Optics: FAIL
I know what y’all are thinking — you did this P’shop last week, Stoaty. Yeah, well, hey — HE DID IT AGAIN. His current political advisers flat out suck.
Anyway, shut up, I have some important news: Mapp laid her first egg today. She’s the little ginger chicken. You never heard so much clucking and be-GAK-ing. I told you she’d be a drama queen if she ever got around to laying an egg.
Actually, poor thing, it took her all morning and she shed a little blood over it, so I shouldn’t make fun. I wouldn’t care to blow large hard objects out my vent after breakfast. Especially if it took me by surprise.
In honor of Ovum Prime, I broke out the Oscar Mayer bacon I’d been saving and fried up a proper breakfast-lunch. Oh, don’t get me wrong — English bacon is lovely stuff. But it’s thick and chewy. Like Canadian bacon. But not round.
Oscar Mayer (made in Spain) is the only American-style bacon I can get — and I can’t always get it. I suspect English people think there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with it.
“Oh, I say, Clive, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong with this bacon — it shriveled away to nothing and left the most extraordinary pool of grease behind.”
Anyhow, if I picked up a dose of salmonella, I’m going to drop kick that silly ginger bird into the next county.
March 21, 2011 — 9:20 pm
Comments: 31
Eh. So I’m a banana.
I’ve been wearing this around Second Life for a while. It’s so me.
In SL, you can be anything you want to be. A dinosaur. A flower. An astronaut.
And seemingly 90% of players want to be slutty-looking girls with huge tits. Including the men.
It’s so depressing.
Anyhoo, it seemed like the right graphic to put next to this story from the excellent Watt’s Up With That blog. It’s a timely repost from a February article.
The Cliff’s Notes version: lots of foods are radioactive. Bananas are especially radioactive. Radioactive enough to set off the bomb-detection doo-dads at our ports. Radioactive enough to give you a measurable dose if you stand next to a crate of the treacherous yellow bastards.
So proponents of nuclear energy use the banana equivalent dose as a way of expressing the risk of various radiation exposures. How many bananas would you have to eat to get similarly irradiated?
We don’t have any numbers coming out of Japan yet (and when we do get them, I freely admit those numbers might be bad), but to use an example from Three Mile Island — after the accident, the NRC found traces of radioactive iodine in the milk. I’m sure it was a story at the time. That’s the kind of place you get radiation poisoning — not so much from breathing it, but the stuff gets in the air, gets in the grass, gets in the cow, gets in the milk.
So how much radiation was in the milk? You’d have to drink seventy-five twelve-ounce glasses of contaminated milk to equal the radiation dose from eating a single banana.
A little perspective from a giant animated bruised banana. Good weekend, all!
March 18, 2011 — 11:51 pm
Comments: 24
At least the Romans got fiddle music
It’s a metaphor for world events at large, of course. I don’t expect Obama to put on breathing apparatuses and go charging into Fukushima Daiichi his own self.
I do expect the Leader of the Free World™ to act like he gives a shit about anything going on in the big wide. Anything beyond his golf game and his basketball picks.
Dude isn’t even playing president on TV any more.
Update: oh, hey, it looks like Stealie McLightfingers here stole that title from Jim Garaghty (I follow him on Twitter). Man, I hate when I do that. I hate it even more when I suspect I’ve done it but can’t find the true source.
March 15, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 48
The Singing Cowboy
The Democrats must cringe every time Harry Reid opens his gob. As usual, Michael Ramirez was a day ahead of me and had a better punchline. Dude is my hero.
By the way, I know there are peculiar liabilities to every job, but how many of you have ever thought to yourself, “I’m drawing Harry Reid’s crotch right now”? Yeah, that’s why I gave him a gun.
Oh! And I talked to my chicken pusher this morning. He hasn’t hatched any Pekin Bantams this year on account of it’s been too cold. He’s got some in the incubator now, should be out in a week. I want them about six weeks old (so I don’t have to faff with heat lamps), so we’re probably talking early April.
And having read everywhere that chickens love cabbages — we have kzillions of cabbages that need uprooting before the Spring planting — Uncle B and I chased chickens all around the garden with cabbage today. I think it’s fair to say, they are fucking terrified of cabbage. And completely uninterested, even when it’s torn into little chicken-beak-sized bits.
But it did bring up an interesting question: do chickens fart? The answer is no. Probably.
Good weekend, everyone!
March 11, 2011 — 7:32 pm
Comments: 23
Fact check? My ass!
I swear to god somebody in my Twitter stream or a blog or Drudge or something said today was the anniversary of the founding of the GOP. So I did this stupid drawing, and then I went to authenticate the story. As far as I can tell, February 28 has no significance what-so-ever to the Republican Party.
Shit.
Screw it, I’m running with it anyway. This thing has Monday written all over it.
First person that says “measure twice, cut once” — I’ma pop you one.
February 28, 2011 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 23
A-HEM!
Dear Koch brothers,
Like my hat? Yeah, because…ummm…it’s empty.
I’ve been reading all over the blogosphere lately how you guys have bankrolled this “Tea Party” stuff and I’m just wondering — where’s mine?
I’ve got this wingnut schtick down. Really. Really, really good.
Do you not know where to send the check or something? Because my email addy is right there in the header. Just drop me a line; we can work it out.
See, if this gig doesn’t start paying off soon, I’m going to have to slide on over to the progressives. Because we all know they’re actually right about stuff.
Hey! Am I right?
The only reason anyone would be a conservative is for dough. Or because Sarah Palin says it’s what Jesus would do.
So, c’mon guys, pony up! Fair’s fair! I’m really hurting over here.
If the Mossad ever stops buying favorable blog copy, I’m screwed.
Love,
Stoaty Weasel
February 25, 2011 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 27
You musta beena beautiful baby…
Yeah. Sorry to do this to you for a second day, but I just cannot get enough of Moammar Kaddafi’s face. He looks like he’s carved out of a giant cube of decomposing luncheon meat.
Pimiento loaf, perhaps.
February 24, 2011 — 12:09 am
Comments: 20
I see Moammar dressed himself today
Seriously, world? How have we all, collectively, let this homicidal nutcake run around loose all these years?
When I saw this, all I could think of was this.
February 22, 2011 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 23
Hello there, New Boss
Is there any reason to be the slightest bit optimistic about the riots going on across the Middle East at the moment? So far, they’ve knocked over very bad men in Egypt and now, maybe Libya. So everything defaults to military control. Um, great?
People on both sides are being a leeetle too premature on the celebration. On the right, because we fetishize the American Revolution. On the left, because they fetishize revolution itself.
Not counting our own — which was hashed out over years by some of the finest political thinkers of the Enlightenment — when has revolution led to better lives? Honest question — I’ve been trying to think of examples.
France? Well, eventually. I guess. They’ve had lots of bad, bloody governments between then and now. Ditto Mexico and South America. I don’t know if you can say a thing improves lives if it takes a couple hundred years to do it.
Russia? No. China? No. Tscha.
After pushing against Apartheid with all their might, the left doesn’t seem to have noticed that South Africa has descended into utter third-world shit-holery. I guess shit-holery is okay as long as it’s racially equitable shit-holery. Like when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and everybody starved together.
So that leaves Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. They got themselves together within a few years. So there’s that.
Anybody know Middle Eastern Lech Wałęsa? Yeah. Um, no.
I have a really bad feeling about this.
February 21, 2011 — 11:40 pm
Comments: 25
Ow. My Awesometer just broke.
Sunday was Ronnie’s centennial, and here’s my take on his enduring popularity: Ronald Reagan was the last guy I voted for who didn’t give me the creeps.
We can talk philosophy and track record some other time. I’m trying to put my finger on a basic and near universal quality of our political figures — right, left and center. There’s something wrong with them.
Something creepy wrong. They give off the paste-eating-kid-from-kindergarten vibe.
Not out of touch. “Out of touch” implies normal people who have been isolated for too long. This is something fundamentally not-all-there. Not right.
In the interest of bipartisanship, let’s talk Bob Dole. Talkin’ about Bob Dole, in the third person. (I had a friend — a Republican — who called him Evil Grandpa). Or John McCain, who hums and fizzes with suppressed…ummm…I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. Just hinky, you know?
And ‘fess up — it was pretty hard propping up George Bush, wasn’t it? Particularly that last couple of years, when he couldn’t be assed to stick up for our principles and all we had to rally around was a man who talked funny and moved like a wadded up fist and gave goofy-ass nicknames to everyone he dealt with.
And, Jesus — Al Gore and John Kerry are just flying right off the Nutcake Scale. Linc Chafee. Alan Grayson. Joe Biden. Barney Frank — GAH! Even people in care homes wear their freaking teeth in public.
Political types are like performing animals, with your Axelrods and Roves just off camera poking them with sticks to make them do the tricks right. Gosh, when they stand up on their hind legs like that, they look just like a people!
Ronald Reagan wasn’t an ordinary person, of course. Neither is Sarah Palin. “Ordinary” is not a desirable quality in a leader. But they are among the few people in political life who don’t seem like they probably wet the bed until they were thirty.
February 8, 2011 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 42