Saturday, March 31, 2007

That's Just Cruel

Poor Florida Gator basketball star Joakim Noah (son of Yannick Noah, '80s-era tennis star). As if it weren't enough that he's become the subject of thousands of mean-spirited photoshops, now the Thighmaster has done a separated-at-birth on him that can only be described as comprehensively brutal and hilarious.

I Want One, pt. 3

But honestly, who wouldn't? My birthday is Dec. 13, by the way. Hint, hint.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Wayback Friday

Fred probably remembers this moment in 2002, I think the yellow thing was a part of some stuffed animal. I remember Fred being unhappy about it, that's for sure.

Trying to rest today, I've been working like mad and am having a nice month of March, but my body is failing and I need to stay on the couch today if I don't want to come apart completely. Which will be difficult considering how much work there is to do. We'll see what happens.

It may well be that I will need a neck fusion before too long. I really don't want to have to do that so soon after my lower back surgery, but that's probably the way it is. Damn you, extreme sports!

Mmmm Hmmmm

Heavy stuff over at One Cosmos today. Heavy and true:

Now, it seems to me that the left is King Midas in reverse, in that it destroys whatever it touches and reduces gold to excrement, whether it is institutions, countries, cultures, or individuals. I realize this sounds harsh, but I believe it is self-evident, since we can see the disastrous outcome of leftist ideas before our eyes. It's not as if the results are hidden, because whatever the left controls goes through a predictable process of degeneration and decline.

For example, we all know that our educational system is a mess, the reason being that the left has had complete control of it for some 50 years, to such an extent that neither political party can avoid using leftist assumptions to tackle the problem.

I'm guessing that the U.N. probably started out with noble liberal ideals and not completely cynical leftist ones. Perhaps not. But in any event, it was long ago taken over by leftists and has become the biggest and most illiberal institution on the planet. Imagine an even remotely liberal U.N. If such a thing existed, there would be universal condemnation of Iran or North Korea. They would be completely isolated from the civilized world. In fact, any country that sided with them would be tossed out of the U.N. and isolated as well. The big mistake of the U.N. -- which is the universal mistake of leftism -- was having no standards for membership. It is a sick joke that members of the U.N. are given rights and privileges that they would never grant their own people. Among the Saudis, only their diplomats are allowed to vote, drink, and patronize the most expensive blonde hookers in Manhattan.

The left has also controlled most of the major urban centers for the past 40-50 years -- including, most infamously, New Orleans. I frequently visited New York before Rudy became mayor, so I know what it was like when the left was in total control. It's not as if the differences could only be detected in abstract crime statistics and the like. The entire vibe of the city changed. And yet, I well remember liberals routinely referring to Giuliani as a fascist and cretin. Imagine if New York had been allowed to continue sliding down the path it was headed in the early 1990's, with more leftist solutions applied to the problems resulting from leftist solutions. (emphasis mine)


I can't argue with a word of that. Or of this:

Because of the thought-control of the left, one can hardly discuss these matters without being regarded either as racist or condescending, but I think that blacks made America's greatest artistic contribution to world culture in the form of the various idioms of music they produced during the 50 years or so between about 1925 and 1975 -- gospel, jazz, rhythm & blues, soul, and various sub-genres of jazz such as dixieland, swing, ragtime, boogie woogie, bop, hard bop, post-bop, modal, and other distinct variants. Not only is my life spiritually enriched every single day by this art, but it is difficult to imagine what my life would be like without it. It would be such a deprivation.

What happened to it? Why did black creativity take off in the 1920s and continue through the 1960s, only to go into decline after the mid-'70s? Speaking only of the music, how could something so beautiful transform into something so barbarous and ugly within a single generation? How do we explain the devolution from Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg, or John Coltrane to Ludacris, or Dinah Washington to Michael Jackson?

More generally, why did black culture produce such timeless and transcendent excellence before leftists began meddling with their culture? Prior to the 1960s, the black family was known for its strength and stability in the face of adversity, not its fragility in the midst of abundance. I have spoken to many blacks of the older generation (now in their '60s and '70s), and all agree that educational standards have declined dramatically since segregation ended. Obviously, this is not because segregation ended, but because that is when blacks were subsumed into the white leftist educational establishment and designated victims, so that the same standards need not apply to them. This is another fine example of the illiberalism of the left. (emphasis mine)


Some of my closest friends are leftists, and I just don't get it. It's not about feelings, it's about results. Leftism doesn't produce the results any of us want. Isn't that the only thing that really matters in this debate?

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Hell to the No



Holy jeez this chick is spooky. Those really are her eyes, it's not anime or something done with Photoshop. Check her out here, some of those modeling shots are downright creepy as hell.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

But What Do You Do About the Humiliation of Being an Animal Rights Activist?

You've probably already heard about the comically named animal rights lobby in Germany that wants to give an abandoned polar bear cub in the Berlin Zoo a lethal injection to spare it the "humiliation of being treated as a domestic pet." More liberal compassion follows:

The zoo must kill the bear," said spokesman Frank Albrecht. "Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws."

When Knut was born in December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.

But Albrecht and other activists fret that it is inappropriate for a predator, known for its fierceness and ability to fend for itself in the wild, to be snuggled, bottle-fed and made into a commodity by zookeepers.

They argue that current treatment of the cub is inhumane and could cause him future difficulties interacting with fellow polar bears. "They cannot domesticate a wild animal," added Ruediger Schmiedel, head of the Foundation for Bears.

The charity cites a similar case of a baby sloth which was put to sleep after being abandoned by its mother last December in the Leipzig city zoo.


Got that? The "animal protection laws" mandate the killing of this noble animal. Can't you mouth-breathing NASCAR fans see that? Are you so full of McRibs and Twinkies that you can't hear Gaia screaming at you to kill that recently unendangered bear, you Friends-watching, Wal-Mart-shopping, Enquirer-reading Bush voters?

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Too Cool

Another Kircher Society gem, this one about a shepherd who walked from Paris to Moscow on stilts in 1891. It's not the walking 1800 miles in two months on five-foot stilts I find interesting, it's the fact that he had grown up doing that to keep better track of his sheep, and to be able to get through swamps and tall grass. It's kind of ingenious, and check out the skills these French stilt-walking shepherds had:

The Tchangue knows very well how to preserve his equilibrium; he walks with great strides, stands upright, runs with agility, or executes a few feats of true acrobatism, such as picking up a pebble from the ground, plucking a flower, simulating a fall and quickly rising, running on one foot, etc.
Sounds like the kind of fun you'd have if you didn't know what a skateboard was. But still cool as hell. I'd love to see the hotshot stilt kid bust some moves, wouldn't you? The article says the still do stilt dancing today (another thing I'd like to see) but didn't say anything about cross-country stilting.

Super Baby

Guess who used the potty chair for the first time? She was so proud she had to come get me so I could see it. She even refrained from throwing a toy or my wallet into the potty chair's bowl afterward, which I had always assumed would be the case. I'm hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of diapers. It's like Christmas and Halloween rolled into one.

This picture is from her first and probably only Lo Mein experience. She seemed to like it but I think the MSG did her wrong later. Poor thing. She eats everything and we don't figure out until later that some of it turns out to be a bad idea.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Frightening

This will scare the hell out of you. Close the borders now.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Blueberry Head

Not to be confused with Carrot Top, thank you very much. Sabrina loves frozen blueberries as they are not just nutritious and yummy but the soothe sore gums, which is nice when you're teething. They get everywhere and the carpet is a horror show, but we've stopped caring. Parenting is like that.

She's been falling a lot the last couple of days, hard sometimes, and invariably returns quickly to the spot of her most recent injury to get the maneuver she was trying when she fell figured out. Which is a little scary, but I definitely understand. Daddy's girl.

I like this picture because it shows her Doc Savage hairline perfectly. Coolest hair in the neighborhood, I say. Not when Deirdre's around, but I do say it.

I Want One, pt. 2

The newest feline species (or rather the most recently identified) looks like a good house pet. Sure it's a leopard. But it's like a foot long without the tail. I think I could take it, and therefore it makes a good house pet. QEMFD.

It's a good article except for the interviewed scientist's inability to keep from trotting out a bad pun: "Who said a leopard can never change its spots?" What a dick.

Monday, March 12, 2007

If Terry Gilliam Were Alive Today

He'd be doing something like this:



Gilliam is indeed alive but making movies, and great ones at that. Or so I've heard, I haven't seen anything since The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, which was excellent. Time Bandits is good too.

Anyway, he's alive. And this is a collection of .gif clips, some of which I've seen elsewhere, set to a weird song that may have been composed on an Atari 2600 or something Old School.

Forgive Me, Lord

But this is too weird not to post.

Why Not

I'll just repeat what the guy's web site says:

"Clark Sorensen has created some of the most amazing and beautiful urinals one is likely to ever see. Each is meticulously hand built and one of a kind - formed from high fire porcelain and fired to cone 10 (2300° F). These pieces are magnificent works of art but they are also fully functioning vitreous porcelain fixtures that can be plumbed and used in a bathroom. They are made of the same material as a commercial toilet but the similarity stops there."


Well said Clark. I don't know how interesting it would really be to pee in an orchid, or a conch shell, or a pitcher plant, but I'd certainly be willing to try it out.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Watch and Learn

"Climate scientists need there to be a problem in order to get
funding." - Dr. Roy Spencer, NASA Weather Satellite Team Leader


Watch this and tell me if you still believe in so-called "human-caused Global
Warming." Long but worth every second. We're all going to be very, very
sorry we ever fell for this nonsense. It's going to take years, maybe
decades, to reverse the accepted "wisdom" that lefties have been
pushing since the early '90s, and in the mean time a lot of dumb,
expensive things are going to be forced upon us by well-meaning nimrods
who will make a boatload of money from being monumentally wrong about
"Climate Change."

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I found this link at Dan Riehl's place, and he has a fantastic post about it here. It led me to another fascinating thing here:

Enron executives worked closely with the Clinton administration to secure support for the Kyoto Protocol because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a financial windfall. An internal Enron memo circulated immediately after the 1997 Kyoto meeting - and first reported by The Washington Post - shows the company believed the treaty "would do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States."

So Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to reduce so-called global warming. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature Conservancy, whose "Climate Change" project promotes global warming theories.


Why would they do that? Simple; they wanted to sell carbon offsets. You
know, that BS where you pay someone else not to pollute so you can do
whatever you feel like and not feel bad about it? They called it buying
indulgences in medieval times, and it was just as ridiculous then as it is now.

But it's going to be a huge moneymaker. Enron wanted to sell them, and Al Gore is selling them right now. That's what he's flying around and promoting with his movie, his company that sells carbon offsets. It's the biggest scam I've ever heard of, and it's going to make Gore even richer than he is, which is excessively. What a dirty SOB.

UPDATE: What a surprise, Google took the video down. They don't include conservative sites in their search results, so it's no shock that they'd refuse to allow a video that obliterates the idiocy that is human-caused Global Warming. But they can go f*ck themselves:



Suck on that, Google.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Everything You Need to Know about the Media

You haven't seen this story anywhere, have you? Not on TV or Google News, that's for sure. You'd think a guy being arrested for toddler and infant rape and torture porn would be news, but I guess not when it's a former ACLU chapter president. Disgusting on all counts.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Wowza



Man that chick can sing.