Category Archives: Links

Just, you know, stuff

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I have been laying down the deepness for a while now, FSW aside. Between my intense navel gazing and my philosophical ramblings, this blog has been dealing with some really heavy stuff.

I mean, this is fucking ponderous, man.

So I figured that it was about time I just kicked back, put my feet up, popped the top on a cool cool pop, and shared some fun stuff with you guys.

After all, life can’t be all navel diving and portentious pondering.

Even Mister Deep Thinker, me, needs to clear the haze and let the sun shine in now and then.

First up, I would be badly remiss if I did not share with you the hot new feel good clip of the day.

God damn, that kid is funny. He really knows how to crack that comedy whip. His timing, his material, his persona, all very honed and precise and the result is COMEDY, baby.

And this is him at just 14 years old. Imagine how funny he will get when he’s older. He has found a field in which his limitations don’t limit him much, and he clearly plans to dominate it.

Speaking of his limitations, I am amazed at how well he speaks for someone with cerebral palsy. My mental image of people with that disease is that they have one hell of a time getting their muscles to obey them well enough to speak, and when they do speak, it is with a thick and distinctive accent that unfortunately makes a lot of people think they are stupid.

But they are not. They are perfectly normal (or in Jack’s case, brilliant) people trapped in bodies that just plain do not do what they are told. What a terrible fate!

But judging by Jack’s clear speech and lack of the involuntary rolling type motions I associate with the disease, it appears that medical science, possibly in the form of the new anti-spasmodic drugs, have allowed people with cerebral palsy to lead far more normal lives these days.

I am very happy to learn this. Any progress against that horrible disease is a miracle and a true liberation for the millions of sufferers.

And sure, he still needs his mobility device, but it seems reasonably compact and would not be a huge hindrance to mobility, unlike the long metal crutches I associate with the disease.

Go for it, Jack!

Now this next item requires a little bit of a setup.

See, there is this email going around the Intarweb lately. It was written by the president of a sorority called Delta Gamma, one Miss Rebecca Martinson, and it has rocketed her into instant Internet infamy.

Apparently, Rebecca was of the opinion that her sorority sisters were not quite acting properly, and became someone miffed at this. So she wrote a little email note to her sorority pals expressing concern.

I ask you to now click this link and scroll down to the section in italics on a pink background to view the text of her epoch-making little missive. Warning : a very high amount of swearing, including the phrase “cunt punt”.

You now have the necessary information to truly enjoy (and be kind of frightened by) the following.

Now that is how you take an Internet story and take it to the next level. Mike Shannon, our impassioned reader above, is apparently a star of Boardwalk Empire. Never seen the show except for the pilot, so I would not know him.

But I love what he did with Ms. Martinson’s little temper tantrum.

I disagree with all the people calling her the “crazy” sorority girl, though. She seems perfectly sane to me. If she had said “And if we piss of the Sigma Nus, they won’t help us fight the Dog Bats of Planet Zenith in time for the Great Awakening”, I would all her crazy.

But as is, she’s not crazy. She’s just being a colossal bitch. Not the same thing.

That said, I would be willing to accept that she was just having a really, really, really bad day.

I mean, I don’t hold Casey Kasem’s rant against him. Everyone loses their cool sometimes.

Oh, and I simply cannot leave “cunt punt” territory without sharing this with you :

That’s from Run Ronnie Run, a sadly obscure movie from the Mister Show team.

And I think it is bloody brilliant.

Finally, I have to share with you the funniest thing to come out of the recent explosions in Boston.

See, amidst the chaos, the confusion, the terror, the heroism, the speculation, the manhunt, the shootouts, and everything else about the Boston attack was one small, insignificant organization that surely knew from the very first day that big changes would be coming their way very soon.

You see, Boston, like any other modern megapolis, has a lot of sports teams, big and small. And if you have a lot of sports teams, you perforce have a lot of sports team names.

And we all know that many sports teams have had to change their names and mascots and logos in order to keep from offending various peoples and groups.

But never has any team been put directly like a certain semi-professional women’s basketball team with a name you simply will not believe.

Go ahead and guess, then click this link.

Yup. The Boston Bombers. The very phrase now describing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his dead brother. Take a look at their logo :

boston bombers logo

Needless to say, they will be changing everything very, very soon. I am sure that this was a perfectly acceptable team name for many years, and it is only recent events that have rendered it hilariously offensive and inappropriate.

I have not seen someone get fucked by the fickle finger of fate that bad since, well, these people :

And with that, our big bag o’ content is officially empty.

Tune in tomorrow for more of the overwrought and overthought ramblings of my mind!

An entire whack of stuff!

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We have a metric whack of stuff to get through today and I am in a bit of a rush, so let’s jump in.

First off, something that I think is righteous cool : the entire run of 80’s science mag OMNI is available for reading and downloading at archive.org now!

When I was but a budding nerdling with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, OMNI and Discovery were the twin stars of my nerdly world. We got both via subscription (ours was a periodical-loving home), and I would always snatch them both the minute nobody was paying attention and rifle through the contents like I was frisking a prisoner for weapons.

I could never pick one over the other. They were fairly alike, and the differences were subtle. OMNI was a little more populist, with slicker graphics and colorful diagrams and so on, and when I was younger, that made it my favorite because I was an impatient reader back then and wanted everything to be as short as possible. Blame being raised by TV.

But once I got older, I started to prefer Discovery because not only was I more patient, but I was learning more about science all the time and wanted better, more thorough explanations. So I guess by the time I left home for college, I was leaning more towards Discovery.

OMNI always had one thing, though, that kept it in play versus Discovery : fiction. Science fiction. And pretty good stuff, too!

So if I go exploring the OMNI archive, it will be in search of fiction, instead of getting caught up in science that is now absurdly out of date.

Next up, check out this epic Bar Mitzvah invitation :

Now you might ask, how the heck does some 12 year old kid put together something like this?

Well, he kind of had help. As this CBC article reveals :

Jorel’s parents are David Hoffert, a director and music producer with lots of TV experience who also produced some of the Beastie Boys’ earliest tracks.

His mom is Mei Lee, a classically trained vocalist and opera instructor.

Even Jorel’s grandparents got in on the act (in the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ homage), and they have some serious chops too. His grandmother Brenda Hoffert is a former lyricist and music supervisor for the movies, and his grandpa Paul is a jazz musician, scientist and new media guru.

So as you can see, the kid has good genes and a highly supportive family. How many people can say their grandparents did Bohemian Rhapsody with them?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes, he is named Jorel (or Jor-El) after Superman’s dad.

With a name like that, he has to name his first born son Kalel (or Kal-El).

Or at least Clark.

Also, I just would like to say that I think bar mitzvahs are cool. I think every culture needs a coming of age ceremony, so that the young people know exactly when they will be expected to become adults.

Having it at age 12 is a bit too early for modern life, granted.

And now for some good news about a terrible thing.

After a year of inaction and amid RCMP claims that there is “no evidence” in the Rehtaeh Parsons case, this case has finally been solved.

By Anonymous. In under two hours.

And we Canadians are going to have to ask ourselves some hard questions about our justice system, because according to sources inside Anonymous, it was not even that hard.

The four human excretions that raped Rehtaeh and drove her to suicide did not exactly cover their tracks. In fact, they shared pictures of the rape all over the Internet and bragged about it to all of their friends and anyone else who would listen.

That is why it did not take Anonymous long to build a case against them, and it really makes you wonder what the fuck the RCMP has been doing all this time.

Right now, people are going with “massive incompetence” as the excuse for why the RCMP thought there was “no evidence”, but I do not buy it.

The brutal truth is that I do not think the RCMP and Rehtaeh’s community wanted to solve the crime. Everybody knew who did it, but nobody wants to think the golden boys of their town are capable fo doing such a thing, so they were happy to just pretend like it never happened until it went away.

Historically, you can get away with unthinkable crimes precisely because nobody wants to believe they can happen in their world.

And it takes something like this to force people to confront the ugly truth of the situation.

OK, so much for the serious stuff. Let’s end with something fun!

A grandmother in Birmingham, England got the shock of her long life one morning when she woke up to find a fox sitting on her chest, looking down at her.

Yes, that actually happened, amazingly enough. Mary Small, an English grandmother who apparently sleeps on her back, woke up to find a young fox peering down at her.

Obviously, the curious fox meant her no harm, and probably got into the home through some little gap in a wall somewhere, or the like.

Why it was sitting on her chest looking down at her is another matter. My guess is, she snores, and the inquisitive little fox wanted to figure out what the heck was making that awful noise.

Now as you all know, I love foxes, so I would like to think that I would have handled the situation better than Mary did. She screamed her lung out, which is understandable.

But I like to think I would have just held very still (this is a wild animal, after all), and said “Well hello there, Monsieur Reynard.” and seen what happened next.

Probably, it would have led to me getting bitten when I tried to pet it.

Still, that is one heck of way to wake up, is it not?

Only the news

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Well, it’s Thursday, I don’t feel like talking about what went down during therapy (although it was pretty productive, actually) and there’s some stuff hanging around the browser looking impatient and bored, so I guess it’s time for spring cleaning.

First off, hey, let’s argue about guns! I’ll start us off.

First, hey wow, Jim Carrey. Still around. When is the last time he did a movie? I think the last thing he did of note was Mister Hopper’s Penguins, which tells ya something about career trajectory.

I am not a fan. I was, back in the heady days of Ace Ventura, which I thought was hilarious when I saw it in the theater but I am pretty sure I would hate now.

After that, did not have much use for him. The last straw was when I followed him on Twitter, and found his twitter ramblings weird and offputting and kind of dickish.

Much like the man.

But to give him his due, I really liked Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and I Love You Philip Morris, so I can’t poo-poo his career too much.

So that’s Jim Carrey. Let’s talk about the sketch itself, as comedy.

Well, like pretty much everything JC does on his own, it is brilliant in many ways, but marred by that psychotic intensity of his and his tendency to amp everything up way beyond 11. Because of this, even his legitimate satire comes across as more abusive farce than anything else, like he is a Spitting Image puppet brought to life by a well meaning but terminally clueless fairy godmother.

Also, and relatedly, it means that it lacks the most important ingredient in satire, which is accuracy. Satire needs to be accurate to be funny and not just mean. As with libel and slander, its main defense is the truth. Satire works because it exposes hypocrisy and thus resolves the tension in our minds between, for instance, what someone says and what they do, or what they said then as opposed to what they say now.

This resolution feels great, and that, to put it simply, is why satire is funny. But in order to get at that tension, your aim must be true. You have to hit the target dead on so that people recognize the hypocrisy you are satirizing, and then, boom, comedy.

So while I agree with the general sentiment Carrey is putting forth, he does it in a really sloppy and disturbingly tweaked way. So as comedy, the skit is deeply flawed.

OK, so let’s talk guns.

I agree that gun culture in the USA is destructive macho bullshit, grown up men acting like little boys who can conjure up any number of imaginary aliens to justify their building a pillow fort and running around the house goes pew pew pew.

That is why gun culture and paranoia are so intimately linked. They pretend they need the guns to protect themselves, but in reality, they want the gun because guns are cool and make them feel powerful and dangerous and such, and they will invent whatever phantoms they need to invent to justify getting them.

It is also why gun culture and right wing politics are so intimately linked. In general, conservatism is based on anger and fear, whereas liberalism is based on guilt and compassion.

And so the conservative emotional primitivism, where only primal emotions like rage and fear are trusted and anything more complex or nuanced are mistrusted to the point of loathing, works perfectly with gun culture, which is founded on anger and fear.

Truth is, crime is rare. Very rare. Especially in suburbia. That is why that gun is more likely to hurt you than any criminal. It’s not that you are an idiot. It’s just that crime is so incredibly rare that gun accidents can’t help to be more likely.

So I don’t think anybody “needs” a gun for self-defense. That is pure self-serving delusional bullshit, akin to a man claiming he “needs” a new power tool for some project he will never do because he can’t just admit he bought it because power tools are cool and he wanted to play with it for a while.

Or a woman claiming she “needs” more clothes when she has a closet full to bursting with outfits, and in reality, she just enjoys shopping.

That all said… a lot of gun control legislation is pointless and punitive and kneejerk, purely based on some politician’s need to be seen to be Doing Something About It.

So yeah, background checks. That makes sense. How else do we make sure crazy people and felons do not get guns? Also basic licensing. Nothing too damned complicated.

It should be roughly as hard to get a gun license as it is to get a driver’s license. In both cases, we want to make sure that we can trust this person with a dangerous and potentially lethal machine.

Hmm. This blog entry is going to go long.

Next news item : some great news from Ottawa. Stephen Harper’s government is fraying around the edges as some of his MPs go rogue!

Sure, it’s only a few socially conservatives complaining about the Harper government leaning hard on them to make sure they do not have to talk about abortion in Parliament, but still.

Of course Harper does not want to talk abortion. It’s a third rail topic and a real vote loser for anyone right of center. The problem, of course, is that there is only so long you can string the social conservatives along and pretend you care about their concerns without letting them actually get anywhere near getting anything done.

How rapidly Canadians forgot the entire reason the Reform Party came into existence in the first place. It was because socially conservative voters were shut out of Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, and that set the stage for Preston Manning to come along and gather up all those dissatisfied folks and lead them under his banner.

But no, then the same kind of bastard that wrecked the Progressive Conservative party forever, basically destroyed it, started up this whole Unite the Right thing, and somehow managed to convince all those Reform people that this time it would be different.

Well guess what? They are not different at all, are they Steve? Just another bunch of crooked businessmen out to loot Canada and keep it all for themselves and their cronies, jerking the social conservatives along by the nose and basically saying “You have to vote for us because we are the only ones who will even pretend we are going to address your concerns.

Now obviously, I don’t want their concerns addressed either. I am a social liberal, after all. So I don’t feel too badly about these people being jerked around by the Conservatives.

But I do wish they would wise up and split the right again. And who knows, maybe that is coming.

I have said before, the only thing that will take the Harper government down is if enough of his own people are willing to turn against him and toss his ass out on a vote of confidence like they did many years ago to that cunt Diefenbaker.

And Stephen Harper is just the kind of smug prick who thinks he is invulnerable to make it happen, too.

So pray with me, for Canada’s sake, for more rancor, divisiveness, and chaos in the Conservative camp.

What’s left… hmmm… I know there was one more thing.

Oh yeah. KISS is hooking up with Hello Kitty.

For reals, y’all. Click the link. I shits thou not.

Seeya tomorrow folks! with SCIENCE!

Some this n’ that

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Took an extra Quetiapine last night (three total as opposed to my usual two) and so I have slept all day. But it was very good sleep. Restful, relaxing, refreshing. So I don’t mind sleeping that much.

But the fallout is that I am still pretty sleepy, despite it being 8 pm on a day where I have already slept something like ten hours. I am going to try to stay awake at least till my midnight snack, when I will, ironically, be taking more Quetiapine.

Only two this time, though, I think. I do want to be awake at some point tomorrow!

I will be going to OA again with Felicity. We will see how THAT goes.

Tiredness and being in general a little bored with the navel probing lately means I will be sharing links with you tonight. Less of me to think up, and all that.

First off, we have this very funny article from a Jezebel writer about vagina murder.

See, recently, Amanda Bynes, who is apparently some sort of singer/actress type (never heard of her before now and this is not a good introduction to you, little Missy), tweeted the following about rapper and potential vagina assassin Drake :

Man, I love how you can embed tweets now. That looks so classy!

Anyhoo, this bizarre comment prompted Jezebel writer and inquiring mind Erin Gloria Ryan’s brain to go into overdrive with questions, which luckily, she shared with us.

Here are some of my favorites :

8. Is Drake a known murderer of vaginas? If so, why are we only paying attention to his vagina murder when a pretty, rich, famous girl publicly brings it to our attention? How many thousands of non-famous, non-rich, possibly non-pretty vaginas has Drake murdered? What does this say about us as a society?

12. Is there any way that vagina protective services can intervene and perhaps seize temporary custody of Amanda Bynes’ vagina, since she’s calling for its murder and clearly shirking her responsibilities as the caretaker of a vagina?

14. Is Amanda Bynes really mad at her vagina or something? I feel like the vagina must have done something to make Amanda angry with her, otherwise Amanda publicly call for her vagina’s execution.

And probably my all time favorite :

18. What if Drake tried to murder Amanda Bynes’ vagina and it didn’t work because her vagina is tenacious and then her vagina came out of a coma and was like, Now it’s my turn, bitches, and then Quentin Tarantino made a movie about it? I’d watch. No, I actually probably wouldn’t.

I totally would watch that movie.

Damned funny stuff, and brilliant comedy writing. It is the sort of comedy that seems simple, and structurally it is as simple as it gets. It’s just a list of questions in no particular order. Hard to get much simpler than that without resorting to armpit fart noises.

But true genius does not required elaborate structure. Just talent, baby.

Upping the weirdness factor, we have this pretty extraordinary series of bits from Will Sasso (MADtv alum and lad from Ladner, BC), who has taken to the strange new medium of Vine (Twitter’s service for six second video clips… makes no damned sense to me, but whatever) and used it to create a series of six second skits that are as strange and hyperkinetic as they are lemony fresh.

Here they are all in one YouTube video. Warning, as they were originally designed to be standalone short skits, this goes by brutally fast, so make sure you are ready to pay close attention and do not be afriad to watch it a few times over to make sure you get it all.

Kind of like shotgunning a case of comedy, isn’t it? Trippy. If Vine inspires funny people to make incredibly dense and fast-moving comedy like that, I guess it can’t be all bad.

And it is good to see Will Sasso is still around and kicking and making with the comedy.

I love this lemon stuff because he took a very simple gag that any moron can do who has a lemon and a big mouth and turned it into this bizarre and hilarious premise for rapid fire comedy.

And it is perfect for Vine, because it is exactly the sort of thing that would not be all that funny if it was not done at breakneck speed.

Done at Vine speed, I love it to bits. Slower, prolly not. You would see it coming every time.

Lastly, we shall bury the needle on the weirdness gauge so hard that it breaks the damned thing by discussing a very bizarre offering from David Lynch.

And I am not talking just plain old weird. All David Lynch stuff is weird.

I am talking weird compared to everything else he has done. Including Lost Highways.

It is called Rabbits. It’s about rabbits. (It’s also 45 minutes long. Fair warning.)

It’s like David Lynch doing Becket with bunnies. It is very weird and definitely hard to follow, but I quite like it. It is a strange and disturbing trip, but I quite like those.

Maybe it is pleasurable catharsis for my strange and disturbing self. Who knows.

It seems to me that with Rabbits, Lynch completed the trip towards maximum strangeness that he has been on his whole career. Every movie was a little bit weirder, until this, which is arguably roughly as weird as it can set without being completely incomprehensible.

Of course, your mileage may vary on that. A lot of people think he has been incomprehensible all along.

It is also the closest thing we will ever get to a furry movie by Lynch. That is probably for the best. I don’t want to see a bunny Isabella Rossilini getting raped by a bunny Dennis Hopper yelling “Don’t you look at me! Don’t you dare look at me!”

Makes Watership Down seem downright family friendly, doesn’t it?

Cleaning out, again

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Once more I have a ton of interesting stuff cluttering up my browser, so it’s time to clean up.

First off, we have a little naughtiness : the Global Internet Porn Habits database from PornMD.

Via that handy interactive infographic, you can find out what the top ten porn searches are for almost any country in the world, and have fun speculating as to what this reveals about their national character, the repressiveness or permissiveness of their cultures, and just exactly what kind of perverts they are growing over there anyway.

Fair warning, though, it’s quite addictive, and you can easily lose a lot of time cast a prurient eye over the nations of Earth seeing what people there are “into”.

One thing I immediately noticed is that a lot of nations have a very high percentage of gay-related searches in their Top Ten. This makes sense to me, as there is still a great deal of the world in which gay men are isolated, with no way to get in touch with each other that is safe, and for such gay men, Internet porn might well be the only way to express their sexuality.

Certainly, when I was a gay youth in small town Canada, porn was my only safe outlet.

That’s not the fun stuff, though. The fun stuff is country-specific.

Like India. It has, as it’s number 3 search, “Indian aunty”. How intriguing. I know that in Indian families, the “aunties” wield a fair bit of power and influence. Childrearing is often quite communal. Could it be that a lot of Indian men have their sexual awakenings in the care of their Aunties?

South America, on the other hand, forces one to learn a little Spanish or Portuguese. For example, I learned that in Chile, the number 3 search is “Gordos (gay)”, which means “fat”.

So apparently, in Chile, they like their gay men fat. Mental note : visit Chile ASAP.

But, by far, the result that puzzles me the most is “straight (gay)”. Sounds like a classic oxymoron, right? But then I remember that there are gay men with a strong fetish for straight men, and hence there is porn starring supposedly “straight” guys having sex.

Seems awfully complicated and confused to me, and the obvious question, namely “how straight can these guys be if they are boning gay dudes?”, remains. But hey, whatever floats your bobber, man. No judgment.

Then we have this charming little tale of swift justice.

Seems that rowdy Irish group the Dropkick Murphys were performing in New York City when, via a complicated route I will not bore you with, a skinhead fan of theirs got on stage and started doing a Nazi salute.

Whereupon the lead singer of the Murphys, a certain Ken Casey, promptly kicked the ever-loving shit out of him in front of thousands of screaming fans.

Now, this is clearly assault. Casey is clearly in the wrong here, legally speaking. He delivered a savage beating to a man who was no threat to himself or his people. Surely, security could have handled this fellow in a more legally acceptable way.

But good luck, Mister Skinhead, on getting a jury to see it that way.

It’s not technically fair, but if I was the racist jackhole in question, I would not go getting a lawyer and planning to sue Casey and the Murphys for everything they are worth just yet.

It is highly unlikely that you will find much sympathy within the legal system for your poor, beat down, busted up Nazi self.

But maybe you were just doing it to be funny. Maybe you are no Nazi. Maybe you were just drunk.

Too fucking bad. Some shit, you can’t come back from like that.

Then there’s this interesting bit of speculation about the role of single-gender workplaces in rape and the abuse of women.

As usual with Jezebel material, I feel the article is on to something, something valid and real, but does not quite have the right grip on it.

They are right that single-gender environments tend to foster a feeling that the other gender is not real or valid. To a lesser extent, that is also true of any monoculture. Similarity breeds contempt.

But gender unity in particular produces some very disturbing feelings towards the opposite gender. Furthermore, I think single-gender environments actually promote a kind of regression into the pre-adolescent, homosocial, schoolyard mentality that inevitably leads to one kind of action to threats from the presence of the outsider : bullying.

Much of what I have seen and read about the abuse women face in hostile work environments strikes me as pure bullying. We don’t see it as that because we are even more blind to adult bullying that we are to childhood bullying, but the exact same dynamic creates the exact same teasing, tormenting, humiliating, and punishing type behaviours.

Rape, in that context, could be see as the worst form of bullying. It sends the unmistakable message that to the dominant group, the opposite gender is only valued for their sexuality[1], and everything else about them is offensive to the dominant group.

Thus, institutional rape as seen in the American armed forces and the Steubenville case. The homosocial dynamic would prefer none of the other gender in their territory at all, but if they are forced to accept a minority gender presence, they will respond by bullying that gender in an attempt to rectify the situation by driving them away, or at least punish them for disturbing the dynamic.

And if the victim(s) cannot leave (because this is their school, their job, etc), then what you have is the potential for an extremely destructive dynamic that will escalate and escalate until the unthinkable happens and it turns into serious violence or even rape.

This also explains “hazing” scandals. In that case, the offense is not being the wrong gender, but simply being new to the existing dynamic.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. A necessary if reluctant concession to the preteen schoolyard homosocial dynamic forced on the dominant group by adolescence↵

Three more things

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OK. This is it. I got three things that have been sitting around my web browser forever and a fortnight, and it is time to finally clear them out and my browser actually clear of all non science related detritus for the first time in a long time.

As for the science stuff, well, I will get to that tomorrow.

Is it too early for this to count as spring cleaning? I doubt spring starts in February in any part of the world. But what the hell, it’s cleaning, and that’s the most important part.

Call it pre-spring cleaning, then.

Here’s the stuff.

First, we have this proof that Elizabeth Warren was placed on this Earth to put things right.

And all she does is ask the dead simple questions that everyone who is not wrapped up tight in the warm cocoon of lies and illusions and false respectability of the financial industry has wanted to ask for a very long time.

Questions like… “When was the last time any of you actually prosecuted anyone?”

Imagine if instead of financial regulators, she was talking to the head of the DEA, and he had to confess that he had never prosecuted any drug dealers, just negotiated fines that the drug dealers simply paid out of their massive illegal drug profits.

That would be a huge scandal and Republicans would be out for blood and screaming about how the Obama administration is “soft on crime”.

But switch over to the financial sector and suddenly the same thing is okay.

I think this reveals a massive weakness in the Republican position. Deep down, they just do not think white collar crime is as important as drug crime or any other kind of crime, and the reason is as obvious as a rose on grass.

All the other kinds of crime are poor people crime. White collar crime is rich Republican crime, or at the very least, it’s the kind of crimes a lot of their base hopes to be rich enough to commit some day.

And when it comes to policing their own house, they simply do not have the guts to do it. They are all for law and order when it’s all about the fun of punishing people nothing like themselves.

But when it comes to something that might have an impact on them, suddenly they turn into a bunch of limp wristed anarchists full of peace love and granola, saying “oh, don’t let the mean old government step on me, I should be allowed to be free as the wind!”

Yeah, well, fuck you and your buddy too. The law is the law. Comply or suffer. No exceptions.

Moving on to lighter fare, let’s talk about the latest hilarious bad thing to happen to celebrity chef and the man who is to food what Larry the Cable Guy is to comedy, Guy Fieri.

Apparently, the dude is a big deal over at the Food Network, presumably for making three more straight guys watch the network and hence double their coverage of that demographic, but I first heard about this living douchebeard when I heard about the epic bad review the NYT gave to one of his restaurants.

In a true measure of verbal virtuosity, the entire review is in the form of questions. so it’s almost like a Socratic deconstruction of the whole Guy Fieri meme.

And that is fun enough. I have nothing against the guy, but he has to expect that when he more or less declares war on good taste and traditional food criticism, it is going to fight back and it is not going to be a pussy about it, either.

But where the ridiculous became the sublime was when one smart cookie noticed that the domain for Guy’s chain had expired, snapped it up, and put up this masterpiece of surreal wordfuckery in its place.

Go read it all. Read it many times. Each time, you will discover wonders anew. Things like :

Panamania!
Deep fried snake with a printed out picture of David Lee Roth stapled on it and a sparkler stuck into each eye. Served with a side of Bud Light you have to write out of a Hawaiian shirt.

Or this one :

The Blitzmas Beast
Two jumbo Big Gulp Slurpee cups filled with nacho cheese and tied to each other with 25 bacon strips fashioned into a giant bow. Shellacked with Slim Jim style jus, and topped with a dollop of smoked kitchen leavings.

Hilarious. But I think my favorite is this one :

Reno!!!
Popcorn crusted popcorn chicken stuffed inside Guy’s Nuthin’ Fancy Meatloaf and superbanged into a volcano of Tabasco butter. We pour it into a Lucite heel, smother it with our own Jalapeno sugarbrew, and set it on your lap on a neon sign. Served drunk and on fire.
Add a Cinnabon and two more Cinnabons 4.95

Served drunk and on fire. LOL.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to an intriguing fellow, a fellow with the unlikely name of Melton (no, not Milton, Melton) Barker.

From around 1930 to around 1970, Barker made his living in an unusual way. He traveled from town to town, making the exact same movie over and over again, with the exact same script, and charging the parents of their town a fee for having their children star in it.

He would roll into town, make a deal with the local cinema to show the as yet unmade film, then make the movie with whatever kids showed up with the money.

I object to the way the article I linked to above insinuates that he was some kind of con man. He was not. Everybody got exactly what they paid for.

And the town always got to keep the movie, too. Sure, it wasn’t much of a flick, just a corny thing where the kids foil a kidnapper then do a few song and dance numbers.

But just think of what joy that movie could bring to people over the years. It would be like a home movie for the whole town. Think of what a kick the young stars would get out of it when they watched it as adults, and remembered back when.

Imagine what a treasure it would be to have locations in the town preserved on film, so people who miss that old malt shop or the hardware store where their Dad worked can see it right there on the screen.

So no, the man was no huckster. He might have prayed on people’s pride in their child and their town a little, but that’s not fraud, that’s marketing.

And just think of how interesting it is that, somewhere out there, there could be hundreds of versions of the exact same movie.

So far, only 20 of them have been found, but that is still pretty interesting. I would love to see if you could seamlessly splice one into the other, or run them side by side and have them sync up.

All in all, I find the whole thing fascinating, and I applaud Mister Barker’s ingenuity and industry.

If you want to sample his oeuvre, there is a website with all existing prints on it here.

Jotsam and Fletsom

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Still more stuff to share! I am a sharing machine lately. What can I say, the Internet is full of wonderful things and I just feel compelled to share them with you wonderful people.

Plus, not a heck of a lot happening in my life to talk about, and honestly, I am pretty sick of the emotional emesis racket for now anyhow.

I have total faith that I will come back to introspection and gazing at my own entrails soon enough. Until then, let’s just keep those solid gold hits coming.

Besides, my browser is all cluttered again. How does that keep happening?

First off, let’s talk about the mystery of magenta.

No, not this one :

I ask for nothink!

I ask for nothink!

It’s this one :

Or as its friends call it, Purple.

Or as its friends call it, Purple.

You might thing “What’s the big deal? It’s just another color.” But as it turns out, it’s quite special!

Because you see, it doesn’t exist.

I will let this fellow explain.

So there you have it. Purple does not actually exist in the world. There are no purple objects in the world, only ones we see as being purple because our brains decide to slap a label called “purple” onto what is actually a side-effect of knowing something has blue and red but no green in it.

And that, to me, is pretty fucking cool. It immediately makes me wonder if we somehow know this on a deep, deep level, and that is why purple has been the color of royalty for centuries. The usual explanation is that royal purple came about because purple was the most expensive kind of dye and therefore you had to be very wealthy, like a member of the aristocracy, to be able to afford anything purple.

And I am sure that is true. But there might well have been other ways to make clothes very expensive and unique looking. And maybe purple dye was only so expensive because rich people bid up the price.

So maybe purple became a royal color at least in part because it registers in our minds as something very unique and distinct. Something that is not found in the rainbow, something that some part of our mind recognizes, in a primitive way, as not quite entirely real.

And the whole point of royal wardrobe is to make the ruling class look different from everyone else in a powerful and impressive way.

So if you are looking to really make an impression, you might want to start wearing purple.

But be warned, there might be side effects…

Next up we have an intriguing idea to ponder : using airships to deliver cargo to cities up north.

By up north, I mean Northern Canada, of course. All that frozen tundra north of the 40th meridian, the Great White North, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunuvit.

The problem with communities up there is that they are few and far between, and have a low population even where they exist, and so supplying them is very expensive, and the cost of living there is very high.

And that is how it is right now. Right now, what does make it up there gets there via truck along ice roads, which as the name implies are plowed out of the ice and can only bear traffic while things stay good and frozen.

That means, incidentally, that counterintuitively, northern communities face the most hardship during their short summers, when the ice roads turn into nothing but mud.

But what happens in the future, when global warming makes those summers longer and the winters warmer? If the ice roads fail, those communities will be devastated.

Solution : blimps! They ignore terrain completely, can carry a lot of cargo, and modern ones run on very little energy (and that, they can get from solar and wind) and even pilot themselves.

It is an intriguing proposition. The main problem with airships like blimps and so forth is that they are somewhat at the mercy of the winds. But that can be overcome by simply building a certain amount of flexibility into your shipping system.

Getting cargo from point A to point B eventually is a lot easier than trying to get there at a fixed date and time. My guess would be that airship deliveries could be done with a two or three day window. And with modern GPS tracking, you would always know where your cargo was located.

Theoretically, you could even send people to go get it if the blimp gets in trouble.

And if you can build a system like that for northern climes, you might well be able to expand it to work everywhere. Imagine buildings everywhere with little docking stations for robotic blimps on their roofs.

Lastly, I am looking into these Chromebooks that Google is hawking.

They are cheap, effective laptops that run the Chrome OS (which is supposedly blazing fast) and they seem like the sort of thing I want.

Just something to support a web browser, basically. Practically everything you can imagine can be done through your browser. All the games I play are browser games, all the blogging I do is via the browser. The Web is where everything happens.

I am sure I could get used to web mail if I had a reason to do so.

Now obviously, I won’t be getting one any time soon. All my cash will be sucked up by Vancoufur for the near future, including the lion’s share of my next GST cheque. So I will not exactly be coming up with $199 or $250 for a laptop any time soon.

But it is nice to know that there are people making products for people like me, with very low demands of their portable computer.

Just run a web browser that fully supports Flash, and I am good to go.

And I already know the Chrome browser fits the bill.

After all, I’m using it right now!

Still more stuff

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The links, they just keep on coming. I got still more things to share with you, my beloved and attractive audience, and seeing as I do not feel like talking about myself right now, tonight’s the night.

As always, you can rest assured that my never ending quest to rescue myself will continue some time soon. I am just in one of my “off” periods right now.

My tragically complete self-absorption will no doubt reassert itself any day now.

But until then, hey, let’s share Internet together, OK?

Yes OK good! We make happy message time together now. Ya ta!

First off, we have… whatever this is.

I bet it make adorable little squeak sounds!

I bet it make adorable little squeak sounds!

I mean, I am pretty sure it is some kind of bat, but what kind? I have no idea. I am not a… (quick Google for some Latin) vespertiliologist.

( I just made that word up and probably mangled the ancient and eternal language of Rome to do it, but to be fair, I totally failed to figure out what a bat expert is REALLY called. Google fu, you failed me!)

But whatever kinda bat or batlike critter it is, one thing is for sure : it is utterly adorable. I mean really, isn’t that just the cutest little critter ever, with its fuzzy lil face, and big innocent eyes, and ears going different directions?

And judging scale via the hand holding the little fella, he (or she) is itty bitty too. Awwww!

Next up is a rather fun link to highlights from the police blotter of Atherton, California, the USA’s third richest area code.

This area is, not surprisingly, in Silicon Valley in California, judging by the fact that the other areas on that page of the paper like Santa Clara (where I used to live) and Fremont are all Silicon Valley suburbs and exurbs.

Anyhow, the funny part is the glimpse into the exciting life of a police officer in a place which basically has no crime and no real problems to speak of but is full of rich people and their extremely high level of entitlement.

Here is an example :

A pedestrian was reported not to be doing anything strange other than wearing black pants and a white dress shirt while walking at an odd hour.

I like to think that the Atherton police hotline got a series of panicky phonecalls that tracked this bizarre stranger’s dangerous peregrination through Atherton’s peaceful streets.

Just call after call, every resident along a street calling in sequence, breathless with excitement and thrilled with the imagined danger.

I have this theory that people love to have their fears confirmed. So this stranger really did them a favour. They were probably giddy with pleasure that their irrational paranoia (possibly genetic) finally had something solid to chew on.

Or how about this one :

A woman told police someone was at her door and that when she asked who it was, no one answered. Police responded and determined the stranger outside had delivered a package.

Must be one tough burg to be a UPS guy in.

But this is my favorite :

A resident worried that a noisy hawk in a tree was in some sort of distress. When authorities arrived, the hawk was quiet and enjoying dinner.

Is that not adorable? I love that someone was worried about the hawk and called the police about it. I am not sure what they expected the police to do, but their heart was in the right place.

And that last line about him being “quiet and enjoying dinner” really tickles my funnybone. What a charming way to put it.

I picture a hawk sitting in a tree wearing a bib and eating a Lean Cuisine with a knife and fork, smoking a pipe, and reading the paper. The police show up and he looks down, mildly irritated at the interruption to his “me” time.

“Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but can we ask you a few questions?
“Certainly. Is there a problem, officer?”
“Well, someone reported noise coming from this area and we just wanted to see if everything was OK?”
“Oh, I am so sorry. I did make a bit of a fuss earlier but it was just because I burned my tongue on my Lean Cuisine. Guess I should have let it cool down longer. ”
“No problem, sir. Just remember to poke a hole in the wrapped to let the steam out and wait a few minute next time. Sorry to bother you!”

I have a neato imagination, don’t I?

Finally, I have a fun little video that is not quite what it purports to be.

It starts off looking like a potentially real documentary. Then, it seems like a fake documentary done for comedic effect, albeit an oddly subtle one.

But what it really is, I have concluded, is an excuse to show off some fairly well executed video edit type special effects to make it look like there are some seriously insane carnival rides out there and see if anyone will rise to the bait and think they were real.

And I will admit, I was fooled at first, but come on. If you can’t figure out that this could not possibly be real when they talk about a ride that takes 45 hours, you are clearly clue deficient.

I admit, I really love that last one, the Steam Cannon Catapult. I just love the way it looks. There is an elegance to the various tracks tapering off into the sky in different directions that appeals to me.

And I love the line about it causing people to “readjust key goals and life aspirations”. That is some very good comedy writing, because it is so understated and yet it implies so much.

Well that’s it for today, folks! Tune in tomorrow for more of whatever it is that feels like coming out of my head and wriggling through the wires into your brains that day.

But, you know, not in a creepy way.

So many links!

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Nothing really noteworthy about my therapy today and this browser of mine is absolutely overflowing with stuff, and that is really slowing down my computer, so it is time for a full flush, y’all.

First of, Ron Paul is a massive hypocrite.

The one thing this guy had going for him, in my view, was his integrity. He might be a crazy ideologue who believes in a lot of things that are stupid, evil, and crazy, but you got the feeling that he was sincere and meant every word.

But not the words he spoke against the UN, apparently, because now Ross Perot’s crazier cousin has called upon a UN body to confiscate ronpaul.com from its legal and rightful owners just because he does not feel like playing the perfectly reasonable $250K the owners want for it.

Wow. Getting big government to stomp on the little guy to give you what you want for free. That sounds like pretty much the opposite of his supposed free-market libertarian stance to me.

Guess libertarianism is only fun when it means you have more money. When it might cost you money, it is Big Government time.

Just goes to show that American libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt.

Next up, this interesting piece from Jezebel.

Apparently, on the show Girls, they dared to have an episode where the average-looking character Lena met a rich, handsome guy who thought she was beautiful and they had a fab date together.

Bravo for them! But what makes this truly television worth doing is that it has brought all kinds of ugliness to the surface where people think the show is “unrealistic” in supposing a hot guy could ever fall for someone average, and some people are even asking if the whole thing was a dream sequence because in their minds, this kind of thing just cannot happen.

And the intriguing thing is that this is not all coming from horribly sexist men. No, most of this flack is coming from women, ones who presumably think of themselves as feminists but who are quick to support the notion that a woman is worthless if she is not good looking when it happens on TV.

In TV world, everyone who matters is beautiful, and everyone else is background, and maybe normal people hook up just for laughs now and then, but the cardinal rule is that beautiful people never, ever, ever hook up with normal people.

Not of their own free will, anyhow.

So bravo twice for this Girls show. Obviously, this episode is stimulating a very necessary discussion about television and lookism and all that nasty business.

And speaking of the beautiful people, how about this video about the women of LA?

Also got that from Jezebel, where they correctly grokked that there is something off about this video but lacked the subtle understanding of the male psyche to really understand it.

They are right to call out these guys for being shallow for not being willing to date the fat chicks from the valley or the hairy Persian girls. Ignoring the ones who are not model/actress pretty is just as shallow as them ignoring you if you are not rich, boys.

But what I feel is truly going on is that our hero comes to a place with so many gorgeous women, all on the make (because that’s Hollywood, baby) that he just can’t believe that absolutely none of them are interested in him. Somewhere in his male mind, his standards just went through the roof, and he and his two can’t-get-laid friends have been blinded by beauty and lost all sense of proportion.

Obviously, they need to get their head out of the clouds and their hands out of their pockets and look around for other people who look like them and who also can’t get the beautiful people.

And just remember, nobody gives a fuck what funny guys look like… if they are successful!

And now for the token Valentine’s Day content. (No I didn’t forget, I just don’t care. )

But because this is me we are talking about, it’s not just about love.

It’s also about BRAIN SCIENCE! w00t!

I am particularly caught by the idea that OCD might be related to low serotonin levels. Perhaps OCD should be added to my mental list of “all the ways that the same chemical imbalance that causes depression can manifest in behavioural problems”.

After all, all the little compulsive behaviours associated with OCD have one thing in common : they stimulate the pleasure center of the brain. That’s how our brains reward us for following our instincts to clean, or follow superstitions, or what have you.

When an OCD sufferer gets caught in their obsessions, perhaps what is really going on is that they are stimulating their brains to release more serotonin until they feel “normal”.

If so, that seems like a particularly cruel self-medication trap.

Finally, OMG, a video web meme that I really like! Finally!

It is called the Harlem Shake, and here is an example.

Basically, they all use the same sound clip, and start off with someone dancing alone, then at the point where the deep voice says “Do the Harlem Shake!”, it cuts to the same place but full of people dressed up crazy and dancing like lunatics.

And I love it so, so much.

I mean, check this one out :

Those army people know how to party the fuck out. I just love how this meme taps into people’s deep down desire to just be as weird as they possibly can be.

That is what makes me love it so. It is like every video is this magnificent explosion of colorful, enthusiastic nuttiness of just the kind that I adore.

This one wins the attendance award :

Far fuckin’ out, man.

But this is probably my fave because of location.

That is to say, both that they did it in a subway car, which appeals to my desire to make boring locations into something magical, and that it is from Canada.

And has what kind of looks like Samantha Bee in a cow costume and a guy wearing a pixelated head of our loathsome Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

Keep letting your freak flag fly, folks!

A smorgasbord of awesome

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Yeah, I know “smorgasbord” has some of those O’s with the slash through them. But I am too lazy to look up the alt codes to put them in, OK?

Anyhow, Facebook hath rained down many riches today, and so it is time I git me to sharing them!

First off, an amusing story from Australia of a seventeen year old boy pretending to be a doctor.

And apparently, they never got Doogie Howser MD down in Australia, because they reference Catch Me If You Can and even Doctor Who (??) but there is no mention of the Doogster.

Anyhoo, seems this mysterious boy has been dressing up in scrubs and a stethoscope and roaming the halls of various Australian hospitals looking at charts and even prescribed drugs to one 12 year old girl, which is very wrong in at least two obvious ways.

Sounds like an interesting young fellow. I am hoping that he just really, really, really wants to be a doctor some day and is doing this out of an excess of zeal, and that he will make a very good doctor someday and this is just a little overabundance of enthusiasm in an otherwise good kid.

That would certainly make a better story than some asshole just seeing what he can get away with.

Then there’s this hilarious example of American logic : in response to a killer nanny who killed two kids in her care, New York City moms are looking to hiring female Navy SEALS as nannies.

Sure, that makes sense. Why have your children killed by an amateur when you have them more efficiently killed by a professional? That;s the way to protect your kid from killer nannies… hire only nannies trained in the are of killing!

That is such an American way of handling something that it is almost adorable. No matter the problem, Americans cannot grasp any solution that does not involve more force.

That is why, in movies, they can never believe that shooting the monster will not work. Shoot it! Did it work? No, it’s still alive. Then… shoot it more! No? Well, have you tried shooting it? Look, shooting always works! Just keep shooting!

I am sure there is a point about the NRA to be made there, but forget it.

Then there is this clip. It has been around forever, but I figured I would throw it in today just for the heck of it.

This is when you completely abandon all sanity and turn the awesome up to eleven.

I really want to meet the guy who wrote that script, because holy shit dude, you have taken it to the next level times ten. It makes anything Michael Bay has squeezed out of his brain sphincter look like My Dinner With Andre : Unplugged.

Hey, if you are going to go crazy, go all the fucking way. That’s my motto.

Then there’s this intriguing bit of technology :

The final product looks pretty awful, honestly, and not my idea of Christmas Dinner at all. They should just be up front and say it’s stew. I like stew. If they called it “Christmas Dinner Stew”, and it turned out like that, I would not be disappointed or surprised.

As is… eww. Still, I am intrigued by the self-heating can technology. It is one of those things that has been promised by science fiction since the 40’s but it never quite seems to be invented in a way that catches on outside army surplus and camping supply stores.

I suspect the problem is safety. Heating stuff up via some chemical reaction is easy enough, but doing it in a way that is not too dangerous to be released upon a world full of idiots is not so easy.

Still, I bet that stuff is fantastic for camping.

To continue our arcade of video clips, here we have Walter Cronkite (I so want there to be a mineral called Waltercronkite, one that is very stable and reliable) introducing us to the home office of the future as imagined in 1967.

Isn’t retro futurism fun? I get the feeling we can learn a lot about humility in our own predictions from looking at visions of the future past.

Anyhow, what really strikes me about that clip is just how old the dream of telecommuting is, and just how ridiculous the idea that “some day we will all work from home” has been this whole time.

Not everybody has an office job, you know. A lot of people have jobs doing actual, physical things.

And there is a lot to be said for being in the same room with people. We have had the technology for widespread telecommuting for at least a decade now, and yet it is still fairly rare.

Maybe because it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth?

And finally, it has been a while since I gave you all a dose of WTF Japan, and this video should fix that right up for ya.

Waddy Fug, man.

OK, technically, this might not be Japanese in origin. Sure, the instructor is a Japanese girl with a Japanese name, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole thing is Japanese.

But what the hell, let’s pin it on them anyhow. WTF, Japan? Seriously.

Now obviously, this video is completely insane. You know that when you first see this check with the clearly fake Popeye arms. But what is driving me crazy is, how the heck did they do the poodle… things?

Because there are clearly actual, live poodles involved somehow. At least, the heads seem to be those of actual dogs. Yet just as clearly, the rest of the poodle… things are people. No dog could be trained to move like that.

And yet, the poodle… things are clearly shorter than our no doubt petite Japanese lady. This suggests to me the frightening possibility that what we are seeing is children in poodle costumes with live poodles on their shoulders, doing the exercises I assume by rote or by audio clues or both.

It could also be some sort of video compositing, but if so, it’s done seamlessly.

Taken as a whole, it has the air of the product of the singular vision of a borderline personality disorder Japanese lady with rich parents and a disturbingly childlike view of the world.

I hope the dogs are OK.