… weird scout, dreadnaught scout, dark scout, fear scout, eternal scout.
Remember, if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget. What color is your helicopter? Start here.
(Via Professor Mondo.)
Category: Humor and horror
… the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor
A couple of toys I recently came across:
And a useful how-to:
Sailor Bruce
Caution: What has been seen cannot be unseen. Think before you click.
So what’s his transformation phrase? “Moon Bat Power Make-up”?
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In case anyone has missed it, here’s a worthy KickStarter:
Woozy Sunday
My neighbors decided that I didn’t need any sleep this weekend. Consequently, my mind is too fuzzy to focus on the posts I have planned. Instead, here’s another batch of miscellaneous nonsense.
Why do engineers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
In lieu of a substantive post, here’s some miscellaneous nonsense I came across recently.
A Gentile goes into a men’s clothing store, where he sees an elegant suede jacket. “How much is that jacket?” he asks the clerk. When the clerk tells him $1,200, the Gentile says, “I’ll take it.”
At the last minute, a Gentile calls his mother to announce that, owing to pressure at work, he will be two hours late for the family Thanksgiving dinner. “Of course,” his mother says, “I understand.”
Put Jews in both of those situations and you have the working premise for at least 50 possible jokes….
The most harrowing performance of Bach you’ll ever see (via Dick Stanley):
(Via Charles Hill.)
Poor Matt Labash. Not everyone has what it takes to be a brony.
Dark Shadows, Guiding Light
Is there worse than the St. Louis Jesuits? Perhaps. (Keep the anti-nausea medication handy.)
Useful advice …
… should you ever find yourself in a South African jail, from Tom Sharpe:
“In prison they told me: ‘Make friends with the murderers,’” he told Britain’s Sunday Express. “‘Everybody else is afraid of them so if you’re with them the others leave you alone.’ That’s what I did. Good tip.”
Tom Sharpe, one of the funniest writers of the 20th century, died last month.
Born in 1928, he was the son of a British Nazi:
Years later, when Tom was a famous writer, he was invited to address a Jewish women’s group and began his talk with the memorable line, “You have probably not often been addressed by someone whose chief ambition, at age 15, was to be an SS officer.” Tom’s dad was the Ealing and Acton member of The Link (a pro-Nazi organisation) and also a member of the Nordic League. A loyal Nazi, he said he hated Jews “in the sense that I hate all corruption”. When the war began the family was on the run from the Special Branch, moving house time after time, always haunted by the fear that the minister would be consigned to the Isle of Man along with other Mosleyites. Tom’s father died in 1944, just too soon to see the film of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen which utterly devastated Tom; he realised that everything he had been brought up to believe had been wrong and that Nazism was pure evil.
Exploding princesses, etc.
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
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In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.
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The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.
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Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.
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Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.
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What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”
Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst
If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.
The words of the Affirmation Creep
Remember “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies“? Here it is again, this time with illuminating captions. (But where’s Voltron?)
Notes, musical and otherwise
There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.
Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”
Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.
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No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.
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Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.
Just because
Quote of the day
Oh for the days when primitive transportation delayed communication such that one could go years without having to speak to another human being! The silence. The isolation. The peace.
While we’re at it, this explains a lot.
And now for something completely unexpected
(Via Darwin Catholic.)
It’s March 17 …
… so here is St. Patrick evangelizing the Irish, with a cameo by Voltron.
A quick test …
… of the breadth of your culture:
If this makes you smile, you pass.
Update: A variation on the theme.
Habemus spinacia
(Via a comment at God and the Machine.)
Nonsense and stuff
Presenting the Pulp-O-Mizer.
(Via dotclue)
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While researching jurisimprudence, I came across some additions to The Rules:
Cunningham’s Law – The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
Muphry’s Law — The principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling
…
Chuck Jones’s Law – If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a bunny.
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Via the professor, here’s the Monty Python “Happy Valley” skit. which I hadn’t come across before.
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I quit watching teevee decades ago, so I missed this classic commercial. (Via Robbo.)
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When assembling a web page, be sure to close all tags. (How large a monitor would you need to read the final line above the footer?)
(Via Dustbury.)
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Even rapidly-flowing, basaltic lava, such as that which Tolbachik is currently erupting in Kamchatka, is dense stuff, as illustrated by the process of taking a sample, above.
Here’s a spherical panoramic movie of a helicopter touring Tolbachik. You can click and drag to change the direction of view.
Since lava is so dense, is it possible, with the appropriate footwear, to walk across a fresh flow? Sometimes, if conditions are right:
At Etna you can walk on small lava flows with good hiking boots (it might be their last hike, though), because the lava is more viscous than on Hawai’i. However, you won’t try on a larger flow because heat radiation is so huge.
You go first.
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Mt. Rainier erupting the Milky Way.
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Some true rock music, made with volcanic phonolite.
The horror, the horror
The truth about Lincoln …
… and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon. Fred Himebaugh, a.k.a. The Fredösphere, who has neglected his weblog for too long, shares the results of his historical research. Content advisory: robots, alien gods, banjos.
Fred earlier wrote a chamber opera “They’re Made Out of Meat,” using the Terry Bisson short story as the libretto, as well as a touching ballad of interplanetary romance, “Earth Girl.”
A double dose of culture
Thomas Hardy does the hokey-pokey:
On a morning when the grey skies rained down sleet,
I stuck my left foot into the abyss;
I shook it to and fro, and then switched feet,
And thought how all must end with death’s bleak kiss.
Update: Poe sticks his left foot in.
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J. Greely notes that the DVD of the movie Megaforce has finally been released in the USA. Out of curiosity, I searched for clips on YouTube and found this. “Awesome” isn’t quite the word.
Coincidentally, one of the links in Greely’s sidebar is “A Cubic Light-year of Cheese.”