MrCaniac for the win!
Barbara Billingsly: Stewardess, I speak jive.
Barbara Billingsly: about speaking jive.
New pool starts Friday, 6pm Weasel Blog Time. Be there, or forever
ask yourself, “I wonder what spotted dick tastes like?”
October 17, 2010 — 11:34 am
Comments: 23
Whaddya know?
This young lady is the daughter of a pair of sweasel.com readers.
Yeah, I know. I’m as shocked as you are. I had no idea any grownups read this stuff.
Anyhoo, she makes music. I have heard it and it is good.
You can hear some of it here.
And then I’m going to leave this picture up all weekend, so’s you can stare into her soulful gray eyes and contemplate giving her your moneys.
Good weekend, everyone!
October 15, 2010 — 10:17 pm
Comments: 27
Is it just me?
This image is really grating on my nerves: the President of the United States walking around clutching a huge goofy-ass microphone, like Bob Barker or some shit.
Bipartisan bitch. Bush did it. Clinton did it. I even found a picture of Bush I at it.
If they can’t wire him up so his voice mysteriously booms out of everywhere like Jovian magic, at least could they give him a long slender Trekky sort of mic? Or one of those little wireless ear clippy things, like some kind of President Tony Stark?
I don’t mind it so much in the initial campaign, but once you’re the leader of my country, I expect you to comport yourself with more dignity than the last fifteen minutes of a Jerry Lewis telethon. Thenk yew.
October 14, 2010 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 24
Vote Barack
…or Michelle will give you a Big Hug.
Just fold you right up in the giant mutant embrace of those…holy shit, lady, what have you been doing to yourself? It looks like she’s been benchpressing Barack’s ego.
My Google news search juxtaposed the source picture with the caption Democrats bring in heavy hitter: Michelle Obama.
‘Tcha! I guess!
October 13, 2010 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 25
I earned my Slurpee today. You earn yours in three weeks, m’kay?
Ace is trying to flog some kind of Get Out the Vote thing. Looks like maybe more on that tomorrow. Let’s make Hopechangelo suck on that stupid Slurpee metaphor until he gets the Mother of All Brain Freezes.
Pretty please?
October 12, 2010 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 19
Let us cowboy up, my Princesses
There was an article in Wired last month about why athletes choke under pressure.
Feh. Sports. I didn’t get that gene. But buried in the middle of it was a really interesting concept sports psychologists call stereotype threat.
It was first noticed when two Stanford psych profs were able to knock down black Stanford undergrads’ GRE scores fifty percent, just by telling them it was an IQ test. Lest you think that’s one of those lefty bullshit stats aimed at Certain Populations, it’s been tested many times since and it works for everybody. You can psych out women before a math test by reminding them they’re women. You can screw up white men before a math test by telling them they’ll be compared to Asians.
…in 1999, Jeff Stone, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, asked both white and black golfers to play a putting game framed as a test of either “sports intelligence” or “natural athletic ability.” The results still astonish: Among the golfers considering the putting game a test of “natural athletic ability,” blacks did better than usual and whites did worse. Among those framing it as a sort of sports intelligence test, whites did better and blacks worse.
Basically, we’ve all internalized the stereotypes, and other people can psych the HELL out of us with them.
This whole whoregate thing made me think of this — one of Jerry Brown’s associates (looks like his wife, maybe) called his opponent, Meg Whitman, a whore.
Oh. Dear. A lewd, woman-specific insult aimed at a woman.
Why, this is…a…a…a perfectly ordinary game of hardball, ladies. This is the kind of ugly trash talk that is entirely unexceptional.
And yes, I know it’s not nice and I know it’s not fun (my email can occasionaly be unfun; I can’t imagine how Michelle Malkin takes hers in stride) — and it sure as hell isn’t an approach I’d be comfy taking — but it’s no big. We demean ourselves by pretending otherwise.
We aren’t getting womany insults because we’re women; we’re getting whatever insults they think will get under our skin and screw up our game, because we’re playing with the big boys. And some of them don’t play nice.
ADDENDUM: on the other hand, we should certainly make a big effing deal of this language whenever they use ugly stereotypes, on account of they pretend they don’t. As Alinsky sez:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
October 11, 2010 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 17
I get a lot of these
Uncle B keeps asking me what I’m going to post tonight, and I keep telling him and telling him.
Stoopid badger.
Good weekend, everyone!
October 8, 2010 — 9:40 pm
Comments: 30
Harvested the last of the driveway…
Blackberries, the end of the harvest. Now I have to cut those suckers back ruthlessly, before they take over the planet.
Today’s batch is still in the primary fermentation vessel. Those are secondary fermentation vessels, of course. Elderberry, blackberry, elderberry/blackberry, and some abomination I made out of all kinds of fruit that had been taking up room in the freezer for too long.
I only make wine so I can say shit like “secondary fermentation vessels.”
Speaking of which, I ordered a couple of extra demijohns at the local hardware store. Their supplier told them it’ll be a month or more. I guess everybody’s got the same idea this year.
In the Olde Countree, we sold out of milk, bread and eggs whenever a snowstorm was coming. When a financial shitstorm is predicted, looks like people buy laying hens and make wine out of junk from the hedges.
October 7, 2010 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 25
And now a public service announcement…
Ah. I knew this imagery reminded me of something.
October 6, 2010 — 9:13 pm
Comments: 47
Long walk, meet short pier
Somebody torched Hastings Pier last night.
Bastards.
It was a great spindly thing with a ballroom at the end, like a Victorian lady hiking her skirts and wading out to sea. Designed by Eugenius Birch (who also designed Eastbourne Pier and West Pier in Brighton — which was itself torched a few years ago), it opened in 1872 on Britain’s first bank holiday.
Its fortunes — like those of all Britain’s pleasure piers — were up and down through the 20th C and into the 21st. In the Sixties and Seventies, Hastings Pier was a rock and roll venue, hosting concerts by The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.
They’ve already made arrests. I’m guessing it’s insurance money or something, but we may never get to the bottom of it.
There is no part of England that is farther than a hundred miles from the sea. When I was told this, I sat down with a map and a piece of string and worked it out. It’s true. The seaside holiday is deep down in the marrowbone of the Briton.
From the very beginning of the Nineteenth C — and really hotting up once railroads made travel easy — Brits built pleasure piers like this. Dozens of them. So they could visit the ocean even when the tide was out, without getting their pink satin slippers wet.
They’re like…long, thin state fairs stuck into the sea (the one at Southend-on-sea is almost a mile and a half long!). They had concerts and shows and shops and food running down the middle, railings on either side to look out over the water and at night they’re lit up like Rock City.
I love these things. I’m sure they make perfect sense to Brits.
October 5, 2010 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 17