web analytics

Round 59: Spring is just around the corner


It is my pleasure to announce the demise of Commie douchecanoe Pete Seeger, and not before time. Thank god we had a Harvard-educated Manhattanite to teach us the real purpose of banjer music, or it would still be all moonshine, pretty girls and fattening hogs for Winter. Congratulations to bigsmarthuman, who wins dick while Seeger bum-ditties in hell.

Not a fan, in case I’m being too subtle for you inbred hillbillies.

Right! Here we go! Wait, first an administrative note (I’ll incorporate it into the rules later): make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.

Like my sainted mother used to say, bad spelling thwarts dick winners.

0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody.

1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).

2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.

3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.

4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay?

5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.

6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.

7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.

8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.

The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I didn’t have any dinosaur shit particles.

January 31, 2014 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 90

Happy Year of the Horse!

It reads better in the original uncut color version, but I had to mash it to fit in my format. Weazels stealz.

Actually, Chinese New Year is tomorrow, but we all know what we’ll be doing tomorrow here at Mustelid Central. 6pm WBT. Dead Pool Round 59!

January 30, 2014 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 11

I did not know this…

Interesting article in the Metro about free-to-play games and ‘microtransactions’. The current crop of free phone/tablet/browser games offer gameplay enhancements and add-ons for small sums. At today’s exchange rate, per the figure in the graphic, that’s almost a million bucks a day one game is taking in. (Games trigger the same reward brainjuice as cocaine, you betcha).

In the abstract, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. We’re all grownups and game designers gotta eat.

Provided the charges aren’t hidden, or easy to rack up by accident. Or aimed at kids. Or centrally important to a game you’ve actually already paid a lot of money for. And some of these new games have apparently done those bad things, but I suppose that’s to be expected. New idea shaking out and all.

I think their constituency is commuters and other bored people with smartphones. Not really my kind of gaming, happy to say. I played vanilla Angry Birds through once — fairly obsessively until it was done, I have to admit — and that scratched the itch.

January 29, 2014 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 17

This shit again

One of the downsides of marrying a foreigner: you have to own up to embarrassing things about your own culture that you would otherwise kick under the rug and forget. For me, one of these is the annual humiliating spectacle of the president’s State of the Union speech.

Any recent president. I won’t pretend they weren’t just awful under Bush.

The president promises a lot of stupid, empty shit that will never, ever happen, and every time he pauses, the guys on his side of the room leap to their feet and applaud like trained seals.

We’re going back to the moon!      ORT! ORT! ORT!
Watermelon flavored bubblegum!      ORT! ORT! ORT!
Adorable puppies!      ORT! ORT! ORT!

In especially bad times, the opposition sits through the whole thing with their arms folded, scowling like they’ve just fellated a pickle. It’s so awful.

I was reading this Peggy Noonan piece on SOTU speeches earlier. For a moment, I couldn’t work out why she thought they’d ever been worth watching, and then I remembered — she’s a former speech writer! Still, she has a point; they haven’t always been dreadful political theater. I remember speeches that sounded substantive, announced new and important things and were lightly peppered with polite applause.

So I took a little tour through YouTube. I didn’t watch whole speeches — this is my half-assed blog, not real science — but I sampled SOTUs going back as far as LBJ. Mostly I was looking for when those multiple, unnecessary standing o’s became a regular feature.

I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that everything turned sharply tacky under Billy Jeff Clinton. What did surprise me, it wasn’t post-impeachment. I assumed all that false enthusiasm was a weird kind of shame reaction, but no — I think it must have been more in response to his style of SOTU. His were long, long shopping lists of lefty policy fantasies. Apparatchik eat that shit up.

Anyway, State of the Union is tonight. Um, yay.

January 28, 2014 — 11:07 pm
Comments: 19

Rejoice! Rejoice!

That egregious old Commie Pete Seeger, dead at 94. I was going to call him an embarrassment to banjo players but, sadly, that isn’t so — banjo players seem to break almost evenly between lefties and righties, those who pray at the Church of Earl and those who pray at the Church of Pete.

And, yes — bigsmarthuman had him in the Dead Pool.
We know what that means, don’t we? Back here, next
Friday, 6pm WBT — Dead Pool Round 59!

— 11:54 am
Comments: 14

Wait…what?

In case the brilliance of my iconography is not immediately apparent, that’s the V from V for Vendetta superimposed over the Fox News logo. Because — holy shit, you guys — Ezra Klein is going to call his new website Vox Media.

Ezra Klein, if you’re blessed not to know, is the thirty-something crown prince of the New Media Wunderkinder that old fart journalists think are the bee’s knees. Klein was also the brains behind the Journolist.

There is no sense in which that name is a good idea. It’s going to be near impossible to distinguish between Vox and Fox when, say, talking on a cell phone. (My mother took a job at the switchboard/intercom of a hospital once. She swore when she started she’d never say “nyan” instead of “nine” because, doesn’t that sound silly? And within days she was saying “nyan” instead of “nine” because, honest-to-god, nobody can hear the difference over a crappy PA system and doctors were all phoning her up to ask, “did you say nine or five?”).

I doubt he did it on purpose. I mean, counting on clicks from people who mis-hear or mis-type another website is so very low rent. It’s the kind of sleazy dick move that pornographers and bottom feeders like whoever runs the Drudge Retort get up to. Klein views himself as a Real Serious Journalist, so that would be out of character.

On the other hand, if they chose the name without thinking through the whole Vox, Fox thing — how amateurish is that? I refused to join the Graphic Artists’ Guild because — c’mon, you guys, you’re graphic artists! You’re supposed to do style issues like acronyms!

Ugh. Amateurs.

UPDATE: Ohhhhh….hang on. Vox Media is already a thing. Klein is hitching his wagon to their star, where he joins other illustrious titles. Like Curbed, Eater, and Racked.

January 27, 2014 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 16

I should build a little house

The Bad Lip Reading guys do the NFL. Again. Doesn’t matter if you don’t give a monkey’s about American football, that shit is funny right there.

Hey, when did mountain man beards become a thing in football?

Good weekend, everybody. Weasel, out!

January 24, 2014 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 14

I don’t even…

I was going for “laughing weasel.” Man, I suck at cute…

— 12:04 am
Comments: 19

birds and artards

So, ten white Gibson Les Paul electric guitars, four white Thunderbird basses, 70 zebra finches. It’s art. Or, if you’re called something gay like Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, it’s music.

If you’re anywhere near Salem, MA, you can go see it at the Peabody Essex Museum. NPR is all over it, of course. The installation requires a highly controlled environment, an on-call veterinarian and a staff of full-time behind-the-scene poop-wipers. The result sounds like somebody absent-mindedly tuning up before a gig (the guitars are clearly open-tuned to a chord). It has all the soothing, pleasant mindlessness of several wind chimes in a light breeze.

Reddit has a subforum called /r/mildlyinteresting where an awful lot of official state-sanctioned art seems to belong these days.

January 22, 2014 — 11:29 pm
Comments: 15

kittehsaurus

If it looks like we got double fangage going on up there, it’s because we do. That big one is shoving aside the little one in front (or the other way around; I’m not sure). Kitteh is teething.

At around four months of age, the permanent incisors will start to come through and when the kitten is around 6 months of age the adult canines will come through. From eight months on, the premolars and molars will start to emerge.

What’s that you say? Several more months of this grumpy thumb-chewing fangasaurus?

January 21, 2014 — 11:38 pm
Comments: 16