Mmmm…Awlaki on toast
Well, well, well…Mrs Hill wins the Dead Pool with Anwar al-Awlaki, and never have I been happier to trade a dick for a dick (not counting Round 12, the Osama bin Laden round). It’s unclear quite what happened, but it apparently involved somebody’s boots on the ground, not a drone or something.
Awlaki, remember, “…reportedly spoke with, trained, and preached to a number of al-Qaeda members and affiliates, including three of the 9/11 hijackers, alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, and alleged “Christmas Day bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; he was also reportedly involved in planning the latter’s attack.”
Killed in the same operation, Samir Khan. Also an American citizen, this little wiggler was believed to be the editor of Inspire magazine — an English-language e-pub that hoped to inspire Muslims living in the West to drive cars into crowds, build bombs in the kitchen and generally fuck the place up.
Jake Tapper over at ABC News is having a little crow about Obama’s jihadi body count. You know what? I’m totally fine with that.
Have a little strut, boys. Pat yourselves on the back. Take a victory lap. Have a cigar. Just keep killing those bad guys, ‘K?
Funny thing is, Obama *is* better-suited to this sort of action than Bush. Because — holy shit! — can you imagine the soul-searching article some hack at the New York Times would be banging out at this very moment if George Bush had, you know, assassinated American citizens on foreign soil?
Will you join me in a little exercise? Here’s a map of the Ma’rib Governorate in Yemen, where this operation took place. Have a look. Zoom in. Zoom out. Pan around.
That, my friends, is a shithole.
Ahhhhhh…delightful.
New Dead Pool starts next Friday, 6pm sharp Weasel Blog Time (which happens to coincide with GMT).
September 30, 2011 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 66
Oh, now, REALLY
Welp, there it is, folks. The final, definitive, can’t-argue-with-that, nail-in-the-coffin proof that crop circles are the work of a vastly superior alien intelligence.
That there is a crop circle of a classic bug-eyed alien smoking a pipe. And it’s not even a hookah or a bong or something interesting. No, it looks like a boring drugstore briar pipe made for Ward Cleaver to toke up some vanilla Borkum Riff.
Honestly, what more proof do you need — likenesses of the Three Stooges miraculously tramped into the winter wheat overnight?
The circle appeared in Cherhill this Summer, under the White Horse (don’t bother looking for the crop circle on the map, though — it’s too new. Though if you pan around, you might find some other interesting features. Wiltshire is a very spooky place).
The White Horse, by the way, was cut into the hillside in 1780 by Dr Christopher Alsop (“the mad doctor”), who stood at the foot of Labour-in-Vain Hill shouting orders through a megaphone. The horse may have been inspired by his friend George Stubbs, an 18th C artist who somehow got famous painting really freaky-looking horses.
Yep. I’ve caught the Crazy Train for Crazy Town, for sure.
September 29, 2011 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 30
Homeless movie star fetches up in East Sussex
Available for adoption: um, this dog.
Starred in The Prisoner of Azkaban (a film I saw but totally do not recall) as Gary Oldman’s fursona. He also did some TV shows in the UK. Now he’s too old to work and his stuntman owner travels too much to take care of him.
Personally, I think that’s pretty shitty. If you take on a dog — working dog or pet — you have a life-long obligation.
On the other hand, maybe he comes with a nice little nest-egg from his Hollywood days and they’re afraid to say so for fear of drawing the wrong kind of applicants.
Anyhow, free dog!
What? Oh, not us. We’re confirmed cat people.
In the Sylvester’s Granny sense, not the Nastassia Kinski sense.
September 28, 2011 — 9:59 pm
Comments: 13
Fork, you say?
So, Uncle B has a birthday coming up, and the only thing he could think he wanted was…a really good fork?
Yes, I am QUITE sure I didn’t mis-hear him.
We made the rounds of the local garden centers (or gardne centres, if you prefer), but nothing impressed. Finally, we were standing, staring at the forks in a local hardware shop (dear twelve-year-old me: you are not going to beLIEVE…) when a little man sidled up and whispered these aren’t the forks you’re looking for.
All the modern ones, he told us, are rubbish. The stainless steel ones are made in China and brittle. The British ones aren’t finished right. What we really needed to do, he said, was check out the refurbished tools at this one particular local antique store, for whom he happens to refurbish tools.
So we did that.
Hoo! I cannot tell you how lovely these old things were. Are. We bought a fork and a spade. Heavy. Wickedly sharp. Great slabs of oak handles polished by who knows how many man hours of human hands, doing work. For about what we would have paid for modern rubbish.
Oh. Yeah. I was going to post about the Obama team’s inability to find Colorado on the map, but my max graphic size isn’t enough to do funny state names justice. Also, I couldn’t think of any.
September 27, 2011 — 8:37 pm
Comments: 34
Ground floor…
It’s been fun, hasn’t it? Watching Obama come to earth? The lightworker. The One. What with the oceans and the jobs and the sick and the healing and the glaven.
Turns out the man expected to perform miracles lacked the basic, practical competence of a decent night manager at Wendy’s. No wonder — he’s never held a job as tough as that one. (Anyone who thinks minimum wage jobs are easy has never tried to be good at one).
Once that balloon popped, the landing was always going to be rough.
But, you know, there’s a floor. And I think we might be getting near it. Sure, the Magic Man turned out to be a plain old politician. But they — his side — they’ve voted for a politician before and they’ll do it again. Not with the same enthusiasm — they’ll never catch that lightning in a bottle again — but they’ll turn up.
Meanwhile, our candidate will evolve from Generic Republican to Actual Human Being and then Shit Will Stir.
I gotta tell you, I don’t like our field this time. I don’t like our field every four years, but I’m really meh on this bunch.
At this point, I’m rooting for Herman Cain. He’s no more flawed than any of the others, and it would be hilarious to watch. (“Vote for our guy — he’s at least three shades authentically blacker than the other guy!”).
September 26, 2011 — 10:30 pm
Comments: 33
We’re going WHERE?
Man, you think there’s an air of everything-going-to-shit in the States? You should be over here, watching the whole rattly, jerry-rigged fraud known as the European Union sway back and forth. (If you haven’t read the Peter Oborne piece in the Spectator everyone’s linking to, do. I mean, if you give a flying one about Europe).
Me, I gotta run. I’ve got websites on three different hosts and four different registrars and I’m trying to squeeze them all down into one. Webmaster type peeps who want to shoot the shit in the comments, I wouldn’t mind company.
Remember, DEAD POOL TOMORROW, 6pm WBT. Get your picks in early, if you can. If I can work up the courage, I may try to move the blog this weekend, so there may be outages. Or, you know, giant, unrecoverable catastrophes. If so, I’m sure I’ll Tweet it.
September 22, 2011 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 20
Where would I be without the easy ones?
Oh, come on. We all know there’s a perfectly logical explanation for this.
September 21, 2011 — 6:13 pm
Comments: 36
On My To Do List
Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806 – 1865). Don’t know why he popped into my head tonight. He was a Belgian painter in the Romantic tradition (though “Romantic” is a brain-hurty way to describe most of his work). After art school, he won the Prix de Rome, a fellowship that allowed him to live and study in Rome for a few years.
He entered a few bits in at the Paris Salon of 1839. That didn’t go so well.
Up to that point, he’d specialized in big, bombastic historical paintings. After the French snub, he went back to Brussels and got weird. The Belgian government was anxious to promote local painters, so they built him a studio in 1850. He holed up in it, writing and painting all on his ownsome, until he died in it fifteen years later.
He had a prodigious output. He did the usual historical and Biblical subjects, but also lots of paintings that were macabre or erotic. Or both. When he died, he left his studio and its entire contents to the Belgian government on condition that they make it a museum in perpetuity.
I bet they’re real sorry about that now. His paintings have gone way, WAY out of style; their museum is a bit of a laughing stock. It’s been on my “things to do across the Channel” list forever.
Some typical examples: Human Insatiability. Suicide. Two Young Girls (one of ’em dead). Two Witches. The Burned Child. Oh, and he was also involved in a distasteful experiment with a freshly severed head. So I learned that today.
Not a very good painter, but the situation is self-correcting. He experimented with the composition of his paints. This is always a bad idea; his stuff is gently falling to bits.
September 20, 2011 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 22
Let’s not play that stupid Class Warfare game either, please
You’re probably seeing this graph and many others like it these days (don’t know who to credit for this one; there are a bunch of them out there). It’s an illustration of just how much of their “fair share” the rich are paying already. The top 5% are responsible for more than half the income taxes collected. The top 50% for nearly all of it.
The millionaires and billionaires Obama has been wagging his finger at are precious natural resources. They invest money in companies, they build businesses. They’re general all-around rich bastards who travel and buy things and own things and employ people to do stuff for them (as a friend of mine once said, Mercedes mechanics have to eat, too). All of those things are fan-fucking-tastic for the economy.
Also, they’re rich. If you piss them off, they can afford to go away and take all their lovely job-creating money with them.
Okay? Okay.
But here’s the problem: these graphs are usually accompanied by text stating that, whatever it is, 40% of the people don’t pay taxes.
Bullshit! EVERYbody pays taxes (the graph is only about income taxes). Sales taxes, gas taxes, extra taxes on booze and cigarettes. Car tax and road tax.
And, really, most of us think of “taxes” as any money the government takes away. Social Security withholding for benefits you’ll probably never see. Quarters fed into parking meters. Licenses and fines and tickets and penalties (the poor are more likely to drive an old beater with a taillight out and live in a house that needs painting).
I spent some years bumping along at the bottom, doing that starving artist thing. I made shit money and lived in bad neighborhoods. Let me tell you, the working poor — the people trying to claw out a living without taking government benefits — they pay, and they miss every dollar of that money vividly. Let’s not alienate natural allies in the fight against huge and oppressive government.
Love the rich, but don’t be hating the poor.
September 19, 2011 — 7:23 pm
Comments: 28
Riddle me this…
I totally don’t get it. Barack Obama rode into office posing as a nice guy. A non-partisan, light-working, no-red-state-no-blue-state kindofa all-around nice guy. However much we’ve learned since, that was the thing he had going for him.
What on god’s green earth makes the left think he should turn into an angry, hectoring, feisty guy to get re-elected?
Oh, I understand why they would like to see that. There sure were times I dreamed of watching Bush invite a hostile press corps to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, however bad it would have looked in the Junior High civics curriculum afterwards. But at least for Bush it would’ve been somewhat in character.
For Obama, feisty is the exact opposite of what independents liked about him.
This is a strategy?
Good weekend, y’all! I’monna go drink now.
September 16, 2011 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 47