Double Flee A: May 2007

another day, another wtf

The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

things i do to piss people off that no one notices

Turn off my blinker halfway through a blink.

Pronouce Sherlock Holmes "Sherlock HOMES".

Pretend not to have heard of lame internet memes like Jib Jab, when of course I have.

Everything on this blog.

Pretend not to know difference between Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and (I just added this to the repertoire) Harry Potter.

Quote The Big Lebowski.

These Japanese chef's knives are expensive. Here's pictures and video of how they're made.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, by a guy who is going to roast in a painful hell while all the Christians laugh it up and high five each other in mansions made of gold forever and ever. Fuck science.
Fortunately, some people who can REALLY be trusted opened a creation museum in Kentucky, and here's a photo essay of it.
Alternately, here's something on the subject that's actually fun to read: THERE'S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO ESPOUSE, PROFIT FROM, AND BELIEVE IN UTTER, UNADULTERATED CRAP.

And here's a page of a lot of great photography, lots of which is not safe for fascist workplaces or people who hate nudity and therefore themselves and everyone else.

campbell's tomato soup possibilities

many good ideas come from china

China has sentenced the former head of its food and drug watchdog to death on corruption charges for accepting bribes in return for granting approvals for hundreds of medicines.

link

I spend many hours a week alone in a room turning screws, so I have lots of time to listen to things. Lucky for me, there's never been a time as good as now for being in this situation. Many wonderful shows abound in the cybersphere, and I'd be happy to send you a OPML of my many wonderful sources if you asked me to. (I beat the dead horse --please take it! here! it's good, you'll see!-- because I can't believe how much more I enjoy my day-to-day life because of what I get to listen to. Whatever commentary you snidely infer about what that says about the smalleness of my day-to-day life, there's no arguing against that the radio's a sewage-flooded wasteland in Florida.)

But here's one program you don't have to ask for! It's great great great, and if you want to develop a crush on a science chick, listen to episode 34 about the earth-like planet that was recently discovered.

They talk about what we know about the universe and how we know what we know. That's great! Now the next time a mouth-breather recites narcoleptically that the universe isn't 13.7 billion years old cause that ain't what the BAHbul says, you can tell them the four different ways it has been determined that it is. And so, so much more.

(Really, listen to #34, even if you don't listen to the other ones.)

Hearken! Astronomy podcast!

hilarious

Former White House Chief of Staff, Andy Card, receives an Honorary degree from UMass Amherst:

(You're not going to see this in the liberal media.)

if this is real I want it

Ubuntu satanic edition

Dinosaurs frolic with Adam and Eve at creationism museum

guest post

nacho sounds off on everybody's favorite space epic...

Star Wars: Thirty years of successful marketing

"When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things."

I was once like you. The fantastical universe created by George Lucas fascinated and amazed me. I bought all the plastic crap I could and watched the movies on VHS until the tapes fell apart. I stared at things and concentrated, convinced that I could somehow access the Force. I loved it so much.

This was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I went to school, I attended various weddings and funerals, and learned that only in a magical fantasyland could the people you love die and then come back to visit you in a spectral form that only you could see.

In school I learned what marketing is. I learned that if someone thinks they can generate revenue by doing something they will do it, examples:
Prostitution
New Coke
Ewoks

Why could I never get enough Star Wars? Because no one could ever get enough money.

Thirty years ago George Lucas made Star Wars and made a lot of money. It is still a great story, but it is also a very 70's story. The 1970's parts get over looked by the rabid fans who grew up ignoring that the Empire is the Nixon administration, the Jedi are New Age Zen Buddhists, Han Solo's sideburns, and the timeless, terrible dialogue. To quote the real Han Solo, Harrison Ford, "George, You can write this shit, but you can't say it."

And the ground breaking special effects? Are you talking about the fake space ships or that Darth Vader and Chewbacca are clearly guys in suits a la Robot Monster? Once again time has not been kind to Star Wars. Did you ever watch the original King Kong? It was a blockbuster. People loved it. Today it looks so fake and ridiculous that it is hard to believe anyone could have watched it and taken it seriously.

Star Wars an epic for the ages? Not likely. Did you ever watch your grandfather's Buck Rogers serials or watch your Father's favorite Roy Rogers movies? Of course not, they are hokey and dated.

And the next generation of dorks? Well, its pretty clear that they're are going to explain to you that you are a Muggle or a Woggle or however it is the Harry Potter people in capes refer the Star Wars people in capes.

It is sad to realize that a whole generation has been deluded for thirty years into thinking that corporate crap equals something worth caring about, but like all sad realizations it's time to grow up and accept it. The bad guys win, no good deed goes unpunished, and there never was a galaxy far, far away.

misheard lyrics = funny

lolhog

holy shit

I think I've officially made my last foray into the woods. Ever.

dead: giant hog in alabama

every reason I can come up with for using google's "safesearch"

wingnut gallery

Bush’s ratings will never drop below 25% for a reason

essay

The Christian right fears pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, which it sees as degrading, corrupting and tainted. For many, their own experiences with sex -- coupled with their descent into addictions and often sexual and domestic abuse before they found Christ -- have led them to build a movement that creates an external rigidity to cope with the chaos of human existence, a chaos that overwhelmed them. They do not trust their own urges, their capacity for self-restraint or judgment. The Christian right permits its followers to project evil outward, a convenient escape for people unable to face the darkness and the psychological torments within them.

The Christian Right's Fear of Pleasure is Our Greatest Threat to Choice

I found this photography of young people transportive.

some people will believe anything

worker

Cartoons:
Bunny Kill 1
Bunny Kill 2
Bunny Kill 3
Bunny Kill 3, part 2

these are the things that make it hard to be cheerful

Moe's sucks

We don't have Chipotle down here, we have Moe's, a carefully mediated restaurant experience which I will now, with my usual style, flash, and overpowering air of morbid disappointment, explore the demerits of.

Number one, the food's not as good. Not even close. The salsas are sedate compared with Chipotle's hot and have little to offer but tomato flavor. If the situation of this blog were far more lifelike in many ways, I'd drink some to prove to you how weak it is. This blog would have to be really different, wouldn't it?

Number two and second-most obnoxious, the menu is a train wreck. I hated even looking at it, much less saying the words that would get the food to my mouth. The tacos menu alone offers The Full Monty, The Other Lewinsky, and The Ugly Naked Guy. Now, silliness once you've earned it I can understand, like if your barbecue restaurant in downtown Philadelphia has been serving it up awesome for fifty some-odd years and you want to call a dinner the Fat Guy Special. But everything on the menu? And it's all part of the "flavor" of the restaurant's ambience? All I can experience under these conditions is what I imagine brought it to exist in this way: a board room full of guys in power ties thinking outside the box. Maybe they just got back from a Tony Robbins corporate retreat. I literally had to employ a breathing technique to restrain myself from walking out of this place for that reason alone. But because of what they make the employees do, I found a new center within, and awarded myself the dragon belt of the serene Zen master. On to that.

Number three and the kicker: every so often, maybe every two or three minutes, the entire staff has to shout "Welcome to Moe's!" Here's how it works. Someone, I'm guessing an overachieving (underachieving?) assistant manager, will initiate the "Welcome to Moe's", then the rest of the crew will shout/say it too. And this, I guess, is how you're designed to feel welcome, appreciated, and important when you go to Moe's. What is the ideal customer thinking here? "Whoa, I just wanted a taco and now THIS? Aw-fuckin-RIGHT!! I'll take the Lewinsky [snort] with no sour cream if you know what I mean!"

According to my lovely and perceptive wife who went there this afternoon, the crew's interest in saying "Welcome to Moe's" managed to sound more like "I want to kill myself". Well put. There's nothing like a stinging corporate mandate to get the morale up. I'd do it like a zombie too, both for myself and for whatever customers felt that something was extremely wrong with this entire scenario, which when you go to Moe's, there undoubtably is: "Welcome to BRRAAAINS!!"

P.S. If you're from Moe's corporate and reading this post that tells people how shitty your company is, I can be bribed to remove it, but not with gift certificates.

funny

Cleavage filtration is apparently
The Dees Nuts difference.

thanks, Loretta

During certain songs I have synesthetic visions of a certain scenarios, and thereafter it's as if I've actually seen them, such is the transposition of the imaginary into memory right down the aisle from "actually happened" and right next to "movies I've seen". (And above the marshmallows! That was a joke! Ha!)

This morning I was listening to the country classic "don't come home a drinkin' with lovin' on your mind" by everyone's favorite coal miner's daughter, and I imagined setting different videos to it. I quickly decided that the most interesting thing that could be done would be an intimate portrait of alcolohism and domestic abuse. In a yellow family room mom's bouncing a baby, a toddler rolls around on the floor, and a child runs by. A hastily folded blanket, a colorful worn toy, a coiled telephone cord, maybe a pet. The mother is singing along with the words to the song, generally pleased at some level about the statement about what she will and what she won't put up with. Across the room the front door swings open violently and a man staggers in yelling, gesturing, and knocking shit over and beats the hell out of her. He passes out, she crawls, bruised, to the children and puts them to bed.

It would be a great video in many ways, not least because it forces those unable to imagine it for themselves to recognize that the sassy woman image is entertaining only because life isn't funny and reasonable and the underdog usually doesn't get her say no matter how right she is; semi-civilized life springs meanly from chimp fangs, power and pain and the effects of alcoholism and violence are both more immediate and lasting than satire or even defiance, and life is, if nothing else, brutal and senseless. Won't sell like a fairy tale, but you can't beat it for substance. Pardon the execuspeak, but I'm thinking anti-disneyism as a general theme.

The modern counterpart to this song is one by american idol winner Carrie Underwood, about how she tears up her man's truck when she finds him a-cheatin'. The video to that should consist of him catching her doing that and beating the hell out of her. Irreversible style. Or at least there ought to be an "alternate" video. But who has time for all this crap?

Hey, guys who drink too much! Am I right, ladies?

person in reagan mask runs for president

some pictures

Clearing off the ol' desktop:

disturbing

Want to see a guy cut his dick off? Here ya go! Not safe for anyone.

no more please

Uncle! I'm sick of the duct tape jokes.

They've been going on for way too long and they never change. The duct tape joke isn't even a joke. It was last week when I heard some annoying morning radio deejay mechanically mouthing that "duct tape holds the universe together" that I realized something had to be done. No one including him thought it was funny, and after he said it there was a period of stunned silence; not the kind that merited a discussion among those present, but the stunned silence of those who stagger, brain-dead and zombie-like, from one stunned silence to another, and mis-refer to that succession of addled, arrested apprehensions as a consciousness.

Not amusing in the least, it was ostensibly juuust semi-tolerable enough to occupy three seconds of his, my, and everyone listening's, life. But I don't want to live under the sick black cloud of informational complacency. It's not that I'm a comedian and demand more from humor, it's that I'm a human being who places more value than that on my life, and it's self-evident to me that any amount of time is too much to tolerate this idiotic shit. The duct tape joke is the conversational equivalent of road noise, of shave-and-a-haircut, of a dog fart.

Feel free to comment on other tired associations.

strange

The top 20 searches leading to this blog this week, according to google analytics:

loser at the battle of chalons a.d. 451
loser at the battle of chalons, a.d. 451
loser at the battle of chalons ad 451
battle of chalons 451 loser
vector watchmaker's lathe
crossville tennessee treehouse
loser of the battle of chalons, a.d. 451
loser at the battle of chalons in 451 a.d.
loser at the battle of chalons 451 ad
loser at the battle of chalons, a. d. 451
loser at the battle of chalons 451
girl+siamese
hermaphrodite jail
japan "i hit a parked car"
loser at the battle of chalons in 451 ad
"she lit a marlboro"
game flee
whats the meaning behind the german 99 red ballon song
1-800-wet-tits
piaget polo tourbillon relatif price

Nothing's the same once you're exposed to the flash tub.

More recreational drug information than you can shake a psychotic episode at:

Erowid

(I'm high on life.)

essay: the semiwarriors

..."semiwar", a term coined after World War II by James Forrestal to promote permanent quasi mobilization as the essential response to permanent global crisis. A man who saw demons everywhere, Forrestal was convinced that he alone grasped the danger they posed to the United States.

so long asshole

A toast! Jerry Falwell is no more! It's so wonderful it kind of makes me cry.

The overdue absence of this hateful piece of shit from the world makes my week. (If Swaggart or Robertson also die I'll be forced to party so hardy it might mean missing work.)

Reason numer one million not to believe in heaven: this guy presumably thought he was going to go there.

good samaritan

This woman was heartbroken after discovering my marital status (who wouldn't be) but I convinced her jumping over the rail wasn't worth it:

Not only that, but I'm providing a link to the scandal map, an interactive world of deceit in our nation's capital.

But wait, there's more! You'd think I'd let well enough alone after fighting the crimes of suicide (insurance fraud, haven't you ever seen Fletch?) and the horrors of politics, but I'm also listening live to the police scanners in various cities. Miami's my favorite. The heat makes 'em crazy over there. You can too, at Mel's Garage.

I don't particularly like death, but I do like when things that don't usually go together are combined for comedic effect, even if one of them happens to be death. When Tammy Faye is on her deathbed with a wasting disease, it's almost as if god didn't like her after all.

Reuben Studdard has really let himself go.

if tickling makes you laugh

Is it funny?

why didn't i think of that

patriotic website!

I rule

I played one of "The 25 Most Exquisitely Sad Songs in the Whole World" at my wedding.

go jesus, it's your birthday, ho-oo

If you worship Jesus Christ but by doing so mean this guy, I'm pretty sure it doesn't count. You let him into your heart and all that happy shit, but do you still go to heaven? I don't know! The theological implications are staggering!

game time?

An unnamed senior administration official summarized Cheney's message to troops in Iraq: "We've got to pull together. We've got to get this work done. It's game time."

I can barely bring myself to point out something so obvious but in blog-land we make sacrifices: it's game time all the time when you're a dishonorable, draft dodging, war profiteer piece of dog shit like Dick Cheney. Country is a game, politics is a game, making money is a game, pissing away the lives of people braver and dumber than you is a game. Dick Cheney and the entire administration are worthless and their necks should be snapped by Jean-Claude Vanne Damme, because his name is French and it would be hilarious to watch them get beaten to death for their crimes against my country. And look at how dramatic he can make it look!

ding dong the wicked witch got fired

Sad clown James Lileks has been removed from the backfence column. "Gee guys, you didn't have to hit me" column here.

In the terse yet apt words of TBogg: something had to give and something gave. Supplementary reading on the subject available here.

government by fiasco

Oh, just the usual:
Last September, White House Counsel Harriet Miers asked if the US Attorney who was investigating the Republican Chairman of the House Appropriations Commitee, could be made to resign. A month later Debra Wong Yang did just that, and accepted a $1.5 million signing bonus to become a partner in the law firm which was defending the target of her former investigation.
puke

Dick Cheney vindicated!

Patton Oswalt made me laugh.

The glib Gin and Tacos points us to the Nelson report (which is timing out on me), which apparently has it that GW's old texas cowpokes hardly recognize their old buddyroo, so he's going to bomb Iran, or something like that. I just wanted you to look at G&T, really.

As I was going to sleep last night I had a memorable thought. Normally I forget those thoughts and wake up thinking they were really good, then on the rare occasion I remember them, they were something like "If we could only find a way to make cotton candy with vitamins everybody would be a winner!" Last night my final thought was less silly then that. It was this: if any candidate for president said that if elected they'd lock Rove and Bush and Cheney and the goddamn young republicans they appointed to positions of power across the country, like in NASA, the NSA, etc. up and throw away the key, I would quit my job and devote my life to campaigning for them. And when I woke up, I still thought that sounded like a good idea.

Tis Thusday, the day I work late. So if you want to steal stuff from my apartment don't try it right now when I'm normally at work. I'm here and will catch you. You wouldn't find much sellable stuff. We don't have a giant tv. We have a computer that doesn't do anything, a laptop that does (feedreader downloads attachments automatically, score), a stamp collection, a letter opener collection, a support the troops magnet collection (I have to show you a picture of that sometime. It's great.), assorted watch tools that are useful once per year to someone like me and for other people never are, and my bobblehead collection, shot glass collection, and some broken stuff I can't bring myself to throw away.

Tonight at work in addition to the walk-ins I'll overhaul a ladies' rolex, a breitling, and hopefully I'll have time to clean an antique ladies' bulova. This thing's tiny. Heirloom watches work their way toward me like kidney stones, encountering resistance the whole way. It moves from a drawer to a counter, maybe to a different drawer, back to the counter, and eventually to get fixed. I give people business cards and tell them to put the card next to the watch.

let's go bowling

sweet relief

It's as if I've been sitting in a hot, stuffy room in a heavy coat and I get to take it off and step out into the fresh spring air. A serious study of right-wing comedian Bill O'Reilly's rhetorical shenanigans in "the no spin zone".

...O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. I hope he freaks out about this and I get to see video of it. What a tool.

lemme try something

I'm trying to hotlink to a skeery christian video at WFMU.

If it doesn't work or quits working, you can go watch it here.

It's not scary for everyone though. If you're one of the GOOD people who gets mansions and robes made of gold and silk, one of the righteous, decent few who are only behaving themselves so that they can get rewarded for it forever and ever, you're going to like this a LOT. It's got a singing midget that's just as crazy as you are!

me too man!

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/mefi

support our bible, assholes!

If you click it it gets bigger.

Double Flee A

Thursday

another day, another wtf

Wednesday

things i do to piss people off that no one notices

Tuesday

campbell's tomato soup possibilities

many good ideas come from china

Sunday

hilarious

if this is real I want it

Saturday

guest post

misheard lyrics = funny

Friday

lolhog

holy shit

every reason I can come up with for using google's "safesearch"

wingnut gallery

essay

Thursday

some people will believe anything

Wednesday

worker

Monday

Sunday

these are the things that make it hard to be cheerful

Saturday

Moe's sucks

funny

Friday

thanks, Loretta

person in reagan mask runs for president

some pictures

disturbing

Thursday

no more please

Wednesday

strange

Tuesday

so long asshole

Monday

good samaritan

Thursday

if tickling makes you laugh

Wednesday

why didn't i think of that

I rule

go jesus, it's your birthday, ho-oo

game time?

Tuesday

ding dong the wicked witch got fired

Sunday

Saturday

government by fiasco

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

sweet relief

lemme try something

me too man!

support our bible, assholes!

retina barbecue

eustachian justice league

many moons

toys