Good Choice of Role, Bad Director

No more jokes as Borat turns war protester

THE creator of Ali G and Borat has been persuaded by Steven Spielberg to move from comedy to serious politics by playing a hippie opponent of the Vietnam war.

In The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Sacha Baron Cohen will portray Abbie Hoffman, a figure from the 1960s counterculture who used a series of pranks to campaign against the war. Baron Cohen is expected to be paid about £3m for the film.

Pinhead Size You Say?

Review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism

He who smelled it dealt it.

The Season to be Jolly

Quoth the five-year-old girl:

I'm crying Christmas lights instead of tears.

Things Were Different Then

I really liked Busby Berkeley's stuff until I understood the depth of his commitment to waterboarding.

Attention Conservatives!

Case in point.

Gee whiz, I gotta mention Frank Burns here so I can Google this again.

The View from Below

The View from Above

Billions of New Money!

Here's hoping the currency they choose is Yapese.

The Rudy Thing

Saw this at Atrios. Poor Rudy. It can't be easy being a fucking nut and knowing that whoever's going to take your place is another fucking nut.

Evel Knievel is Dead

Bye Evel.

Below, a small human dressed as a pig ushers Evel across the dread threshold.

Guaranteed Funny

I'm not kidding.

For God's Sake Stop Being Such Fucking Asswipes

It's not as if a whole lot of assholes aren't named Mohammed already. It's a cute cuddly teddy, which is guaranteed to be more cuddly than nearly everybody on Earth.

If this whole $100 laptop business helps kids find solace as Klingons and furries, well the world could use a few more of those kinds of losers instead of the religious kind.

What a Worthless Prick Andrew Sullivan Is

Shorter Andrew Sullivan:

We can only wait in anticipation for the statistical measure that proves niggers are stupid.

I Can Has Sexier Don Surber

The Challenge:



The original Surberian Tiger (rowr!):



Now with 900% more sexiness:




Okay, I didn't have a camera available and had to scan my left thumb plus expertly designed paper collar (planning ahead not skill good) while fucking around with the mouse with my right. Nevertheless I have contributed much sexiness.

Romania: Your Sole Source of Stigmata-Afflicted Vagina Bears

JamesK in comments kindly points out that I hung it wrong. It's a little more grim now.

Google Has My Number

The Current Playlist

At work edition.

There's Something Funny About This...

This panel represents a moment in my life when I figured out that there was subtext to things. The image now seems obviously cribbed from some porn mag with the addition of a stupid costume and an ugly monster guy, but at the time I was sure that there was something I was not quite getting, and it was IMPORTANT.

I remain excellent at not quite getting things.

The Internet Makes Cheap Jokes Free

No fuss, no muss.

Context here and here.

The Problem with Dealing with Al Qaeda in Pakistan is Now...What?

I'm not personally an advocate of racing in there and blowing shit up, but it seems we have an anti-democratic military strongman harboring Al Qaeda in the same sense that Saddam was harboring Ansar al-Islam.

Issues of Vital Importance

Those who would lie under oath are in big trouble.

Mitt Romney Is a Worthless Shitbag

A surprising sentiment I know, but does this really paint a picture of anyone with convictions?

Mind Your Head

Stopping on the Road on a Tolerant Evening

Whose roads these are I think I know.
These public works they kind of blow;
Police can see me driving here.
But drive these roads with headlights? No.

My little car must think it queer
To drive without the lights on here
Between the hills a concrete snake
The darkest evening of the year.

A cop's lights make me hit the brake
He asks if there's been some mistake.
"The Oakland exit's some ways back,
"Are you some kind of drunken flake?"

The roads are public, each bump and crack,
But each cock-eyed dream must have its hack,
I've not been stopped because I'm black
I've not been stopped because I'm black

Clash of the Tittens

This is pure fun.

Stupid Songs

John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan

Ooh, spelling error right off the bat.

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor,
He trav'led with a gun in ev'ry hand.

That'd be forty guns. No wait, two.

All along this countryside,
He opened a many a door,

What the hell does that mean?

But he was never known
To hurt an honest man.

He was, however, interested in killing Negroes.

'Twas down in Chaynee County,
A time they talk about,

Ah yes, the onion-belted elders among us.

With his lady by his side
He took a stand.

Clicheometer rising...

And soon the situation there
Was all but straightened out,
For he was always known
To lend a helping hand.

Clicheometer smashed by stray deus ex machina.

All across the telegraph
His name it did resound,

Turn down that telegraph you crazy kids!

Rest of rebel millionaire's idiot music ignored due to boredom.

But no charge held against him
Could they prove.
And there was no man around
Who could track or chain him down,
He was never known
To make a foolish move.

Michael Fumento's Dignity Restored

That's a Nice Soufflé You Got There.

Lately, the Zagats have also raised a few eyebrows by selling plaques to the businesses they rate. While they still give out window stickers for free, they charge $149 to $199 for restaurants that want customized plaques. (One twist: The better the rating, the fancier and the costlier the plaque.) Restaurants are told that refusing to participate in the "recognition program" won't affect their scores, yet some can't help but wonder. "There's a little bit of a feeling like, I'd better buy this," says Betsy Alger, owner of the Frog and the Peach Restaurant in New Brunswick, N.J. The Zagats say that "the people who handle our plaques have no connection with any aspect of our editorial process."

Invasion of the Noonanites

Mark Noonan is considering running for office.

The obvious symbol is the Noonanite.

Gawd

I don't think I've seen a worse initial sentence this year.

Internet pedophile suspect arrested in Thailand
By Seth Mydans
Published: October 19, 2007

BANGKOK: At first, on the Internet, he was just a swirly face, something akin to a large multicolored lollipop that a man might give to a little boy.

Marky the Pinhead

Help!

Context here.

Insurance

It occurs to me that a lot of the global-warming denial makes great use of the idea that we shouldn't take drastic steps on a just-in-case basis.

It's an argument against insurance.

The Wages of Laziness

I sat down to do some work and somehow ended up with Debbie Schlussel and a sandwich. This process is mysterious.

Yokel Bothering

Vote for the black guy or vote for the woman? Today's hair-salon yammerers have no answers.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

20 years ago the Harold Faltermeyer and Steve Stevens "Top Gun Anthem" won a grammy.

The category was:

A. Best German-American Promotion of Militarism
B. Special Award for Silver Clothing
C. Least Tolerable Bullshit Most Agreeable to Entertainment Executives
D. Most Egregious Fuck-Faces in Near-Muzak

Satan Speaks!

You have also dared to try to take dinosaurs away from me. I have used dinosaurs for nearly 200 years to teach billions of people that the earth is billions of years old and that God's Word is not true. Your seminar on dinosaurs strikes at the heart of my kingdom. I intend to destroy both your ministry and your reputation for good. Dinosaurs are especially effective for me to deceive children. You are taking children away from me, so I took yours away from you!

Visit PZ Myers for background, though I think Satan's work stands on its own.

Hyperlexia

The five-year-old and I went to test her mettle at an Early Autism Project office. The tester was charmed, as she should have been, and impressed by the young one's obviously powerful nerd mojo.

My sweetie got almost every language-or-reading-only question right and almost everything else wrong, but my favourite wrong answer came after her geek abilities had been well-established and the tester was just fooling around:

Q. What's the biggest ocean?

A. The Yangtze River.

I think it's been established that being spectacularly wrong is not necessarily better than being wrong in a more mundane fashion, but I'll take it in this case.

Blacks Not Yet Domesticated

Joseph Farah on why John Edwards is a racist:

Let me tell you something. No amount of midnight basketball is going to stop young black men from killing one another if steps are not taken to put the black family back together. The black family was destroyed by people like John Edwards – people who believe blacks can be domesticated by government programs that provide them subsistence livings and make them dependent on Uncle Sam for their material needs.

What's a Poo's Favourite Vegetable?

A pea.

Many thanks to the five-year-old.

Heather Wilson Deathwatch

Via TPM:

Do They?

I was somewhat hopeful that what was roiling the Iraq war debate was something of substance.

The Dishes Can Wait

Once there was a stupid cat
He lived inside a giant's hat
He had no need to feed on mice
But feasted on the giant's lice

Hey! I'm stalling!

Through the whorls of giant hair
Our kitty pranced without a care
When nature whispered calls to him
He peed right off the huge hat's brim

Paperwork avoidance demands more stanzas.

An ogre once came rambling by
Receiving cat pee in the eye
"I say good sir" quoth ogre pissed on
"Oatmeal's what you'll soon subsist on

"As I'll knock out your fucking teeth."
"Friend ogre!" lisps the giant, "Pleath!
"Thith kitty pitheth lucky thtreams!
"Itth thtench fulfills the wildetht dreams!"

"How so?" the ogre asked the giant
"Here'th how" said giant now defiant
And ogre's head was split asunder
Fallen Leaving bags of gold to plunder

Let's All Pull Together

I'm working on a care package to some citizens of Iraq. Thus far I have included beer, hot-dogs, and puppies, these being some of the greatest comforts Western culture has to offer. Who's with me?

Strings

It's depressing trying to do relatively simple research on Iraqi universities and having to filter out horrific news articles by adding "-death" "-bomb" and "-killed" to the search. Can't use "-war" because that's more likely to be in what I'm looking for and is the measure of an era.

Here's a link to a list of Iraqi academics killed or otherwise mishandled in some way.

How About That

Who'd have thought that the big fish reeled in in the Oil-for-Food brouhaha would be a Texas oilman?

Confusing Headlines Dept.

Stay?

I Am Not Part of Your Us

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

"We" should be fired.

9/11 Nuts

This thread is really a bring-down.

I have ideas about what it is that makes people want to believe nonsense, but I guess what bugs me most is the laziness of the whole thing. Have questions? There are answers all over the place from people who actually know what they're talking about. Don't like the answers? Make a fucking phone call. Can you verify your kooky theory? If you can, by all means present it. But to spend X years going "something doesn't add up" or "there are unanswered questions" means you don't know what you're talking about and you're uninterested in answers that don't suit you.

At this point "I dunno what hit the Pentagon" or "the towers were wired to explode" are flat-earth equivalents. I remain open to the possibility of being proven wrong, just as I am about space aliens pooping in your cornflakes or Aleister Crowley having bona-fide magickal powers that years later chopped off the ends of Jimmy Page's fingers broke Jimmy Page's finger in an accident completely unlike Tony Iommi's.

In the Fever Swamp of the Radical Wingnuts

Here's an article from Gavin at Sadly, No! which argues that the top of the conservative punditry is smooth enough to deliver the message without sounding nuts, but that the message in unvarnished form is more easily gleaned from the idiots on the bottom.

I don't think I buy this, as a lot of the bottom-feeders have interests that the top guys plainly couldn't give a shit about as long as the votes are delivered, but Gavin writes nice sentences and deserves to win a lottery or something.

Good Thing

Space Plague!

The future may yet turn out to be cool.

Gregg Easterbrook: Moron

Go to The Poor Man and read.

Sports are pretty much for idiots - duh, hi mirror - but perhaps there could be some filter that strains out certain sillinesses.

And if you’re tempted to say, “Gregg, at worst this is just cheating in some dumb football games,” here’s why the affair matters: If a big American institution such as the NFL is not being honest with the public about a subject as minor, in the scheme of things, as the Super Bowl, how can we expect American government and business to be honest with the public about what really matters?

It's not often that I laugh out loud at something that doesn't involve anvils or shovels to the face, so I salute you Mr. Easterbrook.

Now With 100% More Eleanor

Odd outage at Nitpicker:

Write Your Senator

I think it'd be reasonable to follow up the Move-On debacle with a resolution condemning bribery, toilet sex, and the wearing of diapers for prurient reasons.

Medical Education Under the Taliban

This is a pretty old article, but it's worth having a look at:

Sunday, May 14, 2006
Afghanistan: Women Return To Medicine After Taliban Ban
By Mustafa Sarwar

PRAGUE, May 14, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- During the days of the Taliban, women were not allowed to study medicine at Kabul Medical University, not even under the cover of the all-encompassing burqas.

More than four years after the fall of the Taliban, however, the radiant faces of 90 women could be seen in the university's auditorium, speaking happily about their graduation. Some of them are now mothers, having had to interrupt their medical studies during the five years the Taliban held power in the capital.

[...]

Tabesh says the Taliban would measure the length of the beards of the medical students, "and if they found out that they had been trimmed, they would punish us harshly."

[...]

"We lacked the very essential things in that time," Tabesh said. "The first semester, we had anatomy classes. It is a very difficult subject, and you need to have materials like bones and skeletons to study with. But the Taliban did not allow us to work on the human body, so we needed to buy bones from other boys who were in the higher grades at the university. We could not even afford to buy an anatomy atlas textbook. And since we had to use human bones [dug from graves], sometimes [the chemicals used to clean the bones] produced allergies. It was unbelievable."

Tabesh recalls the dean of the university during the Taliban days chasing students with a long stick.

"I remember him boasting that no man could ever be as cruel as he was," Tabesh says. "It was pretty dreadful."

Trolling and Utility

Is Poo Poo Funny?

I say yes and thank you Ron Paul for the bumper-sticker. And J---- for the pic of poor Dave.



Yes, I'm a dick.

Do They Come in Brown?

Attention Alan Greenspan: This Means You're Horrible, Not Honest

Corruption

Here we have an article about corruption in India, mostly regarding fake degrees. There is at least one episode in it that is actually horrifying. What impressed me however was this single sentence:

The unethical practices and the decline in moral values have corrupted a greed-based society.

The Art of Subtitles

My lovely daughter is on the Aspergery side of life, which has its ups and downs. One of the positive ups is that she has a freakish ability to read, demonstrated since before she could walk (which she was late to, but she totters sweetly nonetheless).

A very small part of what this means is that when she and I watch TV she'll pay closer attention when the captions are on. I have learned, to my chagrin, that Spanish or French audio does not match the Spanish or French subtitles in many cases, making most DVDs kind of crappy aids to my charming Braniac 5's attempts to learn all languages on Earth.

I have also learned that television captioning is sometimes outsourced to some place where English is not spoken, or used as makework for drunken hobos, or most likely generated automatically using the Very Latest Technology.

Enjoy what I have gleaned from my venerable televisual reception device.

Are Men as Dumb as the Media Say We Are?

In my opinion men need to stop sneering and do something about that haircut.