Happy birthday, Mag-on!
Today is Baroness Thatcher’s 84th birthday.
Baroness. What a kick-ass title. I’d totally rather be a Baroness than some weenus Princess.
The chattering classes (including, sadly, the current useless pimple who heads the Tory Party) have convinced themselves that everyone hates Maggie as much as they do. So I’m hoping to convince them to package her up when she goes and send her off to the States. You can wall her bones up in the Capitol building (next to poor old Smithson, walled up in the castle) to ward off pussies.
October 13, 2009 — 4:49 pm
Comments: 28
…and the winner is…
And the winner of the Iowahawk Endowment for the Arts $33.18 Steel Cage Art Death Match is…
Racist Pixel by US Citizen of Traction Control. Congratulations, dude — I know that’s the one *I* voted for.
But Iowahawk was kind enough to single out this ‘umble weasel (and John Manders — dammit, I wish I’d thought of a Big Daddy Roth hommage) for the Imaginary Certificate of Special Artistic Merit, which includes the Jack H. Squat Memorial Monetary Stipend.
Gosh, that’s the largest single paycheck I’ve gotten since November!
It was honor enough making the front page of one of my favorite writists. I was all, like, ZOMG! ZOMG!!!! SQUEEEEEEEE!
Wow. I had no idea I could make that noise.
October 12, 2009 — 6:25 pm
Comments: 17
Gots to start somewhere…
Ordinarily, my MO would be to spend a week or two twiddling around with the graphics and layout and stuff, but I can’t resist jumping on the dogpile and taking craven advantage of Dear Leader’s latest humiliation….ummm…triumph…ahhhh….well-deserved award. So, here’s my test storefront and this links directly to my first shirt idea.
DON’T buy something to do me a favor, you wonderful bastards. I’ve turned the commission way, way down — as far as it’ll go — while I work out the kinks. I’d get pennies. I’m not doing this one for me, I’m doing it for Dear Leader.
DO, please…if you get a chance…go over and poke the buttons and pull the levers and let me know what you think of Zazzle and the interface and the range of products they’ve got. It’s all very rough at the moment, but that’s okay — the store template has customizable CSS, so I can really screw it up if I put my mind to it.
Oh, and my shirt idea. If you have suggestions, I can make changes. I want to get it right. It’s not every day that Obama gets accolades just for teh Awesome.
Oh, wait…yes it is!
October 11, 2009 — 3:19 pm
Comments: 44
Can we talk?
Hooray! We’ve reached Phase 2!
I’m thinking about…gently monetizing this blog. Nothing too exciting. Flog a few t-shirts. Run a couple of contextual ads. I dunno. At this stage, I’m just…buy-curious.
I hesitate to do this, because it’s ugly and stupid. Ugly all over my nice, clean monochrome artard blog. Stupid, because nobody is really making money. Ace gets precisely 200 times my daily traffic, and he still rattles the tip-jar when he wants to take a field trip.
But…what the hell. I spend way too much time here to make an actual living doing real work. And I’ve been unemployed for almost a year now; small change from the back of the couch would be a windfall (pennies a day is all it takes to keep a weasel in booze and spotted dick).
The one thing I won’t do is put up a tip jar. Beg pardon to those of you who have them, but that concept (from a user’s point of view) creeps me out somehow. It’s like telling your friends they owe you beer money because you’re so cool to hang out with.
Anyhow, I’m not rushing anything. But I figured I’d better say something before I start, because it means lots of screwing around with the site’s code. Guaranteed fuckupage. So if you turn up here and everything’s busted, close your eyes and think of Stoaty.
Good weekend, all!
October 9, 2009 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 57
Wiener
Because I can. Because there is no “why” in art. Because I got nothin’ again today.
My baloney has a first name…
October 7, 2009 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 30
Excuse me. I’m a little horse.
I’ve got a cold today. Or swine flu. Or the plague. Or an attack of hypochondria.
Lurgee. That’s a good English word.
Creeping epizootic. That’s a US Southern colloquial expression for lurgee, if you pronounce it “eppyzooootick,” but it’s a technical term for a localized epidemic among animals if you pronounce it “epizo-otic.”
Ah. I’m delirious. I told you I was sick.
The horses? From a village fête some weeks ago. You should’ve seen those adorable little bastards do the riverdance.
In conclusion:
Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm
Stoaty Weasel Badger.
Discuss.
October 6, 2009 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 26
You know, that title could be taken another way
We visited friends in Alfriston Sunday, and they were like, “there’s a free screening of the Age of Stupid here today. You should go!” And we’re, like, “oh! Ummm…ha. Yeah. Ah. Mmmm. Heh heh heh.”
Have you heard of this turkey? It’s an indy film about an archivist from 2055 who looks back at footage of our time and wonders, “ZOMG, why didn’t they listen to the hippies about globular warmening????” It’s got all the important scientific issues: Iraq, Nigeria, wind farms, hurricane Katrina. McDonald’s and Wal*Mart (probably. Just guessing here).
It’s less charty and graphy than An Inconvenient Truth; it’s more an attempt to put a human face on pants-peeing alarmism. As one user on IMDB put it, “it’s possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.”
Whoof. Excuse me. Just step around that for now and I’ll clean it up in a sec.
The film premiered in New York on September 21 and all the world’s most prominent scientists were there: Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson. Moby. That freaky-looking dude from Radiohead.
Anyhoo, in case this embarrassing invitation crops up again, I’ve pre-jiggered five reasons I can’t go see your stupid global warmening movie:
1 My mom was so terrified by The Population Bomb, she had an abortion rather than let me be one of the hundreds of millions who starved in the 1970s.
2 In 1983, I went out into the new Ice Age, licked a flagpole and I’ve been stuck to it ever since. Please come get me; I’m cold and lonely.
3 I ate a delicious t-bone steak in a restaurant London in 1998 and was one of the 100,000 to die horribly of Mad Cow disease.
4 Dude! Are you kidding? The grid hasn’t worked around here since the Y2K disaster. I’ve spent the last nine years living in a yurt eating treebark sammiches.
5 I gots de swine flu. Okay, strike that one. The flu pandemic still has time to be an actual catastrophe, for reals this time.
In case I’m being too fucking subtle here the professional catastrophe-mongers are always wrong. Bad scientists and conmen have been trying to sell the apocalypse to a weary public over and over again since…since science overtook Jesus as the main faith of the West.
Man-made global warmening is just the most recent. They’ve gotten clever with this con, though — the deadline is far, far in the future. We must act RIGHT NOW…but we’ll never know for sure how much they’ve played us for chumps. We won’t live that long.
October 5, 2009 — 3:33 pm
Comments: 51
It’s crashing. It’s crashing terrible. Oh, the huge vanity…!
I. CAN. NOT. BE-LIEVE that our greenhorn president really, genuinely went to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the Olympics. Like others, I assumed he had it in the bag before flying out to accept the honor (which was tacky enough, but just inside the bounds). To prostrate THE OFFICE OF MY COUNTRY’S PRESIDENT before the international gang of midget wrestlers that is the Olympic Committee, and to do it ON SPEC?! AND FAIL?!
Oh, I am sorely vexed. I’m not sure the heady pleasure of watching him crash and burn can make up for the hot ouchy of the international humiliation. Can somebody fax this bozo a copy of the job description, please?
There ought to be some kind of Internet Snark Award for the wag at Drudge who came up with the headline The Ego Has Landed.
EDIT: changed ‘humanity’ to ‘huge vanity.’ Thenk yew, lauraw.
October 2, 2009 — 2:03 pm
Comments: 41
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the chicken diaper
We’ve kinda, sorta entertained the idea of keeping a few chickens. But our garden is too small, we’re too close to the road. Oh, and I fucking HATE chickens. But I was doing a bit of chicken window shopping (as you do) when I ran across this saucy little number.
Our totally revamped diaper comes with everything you need to keep your chicken indoors. It’s easy to position and secure, durable and user-friendly. The pouch is lined for extra security against spills. Included with each order are simple instructions as well as one, easily removable, heavy-duty vinyl liner that velcroes into place. Adjustable design, plus five sizes to choose from, means it’ll perfectly fit the size of your bird. Shipping is included!
Great For:
●Injured hens that need to recuperate indoors.
●Show birds that need to be separated from the flock in the months before before the show.
●Beloved family pets who you couldn’t dream of putting outside.
Okay, it’s hard enough to imagine the existence of such a mythical beast as a beloved family chicken, but now that we’ve got our thinking caps on, let’s imagine how much fun it would be to try to lay an egg through this contraption.
Still with me? Okay, now close your eyes, ball up your fists and imagine what it’s like to take this thing off at the end of the day.
October 1, 2009 — 7:10 pm
Comments: 30
Dan Rather listens earnestly to a banana
I’ll be honest: I don’t have any insights into Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS and the tossing thereof. I just wanted to draw Dan Rather with a banana clamped to his head.
I hate Dan Rather.
Hate him like Gloria Swanson hated the talkies. Always have done. There’s something humorless and plodding and mean about him. And phony. Phony as Dolly Parton’s left tit in Madame Tussaud’s parlor. Steyn said, in one of his I-wish-I’d-said-that columns,
Dan’s been play-acting at being a reporter for so many years now — the suspenders, the loosened tie, and all the other stuff that would look great if he were auditioning for a cheesy dinner-theater revival of ”The Front Page”; the over-the-top intros: ”Bob Schieffer, one of the best hard-nosed reporters in the business, has been working his sources. What have you managed to uncover for us, Bob?”, after which Bob reads out a DNC press release.
Wikipedia absurdly says of 60 Minutes, “the show pioneered many of the most important investigative journalism techniques, including re-editing interviews, hidden cameras, and ‘gotcha’ visits to the home or office of an investigative subject.”
Dude. Slash-and-burn editing and ambushing a company director before he’s had his first cup of coffee is not journalism, it’s dumb hack theater. 60 Minutes so outraged my infant sense of fair play, it pushed me down the first flight of steps from apolitical to proud poo-flinging ‘winger basement monkey.
If I had to nail the moment civility went out of modern political discourse, I’d nail it smack in the middle of Dan Rather’s massive forehead.
Rumor has it Dan put up $5mil of his own money to float this suit. Let’s hope he feels every dollar of it. Like flossing a dog’s butt with razor wire. Like shoving butter up a cat’s ass with a hot awl.
Aiiiiii…please make me stop!
September 30, 2009 — 6:06 pm
Comments: 52