CAYMAN ISLANDS (The Borowitz Report) - In an uncharacteristically emotional scene for the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney today paid a surprise visit to his money in the Cayman Islands.

Speaking in a bank vault surrounded by stacks of cash, Mr. Romney praised his money for "the brave work you have done in the never-ending fight for freedom from Federal income tax."

"Thanks to your hard work, losers around the world are envious of me," he added. "For that I salute you."

Stressing that his money's mission in the Caymans was "far from over," he refused to set any timetable for withdrawal.

In a reference to his bid for the Presidency, Mr. Romney told his money, "It would be an honor and a privilege to have my face on you someday."

After plunging into the stacks of cash to touch many of the dollar bills individually, Mr. Romney boarded his private jet to pay a surprise visit to Switzerland.


Received in an e-mail from the Borowitz Report.


Ta much, dear Edosan!

Miller: John Wayne was a fag.

Everyone: (in unison) The hell he was.

Miller: He was too, you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood. And he come to the door in a dress.

- Repo Man



from a long defunct, much missed site

…A few weeks ago I was flipping through the channels when I caught part of an Ed Sheeran gig on Channel 4. It looked like roughly 50% of the audience was just standing there, pointing little black rectangles in his direction throughout. Play that back and you’d only get a hazy shot of a singing blob. So why bother? It seems especially fruitless since there was a TV crew present, filming the concert in high definition with stereo sound in order to broadcast it later for free. And if it’s not about recording the music, but simply about keeping personal mementos, why watch the screen on your phone while filming it? It’s like you’re not even there, somehow. I can understand wanting to distance yourself slightly during a violent uprising, but during a gig? We’re a curious species, when it comes down to it. …

Pigeons have become one of the most revered creatures in the British Isles after their strong inclination to ‘shit on things’ became much admired following the unveiling of a statue of former US president Ronald Reagan.

The 10-foot bronze statue was specially commissioned to “recognise Mr Reagan’s contribution to ending the Cold War” which he single-handedly had virtually nothing to do with.

Mr Reagan died in 2004, aged 93, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease from birth.

It is hoped that the statue, which has been unveiled at a ceremony outside the American embassy in central London, will become completely covered in pigeon shit in time for the 2012 Olympic games. …


Ta much, dear MSiegel

'Isn't the Democrat/Republican choice in the US really a choice between good and evil?" someone tweeted me during last week's Republican debate in Iowa. On the one hand, such a reductive perspective only exacerbates the dysfunctionally hyper-partisan current state of American politics, with the Republicans retreating to a wing so far right it would have given their beloved Ronald Reagan whiplash.

On the other hand, the message did arrive just moments after the morally repulsive Rick Santorum had finished explaining that abortions must be denied even to victims of rape and incest because the baby shouldn't be "victimised twice", concentrating so deeply on maintaining his sanctimonious facial expression that he hadn't the mental space to consider that maybe it would be the raped woman who would be victimised twice if she were to be denied an abortion if she wished to have one. But then, of course, it's hard to answer intelligently when one talks out of one's arse and the brain is therefore so far away from one's speaking orifice.

Anal vocalisation is not the only explanation for much of the Grand Old party's (GOP) behaviour and pronouncements in recent days: rather, it is, I can exclusively reveal, currently engaged in a mash-up of 1984 and It's a Wonderful Life, two pieces of fiction created over 60 years ago, which goes some way to explaining the distinct smack of irrelevance to the party today. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321

Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,

Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?

As a young man, he was in a gang that regularly smashed up private property. We know that you were absent parents who left your child to be brought up by a school rather than taking responsibility for his behaviour yourselves. The fact that he became a delinquent with no sense of respect for the property of others can only reflect that fact that you are terrible, lazy human beings who failed even in teaching your children the difference between right and wrong. I can only assume that his contempt for the small business owners of Oxford is indicative of his wider values.

Even worse, your neglect led him to fall in with a bad crowd. He became best friends with a young man who set fire to buildings for fun. And others:

There’s Michael Gove, whose wet-lipped rage was palpable on Newsnight last night. This is the Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another of his houses in order to avail himself of £7,000 of the taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled (or £13,000, depending on which house you think was which).

Or Hazel Blears, who was interviewed in full bristling peahen mode for almost all of last night. She once forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. At the time she said it would take her reputation years to recover. Unfortunately not.

But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn’t show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies. ...




Ta much, dear Glenn321

Media Titan Loses Closest Ally
POSTED July 14, 2011

LONDON (The Borowitz Report) – In a blow that many insiders saw as the last straw for embattled media titan Rupert Murdoch, Satan today returned Mr. Murdoch’s soul to him and demanded his money back.

“Rupert Murdoch has done my bidding for decades, but that relationship is now terminated,” read the terse statement from the Prince of Darkness, who close associates said has been “disgusted” by Murdoch’s recent activities.

Purchased by Satan in Melbourne, Australia in 1951, Mr. Murdoch’s soul is estimated to have a current value of nine dollars (US).

Around the media world, observers were stunned by this latest setback for Mr. Murdoch, who in Satan is losing one of his closest and most powerful allies.

But according to Ian Langramstone, who at his post as the University of Nottingham has studied Mr. Murdoch’s relationship with Satan for years, the slap in the face from the Lord of Misrule should not come as a surprise.

“Satan never wants to be the last one to desert a sinking ship,” said Mr. Langromstone. “He always takes his lead from British politicians.”

In what many saw a tacit admission of the depth of his current problems, Mr. Murdoch today cancelled plans to purchase the remainder of the British government that he does not already own. ...



Ta much, dear Anneliese

... Successfully forging the belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo. This is one reason why so many tabloid stories are routinely peppered with lies – if their staff didn't continually flex their delusion muscles, a torrent of dark, awful self-awareness might rush into their heads like unforgiving black water pouring through the side of a stricken submarine, and they'd all slash their wrists open right there at their workstations. The newsroom hubbub would be regularly broken by the dispiriting thump of lifeless heads thunking on to desks. Each morning their bosses would have to clear all the spent corpses away with a bulldozer and hire a fresh team of soon-to-be-heartbroken lifewasters to replace the ones who couldn't make it, whose powers of self-deception simply weren't up to the job. Who couldn't cope with the knowledge that they were wasting their lives actively making the world worse.

And now – on top of all of these trials and indignities, on top of the harrowing leukaemia-of-the-soul their career choice inflicts upon them – now their job has got even harder. Because for a while, at least, wasting your life actively making the world worse was relatively easy. You could pay someone to root through someone's dustbins. Then, when the early mobiles arrived, you could get a £59 frequency scanner and sit outside a soap star's flat, surreptitiously recording their calls. And when phones went digital, there was the voicemail wheeze, which made life even easier. You could sit at your desk illegally invading the privacy of strangers just by pushing buttons.

But now, having abused all those tricks, like they abused their talent – not for any noble cause, but to find out which girlband member snogged which boyband member – those easy games are up. And it couldn't have come at a worse time: with plummeting sales, the need for sensational stories is higher than ever. All of which means all those people wasting their lives actively making the world worse will now have to expend colossal effort in order to do so: like prisoners forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves – but with a rubber shovel.

There is no fate more tragic. Pity them. Pity them hard.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

... Now it's almost time to hurl another outmoded device down the historical garbage chute: your body. Last week, researchers at Washington University unveiled a new mind-control computer system. Traditional mind-control systems – and the fact that any mind-control system can be referred to as "traditional" shows you how nuts-deep into the future we already are – require the user to don an EEG skullcap before thinking very hard about specific actions. The resultant brainwaves are then crudely interpreted and the device reacts accordingly. But practical use is severely restricted thanks to the human skull, which muffles some signals and amplifies others. It's like trying to work out what your neighbours are up to by pressing your ear against the wall: fun, but often wildly misleading.

Which is where electrocorticography comes in. Electrocorticography basically means "sticking sensors directly on to the surface of the brain". Once you've done that, you get a far more reliable signal. Already they've had volunteers controlling an onscreen cursor by imagining different vowel sounds. As soon as they refine it further, giving the user the ability to steer the pointer around and click on things, the days of mass-market Wi-Fi mind-controlled iPads will be upon us before you can smother your kids in their sleep to protect them from precisely such a future.

But is this really so sinister? All computers are mind-controlled already. My hand may steer the mouse and my fingers may punch the keys, but none of this takes place without my mental say-so. My brain runs things round here. Surely all a mind-controlled interface does is cut out the corporeal middleman, leaving your fingers free to do something more useful, such as plugging your ears so you can't hear the horrified screams spontaneously exploding from your facehole? What's the problem?

The problem is that the body is the final, crucial buffer between the skittish human mind and the slavish machine servant. Think of how many furious email responses you've composed in haste, only to halt and reflect at the final moment as your finger hovers over the "send" button. The simple fact that a small physical action is required to actually deliver the damn thing is often enough to give pause for thought.

When mind-controlled computers become a commonplace reality, you'll have typed and sent that message in the time it takes to stub a toe; as quick as pulling a facial expression, but more detailed, and full of swearwords. ...

see more My Food Looks Funny

see more Hacked IRL - Truth in Sarcasm

Ostentatious /|\(;,;)/|\ is my fave.

MoD rejects Gaddafi low-flying aircraft complaint

Serious online blow to Libyan tyrant

... They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it's serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium.

Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn't want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn't on your side. It doesn't even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.

Here's a familiar, mundane scenario: you've got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you've got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can't hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ".docx" Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven't been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about "syncing" one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won't tell you. It'll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can't understand why you're crying.

No one uses terms like "sync" in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It's like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay.

Apple's "sync" bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it's actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they'll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking. ...

Ta much, dear Edosan

Genius!

see more Political Pictures

see more Political Pictures












The same sort of people who are afraid of a woman whose bare hair and face are in the sunlight, that's who.




Amen, Sister!

Poor old Ed Miliband. Those aren't my words. Those are the words your mind thinks whenever you see him on television. And then you feel bad for thinking that, which makes you feel vaguely sorry for him again, and that in turns feeds back into the initial pity you experienced, and the whole thing becomes a sort of infinite commiseration loop that drowns out whatever he's actually saying and doing.

I keep reading that if he really wants to build support for Labour, Miliband doesn't actually have to do anything: just sit back, let the coalition slowly appal and repel the population, and voilà: future votes will be his, by osmosis. This low-risk strategy seemed to be working. And then, bafflingly, over the past few weeks he's decided to break the spell by granting interviews and popping up for photo opportunities.

First he was interviewed by Piers Morgan for GQ magazine. Incredibly, he managed to withstand the urge to vomit long enough to describe himself as "a bit square", and mutter something about wanting to share a desert island with Teri Hatcher, Rachel Weisz and Scarlett Johansson. I can't work out whether that's a reality show I'd like to see or not.

Then he went to Afghanistan, shadowed by ITN's Tom Bradby, who was compiling a profile piece. Unfortunately, Ed looks incredibly silly in a helmet and flak jacket. Like a toucan in a fez, it just doesn't go. Rather than making Ed look like a thrusting leader, the end result was several minutes of footage which, with the sound off, looked like a report about a small boy who'd won a competition to go and see a war.

You can understand why his press advisers keep shoving him in front of the microphones and cameras. They want the voting public to get to know him. The trouble is they're getting to know him as "that drippy guy". It's not his fault. He's burdened with an inherently drippy demeanour. Image shouldn't matter, but it's impossible to blot out.

Rather than making Ed more accessible, his PR team should be doing the opposite. He's never going to come across as "one of us", so why not actively go in the other direction? Make him unknowably distant.

Here's an idea: get Ed to seal himself inside a featureless metal cube and insist on conducting all political business from within it. And vow never to be seen in public outside the box. No nerdy face for us to judge, no wet mannerisms to chortle at. Nothing to get a glib critical foothold on. Just cold, blank steel. Ditch the name Ed Miliband and insist on being referred to as "CUBE DX-9" instead. ...

Ta much, dear BrightKnight

Ta much, dear Edosan

Nick Clegg – currently Britain's 7,358th most popular public figure, sandwiched between Maxine Carr and the Go Compare tenor – has written an article for the Sun in which he bravely stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a shamefully overlooked, uniquely burdened segment of our population.

And he's obviously given the matter plenty of thought.

"Now more than ever, politicians have to be clear who they are standing up for," he writes. "Be in no doubt, I am clear about who that is."

Who? Ethnic minorities? The poor? The disabled? The original lineup of Gerry and the Pacemakers? Beekeepers? Milkmen? Necrophiles? Yeomen?

No. They can all piss off. Because Cleggsy Bear has someone else in mind. But despite claiming to be "clear about who that is", it's a group he defines in the vaguest, most frustrating terms possible – almost as if he doesn't really know what the hell he's going on about.

He's on the side of "Alarm Clock Britain", apparently. Yeah. You know: Alarm Clock Britain. Stop staring blankly at me. Alarm Clock Britain! It's everywhere!

"There are millions of people in Alarm Clock Britain," Clegg writes. "People, like Sun readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life."

Basically, Alarm Clock Britain consists of people who use alarm clocks. That counts me out, because I wake each morning to the sound of my own despairing screams. Which I guess makes me part of Scream Wake Britain – a demographic Clegg has chosen to ignore. There are millions of people in Scream Wake Britain, and approximately half of them voted for him.

Still, it's undeniable that millions of Britons use alarm clocks, so it's nice to know someone at the heart of government is prepared to speak up on their behalf. We are yet to discover Clegg's stance on Toothbrush Britain (Britons who use toothbrushes), or Bum Wipe Britain (Britons who use toilet paper), or Newtonian Physics Britain (Britons subjected to the law of gravity), but I think it's fair to assume he's on their side too.

Which is not to say Alarm Clock Britain is an amorphous group with no boundaries whatsoever. Students, for instance, are notorious for waking up late, so they're definitely excluded, which is just as well since the average student trusts Clegg about as much as I'd trust a hammock made of gas.

Anyway, Clegg goes on to pepper the phrase Alarm Clock Britain throughout the rest of the article as often as he can, as though it's some kind of transformative mantra, in the apparent belief that the more he repeats it, the more we'll identify with it. He even managed to slip it into TV interviews, telling BBC News that he could understand why "the people of what I like to call Alarm Clock Britain" are pissed off about bankers' bonuses (not that he promised to actually do anything about it – one of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough). ...



Classic Charlie.

Ta much, dear Glenn321

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Speed never killed anyone; suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you.


Koenigsegg are saying that the CCX is more comfortable. More comfortable than what? BEING STABBED?


A turbo: exhaust gasses go into the turbocharger and spin it, witchcraft happens and you go faster.


The air conditioning in a Lambo used to be an asthmatic sitting in the dashboard blowing at you through a straw.


On the Lotus Elise: "This car is more fun than the entire French air force crashing into a firework factory."


Tonight, the new Viper, which is the American equivalent of a sports car... in the same way, I guess, that George Bush is the equivalent of a President.


This is a Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that that’s much to shout about. That’s like saying ‘Oh good, I’ve got syphilis, the best of the sexually transmitted diseases!'


The Suzuki Wagon R should be avoided like unprotected sex with an Ethiopian transvestite.


I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?


Ferrari is so pleased with it they’ve named it after the founder of the company. They call it the Enzo. That’d be the same as Lotus calling their next car... ‘The Colin.’


Sure it's quiet, for a diesel. But that's like being well-behaved ---- for a murderer. ...



Ta much, dear MSiegel

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel

/ D - / - A / - - / - D / - - / - G / A - / - D /

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed

/ A7 - / / - G Cdim7 A7 /

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy got particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart

"I drink therefore I am"

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed

/ A - - - / - AD /

... Some of the philosophers are portrayed according to their works.

* Kant['s] being "very rarely stable" harkens to his theory of a stable universe.
* Nietzsche's teaching of the "raising of the wrist" references the rising of the sun at the beginning of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
* John Stuart Mill['s] becoming ill "of his own free will" alludes to his work On Liberty, which argues for liberty that does no harm to others.
* The Descartes line, "I drink therefore I am", is a twist on his well known phrase "Cogito, ergo sum," or "I think therefore I am".

The assertion that Heidegger "could think you under the table", is another of the plays on "think" vs. "drink". ...

Ta much, dear Edosan

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Clarkson on: drinking

At home, I have a pair of Sega Rally arcade machines on which two people can race a Lancia Delta Integrale or a Toyota Celica GT4 on a choice of rally circuits. They were very cutting-edge 10 years ago, and in various Northern airport terminals, I note they still are.

Obviously, because I have them at home and because it costs nothing to have a go, I am very brilliant. I guarantee I could beat you, even if you are eight, or if you actually designed the coded software that allows the true expert to convert their cars from four- to much faster rear-wheel drive. And in case you don't believe me, my top 10 times sit on the memory chip like the grouping on a sharpshooter's target. The top eight are identical. The next two are off by just a thousandth of a second.

Here's the funny thing, though. If I have a go after drinking just one small glass of wine, I can't even get close to my best score. I'm way off, sometimes by as much as two tenths.

It's odd. Drinking one small glass of wine does not make me feel different in any way. I can touch my nose, get all the way through ‘Peter Piper' and balance on one foot easily. Even our fanatically bossy government agrees. But the Sega experiment shows that even a pipette of booze affects, noticeably, the reactions of a fully grown, sixteen-stone man.

After two bottles of wine, and some sloe vodka, I'm all over the place. Once, I was so drunk that I was nearly half a second off the pace. And on another occasion, on the forest stage, I actually fell asleep. And so, you should be in no doubt - especially as this is a BBC website, and the BBC gets criticised for everything these days - I am not for a moment going to suggest that booze doesn't affect our ability to drive. It does....

How to cut tuition fees

We should teach only the useful stuff: scavenging, strangling and how to operate a water cannon
Charlie Brooker
Monday 20 December 2010

You can't put a price on a good education. Except, actually, you can – and it turns out that price is just over £9,000 a year.

Unsurprisingly many students are furious at the hike in tuition fees; but apart from shouting about it or trying to smash the Treasury to bits with sticks, what practical steps can we take to make education more affordable?

Nine thousand pounds a year sounds like a lot – but actually, it's shitloads. Yet it turns out that if you divide shitloads by 52, it comes out at around £173 a week, which sounds more achievable. Especially if your course only lasts seven days. So let's only provide week-long courses.

Obviously, to compress a three-year course into one week, the field of study will have to be streamlined a bit. Whittled down. Reduced to a series of bullet points. But in many cases, that's an advantage. ...

So 2010 has slithered past, leaving a gooey trail of memories in its wake. As befits the opening page of a new decade, it was a year with a markedly transitional feel. A tainted old era full of Gordon Brown and Big Brother came to an end, paving the way for a fresh haul of new, improved bullshit. ...

Ta much, dear Anneliese

A friend of mine recently went home with a young woman after a party. However, before he, you know, got down to business, he went to use her toilet and spotted Britney Spears's perfume in her bathroom. He promptly made his excuses and left. Was that unreasonable? And what are other similar style deal-breakers?
Dave, by email

Your query with regard to the reasonableness or otherwise of your friend's swift exit can be quickly resolved. Simply put, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a grown woman in possession of a celebrity perfume must be in want of some psychological help. "Your friend", Dave, was reasonable and wise.

With regard to the latter issue, ah me. It's so tricky, isn't it? Life, I mean. At last, you meet someone at a party who doesn't want to make you bite off your own arm to give you an excuse to leave. You go home with them, and what is about to happen starts to happen – only for you to realise that their carefully chosen mood-assisting album is The Greatest Hits of Kasabian.

Oh sure, there are the danger signs to look out for on arrival in the house of a new encounter: posters of the Third Reich, a Ku Klux Klan hood hanging on a coat hook, books by Jeremy Clarkson – but these are obvious. It's the little things that really count. After all, as anyone who's been in a relationship knows, few end because of the dramatic discovery of a secret love child; most die because of a fight over why one of you forgot to buy lightbulbs.

Few details speak as loudly as someone's style choices because, superficial as they may seem, they are what your inamorata or inamorato elects to wear all day. Hence, they are actually more indicative of a person's true self than the books on their shelves, of which 35% were gifts from other people, 10% were freebies, 25% were bought just for show, and 85% are unread. (Incidentally, according to a recent scientific survey, the current book to flaunt for pulling purposes is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Seriously, only one in 17 of the people you see carrying that book around town are actually reading it. Fact.)

Now, in some ways your question surprises me, Dave, because I'd have thought the fashion warning signs would be obvious. Of course, having said that, if they were as clear to everyone as they are to those of us with a professional eye, no man would ever wear Ugg boots.

So, in a handy cut-out-and-keep guide, here is Ask Hadley's list of What Not To Have In Your Wardrobe For The Good Of The Perpetuation Of The Human Species: ...

... It's only a matter of time before the word "Clegg" enters the dictionary as a noun meaning "agonised, doe-eyed apologist". Or maybe it'll become a verb. Years from now, teachers will ask their pupils to stop "clegging on" about how the dog ate their homework and just bloody hand it in on time. ...

... Point a camera in his direction, and Clegg will construct an earnest argument in favour of virtually any unappealing concept you can throw at him. Such as the following:

On drink-driving

"No one likes car crashes. But to imply that drinking somehow impairs one's ability to control a vehicle is just scaremongering – and it's precisely this sort of jittery overreaction that causes most accidents in the first place. The simple fact is that only by calming our minds with alcohol can we keep a steady hand on the tiller."

On the coalition's decision to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on Berwick- upon-Tweed

"Yes it's extreme, but something has to be done. Berwick-upon-Tweed simply can't be allowed to continue as it is. But the blast won't be as far-reaching as the opposition and the scientists and the UN are saying. If you live in, say, Truro, it probably won't make much difference to your day-to-day life, provided you're reasonably self-sufficient and don't mind the odd hand-to-hand skirmish with mutants."

On being the middle segment of a "human centipede"

"I've heard a lot of people say, "urgh, Nick, have you seen that film The Human Centipede, where the mad scientist joins three people together by stitching them rectum-to-mouth? Can you imagine how disgusting that'd be in real life?" And I can see how they might leap to that conclusion. But real life is about compromise – sometimes we simply have to swallow a few unpleasant things in the name of pragmatism. In many ways, the coalition is a human centipede – a group of united individuals, all pulling together in one direction – and let me tell you, from the inside, it's surprisingly cosy."

On cutting off his nose to spite his face

"Before the election, I made a solemn pledge to leave my nose intact. I even printed that pledge out, signed it, and posed for photos while holding it up and smiling like I meant it. So I can understand people's disquiet over this. It's something I've wrestled with personally. But nonetheless, off it goes. Cutty cutty nose time! Tee hee! Hoo hoo! Chop, chop, chop!"

Next week: Clegg defends his decision to force the Chilean miners back underground, claims 2 Unlimited were better than the Beatles, and explains why the coalition's proposed oxygen-rationing scheme will usher in an age of peace and prosperity for all.



Ta much, dear Glenn321

One promised to restore honour, the other is campaigning to restore sanity. Neither is likely to have much luck.

This weekend, Jon Stewart – the liberal presenter of the Daily Show, the satirical TV programme which is viewed by many Americans as giving a more honest take on the news than they see in their newspaper – is hoping that hordes of people representing a silent majority will descend on Washington for his "rally to restore sanity" to America's politics, days before deeply polarised midterm elections marked by the rise of the Tea Party.

Alongside Stewart will be his former Daily Show colleague, Stephen Colbert, whose own nightly show parodies the fear-mongering of Fox News and its presenters who perpetuate the myth that much of America is still frontier country whose people only need a gun and Barack Obama's socialist government off their backs. Colbert will be holding a parallel "rally to restore fear".

But he was beaten to the punch on that in August by the Fox News presenter and Tea Party darling Glenn Beck, whose own "rally to restore honour" at the Lincoln Memorial drew a huge crowd and prompted Stewart's foray into popular mobilisation. Beck, who has made a name for himself with ever more elaborate conspiracy theories about the Democrats and President Obama sketched out nightly on a blackboard to Fox News audiences, is now the brightest star in a powerful universe of ultra-conservative TV and radio presenters who wield considerable influence over American politics.

Facing them down are Stewart, Colbert and a handful of liberal media presenters, such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Stewart bills Saturday's rally as a non-partisan call to purge America's politics of the extremist rhetoric that is dividing the country. In promoting it the Daily Show presenter has invoked the classic line from the film Network – "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" – to appeal for reason in the face of conservatives who portray Obama as a communist, a Nazi, a Muslim or a foreigner. "We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler moustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles," he said on the rally's website.

Stewart's challenge is not to persuade Americans that the extremists are a minority but to get the less agitated to vote. ...

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom has been pulped. MORE HEADLINE TO GO HERE
There's nothing like the lonely horror of realising you've made a really massive cock-up

Charlie Brooker
Monday 4 October 2010

Messing up in the workplace is never a pleasant sensation, but the very worst kind of boo-boo is the silent-but-deadly variety: a dizzyingly serious error you realise you've committed long before anyone else.

First comes the awful moment of realisation. In this instant, you're the loneliest person in the world. As the scale of your cock-up sinks in, you feel a cold egg of dread being cracked open over your skull, its chilled albumen seeping down your temples, the icy yolk quivering atop your crown like the frozen cherry on a tortured metaphor. This is followed by a brief period of indignant disbelief: how dare the Gods of Fate allow such a terrible thing to happen to a nice person like you, the idiots?

This defensive psychological distancing lasts about 19 seconds, before being swept away by a burst of intense self-recrimination, during which you feel like pulling your own brain out and spanking it over your knee. And then finally, an unreal calm takes hold while you weigh up your options: will you immediately own up (the honourable thing to do, although you could get fired)? Or will you slyly wait, you snake, to see how things pan out, in the hope that maybe – just maybe – you'll dodge the culpability-bomb when it all comes to light?

Maybe they'll mistakenly blame Tom. You know Tom. Nice bloke. Works hard. Keeps his head down. Recently became a dad for the first time. Hope they sack the shit out of him.

Presumably, a similar scenario played out in someone's mind last week, when it transpired that 80,000 copies of the wrong draft of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom – a 576-page whopper, hailed by some critics as a masterpiece – had inadvertently been printed, bound and distributed. Someone, it seems, had picked up the wrong digital file of the book. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321

Mapping Stereotypes by alphadesigner

Europe - Where I Live


Europe According to Gay Men


Italy, According to Italy

Why do so many people wear clothes with brand names on them?

In short, because they are stupid

Hadley Freeman
Sunday 3 October 2010

Hello Hadley, long-time reader, first-time contributor. Why is it that so many people these days wear clothes that absurdly advertise the shop?
- David Walker, London

Hello David, long-time ranter, first-time replier (to you). The answer to your question is simple: it's because they are morons. And not just morons – multi-level morons. For a start, they think that somehow flaunting the name of the shop from which they bought the garment makes them look cool. This means they are brand snobs, which is bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that the brands themselves are always ones that any sane, thinking person would try to hide from the world, such as Sloaney pony Hollister, or the sluttishly ubiquitous Emporio Armani (that Emporio Armani sure gets around: there is not a man on this planet who hasn't had a bit of Emporio Armani splayed across his chest). Thus, while this column obviously abhors any kind of prejudice, it is perfectly acceptable to shun these people, not because they are stupid (although that, too), but because they are saying they think you're stupid, because they think you are as impressed as they are with their label flashing. Now, that's just rude. So shun them, David. Shun them hard. They need to be taught the error of their idiotic ways.

Second, they fail to see that they are merely being used by the brand as a form of free advertising. Again – moronic. They are like those unbelievably dorky kids from summer camp who used to believe the camp counsellor when she said that tidying their bunks extra quickly would make them really cool. Worse, seeing as these idiots are willing to pay to advertise the brands, it is no wonder these companies then decide they probably don't need to fork out money to advertise in magazines and newspapers. Ergo, they are killing the press. Morons!

Third, they paid extra money for that label to be sloshed across their clothes. Lots and lots of extra money! Obviously, as I have never soiled my hands by picking up such a garment, I cannot tell you how much more they have paid for the privilege of being walking adverts. But seeing as they are morons, it is likely to be by at least an extra £500. Per letter.


How long – or, to be more precise, how big – can a man's hair be before it gets a bit "banker"?
- J, New York

J, I like your interjected note of specificity, distinguishing that crucial long/big distinction that is so often treated as a single issue but, in the arena of men's hair, is the difference between sloppy and Sloaney or, to throw in your new, intriguing, and utterly apt description, billowy and banker. With such attention to detail, have you ever thought of working in, I don't know, the financial field? ...

... During the event he made several references to the controversy around Sanchez.

According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, Stewart, in talking about donating to autism education, said: “If you went on radio and said the Jews control the media…you may want to hold on to your money.”

It was a reference to Sanchez, who had made this comment on Pete Dominick’s Sirius radio show: “I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart. And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish are an oppressed minority? Yeah.” During the interview, Sanchez also called Stewart a “bigot,” and then later took the word back.

Stewart made this joke about Sanchez and Jews: “All he has to do is apologize to us, and we’ll hire him back.” ...

JEWS DID RICK SANCHEZ
CNN Fires Rick Sanchez, But Not For Obvious Reason of Being Dumb
by Ken Layne
11:37 pm October 1, 2010

CNN, the once-influential news channel that for the past several years employed a mouth-breathing fool as its main daytime news reader, has finally fired this mouth-breathing fool. Was Rick Sanchez let go because he in an insult to the intelligence of anyone smart enough to operate a teevee remote? No, he was fired for saying idiotic things on a satellite radio channel. The Jews won this round, Sanchez! Guess you’ll have to go back to Cuba. Wait, what?

Sanchez was only known as “Rick’s List” to sad people in rest homes forced to watch CNN two days a week (it’s Fox News and History Channel the rest of the time). But inside his pea-sized brain, being a highly paid news reader on a major news channel five days a week was a form of racial insult, in that Jews (CNN) hate Latinos (dumb-looking white clods who claim to be “Cuban-American”). Also, lousy Jon Stewart thinks he’s so smart, well he’s just a Jew who is prejudiced (like all Jews) against Mexicans such as Rick’s List, the end.

Who knew that inside the mashed-potato brains of Rick Sanchez there was all this simmering, misplaced racial fury? If we were forced to guess, we would’ve said the main thoughts inside Rick’s brain were “time to poop!” and “don’t need to poop yet.”

Comments:
Umbrageofsnow
October 2, 2010 at 1:17 am

Is Rick Sanchez one of them immigrants they talk about "stealing our jobs" on Fox News? Because clearly he was taking up an anchor position your standard Fox anchor could have held, IQ-wise. This new open slot is just the place for another token conservative. Maybe one of the Friends from Fox and Friends?

They'll hopefully learn the lesson not to bite the hand of the NEW WORLD ORDER ELITE RACIST STEALTH-JEW OVERLORDS who pay their salary.


JoshuaNorton
October 2, 2010 at 1:19 am

Shalom, mofo.


straighteight
October 2, 2010 at 1:24 am

It's unnerving to think that the only thing holding Rick Sanchez from total television domination was Jewish control of all media. We need to reinforce the wall of Jews between ambitious morons and the public airways. ...

May all the God/desses bless Jon Stewart.

Tea Party takes over comics page
By Ward Sutton
The newspaper comics page: some find it to be innocuous, even at times irrelevant. But there's a growing concern among a certain segment of the country that the comics page is out of step with mainstream values, if not an outright cesspool of treasonous, pinko propaganda. So in the interest of fairness and balance we present comics reinvented by "Tea Party cartoonist Joe Smith" -- with a little help from Ward Sutton.


Ta much, dear BrightKnight

Fast-food success in the UK requires a guilt-free form of gluttony . . .
So why not eat yourself for breakfast?
Charlie Brooker
Monday 20 September 2010

What with all the hoo-hah surrounding the pope's recent British holiday, the news that Nando's has bought the Gourmet Burger Kitchen chain for £30m may have escaped your attention. In many ways it's the 21st-century equivalent of Little Chef absorbing Wimpy, albeit markedly more middle-class than that. Both chains specialise in upmarket fast food: the kind of place you don't feel thoroughly ashamed to be seen in, unlike their more established and reviled mass-market competitors.

One cold morning about two years ago, I sat in the window of a McDonald's tucking into a sausage-and-egg McMuffin. It was a bit like sinking my teeth into a small, soft woodland creature with a light dusting of flour; one which thoroughly enjoyed being eaten and responded to each bite by gently urinating warm oil down my chin. It was a strangely comforting experience, until I realised that some – not all, but a reasonable percentage – of the passersby outside the window were regarding me with a combination of pity and contempt as they scurried past. Sitting in the window of a McDonald's, I realised, is a bit like self-harming in a glass booth. People judge you for it.

Not so the Gourmet Burger Kitchen. It has about 50 branches around the UK, but since most of them are in London, chances are you haven't visited one. It's a posher, ostensibly healthier Burger King: fresh, chargrilled, 100% Aberdeen Angus patties served inside buns "made to a secret recipe by our artisan baker". But that much you could probably guess from the name. What's truly shocking, the first time you're confronted with a Gourmet Burger, is the sheer quantity of food involved. Eating one is a bit like attempting to cram a fortnight's worth of clothing into a child-size suitcase, or falling face-first into a meat sofa.

You've got two options: tackle it with a knife and fork (the coward's way out), or dislocate your jaw in the manner of a boa constrictor swallowing a foal, and heave it into your gullet, driving it home like a Victorian taskmaster pushing a buttered eight-year-old into a narrow chimney flue, taking care not to let the top half of the snooty artisan bap smother your nostrils on the way in. ...

see more So Much Pun

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear Anneliese

I'm starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

That afternoon, it unveiled a new feature called Google Instant. It delivers search results before you've finished typing them. So now, if I visit Google and start typing my own name, it shows me links to Craigslist the moment I hit "C". When I add the "H", up pops the homepage for Chase online banking. By the time I've spelt out "Charlie", I'm presented with a synopsis and review score for "Charlie St Cloud", a film starring Zac Efron. Add a "Br" and Charlie Brown gazes back at me.

As the name suggests, this all happens instantly. It's the internet on fast-forward, and it's aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can't even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.

Naturally, Google is trumpeting it as the best thing since sliced time. In a promotional video, a likable codger gives it a spin and exclaims, "I didn't even have to press enter!" This from a man old enough to remember drying his clothes with a mangle. Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it's destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.

But this isn't just about ease of use: it's about productivity too. Google proudly claims it reduces the average search time by two to five seconds. "That may not seem like a lot at first," it says, "but it adds up."

Cool. Maybe now I'll get round to completing that symphony. ...




Dear Charlie.
Ta much, dear Glenn321

Nikolas Sarkozy has become the latest high profile victim of a Google bomb, after bloggers linked his Facebook page to the phrase "trou du cul".

Schoolboys searching for foreign insults will discover the French for 'asshole' is now synonymous with the diminutive President, according to Google at least. ...

Ta much, dear Edosan

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Forget those creative writing workshops. If you want to write, get threatened

And don't ask me for advice. I'd prefer you to never achieve anything. Ever

Charlie Brooker
Monday 16 August 2010

One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone.

I rarely respond; partly because there isn't much advice I can give them (apart from "keep writing and someone might notice"), and partly because I suspect they're actually seeking encouragement rather than practical guidance. And I'm a terrible cheerleader. I can't egg you on. I just can't. My heart's not in it. To be brutally honest, I'd prefer you to never achieve anything, ever. What if you create a timeless work of art that benefits all humankind? I'm never going to do that – why should you have all the glory? It's selfish of you to even try. Don't you dare so much as start a blog. Seriously. Don't.

Sometimes people go further, asking for advice on the writing process itself. Here I'm equally unhelpful. I've been writing for a living for around 15 years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It's random. Some days I'll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it's like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue. The difference, I think, is the degree of self-awareness. When you're consciously trying to write, the words just don't come out. Every sentence is a creaking struggle, and staring out the window with a vague sense of desperation rapidly becomes a coping strategy. To function efficiently as a writer, 95% of your brain has to teleport off into nowhere, taking its neuroses with it, leaving the confident, playful 5% alone to operate the controls. To put it another way: words are like cockroaches; only once the lights are off do they feel free to scuttle around on the kitchen floor. I'm sure I could think of a more terrible analogy than that given another 100,000 years.

Anyway the trick (which I routinely fail to pull off) is to teleport yourself into that productive trance-state as quickly as possible, thereby minimising procrastination and maximising output. I'm insanely jealous of prolific writers, who must either murder their inner critic and float into a productive reverie with ease, or have been fortunate enough to be born with absolutely zero self-critical reflex to begin with.

As for me, I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself, the backseat driver who can't stop tutting and nagging. There's no escape from me's relentless criticism. Me even knows what I'm thinking, and routinely has a pop at Me for that. "You're worrying about your obsessive degree of self-criticism again," whines Me. "How pathetically solipsistic." And then it complains about its own bleating tone of voice and starts petulantly kicking the back of the seat, asking if we're there yet. ...

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Innsmouth Beach
The Dread Cthulhu Tries to Relax

Cthulhu Fail
By robert | Published: January 26, 2010

In honor of Dread Cthulhu and the Twitter Fail Whale.

Ta much, dear Anneliese

3. They look way cooler




4. You can hold one any way you like

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Ta much, dear Anneliese

'Had it crashed? Or was it being sarcastic?' Charlie Brooker on the iPad
Websites look great on it. As does video. But books? Here, I'm less convinced
Saturday 29 May 2010

The iPad: the world's most expensive rectangle. The Guardian wanted me to write a first-impressions review on launch day – but how? I could borrow one from an early adopter, but that wouldn't be the same. I don't like poking round other people's computers. It's like snooping through their medicine cabinets: quite quickly you can stumble across something you wish you hadn't seen. I needed a new one, straight out of the packaging. A new one I could keep.

But this being launch day, iPads were bound to be scarcer than cats' eggs, right? Disappointingly, the Guardian picked one up from the Tottenham Court Road branch of PC World without having to kill anyone.

Typically for Apple, the packaging virtually places the device in your hands with the grace of a well-trained butler. The iPad itself is surprisingly heavy: about the same as a hardback book. It gave me mild arm ache almost immediately. Maybe there's an app that can tell you how many calories you're burning just by holding it. The best solution is to adopt a self-consciously casual crossed-legged sitting position, and prop it up with your thigh. Fanboys who wet themselves may cause a short circuit.

The display is extremely glossy, so the first thing you'll see on your screen is a reflection of your face from an unflattering angle. It also doubles as a fingerprint collector, which means you'll spend the first hour obsessively wiping it clean on your T-shirt before giving up and ordering an adhesive screen protector from Amazon (which, if the iPhone equivalents are anything to go by, will be impossible to apply without contemplating suicide at least twice). At this price, Apple – nice, friendly Apply – could at least include a couple of free screen protectors and some kind of carry-case, no? Of course not.

You're required to use iTunes during the setup process, which is like being forced to eat a handful of mud. iTunes is twice as awful as any software crime Microsoft ever inflicted on the world. Up popped a progress bar which turned out to be a work of satirical fiction – lodging fast at 7/8ths complete while making random claims about how long it was going to take to finish. It was impossible to tell if it had crashed or was just being sarcastic. I was scared to pull the sync cable out– and I'm a nerd. So much for Macs being easy to use. Eventually a nice man from MacFormat magazine saw me moaning about it on Twitter and gave me some personal assistance. Your experience may differ. ...

... So websites look great on it. As does video. The BBC iPlayer is particularly impressive. But books? Here, I'm less convinced. Kindle owners can download a free app which lets them access their books on the iPad; Apple also has its own rival iBook service. In both cases the screen looks superb, and swiping a finger across the screen to flip the page gives you an undeniable futuristic thrill. But the display, luminously gorgeous when replaying video, is simply not suited for reading articles at length.Yes, you can adjust the brightness, but it's still firing light into your pupils, unlike an ebook screen, with its poncey "electronic ink".

I doubt many readers will persevere to the final page of a novel, unless it's a book in which the lead character squints a lot, in which case you'll have a certain empathy. ...

Ta much, dear Anneliese

...the answer, of course, is American cartoons. When it comes to pop music, characters in American TV cartoons do no not mess with Mr Inbetween. Characters in cartoons never ask those dumb questions: "Should I like this?", "Am I allowed to like this?", "If I say I like this, will my peer group laugh at me?"

No, cartoon characters always critique an act from the gut. The only way any critic should ever act. Which is why characters in US cartoons make better critics than actual critics. Who, by the way, would almost certainly make rubbish cartoon characters.

There are many fine examples of cartoon characters proving themselves to be better rock critics than actual rock critics. Here, however, just a few examples will have to suffice.

So there's Bart Simpson at a Smashing Pumpkins concert: "Meh. Making teenagers miserable is like shooting fish in a barrel."

Touché, Bart! Twenty years of aural sludge demolished! Then there's Homer making a band play only their one big hit. And then only the good bit. Over and over again. Which, if you admit it, is all you really want anyway, right? Sheer and shockingly honest postmodern genius, Homer.

Next we've got Family Guy's Peter Griffin rediscovering Surfin' Bird and playing the record to death until everyone around him is sick, screaming doolally mental and pulling their ears out in frustration. Don't you wish you could still appreciate moronic rock with that much intensity? Peter gives you permission.

And, finally, here's Beavis and Butthead dissecting Radiohead's Creep:
Beavis: "Why don't they just play the cool part all the way through?"
Butthead: "Well Beavis, if they didn't have a part of the song that sucked, the other part wouldn't be so cool."

I rest my case.

Never mind the Con-Dem coalition. We want bogeymen and we want them now
Why can't these 21st-century Tories just be massively unreasonable from the outset?
Charlie Brooker
Monday 17 May 2010

So: the weirdest election in history has produced the weirdest government imaginable. Well, almost. If Cameron had formed a coalition with the cast of Bergerac, that would be weirder – but only by about seven per cent.

The worst part is working out who to hate, and why. I was eight when Thatcher got in, and didn't really understand what was happening. Nonetheless, before long the Tories had replaced the Cybermen as my number one bogeymen. At first there was a simple, visceral reason for this: they seemed alarmingly gung-ho about nuclear war. They believed nuclear missiles were an effective deterrent, and furthermore, that a nuclear war might be winnable anyway.

I was opposed to all kinds of nuclear war – even little ones between neighbouring Welsh counties were simply not on, in my book. It was my understanding that these things tended to spiral out of control, and burning to death in a massive exploding fireball didn't rank very high on my list of hopes and dreams for the future.

(My paranoia wasn't that far off, as it happens. According to the book Rendez-Vous: The Psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, at the height of the Falklands war, Thatcher threatened to nuke Argentina unless President Mitterrand handed over disabling codes for the French-built Exocet missiles which were pounding British ships. If that was true, and had actually happened, you wouldn't be reading the Guardian right now – you'd be fighting a giant scorpion to impress the village elders.)

As if plotting to destroy the world wasn't bad enough, the Conservatives went on to preside over the most wilfully obnoxious and polarising decade imaginable: braying yuppies at one extreme, penniless strikers at the other. The Tories weren't just nasty – they seemed to actively enjoy being nasty. And there was no getting rid of them, even when Thatcher got the boot. Consequently, an entire generation grew up regarding the Tory government as something like rain, or wasps, or stomach flu: an unavoidable, undying source of dismay. ...

Ta much, dear BrightKnight

‘Were you still up when Brown lost his Balls?’
The Mole
That’s what the Tories - and many in the Labour party, too - hope to be asking tomorrow morning
LAST UPDATED 9:21 AM, MAY 6, 2010

Labour campaigners are anticipating with bated breath the election coverage between 2.30am and 3.0am tomorrow when the returning officer is due to announce the result of the election in the West Yorkshire seat of Morley & Outwood where Schools Secretary and would-be Labour leader Ed Balls could go down to defeat in a 'Portillo moment'.

The Brown camp has accepted defeat in the overall result - though they cling to the hope of winning the largest number of seats thanks to the weird voting system they are now pledged to reform. That could enable Brown to cling to power in a deal with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, but it is a remote hope. Clegg has already made clear he doesn't want to play footsie over power with Brown.

So the Labour camp are already moving on to what happens after their electoral car crash.

Balls, Brown's protege, has the tacit backing of Britain's biggest union Unite to launch a leadership bid if the polls are right and Brown is forced out of office, while the modernisers are clustering round Foreign Secretary David Miliband as the great hope to rebuild New Labour's broken pact with the people.

Balls first has to get over the hurdle of winning his seat which has become one of the Tory's 'decapitation' targets through boundary changes. It is estimated that it will take a swing to the Tories of about 10 per cent to get Balls out - far less than the 17.4 per cent swing to Labour that forced Michael Portillo out in 1997. Then TV viewers who stayed up late watched stunned as the high-profile Tory Cabinet minister lost his Enfield Southgate seat to the young Labour candidate, Stephen Twigg.

"Were you still up for Portillo?" became a catchphrase - and even a book title - in the aftermath. There is no doubt many Tories relish asking each other tomorrow morning: "Were you still up when Brown lost his Balls?" ...

Picking a leader boils down to the question: 'Which stage persona do you prefer?' Answer: not Cameron's
Charlie Brooker
Monday 3 May 2010

One of the most fascinating sights I've witnessed thus far during the coverage of the 2010 election campaign is Gordon Brown's visit to a branch of Tesco in Hastings on 16 April, which was broadcast live and uninterrupted for about five minutes on Sky News.

"Hello, good to see you," says Gordon, shaking someone's hand. "It's great to be here," he continues, waving at a well-wisher. He looks around. "This is a good store, isn't it?" he enquires of no one in particular. He spots a young boy. "How old are you?" he asks. The boy is eight. "That's a good age," Gordon concludes. "Which football team do you support?"

As he continues walking through the supermarket, the pictures carry on moving, but the sound appears to be stuck on a loop, because Gordon's repeating the same words. "Hello, good to see you." "It's great to be here." "This is a good store, isn't it?" "How old are you?" "That's a good age." "Which football team do you support?" The same handful of phrases, over and over again, for five minutes.

When you watch the footage repeatedly, as I have, distinct patterns start to emerge. Throughout the visit, Brown looks marginally less comfortable than a horse crossing a rope bridge, and his internal dialogue tree is starkly visible. Whenever he meets a boy of eight years old or older, for instance, Gordon briefly asks which football team they support, then chuckles, whatever the answer, before moving on to say "Hello, good to see you" to someone else. That's the way he's been programmed. (He occasionally breaks up his repetitive mantra with brief statements of the obvious: at one point, he glances at a shelf full of produce and says, "There's a lot of produce here." It almost makes you wish he was being shown around an orgy instead. Almost.)

The footage is funny, yet somehow heartbreaking. Brown looks clumsy, ungainly and chronically unsure how to behave around everyday shoppers. He reminds me of me. I can scarcely look people in the eye in supermarkets either. But I've learned to survive in demanding public situations – such as standing in front of an audience of expectant strangers – by adopting a babbling, deliberately awkward, vaguely nihilistic persona that is 50% me and 50% comic construct.

It's a shield of radioactive bullshit that hopefully provides just enough entertainment value to stop the crowd physically attacking me, and just enough psychological distance to stop me crumpling to the floor and ripping my own face off at the sheer uncomfortable weirdness of it all. ...

May 2, 2010
Help! I can't operate a thing in my hi-tech new flat
You could use the cooker’s controls to fly a US spy drone. But to make a shepherd’s pie? Not in a million years

In the olden days it was easy to make a television work. You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down. Things have changed. Have you tried to make a modern TV work? It cannot be done. No, don’t argue; it can’t. You have to get a man round and then it still won’t work because you have absolutely no idea what to press on the remote-control device.

I am looking now at the plipper thing for the TV in my office. It has 32 buttons on it, including one marked “COMPO/(rgb 8)”. Any idea what that does? I haven’t. I do understand the one marked “Power”, but this does not actually turn the television on. So far as I can tell, nothing does, which is why, for three years, it has been off. Frankly, for getting the news I’d have been better off building a chain of beacons.

Then there is the world of the mobile phone. Sometimes my wife asks me to answer her Raspberry and not once in a year have I been able to do so before the caller rings off. To my way of thinking, it’s not a communication device. It’s a sex toy for geeks. A laptop enthusiast’s Rabbit.

However, my life took a dramatic turn for the worse last week because I took delivery of a new flat in London. It’s been done up by a developer and fitted with every single item from every single gadget magazine in the universe. This means I cannot operate a single thing. Nothing, d’you hear? Nothing at all.

Let us take, for example, the old-fashioned pleasure of making a cup of coffee. For many years this involved putting some water in a kettle and boiling it. But now kettles are seen as messy, which is why my new flat has a multi-buttoned aluminium panel set into the wall. The idea is that you fill it with beans and the boiling water is instant. Sounds great, but the instruction book is 400 pages long and I’m sorry but if I waded through that, my longing for a cup of coffee would be replaced by a fervent need for a quart of armagnac.

The coffee machine, though, is the tip of the iceberg. There’s a music system that can beam any radio station in the world into any room. Last night I selected a classic rock station from San Francisco and was enjoying very much the non-stop stream of Supertramp, until I wanted to go to bed. This meant turning the system off and, for me at least, that is impossible.

Normally, of course, you just hit the offending electronic good with a hammer or throw it on the floor — this works well for alarm clocks in hotel rooms — but I was holding a remote-control device. Smashing that into a million pieces, I realised, would not stop the noise. I needed to find the actual box and I couldn’t. So the only solution was to fly to California ... and burn the radio station down. ...

BBC debate was a cross between Songs of Praise and Over the Rainbow
I half expected the loser to hand his shoes to Dimbleby at the end before jetting off into the sky
Charlie Brooker
Thursday 29 April 2010

If the leadership debates were supermarkets – which they're not – ITV's would be Tesco, Sky's would be Morrisons, and the BBC's offering would be Waitrose. The ITV debate felt like a 1990s gameshow whose rules required Alastair Stewart to bellow "Mr Clegg!", "Mr Brown!" or "Mr Cameron!" every thirty seconds; the Sky studio was a poky black cave cluttered with discarded British Airways tail fins and dwarfed by an immense Sky logo. With its mix of cavernous space and high-tech backdrops, the BBC debate resembled a cross between Songs of Praise and current Saturday night talent-show splurge Over the Rainbow: I half expected the loser to hand his shoes to Dimbleby at the end before jetting off into the sky on a rocket-powered podium.

The chief topic was the economy, a subject upon which I have such a poor grasp that from my ignorant perspective all three men may as well have been debating the best way to kidnap a space wraith. Cameron proposed 'efficiency savings' which seemed to boil down to a war on unnecessary leaflets; Brown boomed that this would shrink the economy by £6bn and risk a double-dip recession. Clegg didn't care what happened as long as it was fair. He proposed some kind of cross-party economic fairness committee which, as secret fellowships go, sounds about as much fun as a cardboard-licking party.

Clegg was big on fairness generally. Fairness and difference. He used so many distancing tactics – references to "these two", phrases like "there they go again", constant calls to "get beyond political point-scoring" – he may as well have thrown in a "hark at these arseholes" at the end for good measure. It's a tactic that largely works: he sometimes came across as a slightly exasperated translator sadly explaining to his fellow earthmen in the audience that these two visiting Gallifreyan dignitaries were well-meaning but essentially wrong. ...


Selected commentage:

... greendragonreprised
30 Apr 2010, 9:38AM

Love the Stargate Atlantis reference.

At one point Camerson said 1% of public spending was on leafloets from the council, or words to that effect. There speaks a man who has never had to balance a budget in his life. Not an effing clue.

If he's elected I only hope the third world lets us join because we're heading to the stone age.


Kikaboka
30 Apr 2010, 10:05AM

Exactly.

Upon seeing the polls this morning, my thoughts were:

"Did I watch a different debate? I saw a massive orange condom with dead eyes get rinsed by Clegg and Brown. When did Cameron win?"


comping
30 Apr 2010, 10:16AM

'He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact'.

Think of his sex face.

Now try to erase it from memory.

Poor Samantha.


ChocLick
30 Apr 2010, 10:25AM

Following the overblown 'bigotgate' media piss-fight, which saw him force-fed fistfuls of shame, it was vaguely impressive to see him standing at a podium instead of screaming on a ledge.

Brown actually seeemed invigorated by it all. He reminds me a bit of Tik Tok from Return to Oz and last night he was doing that spinny arm thing while the other two watched in awe.

My son sumed up Cameron last night for me "That man has a Fibby Face".


kendrew
30 Apr 2010, 10:32AM

Charlie as ever has his finger on the concealed pulse; how anyone, commentator, punter, journo can get worked up about these non events is beyond me. Politics has now beyond doubt strayed into tele storyline territory.

I mean you couldnt write this fuck stuff; Armando lannuci must be hard put trying to keep up with life imitating art. What a shower; Creature Campbell back in the swamp churning out the political hardcore for Gordon to use to titillate the dyed in the wool Labour unfortunates.

It is so depressing that these are the best that Britan can produce to run our affairs; fortunately it matters not a jot who will be in number 10 on the 7th May.


Sputnik2301
30 Apr 2010, 10:57AM

I've been to quite a few cardboard licking parties and they all turned out to be fairly cosmic.

Although that may have had something to do with what the cardboard was marinated in before hand

o_0

Looking forward to your election night coverage!


NeonMessiah
30 Apr 2010, 1:13PM

Brown, Cameron or Clegg..hmmm

It's like chosing to be hung, drawn, or quartered.

Suicide is painless. ...


Ta much, dear Glenn321

... As you can see qualitatively, our provocative dress didn't really seem to effect the frequency of earthquakes. There were 47 earthquakes on the 26th, which falls well within the 95% confidence interval for number of earthquakes (about 0 to 148).

So did our cleavage/thighs/ankles/hair increase the number of earthquakes? No.

"But Jen!" the internet cried, "what about the 6.5 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan? Surely that shows our bosoms have supernatural powers!"

Sorry to be a buzzkill - hey, I'd like magical control over plate tectonics too - but that single earthquake wasn't significant. Earthquakes between 6.0 and 6.9 magnitude happen, on average, 134 times a year. That means we had about a 37% probability of an earthquake of that magnitude happening on boobquake just due to chance alone - hardly an improbable event that needs to be attributed to an angry deity.

But just to be safe, let's look at the overall distribution of the magnitudes of earthquakes on boobquake. Did they differ from the types of earthquakes we've seen since February? These samples span from the entirety of the event - midnight at the earliest time zone to midnight at the last time zone - so the data encompasses more than 24 hours. ...

Monday, April 26, 2010
And the boobquake experiment has begun...
I won't be able to make a blog post until boobquake is over, but I will be tweeting and posting photos throughout the day. Feel free to talk about your boobquake adventures in this post*!

Check back here after boobquake is over around the world (6am EST) for the results!

*No, that does not mean I need an update of every single earthquake that has happened so far. No, the Taiwan earthquake is not statistically significant - yet. If we get many of a similar magnitude in the next 24 hours, then we might start worshipping the power of immodesty.
Posted by Jen at 12:34 AM
Labels: boobs, science, skepticism

... I just want to apologize if this comes off as demeaning toward women. To be honest, it started as silly joke that I hurriedly fired off since I was about to miss the beginning of House. I never thought it would get the attention it did. If I would have known, I would have spent more time being careful about my wording.

That being said, I don't think the event is completely contrary to feminist ideals. I'm asking women to wear their most "immodest" outfit that they already would wear, but to coordinate it all on the same day for the sake of the experiment. Heck, just showing an ankle would be considered immodest by some people. I don't want to force people out of their comfort zones, because I believe women have the right to choose how they want to dress. Please don't pressure women to participate if they don't want to. If men ogle, that's the fault of the men, not me for dressing how I like. If I want to a show a little cleavage or joke about my boobs, that's my prerogative.

I also hate the ideal of "big boobs are always better!" The cleavage joke was just a result of me personally having cleavage, and that being my choice of immodesty. And I thought "boobquake" just sounded funny. Really, it's not supposed to be serious activism that is going to revolutionize women's rights, but just a bit of fun juvenile humor. I'm a firm believer that when someone says something so stupid and hateful, serious discourse isn't going to accomplish anything - sometimes light-hearted mockery is worthwhile.

Anyway, I'm not forcing anyone to agree with me. Maybe I am failing at Feminism 101, or maybe I'm just taking a different approach.

And to the scientists who are concerned with my methods - don't worry, I fully plan on doing some statistics after the event. I know many earthquakes happen on a daily basis, so we're looking to see if Boobquake significantly increases the number or severity of earthquakes. Or if an earthquake strikes West Lafayette, IN and only kills me, that may be good evidence of God's wrath as well (I'm not too concerned). And yes, I know I need a larger sample size to make this good science. Maybe I'll include Mardi gras in my calculations.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Tremble before Boobquake!
April 26th, 2010

If you are a geek, a skeptic, or a man, then you’ve probably heard that today is Boobquake: a day for women around the world to show off their cleavage in an attempt to debunk a fundamentalist Iranian cleric who blames natural seismic events on women dressing immodestly.

In other words, all that shaking and jiggling in the ground is caused by… well, I don’t need to belabor the point.

To be clear, I happily endorse both of these things (the cleavage and the debunking). But I do have one niggling doubt. Bear with me here…

First, last week an Islamic cleric in Iran said that all the earthquakes occurring in that country are caused by women dressing "immodestly". Yes, this same screwed-up thinking that brought us the Taliban and the idea that burning, throwing acid upon, and beheading women is all their own fault for being, y’know, women, gives us this:

"Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes… What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" Sedighi [the cleric] asked during a prayer sermon Friday. "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes."

I got news for you, Sedighi: if I were God, I’d be throwing more earthquakes your way for the way you treat women. In fact, I’d send a few thousand mini ones that open the Earth and just swallow up the twinkie clerics who say such profoundly horrid things.

Serious note: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: not all cultures are created equal. Any culture that sweepingly and maniacally oppresses half their population is what I would call evil. Moral relativism be damned: that kind of crap is wrong, plain and simple.

Now, the response on the skeptical and science blogs was pretty good; mockery, for the most part, which is what this kind of insanity deserves (Maria at Skepchick, for example, took this opportunity to debunk myths about breasts). But Blag Hag, a female blogger, came up with an interesting idea: Boobquake. The idea is for women around the world to show off their assets today, Monday, April 26, in an attempt to debunk the cleric. When there is no earthquake today, it will show the cleric for what he is: a sexist jerk* mired in an ancient and ridiculous mode of thinking.

I like the idea of Boobquake for many reasons. It’s an excellent display of physical mockery, which is a great way to raise awareness. It also resonates in American culture because we have so many people who are so twisted up about such things morally; I support poking them in the eye with this kind of thing as well. Also, I’m unapologetically a heterosexual man, so c’mon. ...


*You didn’t seriously think I’d call him a boob, did you?

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Brace yourself
Category: Weirdness
Posted on: April 26, 2010 9:38 AM, by PZ Myers

It's the day of the Boobquake.

It's amazing how much press this event is getting. I was going to say that if we do get a flurry of earthquakes today, the women are going to be insufferable…but even if it's an ordinary day geologically, they'll have managed to create a small mediaquake. ...

... Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmVT1LBhwmO9ej9LNg7a5e9d-AVJ8ezfmE | April 26, 2010 10:25 AM

Some say the world will end in boobquake,
Some say in booty shaking.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor boobies.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction big booty
Is also great
And would suffice.
- With apologies to Robert Frost ...

... Posted by: Cuttlefish, OM | April 26, 2010 11:19 AM

Whether B or C or D-cup
It's a tempest in a teacup--
It was just a silly comment; now it's gotten out of hand
But in truth, the intertubies
Are composed of naught but boobies
(Metaphorical and literal), we all must understand. ...


Ta much, dear Anneliese

Boobquake fails to destroy planet
Jubs versus Iranian cleric: Immodesty vindicated
By Lester Haines
26th April 2010

Planet Earth has not (yet) been destroyed by today's terrifying Boobquake experiment - one Indiana student's response to Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi's insistence that immodestly dressed women provoke earthquakes. ...

... McCreight's picture speaks for itself, and thousands of other females have thrown their weight behind the effort to either provoke a major catastrophe or prove that Iranian clerics have a poor grasp of the fundamentals of plate tectonics.

McCreight's earth-moving efforts can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

Random Ramblings of an Insomniac: Boobquakes, dangerous squirrels, things we already knew about men

April 25, 2010

in International incidents, Random crap, mixing medications, no one thinks this is funny but me, terrible titles, this blog cures cancer, why the terrorists hate us

I have insomnia so I’m getting a head-start on National #Boobquake Day; a day when women are encouraged to wear their most immodest outfit to see if immodest women do, in fact, cause earthquakes as reported by Iranian media. Apparently this is a real concern. So I put on my most low-cut corset and used my computer camera to take some pictures but my cat kept getting in the way and I was all “WHY MUST YOU BE IN EVERY PICTURE?” and then Victor woke up and wanted to know why I was screaming and taking half-naked pictures of myself and I was all “Uh…it’s an experiment to see if my boobs can create earthquakes?” and Victor just stared at me and shook his head in confusion and shuffled back to bed and I’m all “I’M DOING THIS FOR SCIENCE, ASSHOLE“.

It was weird though because I always heard that it was girls who didn’t understand science. ...

Boobquake is almost upon us, which means the media is super interested in covering the end of the world. I just thought I'd let you know what shows I'll be appearing on in the next twenty four hours, since they're... uh, kind of huge. And if you need more motivation to watch, yes, I'll be showing cleavage - at least as much as is appropriate for TV. ...

The mullah's right: I'm a walking natural disaster
By LINLEY BONIFACE - The Dominion Post
Last updated 07:57 26/04/2010

On Friday, I was about to don my usual work clothes for a day at the office - fishnet stockings, an animal print corset, crotchless leather boy shorts and a pair of thigh-high fetish boots - when I suddenly thought: but am I just being selfish? Am I really prepared for the consequences of unleashing my gorgeousness upon the world? ...

... * Munich Hailstorm, 1986. In many ways, Iranian clerics would have approved of the 1980s. For an entire decade, most Western women's bodies were entirely obscured by jumpsuits, parachute pants, legwarmers, fingerless gloves and towering, torso-obscuring bubble perms. Owing to the malevolent influence of jazzercise, however, I once walked from my car to a gym in nothing but a stripy green and pink leotard, thus triggering a hailstorm that felled vast tracts of forest and caused millions of deutschmarks worth of damage. Mea culpa, Munich.

* Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak, 1999. No-one has ever satisfactorily explained why 74 tornadoes ripped through the American Midwest in the spring of 1999. Until now, that is. I blame that Lycra dress on the Spice Girls.

* Kolka-Karmodon Rock Ice Slide, 2002. Thanks to the boob-enhancing qualities of pregnancy, every shirt I wore in 2002 gave me the cleavage of a medieval serving wench. And so it was that a chunk of the Kolka Glacier collapsed, burying a blameless Russian village under ice and snow. Sorry about that.

* Mt Ruapehu Lahar, 2007. What can I say? It was a present. I took it off before anyone could get killed, didn't I?

I can't tell you how much better I feel, having got that off my chest. Although, of course, natural disasters aren't all we have to worry about, according to another prominent international leader. Bolivian President Evo Morales said last week that men who eat chicken not only go bald but "experience deviances in being men", whatever that might mean.

It's all very apocalyptic. If both Sedighi's and Morales' predictions turn out to be correct, I fear for the future of our species. Perhaps the world will end not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with a sluttily dressed chicken.

Boobquake to shake Bangalore
By: Priyanjali Ghose
2010-04-26
Bangalore

Bangalore girls say they would not mind wearing low necklines today to support worldwide protests against Tehran cleric who blames scantily clad women for causing earthquakes. Priyanjali Ghose reports

Boobquake, an American student's online worldwide campaign on Monday against an Iranian cleric's comment that immodestly dressed women tantalize men and increase earthquake, evoked mass global online responses and also attracted mixed reactions from Indian activists. Women in Bangalore understandably do not want to [be] left behind. ...

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy!!!!!!1!!!!!eleven!!!!!!

Women can have both b( o ) ( o )bs and brains!

WTF?!

Purdue senior organizes 'Boobquake' demonstration to refute imam's claims
By DAVID K. LI
Last Updated: 9:37 AM, April 23, 2010

... "Many women who do not dress modestly . . . lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes," [Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi] said during a prayer in Tehran last week.

"What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes."

McCreight, through her blog, Blag Hag, is calling for ladies to flash a little more leg (or other flesh) than usual, so Sedighi will know science stacks up well against his goofy geological theories.

"What we want is for women to wear something [Monday] that's a little more immodest than what they'd normally wear, maybe shorts or a low-cut shirt," McCreight told The Post yesterday.

McCreight, 22, says she isn't going overboard in her bra-busting protest. The genetics major plans to dress in a tank top, a shade sexier than her normal T-shirt look.

"It's a personal statement for anyone who wants to take part in what they consider 'immodest,' " she said. "To some people, showing ankle might be 'immodest,' and that'd be fine."

"The main thing is to show we don't need to put up with this kind of supernatural anti-science. Sometimes the best way to attack this is with comic mockery."

More than 45,000 presumably female readers of McCreight's Web site have volunteered to take part in Boobquake.

So what happens if the world's flesh-flashing women do spawn deadly quakes?

"A lot of my guy friends are saying, 'Well, at least that'd be a good way to go out,' " said McCreight.

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear Anneliese

Saturday, April 24, 2010
Changing The Pope's Itinerary

"Your Holiness, a moment please--we've made a couple changes
To the schedule you will follow while you're visiting this week.
It's really nothing, mostly--it just sort of rearranges
All the visits, cos a group or two would like to hear you speak."

"There's a group of rape survivors; there's a dozen men with AIDS;
There's two priests--a married couple--who are looking for your blessing
There's an epidemiologist, who says his courage fades
When he sees you're banning condoms when he knows the need is pressing"

"There's an hour with some "Hitchens" and another with some "Fry"
And between the two, expect to feel a modicum of shame
And then lastly, there's this "Jesus" bloke, who wants to ask you why,
You are doing all this stupid shit, and say it's in his name"



Ta much, dear Anneliese

“Doctors are reasonable people”
Senate hopeful Sue Lowden’s plan for Healthcare reform is to barter chickens for medical procedures. But you may be unsure how many chickens are required for your medical care. This handy calculator converts many common procedures into chickens so you won’t look like an idiot at your next Doctor’s Appointment. ...


Ta much, dear Anneliese

... "The inspiration came to me whilst I was dressing," announced Lucas; "it will be the thing in the next music-hall revue. All London will go mad over it. It's just a couplet; of course there will be other words, but they won't matter. Listen:

Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar,
Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.

A lifting, catchy sort of refrain, you see, and big drum business on the two syllables of bor-zoi. It's immense. And I've thought out all the business of it; the singer will sing the first verse alone, then during the second verse Cousin Teresa will walk through, followed by four wooden dogs on wheels; Caesar will be an Irish terrier, Fido a black poodle, Jock a fox-terrier, and the borzoi, of course, will be a borzoi. During the third verse Cousin Teresa will come on alone, and the dogs will be drawn across by themselves from the opposite wing; then Cousin Teresa will catch on to the singer and go off-stage in one direction, while the dogs' procession goes off in the other, crossing en route, which is always very effective. There'll be a lot of applause there, and for the fourth verse Cousin Teresa will come on in sables and the dogs will all have coats on. Then I've got a great idea for the fifth verse; each of the dogs will be led on by a Nut, and Cousin Teresa will come on from the opposite side, crossing en route, always effective, and then she turns round and leads the whole lot of them off on a string, and all the time every one singing like mad:

Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar,
Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.

Tum-Tum! Drum business on the two last syllables. I'm so excited, I shan't sleep a wink to-night. I'm off to-morrow by the ten-fifteen. I've wired to Hermanova to lunch with me."

If any of the rest of the family felt any excitement over the creation of Cousin Teresa, they were signally successful in concealing the fact.

"Poor Lucas does take his silly little ideas seriously," said Colonel Harrowcluff afterwards in the smoking-room. ...

Ta much, dear MSiegel

ahem Damned amusing.

Ta much, dear Edosan

USA Translation To Jamaican
By Donmerican
Published Mar 1, 2003

... USA: Hors d'oeuvres.
JA: Ah wah dis likkle sinting yuh a gi me?

USA: I think something is wrong with Susan, she might have the flu.
JA: Lawd Gad, obeah tek up Suzie!

USA: Girl, those shoes are the bomb.
JA: Gyal, yuh roach killa dem a seh one out deh.

USA: Oh my gosh, I just broke Mom's expensive plate.
JA: Lawd mi Gad, mi bruk up Mama stoosh crackry.

USA: Aren't those pants a bit short?
JA: Yuh did a expect flood ar yuh tek yuh measurement inna wata?

USA: Why are you squeezing the mangoes like that?
JA: Lissen mi nuh, mi a beg yuh stap fingle-fingle up di mango dem.

USA: Sir, please don't throw my luggage like that.
JA: Aye buff teet bwoy, tap fling up-fling up mi bag dem suh [so] man.

USA: I wish you would quit lying.
JA: Tap di blinkin lyin, yuh ole liyad.

USA: Lift the hood off the car for me, John.
JA: Hey my yute, fly di bonnet! ...

Jesus Christ returns to Earth – punches Pope in face, leaves again

March 18, 2009 by William K. Wolfrum

Jesus Christ – a leading figure in modern Christianity – returned to Earth today after a nearly 2,000-year hiatus. The Second Coming was cut short, however, as Christ, 37, went directly to the Vatican and punched Pope Benedict XVI square in the mouth. Jesus then ascended back to heaven.

While a bloodied Benedict had no comment, Christ put out a press release shortly before his ascension.

“My children, it is not my time yet,” read the statement in part. “But someone had to give that A-hole a good face punching, and the buck stops here.” ...


Ta much, dear Anneliese

... Ominous! The coffin could contain a Roman military or religious official, but Terrenato isn't certain. This lead behemoth will soon reside at the American Academy in Rome, where researchers will attempt to divine its contents using thermography and endoscopic cameras. If neither of these methods work, the coffin may be subjected to an MRI of cyclopean proportions.

So what exactly is in this mysterious half-ton pine - erm - lead box? Here are some totally implausible possibilities:

- Cthulhu Jr.
- Cthulhu Jr.'s lunch.
- Some poor sap who turned the frozen donkey wheel with a little too much gusto.
- The groaning dregs of the first Roman zombie outbreak.
- All the wickedness of the world (with a dollop of hope).
- Apparitions who get their rocks off melting Nazis' faces.
- A bored demon who has nothing better to do other than go to Washington D.C. and make little girls drop the F-bomb.
- Candy. Just a mind-blowing, shit-ton of candy.

It's the World Cup of crisps!
Just like the real World Cup, but with more crisps and less football. OK, no football. OK, it's just crisps
Charlie Brooker
Monday 5 April 2010

Last year's "Do us a Flavour" campaign, in which the company launched six temporary new varieties, was eventually won by the hideous "Builder's Breakfast", which tasted like a fried egg in an envelope. This year, they're celebrating the World Cup by launching 15 – yes, 15 – new flavours, each ostensibly representing a different nation. I was alerted to this exciting development by an email from Walker's PR agency – I'm presumably on their radar after reviewing the "Do Us a Flavour" varieties last year. On that occasion, I went out and bought the crisps myself. This time I'd get them for free. Following a brief phone call, a courier delivered a mock suitcase full of crisps to my door. So you can view everything that follows as essentially free publicity for Walkers, albeit the kind of publicity that explicitly states that their new crisps taste revolting. Well, most of them. A couple of them are quite interesting, as you'll see in a moment: ...

... Italian spaghetti bolognese/ Brazilian salsa

Tomato time. These both taste like scratch'n'sniff pizza aroma: a lame committee meeting of watered-down herbs. The "Brazilian salsa" has a slightly more sugary feel, but otherwise I couldn't tell the difference. My face was openly sobbing by this point, mind.


Spanish chicken paella

It would've been fun to annoyed the Spanish by releasing "maltreated donkey" or "slaughtered bull" flavours instead, but no: chicken paella it is. Amazingly, these actually taste like rice. And slightly like chicken. But they don't taste like chicken paella: more like chicken fried rice. Maybe Walkers were expecting China to qualify.


Irish stew

No.


French garlic baguette

Garlic Bread diluted by a factor of approximately 10,000. So weak and ineffectual, it's almost homeopathic. They missed a trick: a novelty "snail" or "frog's legs" flavour would at least have grim curiosity value, much like . . .


Australian BBQ kangaroo

See? You want to know what these taste like, don't you? A: watery barbecue sauce with a dim hint of meat. There's no actual kangaroo in them, so the "kangaroo" is delivered entirely by your subconscious. They could call it "boiled pilot's leg" and the effect would be similar. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321

Ta much, dear Edosan

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear Edosan

Ta much, dear Edosan

True dat!

T'ank yu, darlin' Matty!

Amen.

... A snow day is a good time to catch up on everyone's blogs. I see this list was published at both Le Café Witteveen and the Rabid Atheist, but it's a meme worth repeating. I give you,

12 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal

1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer life-spans.
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages for gays and lesbians will.


Ta much, dear Anneliese

Ta much, dear Anneliese

January 24, 2010
The worst thing about the smoking ban
Jeremy Clarkson

As we know, the ban on smoking in public places, and the misery of being forced to stand outside like a naughty dog every time you want a fag, has caused almost everyone to give up. This has had a profound knock-on effect on our social lives.

In the not too distant past, the notion of not being allowed to smoke in someone’s house would have been as alien as not being allowed to use the loo. Now, most people I know run a fresh-air policy, and those who do allow you to light up always make a huge song and dance about finding something that can be used as an ashtray. ...

... So, after the first glass of wine, you feel compelled to ask if it’s okay for you to light up, which requires as much courage as it does to ask a girl out. You are terrified that the answer will be no — not because you’ll have to go outside; you’re used to that — but because you’re English and you’ll have embarrassed your host. ...

... What party smokers don’t understand is that proper smokers don’t smoke for fun. It’s a drug. We need it. Running out of cigarettes is not an inconvenience; it’s a matter of life and death. Literally. Because in the same way that a heroin addict will mug an old lady for his next fix, a smoker will get up from a dinner table at midnight and, so pissed he can’t even walk, drive into the night to find a petrol station and more supplies. ...

... Even a preposterous advertising campaign can't dent the Tories. All over London, billboards depict Cameron looking you in the eye with an expression of genteel concern, accompanied by the slogan "We can't go on like this". To the observer, the overall effect is that of a man trying to wriggle out of an unfulfilling sexual relationship without hurting your feelings. Or maybe a boss who's called you into his office for a passive-aggressive talking-to. Would you vote for that? Not normally, no. But when the opposition is a flock of startled, shrieking hens, your range of options shrinks drastically.

But perhaps there's still a glimmer of hope for Labour. I recently watched several episodes of a high-quality US comedy-drama serial called Breaking Bad. The storyline revolves around an underachieving, debt-ridden 50-year-old chemistry teacher who discovers he's got terminal cancer. But wait, it gets funnier. Realising he has absolutely nothing to lose, he decides to become a crystal meth dealer in an insane last-ditch attempt to provide financial support for his family when he's gone. Cue plenty of pitch-black hi-jinks.

It's a good show. It's also a road map for Labour. The party's condition is similarly terminal, so it might as well go for broke by announcing a series of demented and ill-advised election pledges in an openly desperate bid to retain power. Who knows? It might just work. And if it's having a hard time choosing some make-or-break policies, I'll be only too happy to provide a list. Starting now....

Ta much, dear Anneliese, by way of dear Ar0cketman

...The one thing I knew [about Dubai] was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go. The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects being announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.

Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity. To my dumb, uncomprehending eyes it looked like a collection of impossible follies. But what did I know? Clearly the people actually paying for all this stuff knew precisely what they were doing. ...




I love you, Charlie.

I saw a tv show about Dubai a number of years ago and wanted to puke. I kept staring at the screen instead of changing channel, simultaneously nauseous and fascinated - like a hypnotized, rubbernecking car-crash passerby.


[Tangent:
A British woman shopping in Suthun Coliforniyah was delighted with the term "rubberneck" when I used it to describe the nearby idiot car-crash passersby, who'd naturally blocked traffic more than the accident. She said she'd never heard a Yank use it in context before, and she loved it. She mimed holding a steering wheel and sharply turning her head, moronically gawking open-mouthed while driving past and laughed.

Not quite all Yankistanisms suck.]

"Ideas are hard. Blocking them is easy."

Ta much, dear Anneliese

El Reg launches 'Skinny Fit' fashion range
Exclusive preview of international poster campaign
By Lester Haines
Posted in Bootnotes, 16th October 2009

We're delighted to announce today the launch of our "Skinny Fit" range of clothes, seen modelled here by the lovely Filippa for a forthcoming international poster campaign:

Please note that this image has not been digitally manipulated in any way. Filippa is a healthy and beautiful young woman who is naturally "small-boned", and anyone who says otherwise will find themselves on the wrong end of a fat writ. ...



Dig th' cutaway top.

Ageing isn't fun, but it's better than death, by at least, ooh . . . 8%

I discovered George Osborne was younger than me. Only by two months. But still: younger

Charlie Brooker
Monday 12 October 2009

... George Osborne's Tory conference speech last week left me in a state of shredded despair. Not because of anything he said, but because I'd just discovered he's younger than me. Only by two months, but still: younger. In a correctly functioning universe, my advanced age would make me his superior. If I deliberately knocked a glass of milk on to the floor, he'd have to clean it up. He'd be on all fours, scrubbing desperately at the floorboards while I sat back in my chair, resting my feet on his back, reading the Financial Times, occasionally glancing over the top to harrumph at his efforts, grinding my heel into his spine to underline each criticism. You missed a bit, boy. For pity's sake, show some gumption. Tongue, Osborne! Use your bloody tongue!

Wild fantasy, of course: there's no way Osborne would prostrate himself before me, lapping up my mess like a prison cell Betty. He's of grander stock than I. He's worth ten thousand hundred billion pounds, wipes his arse on back issues of Tatler, attended a public school so swish that even its coat of arms looks down its nose at you, and spends his weekends running around his estate, dressed like the Planters "Mr Peanut" mascot, wildly thrashing at the back of chimney sweeps' legs with a cane. I went to a comprehensive and have the social standing of a plughole.

But I'm resigned to the class difference. It's the age difference that rankles. In my head, senior politicians are supposed to be older than I am – for ever. No matter how much I age, part of their job is to be older and drier than me. At 38, Osborne feels too young for the world of politics. At 38, I feel too old for the world in general.

Age has been a lingering obsession of mine since I left my teens. However old I've been is too old. At 26, I felt totally washed up. At 32, I regretted wasting time worrying about my age as a 26-year-old, because now I was convinced I really was totally washed up. At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time with those regrets about wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I'm doing. That's the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I'd need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I'm regretting at once. ...

October 4, 2009
Help, quick – I’ve unscrewed the top on a ticking bomb
Jeremy Clarkson

... I like a hot sauce. My bloody marys are known to cure squints. And at an Indian restaurant I will often order a vindaloo, sometimes without the involvement of a wager. So when I accidentally found that bottle of Insanity, I poured maybe half a teaspoonful onto my paella. And tucked in.

Burns victims often say that when they are actually on fire, there is no pain. It has something to do with the body pumping out adrenaline in such vast quantities that the nerve endings stop working. Well, it wasn’t like that for me.

The pain started out mildly, but I knew from past experience that this would build to a delightful fiery sensation. I was even looking forward to it. But the moment soon passed. In a matter of seconds I was in agony. After maybe a minute I was frightened that I might die. After five I was frightened that I might not.

The searing fire had surged throughout my head. My eyes were streaming. Molten lava was flooding out of my nose. My mouth was a shattered ruin. Even my hair hurt.

And all the time, I was thinking: “If it’s doing this to my head, what in the name of all that's holy is it doing to my innards?” I felt certain that at any moment my stomach would open and everything — my intestines, my liver, my heart, even — would simply splosh onto the floor. This is not an exaggeration. I really did think I was dissolving from the inside out.

Trying to keep calm, I raced, screaming, for the fridge and ate handfuls of crushed ice. This made everything worse. So, dimly remembering that Indians use bread when they've overdone the chillies, I cut a slice, threw it away and ate what remained of the very expensive Daylesford loaf, like a dog. ...



Well, it's hot stuff, yeah
An' it's everywhere I go!

- Memphis Minnie

Jennifer Aniston movies, hateful horror films, cosmetic surgery – what the US should ban
In America there are worse things to outlaw than smoking
Hadley Freeman
Wednesday 23 September 2009

The chances one gets to mangle a Charles Dickens quote in discussing American local legislation are all too rare. This, happily, is one of them. Well, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times in this tale of two cities, states, coasts, even. The big news in New York City at the moment is that smoking may soon be banned in outdoor public spaces. Meanwhile, over in California, cannabis looks set to be legalised. As we Americans (and possibly Dickens) would say, "Wait, what?"

On the east coast, tell New Yorkers about the imminent ban, and they look stunned and sceptical, a reaction my colleague Alexander Chancellor seemed to share in his column last week. Meanwhile, over on the west coast, medical marijuana dispensaries are selling cannabis to anyone with a driver's licence and a doctor's letter citing a need such as, say, anxiety. Many are predicting that next year cannabis will be "taxed and regulated" in California.

It's tempting to see this disparity as illustrative of America's tendency towards wild extremes: in one state, there's pioneering liberalism, in another there's fist-thumping legislation. Tempting, but not quite right, as California has already slapped down a smoking ban in outdoor public spaces – and, in some cities, in private housing, so smokers can't even smoke at home. Quite how you would partake of medicinal cannabis if you live in an apartment block that has banned smoking is something I am too naïve to fathom.

But seeing as New York is in a banning state of mind, there are plenty of things the city's health commissioner, Dr Thomas A Farley, could outlaw in this city – heck, in this country - that affect one's quality of life far more than the very occasional smoker in Central Park. I'm not talking about the obvious stuff. The New York Times recently asked the public for suggestions of things to ban and a popular answer was "cellphone blabber", which was both predictable and wrong. This is because the paper asked New Yorkers and New Yorkers have no concept of how brilliant their "cellphone blabber" is. My favourite overheard conversation so far came from a young woman bellowing into her Nokia in the middle of Union Square, "Just because you're gay doesn't make you king of New York!" The city would be a poorer place without this.

No, I'm talking about the more insidious toxins that the country produces in abundance and everyone then inhales passively. In a public space, you can move away from the smoke. This stuff, however, is so ubiquitous it is absorbed by osmosis. ...

The Oldest Trick in the Book
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.
From UnBooks, the content-free textbook collection


The Oldest Trick in the Book is the infamous "Tapping on a person's left shoulder when you're standing on their right." This trick was first chronicled in cuneiform by the Ancient Sumerians, who lived on the windswept steppes of Mesopotamia. This chronicalisation also created "The Book" itself. In this article, we will chronologically summarise, from oldest to newest, the tricks in The Book. ...



Pure clarse from the very classy MSiegel

Ta much, dear Shell42970

Ta much, dear Foxy

Epic (Dar)win! from dear DontheFox

They forgot one!

Wile E Coyote, super geeeeenyus.

Ta much, dear Zaxy

Charlie Brooker's screen burn

If I died at the hands of a serial killer I'd probably just think, 'Ooh, how exciting, it's like something off the telly'

o Charlie Brooker
o The Guardian, Saturday 1 August 2009

For all its delusions of grandeur, TV drama rarely deals with authentically frightening subjects. Except murder, which has been so overdone it's almost ceased to seem like a real or scary phenomenon. If I died at the hands of a serial killer I'd probably just think, "Ooh, how exciting, it's like something off the telly", before enjoying a nice lie down and a bleed.

Every so often, however, along comes a drama that takes a long, hard look at something you'd rather blank out altogether, something large and menacing and beyond your control. Take Threads, the BBC's profoundly horrifying 1984 nuclear war epic, which brought Armageddon kicking and screaming into the nation's living rooms. You can get it on DVD or find it online: even today, when we spend approximately 98% less time worrying about mushroom clouds, watching it feels like being repeatedly punched in the kidneys during a powerful comedown.

It's hard to know whether shows like this actually do any good. I saw Threads when I was about 12 - too young to handle it, frankly - and it left me feeling despairing and helpless. Perhaps if I'd grown up to be a policymaker it would've been a positive influence. But I didn't. I grew up to be a neurotic bellend. ...

Ta much, dear MSiegel

Ta much, dear Zaxy

The very fabric of society is breaking down around us. What the hell is there left to believe in?

o Charlie Brooker
o The Guardian, Monday 13 July 2009


... The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, "Cuh, Typical."

What about each other? Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

As the very fabric of life breaks down around us, even language itself seems unreliable. These words don't make sense. The vowels and consonants you're hearing in your mind's ear right now are being generated by mere squiggles on a page or screen. Pointless hieroglyphics. Shapes. You're staring at shapes and hearing them in your head. When you see the word "trust", can you even trust that? Why? It's just shapes!

Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there's nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn't matter what they're made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects.

Ta much, dear Gladsdotter

Cleveland's main selling point: At Least We're Not Detroit.

Detroit's main selling point: At Least Our River Doesn't Catch Afire!

heh heh heh

I liked Cleveland, and I still do. :)

Numbas two, four, seven and thirteen in this slideshow are also highly recommended.

The video is completely screwed, doubtless thanks to my 56k dial-up modem.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8111984.stm

Quack! indeed, and ta much, dear MouthAlmighty

... Classic cars are all rubbish. My Mercedes Grosser is rubbish. The Ferrari 250 GTO is rubbish. Even a Lancia Stratos is rubbish. They are typewriters in a computerised world. So why would anyone choose to buy such a thing?

Simple. Anyone who has a classic car hates his wife.

Our friend in the Volvo P1800 is almost certainly a branch secretary of the owners’ club. He will have written to his old school magazine about the appointment and he will spend many hours at night trawling the internet for interesting Volvo titbits. This means he doesn’t have to sit anywhere near his wife of an evening.

When the club meets, he gets to go away for a whole weekend. With a bit of luck, he will break down on the way home and be forced to spend the night in a Travelodge. And that’s excellent too because it means he doesn’t have to sleep with her either.

Furthermore, by driving a 1972 mustard yellow car, he will be seen by other road users as someone a bit unusual. Perhaps someone who writes poetry for a living or is Kevin McCloud from Grand Designs. Consequently, women will give him their telephone numbers at the traffic lights. Or stop to help when he is sitting at the side of the road, exhausted from all the pushing, and looking a bit like Mr Darcy as a result.

Well that’s what he thinks. But, of course, being a classic car enthusiast, he will be wearing shoes like Cornish pasties and Rohan trousers and he will have trouble with his adenoids. Which means he won’t look like Mr Darcy. He’ll look like Man at Millets. And as a result no women will give him their numbers and soon he will stop typing “volvo” into his search engine at night and start typing “vulva” instead. ...

Ta much, dear MouthAlmighty

...One is famous on YouTube as a slightly bonkers Scot with tragic mental health issues and unruly hair, who ultimately loses and the other is a singer in a talent contest. ...



Being one quarter Highlander m'self, I am ever so grateful to dear MouthAlmighty

Nope, just two corrupt conservative parties. One is more conservative than the conservatives, what with their spying on you and planned national ID cards; and the other is more corrupt, what with their moat-cleaning and duck-house-building bills which you paid.
Screw 'em both - vote Green.

I'm so sorry about your politicos' causing that dreadful mess, United (?) Kingdom.

Once again thanks are due dear MouthAlmighty

Ta much, dear MouthAlmighty

Scarecrow mocking MPs over expenses springs up in Jamie Oliver's village
A scarecrow poking fun at money-grabbing MPs is one of nearly 70 which have sprung up in Jamie Oliver's home village.
Last Updated: 5:04PM BST 25 May 2009

The scarecrow poking fun at money-grabbing MPs Photo: PETER LAWSON

The figure is part of an invasion of novelty bird-scarers, including Darth Vader, the Village People and Margaret Thatcher, which have popped up all over the tiny rural idyll of Clavering, Essex.

But one enterprising resident saw an opportunity to make a dig at scandal-hit politicians who have been exposed by the Daily Telegraph's investigation into MPs expenses.

The scarecrow of a gardener pushing a lawnmower has popped up outside a pretty thatched cottage in the village.

Signs offering 'moat clearing', 'removals organised for flipping' and stating 'Invoices can be sent direct to Westminster if desired' have also been errected.

Local MP for Saffron Walden Alan Hazlehurst spent £12,000 on gardening costs over five years.

Farmer Peter Balaam, who made the effigy, said he was not pointing the finger at him but at MPs in general.

He said: "I don't think our local MP has had his nose in the trough but it is a dig at all MPs who have had their noses in the trough.

"We are country people, leading an honest life.

"There is so much red tape attached to our industry and then you see there's so much money just being frittered away. It's not right."

He added: "The village came up with the scarecrow competition and I wasn't particularly motivated by building one and then I thought, I'll do one with the MPs in mind.

"We have had lots of people walking by and stopping for a look. I think it's gone down well."

Victoria Cook, who helped come up with the idea for the figures as part of the build-up for next week's village fete, said the scarecrow was "fantastic". ...

... Organisers of the fete have been astounded by the response to their idea after 67 figures appeared on grass verges, in gardens and on benches in the pretty village. ...

HUGE SWASTIKA FILLS THE SCREEN. PULL BACK TO REVEAL OVERLAYED MEL SMITH, GRIFF RHYS-JONES AND PAMELA STEPHENSON AS SKINHEADS. THEY SING:

ALL
They didn't understand him
Some people called him mad
But any friend of Hitler's
Can't have been all bad.
Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley
Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley

SMITH
He was popular and handsome
As Richard Burton
'Cause I seen him on the box once
With his black shirt on
And though I cannot claim to be
Any great authority
As far as I'm concerned
The sun shone out of his oratory

ALL
He could have been a great dictator,
Given half a chance
But they treated him like a traitor
So he went to live in France
Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley

STEPHENSON
And when they heard he was dead...

ALL
Baronet Oswald Ernald Mosley

RHYS-JONES
...this is what the papers all said:
(AS THEY READ, THE FOLLOWING ARE CAPTIONED. THE ACTUAL NEWSPAPERS ARE ALSO ROSTRUMED IN THE BACKGROUND)

RHYS-JONES
"Genuinely eager to champion the unemployed and other underdogs... dynamic and handsome, popular... gifted and a natural leader"
CAPTION ADDS FOOTNOTE 'The Guardian'

STEPHENSON
"Brilliant man in the Commons... compassionate and humane... a man of genuine courage and inspiring leadership"
CAPTION ADDS FOOTNOTE '- The Daily Telegraph'

SMITH
"Thought to have been the most handsome and gifted British political leader of the twentieth century ...brilliant debater, gifted, lucid and compassionate..."
CAPTION ADDS FOOTNOTE ' - The Times'

Not The Nine O'Clock News
Series 3, Show 7 (08/12/80)
© 1980 BBC - EMI Music Ltd

Ta much, dear Zaxy

We don't want madonna either. Antarctica can have it.

Ahnnnnnd *shlorp* haaaave yoooou been a baaaaaaaad little girl thisssssssssssss year?

Legalize the herb, let folks smoke it in pubs, and profits will be much ahem higher.

It's partly 'cause he's an ass, and partly because Mercury's retrograde.

After the 31st we'll all be able to speak and type again, and even simultaneously walk and chew gum.

Ain't that no shit, girls and boys.

Ta much, dear Strictlychemical

Dear Edosan sent this, saying,

"Baroque Obama."

see more Political Pictures

The world will never be safe until Scrabble is banned
Board games do not bring a family closer together. They rip out its heart in a seething cauldron of rage
Jeremy Clarkson
January 11, 2009

News from the dusty bit at the back of the toy shop. In the past 12 months, sales of Trivial Pursuit have tripled, Monopoly is 13% up and Scrabble is 23 times more popular than it was in 2007.

Naturally, the sort of people who like long walks in the fresh air see this as an indicator that Britain is reverting to traditional family values and that instead of going out at night to sniff glue and stab a policeman, the nation’s children are all at home in pinafore dresses, whittling chess pieces round the fire with mum and dad. They see the resurgence of the board game as a good thing.

I’m not so sure, though. Take Monopoly as an example. To begin with it’s good fun but, like the banking and property system on which it is based, there is a flaw. It never ends. You go bankrupt so you borrow money from your mum who has loads. Then you go bankrupt again. So you borrow more money from the bank. And then, when there is no more money left in the box, you write out an IOU and keep on borrowing by which time it is Thursday, everyone is bankrupt and you have realised that unchecked capitalism doesn’t work whether it comes in a stock market or in a box. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, there will be a “bad loser” around the table who will land on your hotel in Northumberland Avenue and in a hysterical rage will burst into tears and throw the board, his dog, your iron and all your dad’s houses into the fire.

In theory Scrabble is much better and yet it, too, is flawed. Well, it is for me because I always end up with seven vowels. So while my opponent is writing “underpass” across two triple word scores and claiming it’s a game of skill, I’m getting five for “eerie”. Again. And they are looking at me as though I might be a simpleton. ...


Whenever I've played scrabble, I wind up with nothing but Qs and Xs and no vowels. Were it really a game of skill, I would have been able to win instead of constantly passing. scrabble hates me, but it might hate me less if Jezza were my partner and we pooled our tiles. We'd get words like 'exequies' and 'exquisite' and 'quorum.'

Mike Thompson - Detroit Free Press
12 January 2009




Go away, Palin!
Mike Thompson - Detroit Free Press
12 January 2009

You're doin' a heckuva job, shrubbie jr!

I just couldn't resist.
That's one Captain Henry Morgan and crew - you mighta hoid a him.

"sarah who?" indeed, dear Redway420.

"It's not a drug, it's a leaf!" - Arnie Schwartzie

True, true. What a pleasant change.

Ta much, dear Stinkhond

This is pure class - the ignorance, mis-spellings and grammatical errors are perfect.
It's also satire - check a dictionary.

Yup.

You're doin' a heckuva job, junior.

I can't imagine why on Earth anyone would do otherwise, but I suffer from a logical mind.
shrub sr bought jr those elections, and jeb was sposed to be next in line, you know.

Nope. It ain't working.

Quality.

Buh-bye!
Don't let the door slam you on your ass, you goddamned thug.

True dat!

I'd wager she's ahem hit it on the head there.
That's christine beatty, his former chief of stiff, uh, staff.

Yup.

Superb satire. Many thanks to The Next President of Yankistan.

Yup.
Just keeps getting better and better.

This is so obviously photoshopped: monkey boy'd never wear a tie that hip.

Thass beau'iful! Very neatly and succinctly sums up the world of fashion.

Could You Be One Of Cthulhu's Chosen?




You are clearly a being of exceptional wisdom and insight on the greater meaningless and value-less universe for the mark of Cthulhu burns brightly upon your aura. Take heed for when the stars are right and the terrible city of R'Lyeh rises again from the sea you must answer the call of Dread Cthulhu, taking your place beneath the Old One as he revels across the world ravening for delight. Till such time you would do well to please Cthulhu, extracting from the world your own pleasures in decadent and boisterous exploits.
Take this quiz!








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SU hates quizilla.
Dear PopeNorton sent this, but it acts like I discovered it.

Creationist Paleontologists Discover Dinosaur Saddle
Posted by admin on 2005/10/10
By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor
March 29, 2006
Mud Flaps, Arizona

A team of creationist paleontologists from the Discovery Institute's main field research arm announced today that they had discovered the remains of a large manmade object confirmed to be an ancient dinosaur saddle. The Discovery Institute's discovery was discovered in the remote Dusty Rivers area of southwestern Arizona. A spokesman for the paleontological team said that the dinosaur saddle provides irrefutable proof that man and dinosaurs lived simultaneously, as predicted by most creationist or "intelligent design" doctrines.

"I can't tell you how thrilled we all were to stumble upon this groundbreaking historical find," said Dr. K. Firth Booble, leader of the expedition. "We knew there had to be some evidence for man-dinosaur concurrence buried somewhere around here, but didn't think we'd discover it so quickly."

Dr. Booble, who received his doctorate in paleontology from the respected Holy Patriot! Bible University and Correspondence College of Claptrappe, Oklahoma, had embarked on the search, funded by a $2 million Discovery Institute grant, expecting to remain in the field for at least two years. The dinosaur saddle was unearthed a mere two weeks after the expedition's launch. ...




Dis jernt makes Da Onion look like Da Wadduhcress.
T'anks ta Mariodornelas, who's awlways fulla soiprises.

Ain't that no shit, girls and boys.
Many thanks to dear Redway420

Urban75 offers more sizes of this lovely image, lotsa other great wallpapers, and marvel/lous photography.

Many thanks, appropriately enough to dear Redway420

Here's a help desk where I'd be a quite willing and thorough employee.

Quality!

How very clever. Some git who's already suffering has managed to generate even more suffering for her/himself and others. May s/he reach complete and total enlightenment and on all levels.
May Oscar have great and fortunate rebirths.

Thanks again, Edosan

Dear Grandpa.

Snicker snicker.

Thank you, dear Saline