January 2011
45 posts
Bonus points to the first editor to write a headline referring to the sphinx and/or its nose in the context of the current revolution in Egypt. Lots of material about riddles, scents, etc.
I would totally loot a state seal.
Fucking awesome:
CNN’s Ben Wedeman, who you should be following on Twitter, reports that he “saw boys” with “a massive seal of the Republic” looted from the State television building. “If this isn’t the end, it certainly looks and smells like it,” he says.
I don’t know a single person who could wear an Obama T-shirt that says “We Do Big Things” and come off as clearly sarcastic about the painful smallness of O’s agenda. Does such person exist? Do there exist examples of said big things we do?
The word “big” is big at least.
“To undermine the BBC World Service is to undermine truth.”
– Labo(u)r member of Parliament getting a little philosophically confused
This is not from the NYT or about Julian Assange but it too is maddeningly maddeningly stupid:
Scientists working on a project sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory now have a forecasting model that they claim can accurately predict civil unrest against foreign governments.
A team composed of academics at Kansas State University and New York’s Binghamton University developed the...
This profile is getting ridiculous
They accuse Assange of being “conspiratorial” and mock that he considered himself a “hunted man.” Imagine that!
Not sure I can make it through to the end of this thing…
OMG the NY Times is run by idiots
From the Keller piece on Assange:
The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the...
Tendentious tendencies
Early in NYT editor Bill Keller’s account of dealing with Assange/WikiLeaks (haven’t gotten that far yet) he writes:
But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.”
...
Dryden (NY) Dairy Day
Straight from their site:
Our 2010 Theme: Cows…Out of this World!
Back by popular demand: Cows in Time Square
I bet this won't be a very good novel.
From yahoo answers:
hi i am writing a novel with vampires in it. i was just wondering why vampires are suppose to carry their native earth with them?
Best answer carefully explains that vampires aren’t real so she can write what she wants and won’t piss anyone off.
More evidence is this question from the same user, which employs an interesting style of capitalization:
How...
“Rahm Emanuel was thrown off the ballot for mayor of Chicago today by an...”
– Ha ha.
Leading indicators, hack marketing artist division
It seems a Very Bad Sign that this describes a piece of easily available stock video:
Euro sign is burning down to ashes then born out of it’s ashes like a phoenix. Hires loopable 3D animation.
Granted, the same folks also have a dollar collapse, a yen collapse, etc. Still, the Euro Phoenix is the most popular of the lot.
OK i think I figured it out: Sargent Shriver was not a sergeant but was a Kennedy, sort of.
Obama’s annoying editorial in the WSJ today makes this point, featured in the subhead by the WSJ editors:
For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste.
The problem with this point is...
I honestly don’t know if this is sarcasm:
“Seattle Post-Globe: We need to monetize, folks! Get #Amazon deals, along with free #Kindle #apps, and get the latest #Groupon coupons without leaving our site
web • 1/16/11 4:26 PM”
Communicating about your uprising via Facebook may work if you’re in Tunisia (though i’m not convinced yet) but it certainly ain’t worth much in a country like the USA where Facebook itself — the owner of your content — has political & economic interests in what kind of regime is in charge. Accounts would surely be closed when the first rocks are thrown. And info would be...
“Perhaps most annoying has been the call for a return to civility. Well, no, I...”
– Doug Henwood says it best
State Senator Joe Zarelli — werewolf →
This article is unfortunately only on the *second* page of google search results for Joe Zarelli. It deserves to be on the first page, so I’m linking it here. Join me, especially if you agree that Joe Zarelli may in fact be a werewolf.
All the details on this and other happenings by the folks at UndeadOlympia.com. They’re doing a great job — worth a visit IMO.
Speaking of which...
I must admit I still find parts of the Cirque de Cliche fairly funny. Other parts are painfully embarrassing, but c’mon now, it was last updated in 1999.
Thanks to archive.org, however, it lives on!
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816034424/www.jps.net/petista/index.html
Best yahoo answer I've come across in a long time
We all know that Yahoo answers is the best thing done since the day they had a small item about the Cirque de Cliche in their Yahoo Internet Life print magazine. I’m not sure what magic makes this service successful, but where else is it unsurprising to come across a long thread about the best vampire song that includes quibbling about whether a given song is *about* vampires or just...
Can you flag a sentence in wikipedia for...
In some legends, werewolves have an aversion to wolfsbane.
Great Intro
Strong way to start a blog:
Welcome to Budget Tidbits.
A choice bit of information is a “tidbit.” Anyone looking for choice bits of information related to Washington state government’s budgeting will find them in Budget Tidbits, from Sen. Joseph Zarelli.
This seems a little too easy
Wikipedia:
Various methods for becoming a werewolf have been reported, one of the simplest being the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolfskin
Who argues this?
NYT front page: “…some in Washington, who argue that Mr Obama has long needed a White House confidant who has the ear of the business community”
Have some people actually assessed thus administration and found they weren’t desperate enough in their pathetic pursuit of business approval? Really?
Am I the only one who thinks this *is* suspicious?
Suspicious Bagel on Plane
A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.
That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.
Now if it were a bagel, cream cheese, and lox, no problem. But keys and a hat do...
“The idea that Jeff Koons would have an exclusive right to make objects in the...”
Let's just get the top ten cliched thoughts over...
This is the largest mass bird death since the Great Depression.
The bird killers — whoever they are — are just like Hitler.
These bird deaths are historic.
The investigators of the bird deaths will give 110%.
Letting birds fall from the sky is no way to honor 9/11.
We can’t let birds fall down dead when our brave young men and women are fighting for freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We...
Do they not realize what an apocalyptic lead paragraph this is? If you’re leading with questions about whether or not an event is apocalyptic…
“(Reuters) - Birds falling out of the sky in the United States and Sweden are freak examples of the kind of mass animal deaths, from beached whales to deluges of frogs, that have unusual but not apocalyptic causes, experts say.”
...
There’s an obvious explanation for all these mass bird deaths: evolution has suddenly given rise to flying cats.
Why can't accountants keep up with razors?
Single-entry bookkeeping came first, and since then we’ve had hundreds of years of double-entry bookkeeping. Wikipedia turns up a flagged entry on triple-entry bookkeeping, but the system sounds obtuse and hasn’t picked up any momentum. Quadruple-entry bookkeeping is unknown, and here in early 2011, quintuple-entry bookkeeping is still not even a glimmer in the eye.
And yet we have...
Well I think my jokes are funny
What’s the difference between Goldman Sachs and Islamic fundamentalists?
The fundamentalists think the purpose of government is to serve their prophet.
Goldman takes issue with their spelling.
Um, gross
Isinglass (pronounced /ˈaɪzɪŋɡlæs/, /ˈaɪzɪŋɡlɑːs/) is a substance obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish. It is a form of collagen used mainly for the clarification of wine andbeer. It can also be cooked into a paste for specialized gluing purposes.
I live 3,000 miles away and I’m sick of reading about artisanal cured pig products made in Brooklyn. Seriously, the whole borough must reek of rancid lard.
Hopefully this year I get to hear all about the home fermentation of vegetables in the Bronx. Or maybe edible insects raised in Queens? Perhaps breads baked in the inferno that will consume Manhattan when Goldman Sachs gets what it...
“A vulture tagged by scientists at Tel Aviv University has strayed into Saudi...”
– Haaretz
A Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll (!) reports that:
“Asked which part of the world they would fix first, the largest proportion of respondents — 36 percent — chose Washington, compared with 23 percent who picked the Middle East and 14 percent who chose Haiti.”
Presumably there was a follow up question where they explained that the word “fix” means substantially...
Day and a half into 2011 and I still don’t understand why the fuck I’d ever scan a QR code instead of just googling whatever it is with the damn ugly code on it.