Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Amy and Miles were at the playground, where they met little Peter and his mother, a large Russian woman. As they were getting ready to go, Miles asked for his pacifier, and Amy gave it to him. The woman walked over to Miles, bent down to face him, and said in a thick Russian accent (you have to hear the accent in your head):
“Do not let me see you with that thing in your mouth. You are BIG MAN!”
Miles just turned two.
A man entered the next bathroom stall over from me today. I heard him undo his belt, and the buckle hitting the floor. He grunted slightly as he squatted. A few seconds of silence, and then he said in a perfectly loud voice, unaware or uncaring that anyone else might be sharing the room with him, “Okaaayyyy…” as if he was sitting down to tackle the 1040 Short Form.
Nigerian banking spam, as read to you personally by the inimitable zefrank. Hilarious.
How far out is the far religious right? Jimmy Swaggart is how far out. Video here (Windows Media).
Transcript:
“I get amazed, I can’t look at it about 10 second, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this, I’m trying to find a correct name for it, this utter absolute asinine
idiotic stupidity of men marrying men.”
(shouts from crowd)
“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry.”
(shouts, applause)
“And I’m gonna be blunt and plain, if he ever looks at me like that I’m going to kill him and tell God he died.”
(laughter, applause)
“In case anybody doesn’t know God calls it an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”
(applause)
“These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress and ‘well, we don’t know’… they ought to have to marry a pig and live with them forever.”
(laughter)
“I’m not knocking the poor homosexual, I’m not, they need salvation like anyone else… I’m knocking our pitiful pathetic lawmakers.”
“And I thank God that President Bush has stated,”
(applause)
“we need a Constitutional Amendment that states that marriage is between a man and a woman.”
(applause)
“Alright.”
Thanks Ethan.
From good old Mad Magazine (who among us was not unduly shaped in our formative years through hours of study?), this scanned page that’s been floating around comparing Jesus’ words to Bush’s position on various issues. It is a puzzle to me how a leader so steeped in his faith can stand so firmly against the central tenets of that very same belief system.
Also interesting: Who’s the Flip-Flopper? — an AP story chronicling some of the more dramatic about-faces of Bush’s presidential career — a series of directional and policy shifts that are collectively just as flip-floppery as Kerry’s. Politics, like life, is just that way – the terrain shifts, the available information changes, our response to it morphs to accomodate.
Thanks Steve and Frank
A flying saucer bus designed to reduce traffic congestion. An octagonal wheeled water craft invented by a Mexican lawyer. Underground airports. A monorail that looks like a giant Chevy Impala. A public escape pod for plummeting airplanes. 19th century pneumatic subways. Cruise ships with sails. Great collection of images at UC Berkeley library’s online museum of Transportation Futuristics.
Thanks David Huff.
Not only is 1964’s Little Golden Book The Good Humor Man a great example of early product placement (masquerading as a treatise on the delights of suburban life in the summertime, there’s hardly a page that doesn’t sing the praises of licking Good Humor brand ice cream), it’s also riddled with vague and not-so-vague homoerotic references (see images). At least they seem that way to us, seen through modern eyes conditioned by media to scan constantly for veiled references. We could be wrong – it could all be completely innocent, the naive voice of an older writer creating a children’s book in the early 60s. Regardless, the book is a gas. Miles, of course, is blissfully unaware of the undertones – he’s more concerned that Bobby left his boats to go get ice cream, and the fact that the bunny rabbits hanging out by the fence didn’t get a lick.
A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years — a bratwurst sandwich — after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an “ambitious” experiment.
The guy lost a jaw and half his tongue to cancer, didn’t eat a solid meal for nine years, had a new jaw grown in his own back, and can now eat steak! But he complains to his doctor that since he has no teeth, he has to cut the steak into such tiny pieces that it gets cold before he’s finished. Now that’s what I call grateful!
News.com on Microsoft’s record of cultural insensitivity – some examples of which have cost the convicted monopolist big time. Examples cited include a game in which the chanting of the Koran was used as a backing track, and another in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques.
Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.
Returning from the UC-CSC conference last week, hitched a ride with a very cool UC Irvine operating systems prof. Had some interesting conversations about databases, filesystems, etc., then the conversation drifted to the topic of people’s insanely busy lives. I made some off-handed comment about time and money, and he responded without hesitation:
NO! Time is not money. You can always get money back. You can never get time back.