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
Kimjongunzilla
Dangerous baby is dangerous.
Yes. Yes, I went to art school so I could paint people who scare me as ugly fat babies. A friend of mine pissed me off once, so I painted her as Joan of Arc and burned her at the stake. Beware the wrath of the art nerd.
So, okay. AltBBrown takes the dick with…I dunno. Some sports guy again. Round 48 of the Dead Pool starts tomorrow. Here. Six p.m. Weasel Blog Time. Remember, our clocks have changed since the last time, so WBT is now…fucked if I know. Same as GMT, whatever that is. You do the math; I lied on my transcripts to get out of High School algebra.
April 4, 2013 — 11:19 pm
Comments: 22
Not quite as awesome as that last one
This, on the other hand, is Luo Dan, a Chinese painter who has worn this deer’s head mask at work and play for four years (the headline says five, the article says “since 2009” — oh, you won’t fool me with your tricksy ways, Mister Smarty Headline Writer). He does this because…oh, let’s face it — painters the world over are balls-out crazy.
Check him out playing the bongos in his deer head.
Lame. I know. I was playing Skyrim tonight for the first time in months, and my quest encountered a glitch, so I’ve spent the evening chasing console codes. For you non-gaming folks, this occasionally happens in big, complicated games — the computer farts and a thing that is supposed to be there, isn’t. Or a person who’s vital to helping you do something dies unexpectedly. And then you have to reach into the switchbox, yank a few wires and raise somebody from the dead.
I was thinking. Playing Skyrim is like being Kim Jong Un. You sign up to a few magic classes at community college, next thing you know you’re Arch Mage of Everywhere. You slay dragons with your voice. You can kill anybody you like, steal anything you want, and everywhere you go, people gasp, “you! You are the one the prophecies foretold!”
No wonder the little porker is utterly mad. His real life is a video game. He prolly thinks he has a reset.
April 3, 2013 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 9
So, what’s the problem?
This is Li Meng. He hasn’t left this computer terminal for six years. He gets up to pee and shower and they hold his place for him. The rest of the time, he’s sitting in this internet cafe in this very chair playing video games. If you Google “Li Meng” and “internet cafe” you’ll get a ton of different takes on the story, mostly a bunch of handwringing about “internet addiction”.
But here’s the thing: renting a spot full time in the internet cafe costs him about eighty bucks a month. Playing video games, he says he’s making about $325 a month. You know what I say? THIS MAN IS THE KING OF AWESOME.
Plays video games all night, sleeps in the chair all day, slips out for a wash and some Chinese takeaway and puts money in the bank every month. I am NOT seeing a problem here.
It’s like when heroin got cheap in the Nineties and there were all these articles about how horrible it was that junkies could take a McDonald’s job and have enough money to rent a small apartment and support a smack habit. And I’m thinking, “wait…they’re fully supporting themselves and their wicked habits with an honest job? So what part of this is your business?”
April 2, 2013 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 33
Because hippies can’t be wrong about EVERYthing
I would have liked to’ve been a musician. But at some point in my teens, I plateaued at a place that really wasn’t good enough and figured I’d hit the limit of my talents. I’ve just widdled around and played for fun ever since.
A year or so ago, I decided to see if I could push back the boundaries a little. I started practicing, not necessarily for long periods, but in a focused and disciplined way. And, um…sonofa bitch. Practice works. I can almost hear new neural pathways sprouting like potatoes. I’ll never be great, but is sure does scratch an old itch.
I never knew until recently, reading up on it, how many hours the average professional musician puts into practicing. I had just assumed they were crazy talented. I know that’s a simple thing not to grasp until late middle age, but my universe includes whole galaxies of stupid.
So I started meditating. I figured if I could make new brain channels for difficult scales, I could practice being happy and get better at it. When I read that the US Marine Corps was looking into mindfulness training for stress reduction, I thought, “fuck yeah! It’s not just for hippies any more.”
And son-of-a-bitch! It works! The most tangible and measurable benefit is, I’ve seen a dramatic improvement in the hell that is insomnia. Most noticeably, it’s easier to fall back asleep in the morning after the light wakes me.
There’s a shit-ton of free stuff on the web, including guided meditation MP3s — very helpful at first. I started about the beginning of the New Year, twenty to thirty minutes every day (I miss some days). Basic mindfulness meditation, no chanting or anything. Just focusing on breathing mostly. And then sometimes, when monkeybrain is quiet, sneaking in some happy thoughts. Picturing my chickens running up to me. It’s a chicken-based meditation practice, basically.
So, anybody else want to cop to this? With or without chickens?
April 1, 2013 — 11:01 pm
Comments: 30
Happy Easter!
For those of you for whom this weekend has religious significance, happy Easter.
For the rest of you, here is a chicken eating pasketti.
Oh, it’s from last year, when there was a big, warm, yellow thing in the sky that made me want to eat my lunch in the garden (we had a heat wave this time last year, no lie).
And no, I didn’t just toss my ‘skettis in the grass for the chickens. I was sitting in my chair tucking in when Lucia, Leader of all Chickens, flapped up and landed wetly in the middle my plate, like a sack of feathery oatmeal. Chikkens really like paskettis.
Sure, it was kind of cute. But I remind you that chickens will stand around in their own shit burbling happily, given the opportunity. There really wasn’t any question of eating the rest.
Anyway, Brits take Easter seriously (I know, right?), so everything is shut until Tuesday here. Not including this blog, of course. Have a good weekend!
March 29, 2013 — 10:08 pm
Comments: 40
Dichotomies
I don’t like to view things in stark dichotomies. While I certainly recognize the existence of plain good and undeniable evil, I think our tendency to apply these terms to every conflict in our lives — from politics to that lady in Accounting who questions my time sheet Every Damn Week — is stupid monkeythink.
But I keep stumbling over things that make me think Right and Left are now so far apart that we simply aren’t able to talk to each other. Right and wrong aside, our core beliefs are too different to find common ground.
Example. I happened to be browsing Slate earlier for some reason and I came across this. It was the most read article on the site at the time.
Go. Read it. It’s short.
Shit, dude. Three months ago. Oh, I know the guy is in a really awful position and the relationship might not survive the test, despite his best efforts. But, damn. Three months. That’s his best effort?
I especially like the suggestion that it’s not fair to his own kid. What, not fair to make him watch his dad stand by the woman he loves? Damn, man. Is this really no-big-deal discourse on the other side of the argument?
Oh, read the other one, too. It also is a doozy.
— 12:11 am
Comments: 31
Eh…stop that.
News junky + interesting times = I’m on the web a *lot* lately. And not in a real good mood. And now is the time — apparently — to try to sell me something by really pissing me off.
Have you noticed that? Online presences cranking up the annoyingness, maximising the intrusiveness and generally imposing on whatever relationship you thought you had with them?
Popovers. Popunders. That thing where an ad opens up at the top of an article, shoving the text down while you’re trying to read it, then closes itself, jerking the text upwards again. That thing where the whole screen goes dark and you think your computer is about to croak, and then a cheery ad appears in the middle of the screen and holds it to ransom.
Audio that auto-plays. Ingeniously hiding that little X that closes the ad window. Getting rid of that little X entirely. Running big, bright, colorful ads down the full length of the page on either margin. Ads disguised as newsletters from places where I have actually signed up for newsletters. Articles that should be a single page broken into twenty-page slideshows (every click is a hit!). Firewalls that are trivially easy to get around, but add an extra unnecessary dollop of ass ache to the reading experience.
Or that thing where there are a bunch of semi-interesting pictures at the bottom of an article linking to stuff on other sites, and you click one and it doesn’t take you to the article, but to a whole nother page with a whole bunch of links, and you find the one you wanted and click it and it doesn’t take you to an article but to a page that freezes while it pretends to download content and now you have four useless windows open and you think, “what just happened to me?” I don’t even click out-links any more.
Web ads have always been annoying, but these extra-specially asshole techniques are all pretty new. I know times are tight and people are desperate to make money, but making me want to burn down your office and piss on the ashes is probably not the best way to get your hand in my pocket.
p.s. That illustration was originally animated, but the animation really got on my tits. You’re welcome.
March 27, 2013 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 48
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
Stupid Britain, sweet Britain
It’s not funny, you guys. Somebody got hurt, you guys.
Did you see this? Some kid in Essex got hit in the face with a flapjack, so his school has banned triangular food. I dunno. Sharp edges, I guess. Insert “assault snack” joke here.
Flapjacks are a kind of ancient British granola bar: oats, honey, raisins and butter baked together. They’re nice. And chewy. And LETHAL.
Eh. Palate cleanser. This lady is the widow of one of the actors who recorded “Mind the Gap” for the subway system. His recording was used on her local line. Sometimes, she went to the station just to hear his voice, after he died.
The last round of computer upgrades changed to a different announcer. So she got in touch with Transport for London. They not only gave her a CD of his recordings, but they’re going to put his voice back in her local station, just for her.
D’awwww.
March 25, 2013 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 42