you don't know tea-party crazy

not like ralph steadman does, anyway.

oh shit...

...now it all makes sense.

the shining

lego style.



i'm not gonna hurt ya, wendy. i'm just gonna bash your lego brains in!

high school extracurriculars

via.

ouch! well that hurts.

oh my

via

Sarah Palin has plans to campaign for uber-wingnut Michelle Bachman. Here's an early campaign poster? I guess??



And I read on another blog that they are planning to offer people the opportunity to get their pictures taken with the pair--for a mere $10,000.

Now that's downright folksy and Real America, right there!!!

yum yum!

Who wants to go get some McDonald's?
Well, you might change your mind after seeing what a happy meal looks like one year after purchase. This person left a hamburger and fries on a shelf--not in a refrigerator or a freezer--for a year.

Looks delicious, huh? Eerily similar to what it looked like coming out of the bag.
At least we know that, after the Socialist/Nazi/Communists take over following the passage of healthcare reform, we will be able to survive by chipping away with chisels at ancient, calcified fast food sculptures.

days of wine and botox

Ha! Best sub-hed ever:

"If you can't move your face, can you act with it?"

a new york mag article about noticing the stiffness and immobility of many of today's botoxed tv actors.

the wire and the war on drugs (the poor)

I recently started watching The Wire, and I have to say I’m definitely a fan. It’s one of those HBO shows that manages to put the viewer in places he would never have been otherwise, in a seemingly very genuine atmosphere, with real people. (There’s a fine line with some of these types of shows and directors who are enamored of using untrained actors; seems to me you’ve got to give them just enough acting lessons to where they’re comfortable in front of the camera, but cut them off before they get all ‘actory.’ More on what that might mean another day.)

At any rate, it’s difficult to watch the show without feeling some empathy for the fictional--and thus by extrapolation, non-fictional residents of America’s dying big cities. The first season was shot in 2002, so even then the economy wasn’t nearly as down the crapper as today. But imagining children unable to play outside for fear of getting shot or getting stuck with a discarded needle or rolling in broken glass from crack vials--meanwhile the parents, even if they want to work find that the entire infrastructure of the city is fleeing, leaving behind boarded up houses, shuttered factories, and despair--it is as bleak a world as could be imagined.

These are all situations we’re aware of. Capital flight from urban areas, and the collapse of industry and with it decent-paying jobs that could actually have provided careers with benefits and futures for the working poor--this isn’t news.

But what occurred to me watching this show was what a perfectly designed weapon of mass destruction the war on drugs has been. Note that I say the weapon is the WAR on drugs--not the drugs themselves.

Yes, crack and heroin, and now oxycontin and other pharmaceuticals have devastated families, neighborhoods and entire cities, turning people into zombie stealing-machines unable to do or think of anything beyond that next hit. But what I notice is that poor people on BOTH sides of the drug war--an entire generation--was entirely occupied with battling this scourge, or with dealing with the fallout from it, or with trying to find a way to live their lives around it.

How could anyone think about seriously fighting as corporations moved their factories overseas and cut benefits and the government attacked the unions on behalf of capital--while their neighbors and kids were getting shot or going to prison or getting lost in a shooting gallery somewhere? Even the ‘good’ people in the drug war, the ones who earnestly wanted to make the world a better place, they were being tricked as well, distracted with this. They were given a sham war, a battle against their fellow citizens--other poor people who would have been natural allies in an effort to at least hang onto a decent life, a life where jobs pay a living wage, and where decisions aren’t automatically made to the benefit of investment bankers over workers.

The war on drugs was a war on the poor and the middle-class, and by that I mean the warriors on both sides were victims of a larger guiding principle: while they were distracted with crack and all the bullshit that goes along with it, their rights and any potential for having decent lives like their mothers and fathers had were systematically stripped away piece by piece.

the rock and roll metro.

that is all.



via reddit.

sending in a team of restorers

via

For any ladies out there worried that the resurgence in following biblical mandates (see this), specifically this one, laying out the punishment of death for losing one's virginity before marriage:

"But if ... evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones..." (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)

well, this guy's business seems to be here to help!

Yep. That about sums it up.

The sum total of ideas coming from the teabagger right.
Wait--weren't Mayans a kind of Mexican? Certainly they were illegals, one assumes...

thank you, american family association

And there you have it folks. A religious right group called the American Family Association has announced (pronounced?) that Tillikum, the killer whale who killed a trainer should be put to death, preferably by stoning.

Yes, stoning.



And here, exactly, is where we can see the idiocy of following the teachings of bands desert-dwelling nomads who were so ignorant about the workings of the universe that they needed to create a big boogeyman in the sky to tell them not to eat shellfish or kill each other or drive on saturdays. I will be interested to see these same people come out in favor of fathers enlisting their neighbors in the murder of their daughters if they are found not to be virgins on their wedding nights:

"But if ... evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones..." (Deuteronomy 22:20,21)

Or to start (finally!) following this dictum from Corinthians:

"Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says." (1 Corinthians 14:34)

Those mouthy broads!

You can't have it both ways, folks. Either the bible is the literal words of god, ALL OF IT, or none of it is. This is the danger, hypocrites who say they know what the Great Leader in the Sky wants based on some of the words in the bible--which was written by dozens of ignorant nomads across hundreds of years and cobbed together by corrupt church leaders interested in consolidating their power--and who demand utter fealty to those particular phrases, but who pretend other words just don't exist.

***

While we're on the Tillikum thing, guess what, maybe keeping an intelligent, social, sentient creature in the equivalent of blank and empty prison cell for decades, then periodically prodding it into performing tricks in return for snacks is basically idiotic and barbaric. Just a thought.

consumer protection

and former presidents--SNL style. will farrell's funny or die nails it again.

Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell