With a name like Indignico, it has to be unseemly
Let’s see — where were we?
Indignico, Inc — the people behind velvetpaintings.com — bringing you output of the finest Velvet Elvis painters of Tijuana.
Each original custom velvet painting was painted entirely by hand in Tijuana, Mexico by a professional Mexican velvet Elvis artist for Indignico Inc. And each one was commissioned by average ordinary everyday people from the internet–just like you–who thought it would be worth between $250 and $1250 to have their idea envelvetized by a genuine, authentic, professional Mexican Velvet Elvis Artist with the kind and nurturing guidance of a trained Curator-Of-Sales from Indignico Inc.
Indignico Inc. is just the sort of All-American American company who will stop at absolutely nothing to smuggle–over the border and into your lives–just a little bit more All-American American Quality. . .
Yeah, they’re taking the mickey. But they’re also serious: they’ve got a permanent eBay store and they take commissions. For $250, you can have any ol’ thing you like immortalized in acrylic on velour.
For some reason, they have a particular obsession with envelvetizing Republicans. I mean Lincoln, Reagan…sure. I guess. But who’d fork over a couple of hundred bucks for a velvet Karl Rove or annoyed Jack Abramoff?
I get the snark. I just don’t get the point of the snark. Seems like a lot to pay for a big, ugly punchline.
Thanks to Muslihoon, who asked what was so darned funny about velvet paintings when the topic came up. Poor Musli…it probably makes less sense now than it did before.
July 9, 2008 — 6:00 am
Comments: 28
…a popular blogger who goes by the name Weasel…
Jonathan Kay (said blogger) has a long post praising Hitchens for his courage. I’m a footnote (a footnote! You hear that, Ma?). He says of my remarks:
The logic here is faulty: Hitchens agreed to waterboarding because he knew that he could end the experience at any time — and that he was not truly in the grasp of interrogators seeking to terrorize him into a confession. To cite his willingness to try the experience as evidence that waterboarding isn’t torture is spurious. It is also a study in circular reasoning: By this logic, no interrogation technique can be shown to be torture by a journalistic investigator — since the very act of investigation is taken as proof against torture.
But my logic isn’t faulty, Jonathan. That’s exactly what I’m saying: no technique that a journalist endures right the way through for mere journalistic purposes can be classed as torture. Certainly not if he takes seconds.
Look, if we live long enough, all of us have experiences that are torturously painful: an accident; a terrible medical procedure; the death of someone we love. We all know what torture is because everybody gets a taste. Torture is that thing nobody would take if they didn’t have to.
If somebody’s life depended on it? Yes…if you’re strong enough. To write an article about “dear me, how horrible that was”? Nuh-uh. No way. The very fact that he didn’t puss out kills his argument.
Weasel’s new-and-improved, succinct definition: torture is that which
is so awful, you’ll make it stop if you think you can. Hitchens had
an easy out and he didn’t take it. Is that any clearer?
July 8, 2008 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 24
I am indebted to Christopher Hitchens
Torture is any experience so horrible that no-one would consider trying it out simply for the purpose of writing a Vanity Fair article about what it’s like.
There! I feel better.
Article via Ace who pinched it from The Drawn Cutlass.
July 2, 2008 — 1:26 pm
Comments: 83
Senate Underpants Gnomes debate global warmening
“This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.”
That’s from the excellent Wall Street Journal article on the Lieberman/Warner You Don’t Hate Unicorns, Do You? economic rape and pillage bill before the Senate today. Everyone acknowledges this one doesn’t have a prayer; they’re just softening us up for the real bill next year.
Because — back up and cover your buttholes, ladies and gentlemen — the next President of the United States believes in this shit.
Not global warmening — that’s just stupid. If people really believed that rubbish, they’d behave differently (I’m looking at you, Mister Gore). But there’s nothing a Senator believes in more passionately than sucking money out of the productive sector and blowing it into the hands of government, and this sucker would blow to the tune of THREE POINT THREE TWO TRILLION DOLLARS by 2050.
The floor fights aren’t about whether this economic ass-raping is a good idea, but about who gets how much for what. John Kerry, for example, is concerned about the effect of global warmening on “crustaceans” — shitting you I am not — so Boston lobstermen are in. There’s $802 billion for low income tax relief, which is odd since low income households pay little or no tax as it is. Walking around money, I guess.
There’s $190 billion to train people for ‘green-collar’ jobs (has any government training program other than the GI Bill ever done anything good for anybody?) and another $171 billion for mass transit project (yeah, those always work). There’s half a trillion dollars allocated for “wildlife adaptation” (which I guess means shuttling hippies and spotted owls around the country in brightly painted school buses) and $342 billion for international aid (wait, don’t we do that already?). There’s ice cream and bouncy castles and…oh, what fun we shall have!
I’m guessing the point of this trial balloon of a bill is to see how we, who are about to be reamed good and proper, react. I suggest we do so.
June 3, 2008 — 10:14 am
Comments: 40
Free Mark Steyn! (Relatively inexpensive Mark Steyn, anyhow)
Today begins the showtrial of Mark Steyn before a ‘human rights’ tribunal. He wrote an article critical of Islam in Maclean’s magazine, which was enough to generate a complaint under British Columbia’s Human Rights Code. Per the code, “A person must not publish, issue or display, or cause to be published, issued or displayed, any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation that…is likely to expose a person or a group or class of persons to hatred or contempt.”
Got that? Contempt is illegal in Canada. I cannot tell you how much contempt that makes me feel.
If he’s found guilty, he can be forbidden from writing about certain topics (in this case, Islam) under pain of imprisonment. I believe Steyn is a naturalized American citizen, so good luck with that one, Canuckitards.
This demo leaflet from Covenant Zone is a good refresher, if you need it.
I don’t know how interesting the blow-by-blow is likely to be, but Andrew Coyne of Maclean’s will be live-blogging it beginning at 12:30 today. I believe that’s Eastern time. Just keep refreshing.
Other interested blogs that will surely have something to say: Free Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Five Feet of Fury and Small Dead Animals.
I believe it’s scheduled to go on all week, so we’ve got something to read about other than the freaking ’08 elections for a damn change.
June 2, 2008 — 10:32 am
Comments: 69
My daddy didn’t buy a cow, and I won’t either
Ten years ago, I bought a six-shooter in a little shop in Alexandria, Tennessee. Buying a gun is a wingnut bonding ritual; it involves telling each other progressively wingnuttier stories for an hour or two before getting down to bidness. Thus, the buyer knows the seller is an honest man and the seller knows the buyer isn’t a BATF agent trying to trip him up and nick his license.
Anyhow, the shopkeep told me that Al Gore, Sr, ran a crooked cattle auction in nearby Carthage. People would come from all over (“desert sheiks in robes and all kind of thing”) to pay way over the odds for an angus cow that they, like as not, never even picked up. One man, asked on the way out what to do with the grievously overpriced cow he’d just bought, shrugged and said, “throw it in the grinder, I guess.” He didn’t buy a cow, he bought a sitting Senator.
I didn’t think much of the story, but last time I was home, I remembered to ask my dad if it was true. His face lit up, “you bet it’s true!” When he came to Nashville in the ’60s to take a position in Democrat Frank Clement’s government (my dad’s a Republican, duh), somebody took him aside and told him, “Son, you’d better buy a cow.”
Al Senior was a slick, sharp, old school Southern fraud. His son is a different flavor of phony altogether. I’ve never met him, but he’s a sort of a FOAF. My impression? Sharp as a bag of wet mice; a cipher; a bozo; an empty vessel, hollowed out to hold his father’s ambitions.
Politicians have issues the way the Senior Prom has a theme. Ex-military men become the military guy, unchallengable on all things military. Ex-doctors are experts not just on medical issues, they are the compassion guy. Women and minorities are women and minorities.
Legislators without a built-in hook generally pick one at random (this helpful video explains the process). Al picked the environment.
I believe he is genuinely puzzled that anyone would take him to task for flying around the world to tell people not to fly so much. So what if one of his three mansions uses twenty times the electricity of the average family? Don’t you get it? He’s the Environment Guy. Except when he’s wearing an eyepatch — then he’s a pirate!
That was my rambling preamble for grassfire.org‘s Carbon Belch Day. Thursday, June 12th, turn on your space heaters, open a window, set fire to something (or someone!), fart, drive around in circles, eat meat, mow the lawn. Take the pledge! DO NOT BUY THE GORE FAMBLY COW!
May 29, 2008 — 10:47 am
Comments: 72
Fun with wallpaper
Click the images for the great big color wallpaper-sized versions. And if there are any P’shoppers who want the .psd file with the layers and the editable text to play with, lemme know.
May 21, 2008 — 8:07 am
Comments: 14
Not even close, really
Heh. I see from my logs that See-Dubya has kindly thrown me a bone over at Michelle’s. She’s soliciting slogans for the deplorable state of the GOP in 2008. (Pretty amusing thread, akshully).
Commenter at #15 longs for a graphic of a rhino with its head up its butt, and See-Dubya at #24 asserts that your ‘umble weasel might have the skill.
No. I have not. A rhino with its head up its butt would look like an elephant donut with legs sticking out of it. I could not draw that thing.
I have this thing, though. I drew it a while back and was saving it for a post about politics. You know, politics — that thing I used to talk about occasionally, back before I was consumed by my cat and my house and my birthday.
It’s not just that the Republican establishment is now being run by a pack of RINOs. I’m increasingly convinced it’s run by a pack of RINOs who don’t even like conservatives. So in 2008, the Dems are going with the candidate beloved of their fringe and the Pubs are going with the candidate despised of their fringe.
What a very strange election.
I hope they all drown.
Update: Whoa! I was just funnin’, See-Dubya. RINO dude makes it inside a post at Michelle’s.
May 16, 2008 — 8:17 am
Comments: 46
Nice hat, Senator
Y’all know I’ve been pretty depressed about this presidential election. John McCain seriously harshes my shadenfreude. Every time I start to go after a Democrat, I hear McCain’s evil-grampa laugh in my ear, and my (entirely metaphorical) balls shrivel.
But I’ve listened to the entirety of Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club and NAACP speeches and I can’t remember a time I have so passionately wished to poke someone in the snoot. Entirely metaphorically, of course.
I think it was where he imitates the way white people talk. Being mimicked reaches right back into my nursery school braincells and makes them throb with screaming monkey rage.
Or maybe that bit about how Europeans and Africans are different right down to the brainal level. I don’t know from neuropathology, I only know if a white man had said anything close to that, it would buy him a one-way ticket to Lepertown.
Listening to Wright made me feel grubby; that he is slick only makes it grubbier. It was like being dipped in a cesspit of toxic racial sludge. Like attending a Klan rally on Bizarroworld.
How bad was it? Bad enough that Obama disowned the man he could no more disown than the black community or his white grandmother (watch your back, Granny).
Wright didn’t develop his peculiarly smelly brand of afroNazism over the weekend. It’s totally implausible that Obama rubbed elbows with Wright for twenty years and never heard a word of his ridiculous, balls-out craziness before yesterday. Clearly, Obama chose this church for these qualities, because he desired that particular flavor of cred.
I doubt Obama believes a word of that crap; he doesn’t strike me as a retard. That makes this ass-bite especially satisfying. It’s dangerous to handle poison, Senator.
Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh.
Oh, shut up, John.
UPDATE: I told mesa I’d make a color version, but it was pretty much FAIL. I’ve never tinted a photo using this technique, and it looked awful. Like a tinted photo. So I made some slight adjustments to the grayscale version and replaced the image in the post. I’ve also uploaded a large version and one that is 160 pixels wide. It’s a bit too tall for a sidebar graphic, but I’m not the boss of you.
This is as good a time as any to review my graphics policy: take it. Take anything you like. Change it, if you want. Post it. Have it tattoo’d on your butt. No need to link back or give credit. This is ephemera we’re making here and I need the karma.
Just…say something nice about me when I’m gone.
UPDATE THE TWOTH: Yay! Ace-o-lanche! It’s raining morons! Thanks, Deb!
April 29, 2008 — 3:18 pm
Comments: 141
Happy Warman Wednesday — go buy a book from Mark Steyn
Today only, buy a copy of America Alone and Mark Steyn will donate his share to the defense of the Freedom Five (Ezra Levant, Kate McMillan, Kathy Shaidle and Mark and Connie at Free Dominion).
Yeah, you know the story — five Canadian bloggers are being sued by this lying shit-weasel (begging my own pardon), Richard Warman. He’s a former member of the Canadian ‘Human Rights’ Kangaroo Court who left the Commission and has since made tens of thousands suing fellow Canucks before the same Commission. He never loses.
Let’s make this the exception. Let’s make this fascist asshat rue the day — rue, I say! — he took on the chittering hordes of the blogosphere.
See, the state picks up the tab for the complainant, but the defendant has to pay his own way, so they really are hurting. Read up on the case. It’ll make you so mad, pudding will shoot out of your nose.
Tapioca pudding!
April 23, 2008 — 9:35 am
Comments: 30