Wish-I'd-Thought-Of-That Dept.

[h/t: They Might Be Hipsters]

Quote of the day

From a friend of mine, on Lady Gaga:

It is like someone put Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Yoko Ono in a blender and that is what poured out. I am not so sure that the end product got the best of any of the ingredients.

Why I [heart] Mark Kleiman

Because sometimes, there simply oughta be a law.

Song of the day

With a large tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan...

Maine, the day after

A blogger at DKos nails it.

"Then at one o'clock you're heading out to the county jail to marry Carr the crack addict mother of eight and Blankenship the axe murderer before they send him up to maximum security for a hundred years. Then you've got Welch and Nutt at two-thirty. He's the neo-nazi anarchist and she's the former nun who got booted for schtupping sixteen priests, two bishops and a cardinal."

"Great. As long as they love each other..."

"Then at two you're joining Kettlebaum the porn addict and Ganz the kitten-drowner, and at three you'll unite Smith the deadbeat dad and Browlowski, who chain smokes in front of her kids."

"And then the gay couple at four, right?"

"Oh, no, sir! That's against the law. They're too unstable for marriage..."

Go read the whole thing, it's worth it.

[H/T: Louise, at Pam's]

Image of the day

[h/t: GottaLaff]

No life? Hardly...

There's a how-many-movies-have-you-seen meme floating around Facebook at the moment that begins with the declaration:

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 films, you have no life.

Note that we're never told who's supposing this...

But at any rate. Let's test that assumption.

Assume that you see 85 movies. Further assume that the movies you see average 2 1/2 hours, about as long as the latest Harry Potter installment. (Mini-review: It was good, but as a friend of mine put it, I really don't see what there is about this that inspires such fanaticism...).

Further assume you spend 8 hours per night sleeping, 40 hours per week working, and 3 hours per day in other stuff (eating, commuting, etc), leaving 51 hours per week potential movie-watching time.

Let us further assume your movie-watching career began at age 10, and you are 35 when you take the quiz.

51 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 25 years = 66,300 potential movie-watching hours.
85 movies * 2.5 hours each = 212.5 hours.

So if you've seen 85 movies, you've spent 212.5/66,300 = 0.321% (rounding up) of your time watching movies.

Hardly into "you have no life" territory.

As an aside, it's amazing what you can distract yourself with when you don't want to work....

This Just In (Badly Worded Headline Division)

Man Held in LA in Stolen Violin Case

What is it, some kind of kidnapping? And in addition to stuffing the poor man into a violin case, the case itself was stolen? Is that even relevant? Given what you'd have to do to get someone (even a very small someone) stuffed into a violin case, is ownership of the violin case itself really the issue here?

Today's fun little ditty

Apparently Pat Robertson made a spectacularly silly comment to the effect that if gay marriage becomes legal, then marriage to ducks can't be far behind. Or someone who likes sex with ducks will be able to marry one. Or something. (Last time I checked, animals couldn't enter into legally binding relationships with people, or vice versa, but I never ever claimed to understand Pat Robertson's thought processes.)

At any rate, here's a fun little song about where it all could lead.

Life's little ironies dept.

From this morning's CNN homepage... Check out the poll question, and the sponsor.

I kan too has profundity

This morning's lead article on Salon is an attempt to explain the phenomenon of lolcats to those who have been living in caves the last couple of years. (Obsession with the election isn't a valid excuse, as there were sites dedicated to lolmccain, and lolmccain and lolobama sites up before the election. A lot of them seem to be gone, but some are still around.)

It's an attempt at deconstruction, but it's the most shallow, facile attempt at deconstruction I've ever read, an overly-earnest explanation of how the humor works, how it's actually symbolic, you see, so they're not really cats, they're symbols, all leading to the conclusion (are you ready for this?):

They're people. They're us.

Wow. That's really the best you could come up with? Seriously, anyone who needed that explained to them probably isn't a Salon reader in the first place. The thing I regret most is that reading the article took me about eight minutes, and I'll never get that eight minutes back.

Or, in lolcat:

EPIC FAIL. KTHXBAI.

Snarky Atheist Video of the Day

Why God Seems Nonexistent.

Nothing brilliantly original here, but well-executed.

And check the comments out. Poe's law still holds: No matter how over the top it is, someone will take it seriously.

[Hat tip: PZ Myers]

Some Daily Mencken

I may make this a regular feature, I'd forgotten how good some of his stuff is:

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.

--HL Mencken

Reality Explained

[h/t: PZ Myers]

Not-feeling-the-love dept.

A London Times columnist on the Obama phenomenon:

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

The truth shall set you free, indeed...

Go read this. Then laugh.

[H/T: PZ]

Thumbs up for the Apocalypse!

The Atheist Apocalypse (if there could be such a thing) would actually be pretty cool....

[H/T: PZ]

Fanboys and their obsessions

From xkcd, the coolest & geekiest webcomic out there:




That's what strikes me about the Paul crowd...there's an obsessive element to it. I understand enthusiasm for a candidate, but there's such a strong element of with-us-or-against-us and hero-worship to so much of it. Yes, I have a favorite candidate, who I'm enthusiastic about... But I don't maintain that candidate is without weakness or will be the single-handed savior of American democracy. And whatever is driving his fanbase, it's not well-reasoned agreement with his positions, which are an incoherent mess. (Get the government out of almost everything except national defense and regulating orgasms; economic ideas regarded by most economists as crackpot--and yes, they're based on ideas from a Nobel-winning economist, but it was Nobel-winning economists who brought us the LTCM debacle--a Nobel is no sign of infallibility; and why can't Paul quite bring himself to distance himself from the white-separatist fringe?)

Oh, well. Every election has its sideshow.

Updated ratings

Incidentally, that last post put me over the line, what with all the references to sex and all....

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• abortion (2x)
• queer (2x)
• pain (1x)

The word pain tags the blog as possibly "adult"? Who writes this stuff?

Did I Miss This?

President Doofus is in Australia, for a high-powered economic summit. Naturally, with so many world leaders in the city, security is tight. So tight, in fact, that a TV show was able to drive a limo with someone dressed as Osama Bin Laden to within a few feet of the hotel where the President is staying.

There's a video report at Crooks & Liars. The harrumphing commentator at the end gets my vote for the "unintentionally funny clip of the day" award... Apparently the problem isn't the lax security, the problem is how much they crossed the line in even trying something like this because, well, we're never really told why. Because maybe this makes the president's security detail look foolish? Because it raises questions about the millions that's being spent on security? Because it reveals our government as fallible? Those are all reasons to applaud this stunt, not condemn it. Security that can be breached that easily deserves to be lampooned... Or, in the words of the Australian talking head, "bums will be kicked all up and down the line." Apparently the police really didn't twig that something was out of the ordinary until the actor dressed as Osama got out and asked to see his 'old friend,' and explain what a misunderstanding all of this was...

Funny, though. I can't seem to find any U.S. news outlet that's picked up this story. I could be missing something, I suppose... After all, they'd never suppress a story to help out the Commander Guy or his minions, would they?