After admiring the lovely wood paneling, guess the purpose of this room:
Answer here.
Or here: Show ▼
Japanese Elegance
August 29th, 2010Pop! Goes the Housing Market
August 28th, 2010David Rosenberg has a set of very depressing charts:
More depressing charts at the link.
Keep in mind, folks, it’s all George Bush’s fault, and The Won is doing everything he can to make sure you remember that.
Mocking the Europeans….
August 28th, 2010…Has been an American pastime from the very start.
Immediately post-Columbian Figurine :
Zena Kruzick identifies it as a “shaman vessel”, but I suspect it’s more of a political cartoon.
I discovered this while reviewing the slides for Clayton Cramer’s history class.
Quick Links
August 26th, 2010Most of the federal government hangs on the Commerce Clause. Here’s how that happened.
[Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.]
“1848 Daguerreotypes Bring Middle America’s Past to Life”
Got any old Daguerreotypes lying around? Look at them under a magnifying glass — or even a 60x microscope. You might find surprising detail.
Smug asshole Schumer wants to kill political speech.
EPA wants to ban lead ammo.
Quote of the Day in bold:
Naturally, the NSSF stresses the reasonable, Fudd angle, telling you to write your unaccountable, unfireable, unelected EPA bureaucrat and tell them:
* There is no scientific evidence that the use of traditional ammunition is having an adverse impact on wildlife populations.Which is, I suppose, more diplomatic than what I would want to write, which would be more along the lines of
* There is anecdotal evidence that the banning of traditional ammunition would have an adverse impact on government bureaucrat populations.
Say Uncle says gives the other QotD, the core definition of being a gun nut:
If you fuck with me bad enough, I’ll kill your ass.
He elaborates. Read the whole thing. And see this at Smallest Minority.
Best Investment Advice. Roughly speaking: pay off consumer debt, and put your assets in cash. The tsunami is coming, folks.
“If this is true, then everybody involved at the IRS must be fired.
Immediately. No excuses.”
Oh,yes. Oh, very yes indeed. If your group is pro-Israeli, you will be singled out for extra scrutiny on your application for tax-exempt status “to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Blatant tyranny. These policies “constitute an explicit admission of the crudest form of viewpoint discrimination, and one which is both totally un-American and flatly unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”
Bravery of the Day: Offending One’s Fans
August 25th, 2010Penny Arcade:
[click for full size]
I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.
I absolutely agree with this, and I absolutely and without undue irony applaud Tycho and Gabe’s honest bravery in posting a comic likely to offend their somewhat rabid fan base, and yet….
This is what comes of treating your customers like the enemy. They stop being your customers, and become your enemies.
And this is what happens when you treat the artists you love like the enemy. Same-same.
Sad Picture of the Day
August 24th, 2010
City Hall About to Burn Down Chicago Again?
August 24th, 2010The invaluable Second City Cop alerts us that Chicago Police Department Internal Affairs is investigating John Andrews, a cop who wrote an extremely critical blog post, asserting that the CPD is so badly managed, understaffed, and maintained that the city is “at War with Itself” and “Fast Tracking to Anarchy”. And that’s just the title. I’m not excerpting anything else. Go read SCC, and read John Andrews.
Daley and his cohorts need to burn. Chicago is one of America’s grand old cities, and Daley has run it into the ground as his personal, hereditary fiefdom.
If the nation blows up, folks, this could well be the primer.
Heart to Heart
August 23rd, 2010P.Z. Meyers gets a phone call from his doctor’s office.
“We just got the results of your tests from last week. Your heart is a shriveled black lump starved of charity, decency, charm, and kindness,” she said, “a gristly godless clot of marginally functional fibers. You need to go back to Abbott for more tests, and the doctors want to crack your chest and marvel at you.”
“So what else is new? My students are used to that and expect me to be lashing them with fear and pain starting Wednesday…and my black heart is an asset to this job,” I said. “Maybe I can pop in for these tests this weekend. Any chest-cracking can wait for the end of the term and Christmas break, when I wouldn’t be using my heart anyway.”
“No,” she said, “now.”
And I waffled and weaseled and tried to argue with her that this could not be, I had a great deal of work to do right now, and I couldn’t possibly just drop out at the start of the term, and besides, I felt fine. And I bickered, and she exasperatedly told me no way, and I bargained, and then she said, “Here. I’m putting the doctor on.” And the doctor spoke with the voice of Doom and the terrifying tone of I-hold-your-life-in-my-hands-you-dope and she quoth (paraphrased somewhat):
“YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SUDDENLY, ABRUPTLY, WITHOUT WARNING UNLESS WE FIX YOU RIGHT NOW. GO. NOW. DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.”
“Yes’m,” I said.
Prayers I have none. My wishes are of course useless.
Nevertheless, I wish him well. Tough, bitter, and black hearted he may be, we need him. Liberal politics be damned, he is a crucial warrior for the truth, clear sighted and, may I say it, strong hearted in his field, and we need as many of those as we can get.
Death in the Woodpile
August 21st, 2010So, I picked up a bundle of wood — and there he was:
Young copperhead, with keys for scale. I poked at him with a stick to move him away from the keys, and he struck at it, several times.
I probably should have beat him to death on the spot, but he’s not where he’s likely to be disturbed, normally, so I’ll see if we can just let him be.
[update]
Further reading reveals that humans rarely die from copperhead bites, and that younger, smaller snakes have smaller fangs and smaller poison glands. The poison is hemolytic (affects the local blood supply) rather than neurotoxic (affects the nerves, and is far more dangerous).
This is probably an osage copperhead, judging by the thin white line highlighting the diamond pattern.
Filthy Commie
August 17th, 2010Burns! at John Scalzi’s Whatever had an encounter at LAX:
I was hoping that the President would approach for a few questions, but at the bottom of the stairs he hooked a quick right and headed for his waiting helicopter, Marine One. I knew I only had time for one question.
“Mr. President,” I shouted. “Cake or pie? It’s too loud to hear your answer out here, so if it’s cake, just give me a wave.”
And there you go. All good, decent, real Americans (and cute Japanese robot girls) prefer pie, except at birthday parties and weddings. (A good pineapple-upside-down cake properly done in an iron skillet is the outstanding exception.)
Cake is simply sugary bread with sugary cream squirted all over it that looks prettier than it tastes. It’s insubstantial, disnutritive, bland. Mix up the batter, pour it in the pan, bake, and stuff yourself till you’re sick. Add ice cream for further dental caries, or candles to remind the childish and senile of how old they are.
Pie, on the other hand, is complex, nuanced, balanced. Making and baking pie is inherently an expression of skill, yet pie requires no decoration other than an artfully woven or slashed top crust, and even that serves a crucial purpose. Ice cream, if present, balances the fruity tartness of the filling. Eating pie is an expression of mature discrimination regardless of the age of the eater, each bite a timeless act of graceful passion.
After this insightful probe, there can be no question of where the O stands. No pie for him!
Pie!
Go Wai! For Pie!