Frozen in mid-weasel
We weren’t supposed to get the travel chaos down here. This little corner of the Sunny South was predicted to be cold and bright. We had plans to take a train along the coast for the heck of it.
Long about noon, we looked up to see blizzard conditions. Total white-out. Couldn’t see to the end of the drive.
The chickens — which, for reasons explicable only to chickens, are absolutely terrified of snow — were huddled under a table in the garden. They were so paralyzed with fear, they allowed me to pick them up and carry them to the hen house without the usual clucking fuss.
It was wild. Standing in the garden, I could see sun and blue sky in one direction, apocalyptic cloud and squally snow in another, and an improbable bright moon hanging over it all.
Damn, we do get some weird weather here.
When it passed, it had only dumped an inch or so, so we decided to drive into town for staples. Mistake. They hadn’t done much to treat the roads and the bit of slush had refrozen to a glaze of wet ice. Pretty much friction free. We watched people and cars slip-sliding all over town, turned right around and got our chilly asses home.
They say warmer and heavy rain tomorrow. Do we believe them, children?
December 17, 2010 — 10:33 pm
Comments: 71
Words, meet numbers
Have you seen this thing? So cool.
Google has now digitized 15 million books and this dingus allows you to graph word and phrase frequency over time. Up to five comparisons at once.
So, for example, you can see the handover point when “World War I” replaced “Great War” in literature. Or the exact point “Tiananmen Square” drops out of Chinese books.
It isn’t by a pure word count. It couldn’t be. There were only half a million books published in English before 1900 and a squintillion since then, so any pure word count would make a screaming spike roar up the Twentieth Century. They explain a bit more about how they normalize the data here.
This would have been a great tool to have during the Michael Bellesiles controversy. (Though I still think the simplest way to debunk him would’ve been counting how many cookbooks had recipes for game. Game means guns).
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Y’all are going to go look up wirty dords, aren’t you?
Yeah, I know you people like the back of my hand.
December 16, 2010 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 26
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
Yeah. About those ‘student’ ‘protests’
What do Italy, Germany, Spain, Latvia and Argentina have to do with the cost of going to college in Britain?
Yes, exactly.
But there they were, in the thick of the “student” “protests” setting fire to shit and throwing shit and generally losing their shit all over Westminster (including, apparently, taking a shit on the Cenotaph).
Though the Daily Mail (which — I must say it — is not a very good newspaper) got it wrong about the Black Bloc: it’s a tactic, not a group. It’s dressing up in black, covering your face and raising hell. They’ve been running all over Europe since the Eighties, protesting squatter evictions, nuclear anything, abortion (restrictions on), the G-8, the G-20, Reagan, the Pope, virtue, kittens, a good ten cent cigar. Whatever.
Riot tourists. Bored rich kids who travel the (safe, Western) world taking part in violent (but ultimately harmless) street theater dressed up as scary anarchists, because burning stuff and peeing on sacred monuments is fun. And, let’s face it, the European and Canadian and American governments may be TEH EVIL, but they’re not going to open fire on a bunch of middle class kids having themselves some good, clean vandalism.
This lady is at least a student at the University of London. But at 37, don’t you think she’s been hanging off the public teat long enough?
And is there anything more telling than Dave Gilmour’s adopted son turning up in this bunch? Dad’s worth 78 million cool British rock’n’roll pounds, you think this kid worries about how he’s going to pay for his History course at Cambridge?
It’s big kid Hallowe’en for the useless spoiled progeny of the first world. And mummy and daddy back home will frown — then think back to their own student protest days and sigh wistfully.
And tomorrow the circus will move on, repair crews will sweep up the glass and replace the benches and absolutely, positively nothing will change.
December 14, 2010 — 10:04 pm
Comments: 26
The sky! It is all asparkle!
Tonight is the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. Look to the East between midnight and dawn.
The Geminids is a really good one, but it’s overlooked often on account of it’s cold as a witch’s tata out there in mid-December. It’s also a strange one — most meteor showers come from comet tails, but the Geminids come from this big rock thing which doesn’t seem to shed enough fluff to account for the light show.
Oooo. Mystery.
Also, ASPARKLE is the first Scrabble word Uncle B. spelled that got all his letters out. ASPARKLE. Jesus.
Yep. We’re still all over that Massive Multiplayer Online Scrabble game. We’re got over 60,000 points now (the minimum to hit the leaderboard is 160,000).
If you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth going over just to sightsee. Over 12 million tiles now. On a board 21926 by 18975 squares, which would be 90,685 square feet or just over two acres in the real world. Somebody has made a cool sightseeing guide to all the weird shapes and patterns people have made with spellin’!
I must say, it’s a pleasant thing to do of an evening: sit around in front of a roaring log fire with a drink and a sleepy cat and try to outdo each other spelling the biggest, badassedest words we can dredge up.
I had no idea he knew the word for lady parts in so many obscure dead languages.
December 13, 2010 — 8:59 pm
Comments: 20
And the winner is…
Election night, we had a little contest: guess the makeup of the 112th Congress. Contestants guessed the final number of GOP in the House and the Senate as separate numbers, the difference between the two added up would be the final score. The prize was dick, of course. It’s always dick.
I was going to post everybody’s guesses so y’all could see I really did do my homework and tot them all up (and so’s you could check if I missed anything), but then I realized that our outsized exuberance on that evening might be a little sad, seen growing smaller in the rearview mirror. So, ummm…figures released upon request.
The final tally is: 242 Pubbies in the House, 47 in the Senate (I’m counting Murky red).
Without further blah-blah-blah, the winner is: Some Vegetable! With a pick of 240/47 and, therefore, a score of 2. Monotone The Elderish matched that score with a guess of 243/48, but lost the timestamp. Some Veg was the very first guess, and the closest.
Congratulations, Veg! You know what to do if you want your dick.
Thanks for playing, folks, and have a great weekend.
December 10, 2010 — 11:35 pm
Comments: 18
Jazz Hands Nan
The action figure NO kid wants for Christmas.
Yeah. I got nothing today. And with the hinky way my server’s been acting, this big ol’ .gif file will probably bring my whole blog to its knees.
I don’t know why I do animated .gifs — they make-a me crazee.
Oh! So, final tally today…Republicans picked up 63 House seats. Does anybody know the count in the Senate? (I’m painting Alaska red. I don’t have hope for Miller’s suit but I think Murky is going to caucus with the GOP).
December 9, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
Barack Obama, he mad
Did you watch Obama’s Very Cranky Presser yesterday? You should. Go on. I’ll wait.
One of the most inartful pieces of political theater ever. Somehow he took a fairly wise political compromise and turned it into a complete loser for himself.
He could have been just a leeeetle teensy bit gracious to the Republicans and come off as a reasonable man and a tough negotiator. Nope. He was petulant about Republican opposition right from the start, which somehow made it look like they had pwned him utterly.
He could have appealed to his base, explaining that a deal with this congress has to be a bzillion times leftier than any deal with the next congress could possibly be. Nope. He scolded them for being “sanctimonious” and “pure.”
He could have minimized the whole thing. You know, all this bill does is keep things the way the are for now. No big.
Nope. Somehow, he managed to alienate pretty much everybody, and look like a tooth-gritting, vein-throbbing lunkhead doing it.
I don’t get who he was trying to appeal to. “The American people” he kept invoking — presumably minus the Republican part of the American people and the leftmost section of the Democrat part of the American people. Which leaves — oh, I dunno — maybe a third of the actual American people?
President Sooper Genius not look so smart these days.
And if you don’t recognize the image I’m riffing on, you are an utter, utter Philistine. It’s this famous shot from the always spooky Diane Arbus. After she cut her wrists in the bath in 1971, there were persistent rumors that she had set up a camera on a tripod to film her own death.
December 8, 2010 — 6:02 pm
Comments: 33
*pop*
Man. Was there ever such an international display of utter FAIL as this Julian Assange/Wikileaks shit?
To start, there’s nothing I care about that I didn’t already know in any of the cables published so far. Catty diplomatic chit-chat. Bo-ring. Unless, of course, you were one of the people whose lives were put in mortal danger by the leaks.
Yeah, that’s the first thing we should have done — offered US asylum to anyone endangered by our crappy inability to keep a secret.
I don’t know why the left is so stoked on this guy. His leaks confirm my every ‘winger belief. Israel is reasonable. The entire Middle East is afraid of a nuclear Iran. China is pushy. The UN is useless. Global Warming is a front for wealth redistribution.
Oh, and he has deeply embarrassed and hobbled the foreign policy of the most left-wing government America is likely to have. EVER.
An act of courageous journalism? Please. Document dump. Some journalism.
And now he’s been arrested on the stupidest charge in history — sex without condom. Whether we had anything to do with this silliness or not, whether we move to extradite him or not, nobody is ever going to believe this double shitburger doesn’t have Made in America written all over it.
I can’t see that Assange is any more guilty of a crime than the New York Times is, but I won’t waste any pity on this whispy dumbfuck. Garden variety attention whore; the internet is full of ’em. He didn’t have to put face on the box . If all wanted he wanted was to get the info out there, he could have dropped it on a server somewhere and posted a note to a blogger. The file would have replicated across the wires like plague.
Like the Climategate leaker did. What was his name? Oh, right — we don’t have a clue.
December 7, 2010 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 21
Yeah, I should be so stupid…
You know the most hilarious part of the Sarah Palin phenomenon? All the same people — right and left — who thought Reagan was a complete doofus back in the day are now swearing on huge stacks of Bibles that he was a great man and a bzillionty times more differenter than Sarah.
Yeah. Most common old school media descriptor of Ronnie: Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime for Bonzo.
Since I can’t watch the show, I went online and watched the trailers for Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Now, I’m a total and complete sucker for a montage, I admit, but I was…mmm…charmed.
Okay, so let me get this straight. The woman wangled eight hours of polished, prime time, slickly-produced, kick ass television time out of a major cable network, and I’m supposed to believe she’s stupid?
Huh.
I was firmly in the “I love Sarah but I don’t think she should run” camp. Every day, I edge closer to the “fuck it — RUN, SARAH, RUN!” camp.
Those of you who didn’t get the bubblegum reference…I’m extremely disappointed in you, that’s all.
December 6, 2010 — 9:57 pm
Comments: 44