proper, prepared anatomical specimen, too — the anatomist ran wax into the arteries for preservation and everything. Carbon dating puts its origins round about 1200 AD.
Yup, during the Middle Ages. When things like autopsies were supposedly verboten.
I’ve read for some time that the Dark Ages were unfairly tagged with that moniker. I mean, that’s been a trend in history books for my whole lifetime: rehabilitating that long stretch between the Romans and the Renaissance.
Until I read the article, though, I didn’t put that together in my head with Protestantism. That newly minted Protestants talked a lot of crap about the state of science before their time, as a sort kind of anti-Church thing. “Oh, boohoo — the Pope didn’t let us cut up dead people!” Which was not, apparently, true.
Worth a read, anyway.
Oh, speaking of dead people! I’m delighted to acknowledge that Hugo Chavez is officially dead. I’m even more delighted to point out that his official date of death is today, Tuesday, March 5. Which means he falls between Dead Pools and I don’t owe dick.
Sorry, Hutch. I suspect you wuz robbed.
March 5, 2013 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 37
Are you ready for some ar-che-ology?
These days, the Thames is one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world. Once upon a time, though — and for hundreds and hundreds of years — it was London’s toilet, wastebasket and repository of unwanted dead hookers rolled into one. If you have the stomach to go looking, some of the junk thrown or lost down there is incredibly cool.
“Mudlarks” are people who traditionally combed through the shit on either side of the river looking for stuff worth having. Historically, it was neither nice nor lucrative. These days, mudlarks are armed with metal detectors, and it’s…well, actually, it’s still not nice and not often lucrative, but they find some unbelievable stuff.
To metal detect along the Thames, you need a license from the Port of London Authority. And to get that, you need the approval of the Museum of London. Which is excellent, because the museum does analysis on their finds and buys the very best specimens for display. There are only about fifty people with a license at the moment.
Okay, hang on to your retinas, I’m about to send you to the Mudlarks’ official site, or as I call it: The Worst Site on the Internet. I mean it. Not because it’s ungrammatical, scatological, politically incorrect, half missing and keeps pointing you to the awesome new site that doesn’t seem to exist. No, because MY EEEEEEEEEYESSSSSSSSS!
But it’s totally worth the risk of nausea, shortness of breath, incontinence and temporary color blindness, just to browse through what’s left of the pictures of all the cool things they’ve dug up.
Would I lie?
Update: oh, their new website is MUCH easier on the eyes! Thanks for the tip, Carl!
January 7, 2013 — 11:49 pm
Comments: 31
You could own Bonnie Parker’s snubby…!
Going up for auction, Bonnie Parker’s Colt Detective Special .38 revolver. It’s expected to fetch $100K. Referred to as her “squat gun” because it was found taped to the upper inside of her thigh with surgical tape, where no true gentleman would dare frisk her. I guess the same rules don’t apply to ladies’ corpses.
In the same auction, other objects from the death car, some of Clyde’s arsenal and general stuff associated with other outlaws and lawmen. Really interesting auction house, that — worth a poke around. They specialize in autographs and historic memorabilia.
For what it’s worth, my grandma was a nurse in Baton Rouge about the time the Bonnie and Clyde went down. She claimed to have seen Bonnie’s body in the mortuary. Said it was dirty. Like, old dirt. Like someone who hasn’t had a good scrub in a long, long time.
On the other hand, my grandmother was often — how you say? — full of shit.
July 16, 2012 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 39