Just throw the damn hammer, wingers!
I don’t BELIEVE this week — this week of ALL weeks, when we’re eulogizing gleeful bomb-tosser Andrew Breitbart — there are commenters on the Right who found it necessary to scold Rush Limbaugh for using the word “slut.” (And no, I’m not happy he apologized).
Let’s review some basics, shall we?
■ If your name is not Rush Limbaugh, you are not responsible for anything Rush Limbaugh says. You do not ever have to apologize for things other people do. Even people on “your side.” That’s Individualism 101.
■ “Slut” is not a shocking word. You can say it on TV. Chaucer used it, for god’s sake. Your mom probably read it in her Advanced Placement English course. It’s a deadly insult (to most) but it is not a shocking profanity.
■ A year ago, the feminist Left embraced the word “slut” all around the world and carried banners proclaiming themselves sluts…and now hearing the word gives them the vapors? Pff!
■ A distraction? Really? So if Rush hadn’t said “slut” we’d have spent the last week talking about taxes or gas prices or all the other stuff we want to talk about and they don’t?
No. HELL no. They’d have found something else to knock us off message. Anything at all will do. Members of the media and the institutional Left leap out of bed every morning screaming, “WE AM RUBBER, TEABAGGERS AM GLUE! RAAAAARRRRRR!”
Stop apologizing, Righties, and THROW THE FUCKING HAMMER!
March 5, 2012 — 11:42 pm
Comments: 50
Noticed anything…weird about the Daily Mail lately?
So the U.K. Daily Mail beat out the NY Times to become the world’s the most visited online news site.
And then this happened. It’s a screen grab of today’s Mail. It’s like that all the way down. It’s like that every day. It’s been that way for weeks. It’s been driving me mad.
The UK’s most popular newspaper IS ALL ABOUT THE USA.
It hasn’t always been this way, and I’ll bet the print version isn’t. If I were a proper journalist, I’d buy one and compare. But I’m not. I’m a lazy weasel impersonator on a Friday night and, anyway, I only read that filthy rag when somebody leaves it on the lunch counter.
Yeah. Not a fan. I know it’s a supposed to be right-wing, but it’s really just the Shit-Stirrer’s Gazette. I know, I know – all newspapers are bad, but the Mail is something special.
More than usually mendacious. Less than usually accurate. They specialize in running snapshots of Angelina Jolie with a bit of toilet paper on her shoe under the head “Not so classy now!”
Feh.
But the good capitalist in me is torn. On the one hand, the Mail has apparently identified its actual user base and is providing them the services they want. So, good.
On the other hand, a British newspaper that’s all about America? How weird is that?
Good weekend, all.
Oh. Hey. Mono the Elderish has cobbled together a discussion forum. In case you’re not wasting NEARLY enough time on the internet, there you go.
<litella>Never mind.</litella> As Carl points out in the comments, my default Mail URL points to /ushome/. Why that should be — my IP says I’m in Maidstone or some such — I do not know. The Mail still sucks, though.
March 2, 2012 — 11:55 pm
Comments: 23
Holy shit! ANDREW BREITBART IS DEAD??
Forty three. Natural causes.
THE FUCK?
March 1, 2012 — 3:55 pm
Comments: 54
Posted without comment
You know, I don’t think my patented Weasel Brand Snark ™ would add much to this story, so I’m’onna recommend you go read the original. It’s oddly worth your time.
Meanwhile, the drain thingie on the fridge is clogged with chunks of eel and lamb spleen, or whatever’s in those pasties we eat. I have to go pick it out and mop the kitchen floor.
February 29, 2012 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 17
That’s my stat camera!
As I’ve mentioned before, I started my career in commercial art a handful of years before computers began making in-roads into graphics. That means I had to learn to do everything one way, and watch as, bit by bit, computers swept away most of the jobs I had just learned to do.
It was awesome.
If the bomb ever strikes, we will never go back to doing things the old way again. Pre-digital printing technology was as complex and far more time-consuming and expensive as anything you can do with a computer. It was all photographic materials and layers and fiddly alignment tools and calculation charts and masking. In a lot of ways, it was fun — sort of a cross between flower arranging and carpentry — but it was a whooooole lot of work.
Anyhow, someone on an art forum posted a link to the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. If you’ve ever taken so much as a mechanical drawing class in High School, you will recognize and (I hope) enjoy paddling around in this collection. The sheer amount of junk we need to do our jobs was staggering.
So many old friends <sniff>
February 28, 2012 — 11:39 pm
Comments: 27
Play pinball, live to a hundred
Steve Kordek, widely credited as the Godfather of Pinball, died last week, aged 100. He didn’t invent the pinball machine, but he came up with many of the innovations that make the modern pinball machine familiar.
Dual flippers. Multiple balls. Pop-up targets. He designed hundreds of the things.
But not the one in the picture, Jungle Queen. That was my machine.
I mean, I played it a whole bunch. The four or five months between the time I turned 18 (and thus could legally go into bars) and the time I went away to college, that was my passion: a brandy alexander, a roll of quarters and Jungle Queen. With bonus games, that could last me a whole evening (or until the third brandy, which stole my superpowers).
See those triangular things near the top? Those are two rows of five drop-targets with monkeys on them. If you caught the ball on the flipper and held it to a standstill, then slowly let it fall and popped the flipper at JUST the right picosecond, you could sling the ball down a whole row of monkeys and take them all out in one move, pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
God, I loved those monkeys.
The last time I saw Jungle Queen — actually the two-player variant, Jungle Princess — was in a fairground in Rhode Island. It was like bumping into my best friend from High School (what the hell – Jungle Queen was my best friend from High School). I had spent a quarter and won a free ball on the first go and I was feeling fine, when a young man with Down’s Syndrome pushed me away and started playing. My bonus round.
I stood there a moment calculating how bad it would look if I got interrupted in a shoving match with a handicapped person, and then I walked sadly away.
February 27, 2012 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 19
Four things I did not know about Edweard Muybridge
Y’all know Edweard Muybridge, right? He settled a very old argument and kind of fathered the moving picture in the process.
Horsey folk had argued for ages whether a running horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. Muybridge was a well-known photographer in California when Leland Stanford (former governor, race horse owner and founder of Stanford University) hired him to answer the question. Took him years to work it out, but Muybridge eventually wired a bunch of cameras along a track with tripwires, ran a horse down it and got the answer.
Which was: everybody was wrong. People in the NO camp believed a horse always had at least one hoof on the ground. People in the YES camp thought they were all four off the ground, with the front legs aiming frontwards and the back legs aiming backwards. Like a rocking horse. Whee! Turns out…well, look at the picture.
Muybridge went on to take upwards of 100,000 photos of people and animals in motion. Which is, to this day, a cherished reference for animators and illustrators. Lumme some Muybridge!
So anyhow, I was looking up the date of that first definitive horse series (1877) and I discovered four things about him I did not know before.
He was English. Born in Southwest London in 1830. He moved to the States in his mid-twenties. He was born Edward Muggeridge, but apparently decided his name needed a little weirding up. Which explains why you’ve never heard of an Edweard or a Muybridge before (unless you have, in which case — do tell!). He got some nasty head injuries in stagecoach accident in San Fran, which may have left him a little…cracked.
Also, he killed a guy and got away with it. He discovered his wife had taken a lover — a certain Major Larkyns — tracked him down, said “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife” — whipped out a gun and BANG. Shot him dead.
His insanity plea (on account of his brain damage) was rejected, but it was ruled a justifiable homicide anyway. On account of, diddling other men’s wives was considered really unacceptable then.
Oh, a fifth and final thing — he then dropped his son off at an orphanage, assuming him to be Larkyn’s boy. Poor bastard grew up to look just like Muybridge.
Good weekend, folks!
February 24, 2012 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 27
Screw poetry — I want to shoot something
And now to the third and final game I got for Christmas — Deus Ex: Human Revolution. So far, I don’t think the facial/figure modeling is really up to the current standard, but the gameplay is supposed to be awesome. So here I go.
Beats the hell out of limping around a deserted Hebridian island pissing and moaning about my dead wife.
I didn’t mean to make another lame computer game post this week, but I was out for most of this evening. Taking notes at a Church council meeting.
I swear to god, the first one of you laughs, gets a slug in the face.
February 23, 2012 — 11:08 pm
Comments: 21
A good idea
Hm. So. I bought Dear Esther last night, which is an Indie game.
Actually, I would dispute calling it a game. You don’t really interact with stuff. You wander around a surreal landscape at will while a narrator (who is presumably you) randomly declaims fragments of a story. That’s potentially a cool ride, but it’s not a game.
I “finished” it tonight — that is, I reached the end scenario, though I haven’t seen all the content. If you watch the trailer at the link, you’ll pretty much have the whole experience, right there.
Dear Esther started life in 2007 at the University of Portsmouth as a free mod, using the Source game engine (Half Life 2). They decided to develop a commercial version, which was released on February 14 of this year. They cleverly charged a pittance (well, £7), and — much to their surprise — made their investment back in six hours.
So. Well. It was kind of like watching many indie films (something I did a lot of in my yoot). It was pretty to look at. Evocative. But after a while, you figured out that nothing was going to happen, nothing was going to be resolved, and they weren’t really ever going to tell you anything. If you like that kind of movie, you’ll love this.
Anyhow, I do hope they keep developing off-beat stuff like this. I think it could be a spectacular experience, with a bit less hippie and a bit more…meat.
February 22, 2012 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 11
Great news!
This hideous piece of shit is for sale. They think it’ll make $80 mil, easy.
Actually — I did not know this — there are four versions of The Scream. So somehow, inexplicably, this is exactly what Munch wanted this image to look like.
Three are in the National Gallery of Norway. Only this one was in private hands. This one, in pastels.
Yeah, eighty bazillions for a work on paper. In chalk. Nobody sneeze!
February 21, 2012 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 38