Captions?
Hmmm. I don’t know. My best so far is:
Only YOU can prevent Muslim crotch fires!
December 28, 2009 — 5:48 pm
Comments: 64
If the science were real, they wouldn’t have to be so tricksy
The Associate Press published this interactive map today. You click the little buttons at the top, and you get to see the map turn from cool blues and grays to scary-hot oranges and yellows as average global temperatures get warmer.
Then I read the key.
They are comparing warm seasons (May to October) of four recent periods (1891-1900 to 1945-1954 to 1970-1979 to 1997-2006) to the averages for 1951-1980. Prithee, allow me to inquire — what the fuckity fuck? Here that is on the calendar:
Why those four particular nine-year clusters? And why compare them against that particular overlapping 29 year stretch? And why just the warm seasons? They don’t explain, but we suspect we know why, don’t us?
Comparing four random chunks of time to another random chunk of time may make for a colorful, scary-looking picture, but it sure as shit isn’t science, folks.
But wait! There’s more! Remember our old friend the Greenland ice cores from a while back? Taking the earliest period versus the latest period on their map, this is what their cunning stunt looks like plotted on that:
Pff! Lovely settled science there, guys.
Oh, and the little stars on the map? You’re supposed to click them — all six of them — to learn what adorable, doe-eye animals are endangered by this obvious runaway warmening. Click the star for Sweden and you discover that climate change means filthy, disease-carrying ticks can survive there now.
So it’s getting warmer in Sweden, and the most striking consequence of that is…ticks!?!
December 22, 2009 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 12
Now, let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions
Keep fucking that chicken, mainstream media!
November 6, 2009 — 3:31 pm
Comments: 35
Aww, dammit — the bread’s gone bad!
This is from an occulty shop we visit occasionally. I figure anyone who sells dream-catchers, fairy sculptures and Buddhas has got to be deeply spiritually confused, but what can I say? I like pretty, shiny stones and good incense. Also, this is funny.
It’s a piece of toast magickally decorated with the face of Aleister Crowley, famous occultist, junkie and all-around asshole. He died of an overdose not far from here.
If you want to know more about him, visit his Wikipedia page. Topicks with inappropriate K’s in them give me the ckreeps.
July 15, 2009 — 7:34 pm
Comments: 19
Seven reasons a layman can be sure global warming is complete bullshit
It can be tough for a non-scientist to tease apart the arguments of scientists. To make truly informed decisions, you’d have to throw it all over and become one yourself. No thanks — there’s math involved! Instead, let me share a few reasons you can be pret-ty daggoned sure anthropogenic global warming AKA climate change is complete shite without a glance at the science.
7 Surprise! The “cure” is ALLLLLLL the things hippies have been trying to get us to do for decades: biff our cars and ride bikes, save the rainforest, go vegetarian — organic vegetarian (home-grown, or at least local), recycle, reject consumerism and, like, get back to the land and shit, man. What a lucky coincidence for hippies!
6 Globally, the “cure” involves sucking billions out of the economy and handing it over to government. Yay! What a lucky coincidence for governments!
5 Burning wood for heat — thereby releasing a bunch of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — is now considered a net REDUCER of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Ha! For this to be even remotely true, all firewood would have to come from lands newly turned over for purpose-grown forests. Boolsheet. Hippies just like woodstoves.
4Al Gore. Seriously — Al Gore. That’s some big fat clue right there, folks.
3 Nobody can think of a single good thing that would follow from higher average temps or CO2 levels. There was this article I read — see, plants love CO2, so it was all about how carbon dioxide is making poison ivy loads more poisonous. That’s really the only thing that comes to this writer’s mind when he thinks “plants love CO2”? Change makes some things better; an honest discussion includes those, too.
2 As Glenn Reynolds famously put it: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Downsizing their mansions. Selling beachfront properties now, before they sink beneath the waves. Riding bikes to work — or at least not so much flying their personal jets to the 7-11 for a pack of Kools.
Numero uno But the main reason you can be sure global warmening isn’t happening? IT’S GETTING COLDER!!!!!!!
July 7, 2009 — 7:34 pm
Comments: 33
Honey, the door-to-door funeral salesman’s been…
Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday. In sunny climes, they celibrate Mardi Gras with a great wicked bacchanalian festival. In Britain, they make pancakes.
But I don’t want you to think Brits lack all sense of fun; housewives traditionally make these pancakes while running a footrace.
Me? No. I didn’t make any pancakes. I assumed “wifely duties” had something to do with surprise sex. Running the hundred-yard dash while flipping flapjacks in a skillet? Day off to sulk.
Another Shrove Tuesday tradition is to strip the churches of all extraneous decoration, so that services during Lent are conducted with maximum austerity. That means all those leftover lilies from the Weasel/Badger wedding had to go somewhere. Very thoughtfully, someone left them on our front stoop this morning.
I went out to get the mail and, for one dizzy little moment of freefall, wondered if I’d made it through the night.
February 25, 2009 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 10
Suggestions?
Last meeting with the vicar today; the order of service. This is where we pick out hymns and all. It was rather sweet, actually. She sat on the couch and hummed religious tunes to us for an hour.
I have ascertained that there is not a hymn called “O Holy Shit!” Nor one called “Dear Sweet Jesus, How the Hell Did I Get Here?” after which I was completely stumped.
I think the vicar thinks I’m a sweet, shy thing, on account of I don’t say much. But, really, I don’t recognize any part of this. I was raised a Presbyterian which, it turns out, shares almost none of the hymnbook with the CofE.
Like I remember the Presbyterian hymnal.
January 22, 2009 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 39
Yep. I’m goin’ to hell!
We went to church yesterday.
Yeah. Heh. I know. I kind of expected it to disappear up its own belfry like that house at the end of Poltergeist, too, but we sat in the back and it was very uneventful. This was the last of our premarital Tests of Courage.
Poor Uncle B didn’t recognize a single hymn from childhood. All the King James in the service was wiped away and replaced with easyspeak.
I’m not sure which bit was more painful, the part where everyone shook everyone’s hand (and I do mean everyone and everyone; we all milled about the church shaking random hands like sleepwalking Fuller brush salesmen), or the part where we sang the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of Kumbaya.
That really happened. I swear.
I’ve worked out why the CofE is bleeding customers: this was like all the thing British people are least comfortable doing, rolled into one socially awkward hour. I’m surprised they’re hanging in as well as they are.
Take it from an atheist, O ye witch doctors: you vary your schtick at your peril!
Religion is in the business of selling ancient, immutable, bedrock, absolute truths. A big dose of the traditions of our fathers, with a touch of the secret answer to absolutely everything. Any time a religion “modernizes” itself, it admits that parts of its creed are negotiable. The honest-to-God secret answer to absolutely everything isn’t going to be negotiable, is it?
Plus, the CofE lacks a certain snake-handlin’, foot-washin’ something.
January 19, 2009 — 8:47 pm
Comments: 49
AIIIIII!!! geddidOFFAme!
I can’t believe I did that…I CAN’T believe I DID that. Uncle B and I just got back from seeing the vicar about the…THING. That legal thing. That…ugh…let’s back up a second.
You can’t get married just anywhere in the UK. They’re stuffy about civil ceremonies — outside the church, only licensed venues in your area are allowed to do the deed. The Town Hall would’ve done me fine. For an extra £50, a wheezy old git in a tricornered hat and kneesocks will walk ahead of the happy couple through town ringing a handbell and going, “hear ye, hear ye!” Nay, a-shitting of thee I am not.
Uncle B wasn’t happy with the idea. The Hall is pretty shabby and downmarket and all the worst people get married there. I’m like, “but it’s so old!” and he’s like, “pff! No it’s not — it’s 18th Century!”
Oh, how we laughed.
We had never even considered the church option, because — duh. But then he met the local vicar and was taken with her (her! Lady vicar! Oi! Clue!). Our little community outside the town has its own ancient church, which — like so many ancient churches in little communities — is struggling to survive. And so in time it grew to seem a neighborly good deed, this propping up our local House of Saint Mustelid.
The vicar said she would certainly consider (!) marrying us…provided we come in for several counselling sessions (!!!) beforehand.
And that’s where we have been this night. First thing, we were each handed a mimeographed page of British road signs and asked to circle the three which most typified our idea of marriage. And so naturally I gave the vicar a lecture on Margaret Calvert — the New Zealand woman who redesigned most British road signage in the 1950s and a parTICularly violent hate object of mine — including several diagrams drawn on the spot to explain why Calvert’s graphic design skills are totally Teh Sux0r.
Yeah. I think that went well.
December 17, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 53
My groat. Let me show you it.
This is my groat. There are many groats like it, but this one is mine.
My groat came up in conversation here last week, so I figured I’d give you a peep at it. This is my groat. Specifically, it is a Maundy groat of Charles II. The obverse says CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA and the reverse says MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX. Which means “Hix Nix Stix Pix.” Heh heh. Jes’ kidding. The real translation is: “HEY CROMWELL, how does my ass taste?”
A groat is a little silver coin worth four English pennies, also called a fourpence. The first was minted in the 13th Century and the last (for actual circulation — more on that in a moment) in 1888. The date on this one is 1679, but it wasn’t necessarily made in that year. They weren’t all that fastidious about minting coins every year, or changing the dies when they did. Early in Charles II’s reign, they were still producing most coins by hammering, but they switched to milling in his lifetime. This is a milled coin.
The Maundy ceremony, confusingly, happens on Thursday. Specifically, the Thursday before Easter. “Maundy” is a corruption of Mandatum Nuvum — the ‘new commandment’ to love one another and, umm…wash feet. British monarchs have observed some sort of Maundy ritual since 600AD — which sometimes included foot washing, but nearly always involved giving silver coins to the poor. The coins were known as Maundy money.
Regular old coins were used at first, but beginning with Charles II, special coins were minted, in sets of four: 1p, 2p, 3p and 4p. And still are. Despite decimalization (in 1971, Britain utterly fucked its wonderful but brain-hurty old currency scheme and lost many a beautiful coin) Maundy money is still legal tender.
Today, the Queen gives out Maundy money to worthy old persons, as many old coots as she is years old. The foot-washin’ part was quietly dropped centuries ago, until the current Archbishop of Canterbury — a very strange man — revived the custom in 2003.
Because it is a Maundy coin, Charles II his own self may have handled this groat. But probably not. And now you can tell all your friends, “I have seen Weasel’s groat.”
October 27, 2008 — 10:13 am
Comments: 104