Oh, man, Michelle looks *pissed*
Look at these guys. Look at ’em!
Cameron, Helle Thorning-Schmidt (Prime Minister of Denmark) and Obama, grinning like frat boys at Mandela’s funeral and popping off a selfie. I suspect these guys are going to regret this snippet of bad optics going down in history.
Amateurs. Remember when a camera caught Clinton laughing as he came out of Ron Brown’s funeral, and he immediately made a boo-hoo face and wiped away a tear? That’s how you politick, gentlemen. (Bonus: that YouTube describes a paranoid theory of Ron Brown’s death I’d totally forgotten).
Embarrassing — my source for this image is Imgur — where it’s been posted, like, fifty times today. Imgur: the biggest little time suck on the internet (if you’re a lookin’-at-the-pictures kindofa weasel).
December 10, 2013 — 6:29 pm
Comments: 33
He came amongst us
So, could anybody stomach the MSNBC interview of Obama? Not me, but I got hung up on the HotAir headline (quoting Matthews): “He came to us. He came amongst us.”
Ick factor: off the scale.
We’re in one of those news cycles when my liver just can’t handle the news cycle. I scan portals, find articles about the news (articles with a soothing, congenial viewpoint), and learn what I know about what’s going on at one safe remove. Slashing at Medusa through a mirror.
Ace’s MacGuffin article nailed the general aura of unreality around the Obama Cult in general (and the Matthews interview in particular) best of all. I know most of you guys are regular Ace readers, but in case you ain’t.
December 9, 2013 — 11:23 pm
Comments: 19
Famous people, you so weird
So Liz Cheney is running for office. And her sister Mary is a lesbian and gay married Heather last year. And they’re all having a three-way stand-up slap fight about gay marriage.
On Facebook.
So Dick and Lynne Cheney weighed in.
In a statement.
Seriously, in a statement. A statement. How do you release a statement? Is there, like, a Statement Tree you nail this shit to and all the journos gasp and run over?
Dick Cheney, I love you man, but this is so, so fake. Families don’t get into fights on the editorial pages, they get into fights over the Thanksgiving turkey like normal people. They pick up a phone. They send a Hallmark card with a pointed double entendre. This is Liz running for office as a Republican, when she is on the record saying tolerant things about gay marriage in the past. Pure theater for public consumption.
I hate political theater. I hate dynasties. I hate that the ruling class thinks I’m this dumb.
November 19, 2013 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 17
Don’t stare at the Angel of Death, honey
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Stoaty, how can you NOT be blogging the great liberal train wreck that is Obamacare?” I’ve soaked up every article I can find this week, I promise. I’ve enjoyed — I have so totally enjoyed — my Schadenfreude McNuggets Happy Meal.
But brain simply refuses to absorb the scope of what I’m looking at. Popular culture during and just after the Black Death (the Big One, 1348) is surprisingly free of references to the Black Death.
“Holy shit, dude — what just happened to us?” “Shhhh, dude. Shhhhhh.”
I mean, I’d enjoy this fustercluck a lot more if I could see how a healthy medical service will come out the other side.
Oh, I know what else you’re thinking. “Stoaty,” you’re thinking, “you’re covered by the NHS now. What do you care?”
Well. Yes. I’m covered. The NHS isn’t truly awful, though it is awful in parts. Perhaps some day you’d like me to expand on that. But it’s just not…
Okay, for example — by law, a doctor’s appointment is ten minutes long here. If you think you have an especially thorny medical problem, you can book yourself for twenty.
Well, the British Medical Association’s GP negotiating team has just renegotiated that bit. In case your doctor thinks you really only need five minutes.
Good weekend, folks!
November 16, 2013 — 12:00 am
Comments: 15
I don’t even…
Hmmmm…didja see this over at Jammie Wearing Fools? It’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz defending Obamacare on MSNBC. Just after 1:10 she tries to say “misled” and ends up saying “my-zeld.”
Now, that’s not a slip of the tongue. I get those ‘tard tongue moments all the time. “Misled” might come out as “mislaid” or “missiled” or “trombone.”
But not “my-zeld” — that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re cold reading someone else’s writing and a word doesn’t register for a second. It’s a read-y slip, not a think-y slip.
So, did she have a teleprompter with the answers on? And if the answers are scripted in advance, the questions would have to be scripted in advance, too. You can’t write the answers until you know the questions.
I mean, on the one hand, MSNBC. But on the other hand, really?
November 7, 2013 — 11:36 pm
Comments: 27
Well, that was inevitable
Been getting a fair amount of these lately. You?
They’re obvious phishing emails. I mean, obvious because they were auto-exiled to the spam bucket. And I live in England, for cri-yi. They actually look pretty official if you open them up.
Oh, how I worry about getting old. Have a good weekend, all!
November 1, 2013 — 11:34 pm
Comments: 18
Just in time for Christmas
It’s a little backpack that sends tiny signals to one or other antenna, causing the roach to run left or right. Via Bluetooth.
I don’t think it’s a joke. They’ve got a Kickstarter going and they’re taking pre-orders (projected delivery: November 13). Only $99.999999! (PETA’s going to have a cow).
Still watching the O’care rollout with stunned amaze. I fully expected the insurance to be a big steaming pile of FAIL, but I honestly didn’t think they could fuck up the website this badly. After all, the IRS site isn’t too bad. I understand the Medicare site works pretty well. I know this administration is paranoid about outsiders, but surely that doesn’t include their brothers and sisters in government?
I honestly have a hard time understanding how anyone could lose control of a project on this scale. And then release it anyway. All I can think is industrial-grade arrogant combined with monumental stupid.
October 22, 2013 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 22
Wooowooooo!
The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.
Oh, they are SO boned now.
If you haven’t run across it today, allow me to introduce you to Brooks’ Law:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Which is exactly right, when you think about it. All those new people — no matter how good they are — have to come up to speed. The have to read the code, work out what’s happened so far and what’s gone wrong and plan a way out. And now the managers will have a much bigger team to communicate with. Think meetings, meetings and more meetings.
I think it was also Brooks who said nine women can’t make a baby in one month. Programming jobs can only be diced up in specific ways; you can’t just throw infinite smart people on the fire and put it out faster.
If these guys had ever, you know, actually DONE anything in their lives, they’d know good intentions and a can-do attitude don’t get the job done. Here’s Bruce at And Still I Persist on Lefties and wishful thinking. Good read, AND he got an NRO link out of it.
I’m hoping the website problems last long enough to disillusion a whole new generation on government, but not forever. Because nothing is going to help kill Obamacare faster than a functioning Obamacare.
Please god they get it up and running before the midterms.
October 21, 2013 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 22
*insert metaphor here*
Holy cow — I’ve just discovered that my current Photoshop will import video and snip it into frames for export as animated .gif. That’s…well, if you can’t see how unspeakably exciting that is, I feel sorry for you. I’m having fun, fun, fun.
Well, fun, fun, drudgery, fun. Even a little bitty animation like this runs to 110 frames and takes considerable fussing and fluffing.
This is a clip from an 1897 Edison film called Seminary Girls. In the full version, the headmistress comes in and gives them all hell. Please note, the girl with the longest hair — the one who has her back to us most of the time — is smoking a cigarette. Nice touch.
You can find the whole thing at archive.org (and you can lose whole days of your life to archive.org, fair warning).
October 15, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 20
Dang!
So Michelle O’s “Let’s Move” postage stamp series was pulled and will be destroyed because some of the children weren’t wearing safety equipment. Dumb. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how godawful ugly these fucking stupid things are (click the pic to see the whole set in color).
This isn’t loose. Or naive. Or graphic. Or playful. This is awful. It’s terrible. It’s shit. It’s just unspeakable. Who approved this crap?
It’s tempting to say that all government art is bad, but it’s not. I love a lot of classic propaganda art — the stuff that’s competently executed and way, way over the top. Bad guys, good guys — they all did some awesome posters back in the day. When I was a little girl, I secretly wanted to be a propagandist. Or a comics artist, before that became quite such a thing. Much similarity.
But this stuff, it’s just bad on all levels. What is it with this lot, that they see citizens as faceless nonentities?
October 10, 2013 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 28