Bad news: America enters the age of Sputnik 2
I knew Laika the space dog was never intended to return to earth. I always imagined her death something uniquely awful; agony fading into crusty dessicated orbiting dog mummification horror. Brrrrr.
Well, read and be comforted. She was one of several strays picked up on the streets of Moscow and trained for the mission. Though bringing her back alive was never on the cards, they didn’t intended to let her starve or suffocate or anything. After a week — which was as long as the radio transmitter had in it — her daily food ration was supposed to contain a euthanizing agent. So they say.
In fact, she died within hours of liftoff, of the heat — some thermal insulation came loose during launch, leaving the capsule too exposed. So, not nice, but essentially the same death that uncounted dogs face every year in the back seats of cars.
Five months later, Sputnik 2 re-entered the atmosphere and went to bits on the way. So the horrible thing I have drawn for you is not up there going round and round and round.
Rich Lowry has a terrific article in the New York Post today about Obama’s Sputnik myth — the grossly misguided idea that the appropriate response to scary events is a huge transfer of money and power to the government for a giant engineering project. He suggests we replace one of my least favorite phrases with this one: “If we can send a man to the moon . . . we can waste lots of money based on false analogies.”
Good weekend, all!
January 28, 2011 — 10:38 pm
Comments: 22
Sputnick, salmon, high speed rail
Okay, I lied. I did watch Obama’s State of the Union speech. In fact, I’ve watched it over and over and over tonight.
See, I was going to make you a nice little YouTube highlight reel, but I just couldn’t grab a clean copy. Sometimes I managed to download video but no audio. And sometimes I got video but it juddered horribly. And sometimes…oh, fuck it. You get the idea. I gave up in the end. Clearly I have some things to work out, videographically.
So what did I think of the speech? Honestly? I didn’t think it was as bad as people are saying.
I mean, it was a mess philosophically. The Sputnik metaphor doesn’t work at all, and — oh, dear god! — high speed rail?! Really? That one’s older than I am. It was a muddle, but it was a low-key muddle.
He didn’t flip anybody off. He managed to look reasonably gracious congratulating Boehner. He didn’t come across as too stuck up or madder’n hell. He didn’t look like he was sucking a lemon.
I was terribly disappointed.
January 26, 2011 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 22
Where would I be without the easy ones?
Huh. I guess the National Enquirer thinks Obama has worms*. I’m not sure. When I click the link, I get “The content of this website is not available in your area.” That happens with Saturday Night Live skits, too.
See? England isn’t all bad.
In other wormy news, did you see the Cheezburger Network got a major capital infusion?
I love the Cheezburger folks, but I don’t know how they’re getting away with this. They pretty much admit they don’t know where most of the photos come from and that’s totally, no-doubt-about-it, not even a little bit legal. You can’t do that. You can’t nick other people’s stuff; it doesn’t matter if they’re amateur snapshots of pussycats and you supply the captions.
I assumed they got away with it because there weren’t any deep pockets involved, but $30M is a respectable pocket. Well, long may they escape the roving bands of aggressive IP lawyers that scour the internet (and ruin my fun on Zazzle).
January 19, 2011 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 16
Flap harder, Hillary! You’ll make it!
A brief moment of amusement. Oh, c’mon — you didn’t expect me to let this one go. Me?
I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which is built on the side of a steep hill. One morning on my way to class, I hit a rain-slicked manhole cover and went down.
I didn’t so much fall as come in for a landing. My left foot went out from under me, my drawings went airborne and I instinctively attempted the save — ran sideways for about twenty feet, gradually lower and lower, until I slid full length into Angell Street.
First class of the day, so hundreds and hundreds of my peers looked on. I had people coming up to me for weeks afterwards.
There. My moment of solidarity with Hillary Clinton is at an end.
January 13, 2011 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 16
Misdirection
I was going to play with Loughner’s mug shot, but I couldn’t deal. Never mind the smirk, that boy’s head is full of battery acid and rusty razor-blades and there’s nothing but a long lifetime of prison and scary meds ahead of him. Let him be.
Dupnik, on the other hand, has some ‘splainin’ to do. If Loughner had come to the attention of law enforcement many times — including the morning of the shooting — did they miss any opportunities to get him evaluated? Maybe not. I accept that — maybe not. But my mother used to say you could smell schizophrenia — by which she meant something about the behavior of a psychotic rings every THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG HERE alarm bell you’ve got. Apparently, anybody in Arizona can get anybody else carted off for a psych eval.
And Dupnik sure is yelping like a scalded hound.
January 12, 2011 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 39
A Public Service Announcement from Paul Krugman
Yep. Because restoring civility begins with accusing your opponents of mass murder.
I’m gonna have an outbreak of Tourettes over this. I swears.
January 11, 2011 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 35
Attempted incitement
If you weren’t on Twitter over the weekend, you’re smarter than me. The instant there were reports of a shooting in Arizona, the Left went ugly trying to pin it on the Tea Party. It was a wonder to behold. A giant steaming wonder.
I couldn’t take much. After a while, even the pushback from our side began to feel a little opportunistic, so I just shut Twitter down for a while.
This is part of a pattern since the rise of the Tea Party (helpfully recalled by Legal Insurrection): the Left blamed them for Bill Sparkman’s suicide, Amy Bishop shooting up the University of Alabama, the Fort Hood shooter, the IRS plane-crasher dude, the cabbie stabbing and the Pentagon shooting.
When every one of those perps turned out to be politically neutral or even avowedly liberal, the left stood down…but didn’t substantially back down. I finally worked out why (besides crass opportunism): they really and truly believe their own narrative. They are so absolutely certain-sure the Tea Party is inherently violent, whenever they hear a report of gunshots, they think to themselves, “well, finally. What took them so long?” They must be utterly bewildered when it isn’t true. Again and again.
Look again at my favorite picture of Nancy “Hammertime” Pelosi, walking through the Tea Party crowd carrying a giant gavel. She didn’t have to do that. As I understand it, Congress has a subterranean entrance to the building. She was hoping to start something (I can’t think why else she and Steny Hoyer would be holding hands with…John Lewis, is that?). Give that imaginary hair trigger a tug.
The awful thing is, Jared Loughner sure reads paranoid schizophrenic to me. Which would mean not even the shooter is responsible for the shooting on this one (I’m skeptical of the insanity plea, but not in the case of demonstrable schizophrenia…brrrr that’s an evil-ass disease). Still, his parents may not bear much real blame either. It’s damn near impossible to “get help” for an adult until he clearly crosses the line into batshit dangerousness.
Well, if this is true, maybe Sheriff Douchenozzle has some culpability.
January 10, 2011 — 8:25 pm
Comments: 25
On her last day in office, Nancy Pelosi crashed my new computer
Oh, man. I’d been working all afternoon on a video, when the software crashed. Hard.
I’d load the program, it would sit there for ten or fifteen seconds. Then Windows would pop up and say, “there’s something wrong with this thing — seeya!” and shut it down.
I guess it’s an improvement on the Blue Screen of Death. I mean, the program didn’t crash anything but itself. But it sure was off-pissing.
Anyhow, I finally figured it out. There was something in the Nancy Pelosi folder that was freaking it out. When I moved the folder out of the default spot, it worked again.
Spooky.
I wanted to do a lot more with this, but spent most of my free time trying to fix the computer instead. Still, here’s my little goodbye to Nancy Pelosi on YouTube.
G’bye, Nan!
January 6, 2011 — 12:44 am
Comments: 34
Planning for Retirement
I made a short, stupid movie about the 112th Congress (click the pitcher, Sherlock).
I have a love/hate relationship with video, leaning toward hate. I had to work with it a bit back in the day, and I was always screwing up some codec or frame rate or something. The technical side makes me crazy. But the graphics side was pretty fun.
And now that I have an extremely good machine, I figured I’d poke a toe in the water.
January 4, 2011 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 31
If only there was SOME kind of…visual clue
You know that montage of terrorist suspect mugshots that Michelle Malkin publishes every time there’s a new outbreak of Islamic dumbassery? It’s a great visual, but whenever I see it, I itch to Photoshop it into tidier shape.
So I did.
I know, I know — this leetle one isn’t legible. Here’s a big version (576 x 2226 and 360K) and a smaller version (300 x 1160 and 150K). Nice and color.
Feel free to suggest corrections or additions (I can’t believe the Shoe Bomber and the Panty Bomber weren’t in the original!) — and, as usual, you can steal it, edit it (.psd file available on request, ~6 megs), forward it to your favorite anti-profiling lefty, make it your Christmas Card for 2010. Whatever. Merry Christmas!
I walked down the list and Googled every single one of these guys to make sure I had the correct spelling and there weren’t better mugshots available, arranged in reasonably chronological order. I think it’s pretty clean, barring typos.
You know, it’s striking how many of these mooks were turned in by fellow Muslims. Notes passed to the FBI in broken English, clearly written by somebody else in the same immigrant group. Somebody who declined to join the jolly Jihad.
That’s the one thing that troubles me when I go all nanny-nanny-boo-boo on Islam. I don’t mind offending a billion people — that’s easy! And I think a big, fat dose of ridicule is exactly what these jihadi jack-holes are begging for.
But I sure don’t want to do anything to discourage those who rat out their evil brothers.
December 15, 2010 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 33