Bits…
I was going to lead with a really stupid photo, but that looked awful sitting on top of 9/11 Atrocity Man. So I’ll go with this mildly stupid photo and three quick observations on the news.
First, that story about the oil tanker hijacked by the Taliban in Afghanistan. They hijacked the boat [ummm…tanker TRUCK, I’m told], ran it aground [got it stuck in the mud] accidentally (I guess) and then told the locals they could have the fuel. Meanwhile, NATO called in an airstrike and we blowed it up. Bingo, dead civilians and a huge stink.
Ummmm…isn’t “salvaging” oil off a stolen tanker what we call looting? And isn’t the traditional response to looters in time of war to shoot on sight? What exactly is NATO apologizing for? Surely the lesson is for Afghanis: don’t steal shit, even if your buds in the Taliban say it’s okay.
Next, the ACORN story. I was shocked to watch the undercover video shot by Giles and O’Keefe. I had no idea the pair were a couple of clean-cut young white persons. Heartwarming. We’re surely in a better place than we knew, vis-à-vis race relations, if our mostly-of-color urban community organizers will cheerfully help a couple of middle-class white kids set up their house of prostitution and illegal immigrant child sex ring. Colorblind society, here we come!
Finally, that terror raid over the weekend. Did you (like me) breathe the teeny-tiniest sigh of relief to read the words al Qaeda in the story? As in, thank Christ it wasn’t some dimwitted bubba from our side out to water him some Tree of Liberty.
September 14, 2009 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 22
Nuclear wasteses; I eated it
Not really. This is one of Scubafreak’s six cats, coming along nicely, thank you. They’ll be ready to harvest any day now. He’s got a classified going out next week trying to rid himself of a few. If that doesn’t work, what say we all pile into a rental car, drive to Colorado, and take his flash gun away from him before he hurts somebody.
In fate’s ongoing Summer War on Celebrities, actress Mollie Sugden died today. She was 86. Best known for her role as Betty Slocombe in Brit TV’s Are You Being Served? She managed to outlive Wendy Richard (who played the young tart) by some months.
As I am tired from a long day of shopping, making black currant syrup and choppin’ broccoli, I invite you to put paragraphs one and two together and build your own Mrs Slocombe’s pussy joke.
July 1, 2009 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 22
Saving the Great Hamster of Alsace
Some say the European Union is useless, but think again! Brussels is all that stands between the Great Hamster of Alsace and total annihilation. The Great Hamster (or European Hamster), Cricetus cricetus — an animal substantially less fictional than the Giant Rat of Sumatra — has been on the endangered list since 1993. At which point French farmers (presumably) stopped giving sweeties to children in return for severed paws and tails.
But the little blighters are still in decline. France no longer grows so much of the hamsters’ favorite foods — wheat, barley, alfalfa and cabbage — in favor of the more lucrative corn. Great hamsters fucking hate corn.
So what can the EU do about that? It can by-god impose fines on the French government, that’s what! €68,000 per surviving hamster, that’s what! If that doesn’t work, they’ll set up a training program to teach hamsters to eat corn. That’s what.
Y’all think I make this shit up, don’t you?
June 30, 2009 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 16
Impenetrable symbols
I’ve had to create graphics in international symbols style; I know boiling ideas down to a few simple shapes is not easy. Still, half the damn things are so utterly impenetrable, I feel sure it would be better just to spell it out in Maori or Sanskrit or whatever and let me look it up in the dictionary. (My favorite sign in the States was the international symbol for library. Pointless. What would someone who can’t read the local lingo need with a library?)
Britain seems more than ordinarily decorated with these things. Seems everywhere we go, some poor bubble-headed bastard is getting electrocuted, sliced in half like firewood and pan-fried. He should sue somebody.
Today, I ran across one so impenetrable, I’m still trying to work it out (see above). So far, this is my best guess:
■Holy shit!
■According to the book
■Rays of light will come shooting out of your face, your bellybutton and the tips of your toes
■If you stand too close to the monolith
Got a better idea? I can’t seem to find an international symbol dictionary, so I’m opening it up to suggestions. And no — I’m not going to tell you where I saw it. That would be cheating.
June 16, 2009 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 29
International incident, narrowly averted
Keys in the right pocket, knife in the left. I’ve done it that was since I were a wee slip of a lass of a weasel. It’s the things you don’t even know to worry about that get you when you’re a ferriner.
There was an airport-style security screening going into the building. The look on dude’s face when my NRA Commemorative Charlton Heston Three-Bladed Case Knife tumbled out told me “I’m going to have to talk to my supervisor” wasn’t a good thing. They huddled over my knife and hooted, like those monkeys in 2001.
It’s a perfectly ordinary American-street-legal pocket knife, but Supervisor told me if I were stopped for some reason by the police, I would automatically be arrested. It’s a knife. And it’s sharp — something a knife in London is not allowed to be. (I bit my tongue before I blurted, “my daddy always told me it’s the dull knife that’s dangerous”).
As it was under three inches and it wasn’t a locking blade (“my daddy always told me that a locking blade is a safety feature”), he wasn’t obliged to call the cops on me himself. But he did give me a talking-to and confiscated my deadly weapon while I was in the building.
It’s no joke. Under new rules, an arrest — even a small and stupid one — could get me kicked out of the country and barred from coming back.
Yes, today’s the day we had to drive up to sunny Croydon (think Queens) to the UK Border Agency in the aptly named Lunar House, so’s I could be biometrificated for my next round of alien papers. I left Uncle B outside. His tolerance for bullshit is extremely low. After I was disarmed, I went to the third floor to a great long room full of hundreds of green plastic chairs bolted to the floor and took a number. My number was 523.
The interview and biometrics were pretty prompt, but I waited for an hour and half while my fingerprints were checked against the ones I gave in November for my fiancée visa. They checked. I’m not approved for visa #2 yet, but it’s one more step in that direction.
I found Uncle B outside, looking splotchy and apoplectic after two hours of standing on a street corner in Croydon. Poor bastard. I didn’t have the heart to tell him beforehand he’d be the only white man in all of South London.
And my fingerprints? “In the permanent database” the helpful brochure informs me. Isn’t that swell?
May 19, 2009 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 25
Stupider than tacky, or tackier than stupid?
Did you see this on Drudge this weekend? Remember the thing where Hillary gave the Russian foreign minister a toy button that was supposed to say “reset” and in fact said “overstress”? Apparently, some in Russia aren’t absolutely positive it was an accident.
See, this is why you don’t let amateurs fuck around with this diplomacy stuff: there are some paranoid nutjobs with serious power out there. I read somewhere the State Department was pissed about this one. They’ve got tons of proper Russian speakers on staff (duh), but Hillary’s people don’t take advice. I thought she was smarter than that. I really did.
The wrong word? Stupid. Not writing the word in Cyrillic? Tacky. Actually, scratch that — the very idea of giving a foreign minister a toy reset button is prima facie tackier and stupider than fucking up the execution.
Seriously, can you believe the low-rentiness of these people? I thought the smarty pantses were in charge now. College boys. No more Texas goobers embarrassing us on the world stage.
So, what do heads of state give each other? Well, whatever it is, you can bet your ass it would look good in a museum. Gordon Brown gave Obama an ornamental penholder carved from the timbers of the anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet. Like that.
What did Obama give Brown? Twenty five DVD’s. Oh. So. Tacky.
DVD’s that won’t play in Britain? Stupid. Stupidstupidstupid. Deeeep stupid.
And her Maj? Giving the richest woman in the world an iPod? Stupid. Putting your own speeches on it next to the Great Moments in History? Tacky. Un-fucking-beLIEVABLY tacky. Britney Spears has a better feel for the tasteful and appropriate.
There’s more to sophistication than putting Dijonnaise on your arugula, sport.
May 11, 2009 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 21
Mao Zedong was a poopy head
Looks like the Chinese are getting stroppy again about people mocking Mao. I think that’s our cue to mock Mao, don’t you?
We know tens of millions died in Mao’s famines. Have you ever wondered if it was the passive incompetence of Communism, or whether he was an actively genocidal nutball? To examine the question, I mucho recommendo the book Hungry Ghosts. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’ll pull this together from memory as best I can. And I’ll try to be brief.
Mao adored science. He was sure science would lift China to world dominance. Unfortunately, he had NO fucking idea what science was. He’d imprisoned most of the real scientists, anyhow, so he just took his best guess:
Communism + enthusiasm = science!
Mao believed nature actually worked on communist principles; that rice plants should be grown as close together as possible, since plants would cooperate, not compete. The propaganda rags of the day claimed elementary schoolchildren were making dramatic genetic breakthroughs in their school gardens during recess; that crops grown with communist methods were so thick, kids were photographed walking across the tops of the wheat stalks (it later came out they were standing on a bench); that it was unnecessary to build new roads when everyone in China would soon have his own personal airplane. Students declared the decimal point bourgeois and demanded the right to place it anywhere they liked. Oh, it was going to be Emerald City, man.
In short, the whole country went bugfuck crazy under Mao’s direction.
But, you know, when your boss is a nutcase who gets annoying people killed, you do your best not to be an annoying person. Provincial governors began to vie with each other who could promise the most balls-out insane wheat production numbers. Using Mao’s methods, you can produce twice as much wheat? Well, we can produce ten times as much! Oh, Yeah? Well, we can produce thirty times what we did last year! And so on. Anyone who didn’t play the game was out.
Beating the West at wheat growing (not really China’s crop) and steel production were Mao’s two biggest obsessions. But “steel production” isn’t what you think: you know, digging up iron ore and smelting it and shit. Oh, no. Peasants were made to build these makeshift furnaces in each village in which they melted down their own tools and utensils and hinges into useless lumps of mongrel metal. I am so not shitting you. AND, when they ran out of firewood, they burned their own furniture and doors to keep the fires going. AND, their best and strongest workers were drafted to run the furnaces (the ones that weren’t already working on wild-ass crazy projects like building earthen dams that would crumble to bits in no time) so that the fields were neglected.
And then, quite coincidentally, China had a bad growing season. Periodic regional famine is historically common in China, but this one — few tools, few workers, desperately wrong-headed stupid farming methods — was set to be a hum-dinger.
But when harvest time came around, Mao gathered his deputies and said, “okay — pony up!” (I paraphrase). And they’re like, “what?” And he goes, “you guys promised me a hundred times the grain we produced last year, so let’s have it!” And they said, “oh! Um. Sure, boss.”
But of course, they couldn’t scrape together half what they’d produced the year before, let alone a hundred times. So they came back to Mao with the only possible explanation: those bastard peasants are hiding it from us!
And, of course, the poor bastards were hiding some. The soldiers had come around again and again rounding up what little food they had, so of course they hid what they could or starved outright. If the peasants were caught hoarding food, they were taken to camps, or beaten to death on the spot. If they didn’t hoard food, they starved or ate dirt and died of stomach cramps. Ttwenty or thirty or even fifty million of them. All the while Mao was giving away food to friendly communist countries and letting much of the rest rot in warehouses. Because they had a hundred times the grain they needed, don’tcha know.
So! Was Mao a drooling bumpkin retard or a homicidal nutcake psycho? Do you know, I still have no idea.
April 17, 2009 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 30
How to tell you’re in an exotic foreign land…
Whiskas comes in flavors like duck and rabbit, which makes annoying Warner Brothers cartoons play in my head whenever I feed the cat (DUCK season…WABBIT season…DUCK season…WABBIT season…). And the packet is in five languages.
Also, you have tea with the vicar. Tea with the vicar, I am so not kidding. Tonight was the second of our premarital counseling sessions (oooh! ‘Premarital’ makes it sound so naughty). She didn’t show us any more of Margaret Calvert’s industrial design work, but there was this graphic of a cup filling up with anger and resentment and spilling over with sarcasm, or some shit. I don’t know. I drew a picture of an weasel going “grrrr!” on it when she turned her back.
The vicar is a very nice lady, or I wouldn’t put up with a minute of this.
Then we came home, started a roaring coal fire and set the chimney on fire. No, no…we were able to starve it before it burned down Badger House, but that means no more fires until the sweeps come. And the sweeps can’t come until Thursday. And it’s going to be Really Very Cold this weekend.
But never mind. I’ve always said one of the great benefits of living in a multicultural society is that the airport ladies’ room teaches you how to say, “please put your tampon in the receptacle provided” in a variety of pointless, mouth-grinding, ugly languages. So here, courtesy of Whiskas, for your enlightenment and entertainment, is “complete pet food for adult cats” rendered in a bunch of stupid foreign tongues:
Alimento complete para gatos adultos.
Helfoder för vuxna katter.
Fuldfoder til voksne katte.
Täysravintoa aikuisille kissoille.
Ah, Croatian. The language of love.
January 8, 2009 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 36
Dis-graceful
Okay. I confess. The general lateness and lameness of posts lately? I’ve been…
…umm…
…asleep. And that’s not a metaphor for hot, hot mustelid sex or anything. Uncle B and I have passed out comatose a minimum of ten hours a day since I got here, snoring and farting like livestock.
Seriously, it’s whack. It’s Britain-induced narcolepsy. Turbojetlag. Even the cat can barely lift her head off the pillow to cadge Friskies. I knew I had some catching up to do after a year of low drama and high anxiety, but this is stupid. We haven’t spent eight hours awake in a row since November 26.
Tonight, I struggled awake to the sound of, “oh my god…it’s ten o’clock!”
And I go, “I dreamed I was having lunch with Mrs Rockefeller and Bette Davis.” And I really was.
And he goes, “I dreamed I was watching the Prime Minister put on a conjuring act.” And he really was.
Well. We’re a well-matched pair, I guess.
Surprisingly, that’s not as happy a thought as you might imagine.
December 16, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 25
Legends of Olde Englande
Oh, aye. When a man in a Santa-hatted gorilla suit playing a drum kit salutes you with a banana stump, sure an’ it’s goin’ to be a long Winter and hard.
Yeah. These people are weird.
I’m having trouble finding my rhythm; stand by for adjustments. I was always a morning poster ’til now, but I need every ounce of daylight to do house-y things. After which there’s Tea Time then Nap Time then Booze Time. My cup runneth over.
Tomorrow morning, the neighbors behind are cutting down a line of trees in their garden to get rid of the rooks — who are, I admit, very noisey. But it’s a shit thing to do. In December. Corvids are extremely fucking clever animals, and rooks are social and attached to their trees. I’m going to miss the bastards; I hope they take up residence in nearby trees, owned by somebody less keen.
On a happier note, the same neighbors told us there’s a stoat living under their back porch. A stoat, in case you haven’t Googled, is what the Brits call a proper, full-sized weasel.
w00t!
December 9, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 25