AFK today
Please not to be trashing the place.
July 27, 2007 — 6:11 am
Comments: 19
This blog needs more death kitties
I find the spready toes irresistable. My cats know this, I think. They never waste an opportunity to drop and spread ’em. Good morning! Yoink! My bowl is empty! Yoink! I hacked up a furball in your underwear drawer! Yoink!
I’ve been holding this picture for several days, waiting an opportunity. You can thank Uncle Badger for this.
July 26, 2007 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 11
It’s not one of mine, I swear!
Oscar is a two-year-old cat adopted as a kitten by Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, RI, where I be at (Providence, not a nursing home. Not yet, bucko). Oscar isn’t an especially friendly cat. Doesn’t seem to like people that much, in fact.
Every morning, Oscar makes the rounds of the dementia ward, checking up on everybody, just like a real doctor. Say, Dr Kevorkian. Because, every once in a while, Oscar will hop up on the bed and curl up next to somebody. And when he does this, that old coot is going to die today.
So far, he’s gotten it right upwards of 25 times, which is a better track record than the doctors. When Oscar cuddles up to somebody, they call that person’s family and a priest. One ungrateful wretch asked that Oscar be put out of the room while he said goodbye to his mom. Oscar paced up and down the hall, mewing.
Sender-inner thinks they’re overlooking the obvious explanation: when no-one’s looking, Oscar bumps people off (presumably by the classic feline method of breath-stealing). Me, I think it’s adequately explained by the “special relationship” between cats and the Man in Black. The one with the sickle, not the one with the guitar. Eh. Either one, at this point.
— 8:43 am
Comments: 23
A bleak day for journalism
Weekly World News is calling it quits.
American Media Incorporated’s other titles include the Star, National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness — which, if you ask me, is putting way too many of our precious journalistic resources in one basket. If AMI went under, what would I read in the checkout line?
And I speak for all of us when I shriek uncontrollably, WHAT ABOUT BATBOY?!
According to Wikipedia the original Bat Boy edition of Weekly World News was the second-best selling issue of all time, and then infuriatingly doesn’t reveal which one was first best, so screw Wikipedia.
Bat Boy was rendered by editor-slash-cartoonist (or editor/cartoonist, if you prefer) Dick Kulpa. Dick’s other claims to fame include drawing Star Trek and Bruce Lee comics for the LA Times Syndicate and art direction for the Testor’s corporation (where he drew the instruction sheets for the Weird-Ohs line of models). Also, he was elected to the Loves Park Illinois City Council, where he regularly appeared wearing tights and a cape as Alder-man, crusader for justice. Weasel does not make this shit up.
But I digress. More Wiki.
Bat Boy has a chaotic sense of morality. He has been known to steal cars as well as come to the aid of the needy. According to the mythos, the only person who cares about the chiropteran child is Dr. Ron Dillon, who discovered him in a West Virginia cave. At the time of capture, he was two feet tall and weighed nineteen pounds. By February 2001, he was 2′ 6″. In 2004, he was five feet tall and his weight was unknown.
He sheds his wings every three years, and regenerates a new pair.
During the 1990s Bat Boy is rumored to have tried to escape society’s gaze by enrolling in a small liberal arts college in upstate New York under the assumed name of Guy Fledermaus (German for bat). He purportedly graduated with an art degree from the college’s “Music Program Zero”.
On 27 February 2001, he allegedly attacked a fifth-grader in an Orlando, Florida park. The girl was nearly ripped to shreds. The next day, he endorsed presidential candidate Al Gore.
Worth following the link just for the geneology of the Boy family. A sad day. A sad, sad day. Also, I goofed off too much yesterday and so I’ll have to make up for it today. A sad, sad, sad day.
July 25, 2007 — 8:26 am
Comments: 24
Good morning! Have some poetry…
The Raven
There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says “Nevermore.”
I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
There once was a poet named Will
Who tramped his way over a hill
And was speechless for hours
Over some stupid flowers
This was years before TV, but still.
Gnus sent me that link. The rest of the site is high-larious; mostly comics and Flash animations. It’s updated Mondays and Wednesdays. Go here if you want to start at the beginning and browse the lot. Lore Sjöberg. That’s his
name. Don’t wear it out. He also writes a humor column for
Wired which is pretty…humorous.
— 6:22 am
Comments: none
Dismissalooza…!
It’s D-Day for Ward Churchill. The CU Board of Regents is holding a hearing right now to decide his fate. Ward is going to plead his case, but sadly that part is behind closed doors. Some preliminary remarks were supposed to be streamed online at 8:15, but it’s 8:55 and nary a peep yet. Some time after 4pm, they’re also supposed to be streaming video of the press conference announcing the result (same URL).
Pirate Ballerina‘s jwpaine promises live-blogging, whenever there is something to liveblog. He might even have thugs and/or goons in the area of the actual hearing.
Me, I just have some fashion advice for the professor. First, lose a few pounds or lose the turtleneck. Dude. Seriously.
Second, the hair. Yes, I realize long, straight hair parted in the middle is supposed to evoke the whole Native American thing, but your forehead is too low to support this ‘do. That’s something we have in common, Sir — hairlines so proximate to our eyebrows, the effect borders on simian.
Now, when you combine a low forehead with long, straight hair parted in the middle, you are presented with two options. You can hook all that hair behind your ears, flapping them outwards, cartoonishly. The Dopey of Tribe Disney look, as it were. Or you can let the hair fall where it may, which is going to be basically in front of your face.
When I went through my obligatory long-straight-hair-parted-in-the-middle phase in the early ’70s, I generally pursued the latter hairdressing strategy. Hence, for several years, there was nothing to see of me but two lank curtains of brown hair barely parted by the tip of my proud aquiline nose.
“You look,” my mother remarked, squinting at me, “like a weasel peeping out of a tent.”
Update: Lokki points out, they’re in a different timezone in Colorado. Ummm…duh, Weasel. Update, update: okay, NOW they’re really, really late.
UPDATE: gone, but not forgotten. Let the litigation commence! Somehow, I keep replaying in my head that ridiculous dogfighting speech by the ridiculous Senator Byrd, “the dawg dahd! …the dawg dahd! …the dawg daaaaaaahd!”
July 24, 2007 — 8:54 am
Comments: 36
Richard Johnson: Postings from Afghanistan
Small Dead Animals — but do please check out the National Post of Canada blog Postings from Afghanistan.
Of course, you have to admire a guy doing it old school and flying his own ass out to Kandahar to sketch his country’s troops. That’s a given. But I have to tell you, this man is seriously good.
Yes, I know you’ve seen drawings in this general style, but they’re often not quite the quick, spontaneous sketches they seem. There’s a whole ‘nother art to laboring over a drawing and making it look like you didn’t. This guy, on the other hand, is the real deal; he’s doing these drawings on the spot, in one take, with very little underdrawing (preliminary sketching) or overdrawing (correction after the fact).
How do I know? I’m a professional artard, dammit. I can draw, but I’ve never been good at quick and fluid life drawing like this. I’m deeply envious of people who are, and I’ve made a study of them.
Like, check out the boots on the kneeling guy in the sketch above. Boots and shoes are tough (I had to draw a pair as part of my entrance exam to art school; it’s harder than drawing Binky, I can tell you). Not only does he do them well, he shows them at slight angles, natural to the pose. Novices need to draw things from clean angles: directly in front, directly from above, directly from the side. The ability to render objects slightly tilted is a sure sign the artist has grokked a shape so completely that he can rotate it in his head, three dimensionally. In other words: damn.
I traded email with him Saturday; I was lucky that his connect was good that day and he was sitting by a computer in Kandahar. He confirmed that he draws, as much as possible, quickly and from life. He takes photos as well, but refers to them sparingly. I believe it. As a technical illustrator, of necessity I’ve done a lot of drawing from photographs. It always gives itself away. Even experienced draftsmen can’t avoid a certain a stiff, flat, mechanical look when relying heavily on photos. You look at a photo and tend to think there is a dark shape next to the eye instead of there’s an indentation next to the eye. The difference shows.
His words are good, too, but I haven’t finished reading them. I hate reading a blog from the beginning; the format is so damned uncongenial. New entries are on top. You have to go to the bottom, look up until you find the top of the unread entry, read down to the end of it, then go up above that until you find the unread entry above the one you just read…well, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a pain. It’s fun to see his drawings get better over time, though. That’s natural — you gotta draw every day to get good at it, and the more the merrier.
Anyway, I think he’s over there for two months this time (he went in 2003, as well) and he looks to be about halfway through. There’s a link from the top of the Post, but I don’t think he’s getting the attention he deserves. Wander over and check it out.
July 23, 2007 — 6:24 am
Comments: 5
Into every week, a little Friday must fall…
Ward Churchill. I bet you thought he was long gone. Nope. D-Day is Tuesday. Keep an eye on jwpaine’s place, Pirate Ballerina, for the latest news on everybody’s favorite pretend injun.
July 20, 2007 — 6:37 pm
Comments: 22
Stalking the BBC
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea——————————————————————————–
Reg: If you want to join the People’s Front of Judea, you have to really hate the Romans.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh yeah, how much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right, you’re in.
However bad our media is, the BBC is shockingly worse. Smug, bitter, anti-West, pro-just-about-anything-else — I swear, they work “George Bush is stupid” jokes into the cooking program. It’s like swimming through a leftoid fever dream.
Brits are required to fund the BBC by paying a hefty annual license fee. A colo(u)r TV license currently stands at £135.50 annually, which is…$278.14627 per today’s exchange rate. Free if you’re old, half price if you’re blind (I guess they figure blind people aren’t using the video portion. Maybe they recycle it).
Having ‘customers’ that are forced to pay up whether they like your product or not is bad, m’kay? Brits of the conservative persuasion (a small, angry tribe) are justly furious at the BBC’s clear ideological bent, but they have no recourse. Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web.
The best blog tracking the BBC was Biased BBC. I’ve read it for a couple of years, but it’s been going for five. In my time, there wasn’t a whole lot of action in the main posts; the good stuff was in the comments. An open thread there will typically run for a couple of hundred comments, most by good and conscientious regular commenters. Trollage was minor.
Sweet deal, huh? An excellent, popular blog that writes its own damn self…?
I guess not. Someone with a set of keys decided to impose a little authoritay on the place. Have you ever seen someone get hold of the moderating stick and go nuts? It’s an ugly scene. It’s like a blood frenzy. It starts with “off topic” posts and naturally moves to the posts that complain about the deletions, and then to any complaints and settles into a cranky, arbitrary, uneasy place, where no-one knows quite where they stand. For a blog that relies so heavily on commenters, it was a suicidally arrogant act.
This happened when I was away at Weaselfest last week, so I didn’t see it in realtime. I’m not a contributor there, anyhow. A faithful reader, but the BBC is not (yet) imposed on me by force, so I seldom have much to add. But that alpha wolf shit really gets my knickers in a twist, so I pulled my link (that’s right — offa my blogroll! They’ll rue the day they angered a weasel. Rue, I say!)
I repeat: Being stuck in a situation they are utterly helpless to change makes people mad, and mad is going to spill onto the web. A couple of different schismatic sites sprang up and fizzled. One looks like it’s got the right attitude and is going to stick: BBC-Biased — Exposing the bias of the BBC.
Keep an eye on it. It’s picked up several of the better commenters from the old site, and will undoubtedly pick up more when word gets out (it’s hard to leave a breadcrumb trail in a place where posts disappear).
I’ll even put it on my blogroll (my blogroll!) if I can remember where I left the keys…
— 9:07 am
Comments: 34
They get the last LOL
There’s been a certain amount of hatin’ on the lolcats lately. But check out this Business Week article on blogs that make money (Cheezburger is the third one in the slideshow). BW estimates Cheezburger is pulling in $5,600 a month in ad revenue.
Now, that’s not a spectacular amount of scratch for the big blogs (witness some of the others on the list), but Cheezburger only started in January of this year. And it’s entirely driven by user submission. Who’s LOLing now?
My promise to you, my faithful minions: I will never sell out. Not unless I really, really need the money.
July 19, 2007 — 4:30 pm
Comments: 22