look for the union label

, tear it off, and throw it away.

alpha-tecture

giornale nuovo's alphabet buildings

jay leno's cars

online gallery

how about turkey baloney?

just say no!

good question

"What If Chick-fil-A Had Been Chick-fal-Afel?"

via imao via iotw

continuing controversy

harry reid continues to evade questions surrounding his personal life, which were brought to light by credible documents faxed from a kinko's in abilene.

won't someone please think of the children!

update: the scandal deepens.

extermi...

...nzzzxtftpppphft

cover tunes

"the wimp factor"

"arugula" is the new "potatoe"

...and other gaffes the msm doesn't repeat

...and other gaffes the msm doesn't repeat

maybe, maybe not

false flags flying in colorado? and if so, is it yet another atf overreach or yet another eric holder stunt?

either way president hussein will use it as a pre-election distraction.

update: and the joker keeps laughing

this is the blog

that linked to the cube
that posted a book
about the house obama built

spectacular

A lot of people I know watched the grand opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, but I had already seen it...

a one-two-three punch

Vodkapundit has a message...

to President Obama: Hey, bub, if you didn’t want the job, you shouldn’t have ran.

...you didn’t hear (President Bush) whining about the situation (or) blaming his predecessor — which he could have very rightly done.

Obamanomics consists of taking the economy when it’s down, putting his boot on hard its throat, then beating it on the head with a big bag of money and shouting, “Produce some d*** jobs, you greedy b******!” When that fails, get a bigger bag.

that explains it

the serious version
via
the not-so-serious version

in the interest of accuracy

here's a bigger picture of unemployment.

and here's a bigger picture of credit history

green energy

remember, you can't spell "solyndra" without y - o - d - a

sam i aint

this dish should make everyone queasy

newspeak

read this people's cube dictionary before it goes down the memory hole

update: also this slightly-crude analogy of imaginary particles

nosah massah

we be workin fo unkle bommacare now

also at imao

many thoughts, including this:

“I am altering the Constitution. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” - Darth Bader Ginsburg

july 4 +/-

besides the boston tea party, mr.right at imao reminds us that:

Not mentioned nearly as often in the history books is the concurrent Occupy Boston movement, in which a bunch of confused teenagers dressed up in tie-dyes and birkenstocks and sat around banging on drums while complaining that everything ought to be free and defecating in the public square.

Well, I Declare!

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.


The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
• For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
• For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
• For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

(emphases mine)

must... post... something...

does this count?

i'm guessing not... ;)

be back eventually

there's a fine line between impressive and depressive

a list of president hussein's accomplishments

there's an index too

haters be hatin

homophobes are just born that way - stop trying to change them

true story

today my caller id said i got a call from area code 404.

the name of the caller could not be found.

:D

that was close

lileks is livin' la vida locavore:

"No one ever takes a bite of steak and says “man, you can really taste the proximity.” "

paying the price

man, i'd pay $20 a gallon for the rest of the year if it guaranteed that obama and all of his goons got booted out of office in november

(not that i'm fond of his rino replacement)

freudian slipknot

remember the new yorker cover depicting the terrorist takeover of the white house that was later claimed to be satire?

there is a new video by rammstein that seems to parody beach party movies, but turns out to be an accurate depiction of how the sexual revolution started off light and ended in pandemonium - literally.

the 1%

it's odd that the occupy movement marches in lockstep with the plutocrats of the media-infotainment complex

patterns to be noticed

instapundit got it started with this list - to which i'll add:
government takeover
government overreach
government from cradle to grave
and somewhat-related, "the parable of the untalented"

be wary still

here's a good one i wrote seven (?!?) years ago:

---

Saturday, Apr. 9, at 6:13pm EDT, Awareness achieved a stable orbit around the earth.

For many years in America and abroad, numerous grassroots efforts have sought to raise Awareness on a wide variety of causes, and now those innumerable hours of jogging, dancing, and biking have paid off. "Awareness is now at an all time high. I'm really on cloud nine about this," says Karen Pochissimo, president of Aware-R-Us International. We spoke with Ms. Pochissimo at the Aware-R-Us headquarters, located in the festive Roman suburb of Troppi Eventi, Italy.

Ms. Pochissimo founded the Aware-R-Us organization in 1993. She recalled how, nearly a decade earlier, she had been inspired by both the Hands Across America and We Are The World events, but also recognized their inherent logistical problems. "Hands Across America suffered from large gaps in the human chain, due to the logistical problem of getting such a huge number of people holding hands stretched all the way across the North American continent. Similarly, We Are The World suffered from large gaps in intelligibility, due to the logistical problem of getting such a huge number of egos crowded into one recording session."

Ms. Pochissimo recalled that one night, while watching a rerun of Knots Landing, she suddenly became aware of an idea, and that idea was simply Awareness. "Up to that time, I had been wandering through my life completely unaware. I had mistakenly looked to other things to erase that feeling, little realizing that Awareness itself is as easy as a walk in the park."

The idea of Awareness spread even more quickly than Karen could have expected. Numerous groups across America soon realized that by organizing a normal social activity under a banner of Awareness, attendance would dramatically increase at that event. Seemingly overnight, the Awareness movement had been launched, and it spread like wildfire.

As successful as it has been, the Awareness movement has not been without its problems. "During the early days of Awareness, groups were free to choose their own Awareness ribbon color, and conflicts quickly arose as to color ownership." recalls Ms. Charite Fausse, spokeperson for the Cause-Color Coordination Center of Cape Canaveral, FL. "By now, every possible color of ribbon has some associated cause in the Awareness rainbow. We are now even seeing a looming shortage of color patterns. So our organization stays quite busy pinning down issues of color registration, cause overlap, ribbon suppliers, and other red tape. And on rare occasions, we have to find a way to tie in some pre-CCCC-regulation color we had overlooked." She admits the organization had briefly considered sponsoring a Color-Cause Confusion Awareness week, but had quickly rejected the idea.

As you may remember, Ms. Fausse first became known for ending the conflict between Sky Awareness and Robin Egg Awareness over their identical theme ribbon color. Despite the numerous challenges she has faced over the years, Charite is elated over the success of Awareness, and proud of the support the CCCC has given to it.

In addition to the duties mentioned previously, the CCCC also keeps track of the heights to which Awareness has soared, and compiles data of the amounts that participating groups help to raise Awareness. Tuesday morning, the organization confirmed that the specific event that placed Awareness into its stable orbit was the "2nd Annual Bowl-a-thon for Athelete's Foot" event held by the East Side Junior League of North Westchester, South Dakota.

But by no means are Aware-R-Us and the CCCC resting on their laurels. Ms. Pochissimo enthusiastically states, "The next goal we have planned is for Awareness to achieve escape velocity. And in the far future, we hope to make Awareness universal."

it's a gas

For decades, the corporate world has been loudly castigated for "chasing the almighty dollar". Fair enough, but the exact same thing can be said of the Occupy movement, tax-and-spenders of all parties, unions, management, workers, welfare recipients, and investors alike.

Any "war on greed" is founded on greed itself.

and counting

monday evening can’t be both honest and polite about paul ehrlich

Paul Ehrlich has not merely been wrong in his long career as a “population expert”: he has been demonstrably, repeatedly, spectacularly wrong about almost everything...

Ehrlich is most famous as the author of the Population Bomb, a book of almost sublime evil and stupidity. He dusted off the creaky old theories of Thomas Malthus... and gave them a healthy coating of panic that drove the great overpopulation scares that still swirl through intellectual circles.

According to the Population Bomb and Ehrlich’s subsequent work, we should all be dead right now. His book began with the infamous sentence, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Except that never happened. Not in the 1970s … not ever. The localized (not global) famines were not caused by a collapse of the food supply, but by political instability.

He insisted that the global death rate would skyrocket. It’s fallen.

He swore that India could never feed 200 million people. It feeds over a billion.

He suggested or supported all kinds of draconian solutions to this imaginary problem, including putting birth control in the water supply, forced abortions, coercive sterilization, forcibly starving countries who refused to implement radical population controls, punitive taxes on people who have children and on childcare products, and good old fashioned jack-booted totalitarianism in order to “fix” the problem of global famine from overpopulation... And yet this utter sham of a man made a career as a public intellectual while being... spectacularly wrong while offering objectively evil solutions to imaginary problems. The stunning thing is that he’s still talking, and people are – inexplicably – (quoting him) in major newspapers...

terror attacks on us soil

to commemorate an upcoming anniversary of "modern justice", notice the decades when the trend explodes and when it recedes... and notice the current definition of "modern justice"

eight epsilon strikes again

if management wishes to complain about the accuracy of my work, management should learn to spell the word "accuracy" properly.

update: if management wishes to reprimand me for an action, management should not have told me to do said action in the first place.

oh man

jack baruth via dustbury:

Forget the “war on women” you’re hearing about right now, although it may well exist. There’s been a “war on men” for the last fifty years, and it’s been more successful than any of the Middle Eastern adventurism which has burned up the lives of American men... A war against the ideas of manhood, fatherhood, responsibility, dependability. The traditional American man... has been parodied, denigrated, humiliated, ironized, written out of existence. It’s no longer pleasant or even feasible to emulate our grandfathers and their unashamedly masculine lives.

racism

it

will

never

heal

if

you

keep

picking

at

it

spring training

update & bump: did instapundit reader chris fox read my post, or is the incivility of the occupy movement really that obvious?

Could we have possibly drawn a more stark comparison between the Tea Party minded and the OWS minded? We say it with Post-It notes. They say it with feces and spray paint. They made a mess of DC and Wisconsin. We cleaned it up and left it better than we found it. Oh, and we also didn’t rape or kill anyone.

i vote the latter.

---

The occupy movement is preparing for next season:

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Activists inspired by Occupy Wall Street are gearing up for spring training. They say they will teach thousands of people to lead nonviolent protests aimed at reinvigorating the spirit of the movement against economic inequality...

(Many people have) signed up for hundreds of sessions organized by more than 60 activist groups and the nation's largest unions...

It is quite telling that union-organized leftists require formal training to NOT be violent - so unlike the relatively rape-, assault-, and vandalism-free tea party movement. One must wonder whether leftism breeds violence or naturally-violent people are more attracted to leftism.

history lesson

Lileks nails it:

the Eurozone troubles have been fascinating to watch. The entire idea seemed like madness to me. Yoking disparate cultures together into a manufactured political union seemed unwise... A new generation may grow up thinking “I am a European!” but it’s a cotton-candy construct that dissolves upon contact with the hot water of current events...

Culture divides; history shapes; language binds. This doesn’t mean it has to result in conflict or adversarial stances, but they’re givens in human nature, and the most workable system is the one that recognizes them and accommodates them, not the one that pretends they are tissue-thin wisps of an old order that can be swept away with a shiny new broom...

It’ll probably end poorly...

Everything about the EU has always seemed like play-acting - functionaries and mandarins pretending to rule over a thing that does not exist, yet given the power to tax and regulate the people who live in their imaginary land...

read the rest, see also Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, USSR, and most any empire.

beetles are similar to roaches :P

i just found this band "yellow dubmarine" - which i haven't heard but can't imagine them being better than "dread zeppelin"...

man that's deep

http://xkcd.com/1040/large/

maybe time to invest in tar & feathers...

we can't vote "none of the above" to our two-headed monster and the nattering nabobs, and the french can't vote "le'pew!" to their medusa...

rotten spam

somebody left the container open ;)

i just received the most pathetic phishing scam spam ever. i would have copied it exactly, but had to change all the <> brackets to ^ so that it can be viewed as closely to verbatim text as i recieved it - not interpreted as html by your browser.

^html style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 90% 90%; ^moz-background-clip:

^moz-initial; ^moz-background-origin: ^moz-initial; ^moz-background-inline-policy:

^moz-initial;"^^head^^style^body {margin:8px} .tr-field {font:normal small arial} img

^moz-force-broken-image-icon: 1;}^/style^^/head^^body g_editable="true" hidefocus="true"

class="editable tr-field" id=":ce" style=""^^div^
^img alt="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/paypal_logo.gif"

src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/paypal_logo.gif"^
^/div^

Dear Customer,^br^^br^
We are currently performing regular maintenance of our security measures. Your account

has^br^been randomly selected for this maintenance, and you will now be taken through a

series of^br^identity verification pages click on the link below

^br^^br^

^a href="http:***SPAMMINGSCUMBUCKETS***.htm"

target="_blank"^^font size="2" face="Verdana"^Verify your Paypal

account^/font^^/a^^br^^br^Protecting the security of your PayPal account is our primary

concern, and we apologize for^br^any inconvenience this may cause.^br^^br^^br^Thanks For

using Paypal^br^Management^/body^^/html^

a new national holiday

bumped to "the day of", and added this link worth reading

Since it's been over 400 years since the probable origin of April Fools' Day, I suggest that it be replaced with:

Keynes' Fools Day 

to be enacted just as soon as America recovers from the Obama Stimulus Disaster and Depression.

 I also suggest it should be celebrated exactly two weeks after the old date of April 1st...

just to clarify

A few definitions via Wikipedia:

Justice

"Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics"

Lynching

"Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob... in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that arise in communities... , have been more frequent in times of social and economic tension, and have often been the means used by the politically dominant population to oppress social challengers."

Mob Rule

Ochlocracy or mob rule is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of legitimate authorities...

Ochlocracy ("rule of the general populace") is democracy ("rule of the people") spoiled by demagoguery, "tyranny of the majority" and the rule of passion over reason...

Strangely, Wikipedia does not have a listing for "Race-Baiting Opportunist"...

jobs deletion

Jeff Brokaw seems surprised that his article keeps getting hits from searches for "cynicism" and "taxpayer":

Politicians and others who want our money have been scaring us with phony crises for decades, and after awhile, you learn to shrug your shoulders and say “whatever, pal”. But sadly, lots of people still buy this b.s., and so they help grow our government bureaucracy and increase our taxes...

...a very important point... that too many of us miss because we focus too much on blue states vs. red states... is this: too many people implicitly trust government — and therefore, politicians — to fix society’s problems... It’s time to put a stop to this foolishness. While government can always offer a solution, it is rarely the best solution.

Private enterprise is cheaper, more efficient, and provides better goods and services at lower prices, along with jobs. Private enterprise grows the economy. Good things happen in growing economies...

It’s well-past time to move into a post-partisan world, and accept the fact that the real class warfare we taxpayers face today is against rent-seekers, i.e., anybody who seeks a place in line at the tax revenue trough.

I'm surprised that any real American would enable those nanny-staters to keep slaves on their vote-growing plantation.

jobs creation

we're living it!

d.i.y.

i like reading makezine blog, even if i hardly ever make things myself any more.

i don't
think
wondermark
holds
the same
opinion
of the
d.i.y.
movement...

Dave's not here, man!

Where's Dave?

(i 'shopped this from a google satellite view of an airbase. sorry i couldn't get an acceptable thumbnail-to-preview in blogger here...)

less regulation please!

medical costs are making me sick

more randomness please!

dustbury found a question he 'couldn’t resist':

What do you think of blogs and randomness? As the question says, can a blog be too random? Would the lack of connection between topics/posts annoy readers even if the content was interesting?"

fillyjonk answered:

Can free ice cream be too free?

I’m always amused at the people who complain about blogs not conforming to what their exact wants in a blog are: they’re not paying to read them, nor are they forced to read them…

Me? I like randomness.

i followed:

fillyjonk is exactly right.

i can imagine those yammering yahoos of (y)uniformity wishing:

“One Blog to rule them all,
One Link to find them,
One Rule to write them all,
and in the Blandness bind them.”

blogosaurus

frank j of imao pondered:

“Why do scientists have to keep sissifying all the dinosaurs by putting feathers on them?”

son of bob commented:

"First they put feathers on the dinosaurs, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a dinosaur…"

then i commented:

it all started back when the eltonjohnosaurus flamboyantii was discovered…

of course, the comparison was then applied to manhattan

What a weird but effective way to present a factoid: I was just watching a History Channel show that claimed "Americans eat one hundred ACRES of pizza a day"...

the ups and downs of "non-profits"

monday evening wonders the same thing

the american eye dulls

my sister has a much higher tolerance for "reality shows" than i do, and her kids are now fans of "the voice" on nbc. i have less-than-zero interest in that show, but enough interest in finding out what the kids like for me to watch a few clips of it on youtube with them. after seeing the clips, my interest in the show has now increased to zero, because it was sorta funny for those otherwise-sweet rural gradeschool kids to be mimicking the street attitudes of ceelo & christina.

but that's not why i'm writing.

on the way home tonight, i thought of a horrible pun to describe my feelings watching the show (brace yourself...)

...

...

...

"i watched 'the voice' the other night. at first i noticed all the performers had emote in their eye, then i noticed i had a bored in mine."

pair un balanced

msnbc's broadcast today included a lower-third graphic titled "mitt happens" - yet another shining example of the "fair and balanced" elections coverage provided by maddow & matthews team.

redirect, your honor?

obviously my writing is sporadic here, and it may become more so. since late march i've started writing something (my memoirs? autobiography? ex post facto diary? demented scribblings?) for my indirect descendants.

jeepers creepers

ttac commentors (via dustbury) noticed the jeep brand seems to kill its owners.

i pondered there "what would happen if jeep released a special “ted mcginley edition” cherokee?"

money

it's a gas

declaration of independence 7.6x10^99, pelosi 0

update 2: apparently this post caused quite the kerfuffle in imao's comments section! here is my input, with the intent to clarify - i intend no defensiveness.

• my choice of the word "shamelessly" was mostly facetious. the only semi-serious intent that word might hold was that i had no shame in the pro-America-anti-pelosi-ness of the content.
• if i had intended to truly plagiarize the piece, i would not have provided links to the original.
• harvey of imao has stated that neither he nor frank j is upset about this.
• as my archives can show, my habit is to provide a shorter excerpt with a "read the rest"-style link.
• the spirit of the length of this copied portion was to reinforce the seriousness of the threat that president hussein-o and his cronies are to the foundations of America. 

everybody cool now? i think the affected parties are...  ;)

---

update 1: wooohooo, it's an imaolanch! thanks :)

---

shamelessly copied from imao

Well, Nance, as long as we’re plucking random phrases from the D of I and hotgluing them to Obamacare, here’s a few more choice nuggets from the document you so obviously revere that might be more appropriately attached to this President and his sundry legislations:

• whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it
• a long train of abuses and usurpations
• a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism
• repeated injuries and usurpations
• the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States
• refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance
• utterly neglected to attend
• the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures
• his invasions on the rights of the people
• exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without
• obstructed the Administration of Justice
• sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance
• subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution
• abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments
• works of death, desolation, and tyranny
• Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation
• excited domestic insurrections amongst us
• Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury
• deaf to the voice of justice
• A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

and some more shameless links found via imao

homage ---> myopia

like me, lileks won't watch avatar:

"It’s the fact that the big expensive movies have no soul. They’re machines - loud, noisy machines that hit you over the head and show no recognition of Disbelief, and the effort it takes to suspend it..."

mark steyn's quote was harsher:

Hollywood’s business model is to take a story that cost two shillings and... spend a fifth of a billion making it lousier. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way the industry’s living off Model T fumes. Hollywood could use its own Edgar Rice Burroughs, but instead it’s a business full of guys who can’t even adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs for less than 300 mil — and then blow it.

i think it would be a good start to outlaw the scene where the hero jumps-over-a-hundred-feet-both-horizontally-and-vertically to either land-in-a-crouched-pose-without-rolling or bury-a-sword-that's-longer-than-he-is-tall-in-a-monster's-head.

adele 21

fark points out that:

"Adele’s record, 21, overtook Pink Floyd’s 1973 release, The Dark Side Of The Moon... making it the seventh biggest-selling (UK) album of all-time."

dustbury suspects that:

"...no one has suggested synching up 21 and The Wizard of Oz."

i suggested (in his comments) that:

there’s probably some stoners out there experimenting now.

it might go with a much newer movie though, something like:

“ocean’s eleven”
“gigli”
“pi”
“raising arizona”
or the pilot episode of “24″

:)

any other suggestions?

check out the infographic below

follow this link for the pic

President Barack Obama’s Facebook and Twitter following leaves Republican presidential candidates in the dust. The president has more than 25 million Facebook Likes and more than 12.5 million Twitter followers...

Romney comes in second with 1.4 million Facebook Likes...

Newt Gingrich has 1.4 million Twitter followers...

Ron Paul is the third most followed candidate with more than 862,000 Facebook Likes and more than 130,000 Twitter followers...

Rick Santorum is next to last with nearly 130,000 Twitter followers and more than 138,000 Facebook Likes...

Gary Johnson, the libertarian who has been in and out of the race... has more than 23,000 Twitter followers and 149,000 Facebook Likes...

My guess is that these numbers represent people who need to have someone else do their thinking for them :)

i wasn't the only one to notice

mark simonson on the fonts in "the artist" movie:

The Artist won this year’s Oscar for Best Picture about a week ago. It seems to say something about the state of movies today that a black and white, silent picture—not even wide screen—wins the big prize. I’ve seen it, and it’s good, but I confess that I had to force myself to ignore most of the type in it in order to enjoy it.

The Artist mimics the look and feel of a late 1920s silent film. The sets, the costumes, the makeup, the lighting, the camera work, the acting—even the way it’s written—makes you almost believe you are watching a classic of the silent era. Of course, you know it’s not. After all, there are recognizable modern actors in it, like John Goodman and James Cromwell. And, for me, there was the type.

Most of the fonts they used looked more or less right for the 1920s, although quite a few were badly made free fonts (or badly made commercial fonts—those exist, too). Others are not quite from the era or were applied in an anachronistic way—for example, using negative line spacing, which is impractical to do with metal type.

But the real problem was that they used type at all. Except for things like newspapers, a few other small props, and the intertitles (more on these later), type would not have been used. Movie posters, signs, magazine covers, movie titles and credits—back in the 1920s and 1930s, that kind of thing was almost always lettered by hand. Type—and it would have been metal type, back then—was not up to the job. There were too few styles, too few sizes. It just wasn’t as flexible as someone skilled with a brush. Things that are so easy for us to do with type today were practically impossible back then, which provided plenty of work for letterers.

If you’re careful, it is possible to get close to the look of lettering with modern fonts. Some are even made to look that way (I’ve made a few myself). But for all the attention they paid to other period details, there is something slap-dash about the way this stuff was handled in The Artist...

(many examples follow, some of which i didn't even catch when i watched the movie)

...In conclusion, the typography in The Artist wasn’t way off the mark—it does seem that some effort was made. And I’m sure that, for 99.999 percent of the movie-going public, it was more than sufficient effort. But it would have been great to see the typography get the same high degree of attention that the other period details in the film got.

"this is the percentage of our discontent"

via dustbury, edited:

"Class warfare resentment is just a way to translate bitterness and disappointment into personal superiority."

vd

xkcd has even worse valentines' ideas than i've had before

something's a bit off...

but we can't blame the obama administration for this one...

yet...

lesser of two evils, feh

roberta x via dustbury:

Even more sad than (the putrid slugfest of rino debates viewed through lsm lenses) is having to watch the Republican faithful as, once more, they play the Battered Bride, talking themselves into the belief that a liberty-fearing Massachusetts patrician won't be so bad, not really, I mean, at least he's not a Democrat, right? (Got news for ya, kids: in Indiana or elsewhere in flyover country, he probably would be).

read the rest

storing files in the cloud...

...is dangerous when they start evaporating for no reason.

hiss-o-fit

it's not the color of their skin, it's the thinness

work-related

okay, my job is not this bad,

or this bad,

i still want out though...

sustainable is the new unsustainable

see also "f-bombs"

islamic rage, yaawwwnnnn

personally, i'm more outraged by the beheadings, bombings, and misogyny of islam more than a film that depicts the threat.

primarily

the truth will come out

SOPA

Unlike some other sites, this blog is just too important to shut down in protest  :D  , but here's a quote about (yet another) really bad piece of proposed legislation:

(SOPA) is like shutting down a freeway because a car got stolen.

not MLK's day

which is worse: that martin luther king jr's "dream" has devolved into a "society" of gangsta-rappin-pimps-n-hos, or that somebody designed a poster showing how bad things have gotten?

that stopped clock

got one thing right

art

painting is alive and well

i'm not calling for a boycott

i'm just not going to buy these brands any more:

• 7UP
• A&W
• Cactus Cooler
• Canada Dry
• Clamato (as if anyone drinks that swill)
• Coco Casa
• Country Time
• Crush
• Deja Blue
• Diet Rite
• Dr Pepper
• Elements
• Hawaiian Punch
• Hires
• Holland House
• IBC
• Margaritaville
• Mistic
• Mott's
• Mr & Mrs T
• Nantucket Nectars
• Nehi
• Orangina
• Peñafiel
• RC Cola
• ReaLemon
• Rose's
• Schweppes
• Snapple
• Squirt
• Stewart's
• Sun Drop
• Sunkist
• Tahitian Treat
• Venom Energy
• Vernors
• Welch's
• Yoo-hoo

and here's why:

as of 5 p.m. today there is no more Dublin Dr Pepper: From here on out, per a settlement agreement just announced in the case filed by Plano-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group in June, the Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Company will now be known as Dublin Bottling Works Inc. And it will no longer manufacture Imperial Pure Cane Sugar Dr Pepper at its bottling plant.

emoticons

mcsweeney's list is almost as cool as the emoticon i invented:

8^O>

me, with goatee, surprised by something to my left

captured

this review via google maps



(sorry for preview issues. please click on image to read right half of it...)

dave barry's year in review

"This was a year in which the cast members of “Jersey Shore” went to Italy and then — in an inexcusable lapse of border security — were allowed to return."

short answer: yes

long answer: here

with no particular place to go

a meme via dustbury:

Go into your archives and post the first sentence from the first post you made each month last year.

I'm going to cheat a wee bit because some of mine are just links to someone else's quote:

jan: "Simply stated, if we are to believe the Islamic scripture’s portrayal of this “prophet,” Muhammad was the most repulsive, and thus the least qualified, divine messenger in human history."

feb: You mean there's someone else out there who has to deal with unfair complaints from co-workers?

mar: why are we supposed to care more about lindsay lohan's and charlies sheen's... misadventures... than about the problems of some guy that lives downtown in an abandoned entryway behind a bus stop?

apr: i have now personally seen chiropractors who believe in their profession at five levels.

may: sony's database was hacked, again.

jun: "Saying that man didn’t land on the moon, that Bush caused 9/11, or that Obama knows what he’s doing aren’t simply other opinions — they’re false and destructive ideas, and the people who cling to them border on mental illness."

jul: john lennon, republican?!?

aug: Q: What's green and looks like an iguana?

sep: now that the freedom tower is nearing completion, maybe we can begin some foundation restoration

oct: "If in 2004 5.7% unemployment was supposed to mark a “jobless recovery,” what exactly is 9.1% called?"

nov: Ann Coulter via Instapundit didn't go far enough...

dec: i never would have known to avoid the burzynski clinic if it weren't for their threats...

the slow down

entropy? inertia? some other fancy word for laziness?

i haven't forgotten this blog, i just don't have much to say at the moment (without excessive whining).

...so just watch this strangely-relevant rerun in the meantime.

old years resolutions

no i'm not making any this year - not even silly ones like i've posted before. so here's a pic of (allegedly) woody guthrie's resolutions for some year long past.

gimme the krampus

...instead of obama claus

giftgiving

Luke 11:9-12

"9 “So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
10 For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened.
11 Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish; he will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he?
12 Or if he is asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he?
13 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?”

it's all about meme

I'll post my quibbles with this list of "100 Cult Films" after I answer the meme:


2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988 (1)
Angel of Vengeance, Abel Ferrara, 1981
Bad Taste, Peter Jackson, 1987
Baise-moi, Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000
Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, 1991
Behind the Green Door, Artie Mitchell, Jim Mitchell, 1972
La belle et la bête, Jean Cocteau, 1946 (2)
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer, 1970
The Big Lebowski, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1998
Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982
Blue Sunshine, Jeff Lieberman, 1978
Brazil, Terry Gilliam, 1985
Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale, 1935
The Brood, David Cronenberg, 1979
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920
Café Flesh, Stephen Sayadian, 1982
Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato, 1979
Casablanca, Michael Curtiz, 1942
Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, 1928
Coffy, Jack Hill, 1973
Daughters of Darkness, Harry Kümel, 1971
Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero, 1978
Deadly Weapons, Doris Wishman, 1974
Debbie Does Dallas, Jim Clark, 1978
Deep Red, Dario Argento, 1975
Dirty Dancing, Emile Ardolino, 1987
Django, Sergio Corbucci, 1966
Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly, 2001
Don’t Torture a Duckling, Lucio Fulci, 1972
Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, 1990
Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Aristide Massaccesi, 1977
Emmanuelle, Just Jaeckin, 1974
Enter the Dragon, Robert Clouse, 1973
Eraserhead, David Lynch, 1977
The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi, 1981
Fight Club, David Fincher, 1999
Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith, 1963
Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger, 1981
Freaks, Tod Browning, 1932
Ginger Snaps, John Fawcett, 2000
The Gods Must Be Crazy, Jamie Uys, 1981
Godzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1954
The Harder They Come, Perry Henzell, 1972
Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, 1971
Häxan, Benjamin Christensen, 1922
Hellraiser, Clive Barker, 1987
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973
The House with the Laughing Windows, Pupi Avati, 1976
I Walked with a Zombie, Jacques Tourneur, 1943
Ichi the Killer, Takashi Miike, 2001
In Bruges, Martin McDonagh, 2008
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel, 1956
Invocation of My Demon Brother, Kenneth Anger, 1969
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, 1946
The Killer, John Woo, 1989
Lady Terminator, H. Tjut Djalil, 1988
The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson, 2001-3 (2 of 3)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, George Miller, 1981
Man Bites Dog, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde, 1992
Manos, the Hands of Fate, Harold P. Warren, 1966
The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman, 1964
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975
Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow, 1987
Nekromantik, Jörg Buttgereit, 1987
Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero, 1968
Pink Flamingos, John Waters, 1972
Piranha, Joe Dante, 1978
Plan 9 from Outer Space, Edward D. Wood Jr, 1959
Re-Animator, Stuart Gordon, 1985
Reefer Madness, Louis Gasnier, 1936 (*)
Repo Man, Alex Cox, 1984
Ringu, Hideo Nakata, 1998
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jim Sharman, 1975 (*)
Rome Armed to the Teeth, Umberto Lenzi, 1976
The Room, Tommy Wiseau, 2003
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975
She Killed in Ecstasy, Jesús Franco, 1971
Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven, 1995
Soul Vengeance, Jamaa Fanaka, 1975
The Sound of Music, Robert Wise, 1965
Star Wars, George Lucas, 1977-2005
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Todd Haynes, 1988
Suspiria, Dario Argento, 1977
Tank Girl, Rachel Talalay, 1995
Tetsuo, Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, 1974
This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner, 1984
Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Bo Arne Vibenius, 1974
Thundercrack!, Curt McDowell, 1975
El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970
The Toxic Avenger, Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, 1984
Two-Lane Blacktop, Monte Hellman, 1971
Two Thousand Maniacs!, Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1964
The Vanishing, George Sluizer, 1988
Videodrome, David Cronenberg, 1983
The Warriors, Walter Hill, 1979
Witchfinder General, Michael Reeves, 1968
Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson, 1987
The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming, 1939

On this list I'd replace the fairly mainstream

• Casablanca
• Dirty Dancing (*)
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• The Sound of Music
• Star Wars
• The Wizard of Oz 

with the far more "cultish"

• The American Astronaut
• Jacob's Ladder
• Koyaanisqatsi
• Orlando
• Pi
• Valhalla Rising

, all of which I've seen.


(*) = I couldn't make myself finish watching
(1) = All three versions: Japanese, English subtitles, English dub.
(2) = Seen at the live performance of Philip Glass' new soundtrack for the movie.

another special time

Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel

a mere adjustment of terminology

December 7th, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - a greedy power-crazed cocaine-addicted totalitarian (a.k.a. F.D.R.) feigned surprise when the oil war he and his socialist cronies started was suddenly waged by conventional means, against the will of both the Japanese and the American people...

celebritis

a
sane
world
would
not
find
obnoxious
boors
or
common
prostitutes
noteworthy

now that's progressive!

sorry about your cat

2012 or not?

this is true at least as far back as the war of northern aggression.

obama's great depre.... squirrel!

remember the old crude joke about "athletic supporters"? obama's "job supporter" joke is worse.

does everything he touch turn to... ahem, the opposite of gold? maybe that's what "shovel-ready" refers to...

scifi poster art

star wars & firefly

the barbara streisand effect strikes again!

i never would have known to avoid the burzynski clinic if it weren't for their threats...

something i thought on the way home 5

when was nougat invented?

body count

"fast & furious" seems to be killing people at a faster rate than the iraq war.