The Cultural Moment

Gangnam style.

By a competent person

This seat's taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

On The Freaking Moon

Mr Armstrong says when he and Buzz Aldrin descended on board the Eagle to the moon’s surface, the on-board computer was intent on putting them down on the side of a large crater littered with huge boulders. 

“Not a good place to land at all,” he said. “I took it over manually and flew it like a helicopter out to the west direction, took it to a smoother area without so many rocks and found a level area and was able to get it down there before we ran out of fuel. 

“There was something like 20 seconds of fuel left.”

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The Internet at its best

What? On our own citizens?

Yup.

9

Steve Martin tweets Pleasanton

(link)

Atlas Fabulous!

And here I thought I'd gone too far. This week's New Yorker Cover.

#RUSSELLMANIA

Wilson suspends Eric Berry in mid-air with his mind.

This is totally happening.

The Kid gets his shot

Russell Wilson will start tonight's preseason game against the Chiefs. If he can perform close to the level he has in the first two preseason games (against second and third units), he's going to be the Seahawks' starting QB. (You read it here first, sports fans!)

This will be the most important preseason game in Seahawks history.

Mitt Romney August 2012 SuperJokes

Mitt Romney...

1.  likes lemurs.
2.  is like the Ken Doll that somehow made your father cry.
3. moves men to be as little than they can be. 
4. Thinks food stamps are the stamped food that poor people eat.
5. is entirely unaware of sporks. 
6. believes woman's place is in the home, helping out the other women. 
7. is paid 300,000 times as much as you, because he's just that much better than you.
8. smells a lot like a Bed, Bath and Beyond. 
9. is secretly terrified of lemurs.
10. believes we are all created in the image of God: a white man, in a sensible tie and pressed, tailored jeans.
11. never met an opinion he didn't like.
12. can take America back into the ditch. 
13. just hates it when his jet is dusty! Am I right, people?
14. thinks the Internet is the future of AOL. 
15. believes in the principle of power without principles. 
16. is kind of obsessed by lemurs. 
17. thinks "control freak" is racist. 
18. Romney's secret to saving the Olympics?  Luge Porn. 
19. Strongly believes in the most important values that every American  holds deep in themselves, that are about those things, those incredible things, that make us all who were and who we hope to be in the most American America we can make out of this America, our American America, with our really deep American values that are about holding American's close to our hearts in America, and away from non-American American values which are happening in America in the less American parts of America made less American by Americans who want to apologize for America, right now, so our patriotic is to Americanize American America for all the real American Americans and all the Americans around the world who can't come here. Like Free Enterprise. Which IS people, my friend.
20. right now, is just kicking back, daydreaming about Paul Ryan.
21. just had a caviar faucet installed.
22. has micro-butlers.
23. asked for some Grey Poupon, bought the company, bankrupted them, and sold the assets to French's for a tidy profit.
24. knows that Ann is right, and the yacht in San Diego probably needs a new stables.
25. Is a great guy to sit down and bankrupt a beer factory with. 
26. Knows exactly what the price of a gallon of milk will be when he corners the market on milk. 
27. As a hilarious college prank, once strangled a hobo and made everyone laugh.
28. Is on the side of the working man.  Behind, specifically, making sure he doesn't cause trouble as he vacates the premises.
29. Sent his all his kids to Bilderberg Middle School. 
30. Monograms his Q-tips. 
31. Thinks Miracle Whip is a sacred Vatican relic. 
32. Looks in the mirror, and sometimes, he sees a lemur: a happy, carefree lemur. 
33. makes George F. Will look like Nicki Minaj.
34. Is getting over his habit of, upon meeting them, asking women whether they are fertile. 
35. Hunts pre-shot deer.
36. Waxes his car with Pâté de Foie Gras.
37. Makes sincere outreach efforts to WASPs. 
38. Has a golf cart for driving around his limo.
39. When dining out with friends, always picks up the berating of the waitress. 

Also, and not that there is anything wrong with this, we would like to apologize presumptively and profusely for the following....
 

Reagan by Killer Mike

This is my favorite political rap song since Brother Ali's Uncle Sam Goddamn. I don't agree with everything presented here, but it certainly made me think.

In this week's The Onion

Terrell Owens Having Trouble Deciding Which Seahawks Quarterback To Undermine

Irish Prime Minister Higgins En Fuego.

A poor, poor right wing radio host is hit by an Irish bus of righteous.

Headline of the Year

Sometimes you think everything has been said.  Then there's this opinion headline in the LA Times:

 "Pussy Riot Sentences Shouldn't Derail Our Trade Relations With Russia."

If Only...

If only I could find a PT Boat to work on while I listen to this. Here's an updated version. I wonder if that game is any good.

On Top of the Issues.

Best with this.

BEST OF! Tomorrow's Urgent Headlines TODAY #1 (2004)

Brevity: Wit

Candy-Ass Alaskan Mauled By Gummy Bear

As Casualties Mount, Pizza Hut Pulls Out of Iraq

Shelving Display Bores Children Into ICU

HUNGRY METEOROLOGIST PREDICTS STRONG ONSHORE FLAN

HOLY CRAP! VATICAN CITY WATER TREATMENT BONDS DISCUSSION SLATED

Deadline for Peace Expires As Adorable Kittens Reposition to Attack Drapes

White House Hobbies!  Senior Bush Administration Economist Great at Sucking Cock

INTENSE CRITICISM OF ENTROPY PETERING OUT

PAKISTAN CLOSING IN ON PAKISTAN

Tiny, Carnivorous Snapping Frogs Begin Hiding in Lattes by Sticking Upside-Down on Lid

LOBSTER SOUP BLOWN UP BY BISQUE SEPARATISTS

University of Michigan Study of Learning IDs Common College Learning Pattern: Reading, Learning, Forgetting, Reminding Self Enough to Pass Test, Remembering a Bit, And Finally Forgetting Suddenly When Distracted by Presence of Bee in Car

Bush Relaxing Behind Closed Doors in Crawford Reverts Back to Thick Boston Accent, Russian Service and Dressing Basically Like Mr. Peanut

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: As of 5/11/04, Henry M. Kissinger is not responsible for any genocides other than his own.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ASTROPHYSICS PAPER SUGGESTS THAT TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPIN', SLIPPIN', SLIPPIN' INTO THE FUTURE

Hogan's Heroes Anthropologist Sought Missing Klink

Madison, WI Communist Party Meeting Sees Modest Increase in Attendance; Extra Chairs Requested from Denny's Waitress

University of Robots' Robot Sexologist Recommends Liberal Application of KY WD40

Rumsfeld Team Quickly Developing Some Sort of "Operation Desert Badger"

North Korea Announces Another Atomic Bomb; Also, Possible Toaster Oven

IN MARKETING DEAL, RICHARD THE THIRD ANNOUNCES "NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTINUED MATTRESSES."

Ann Coulter: Boxers or Briefs?

CONCERN GROWS: WILL ADORABLE KITTEN BE ABLE TO HANG IN THERE?

As We Speak, Millions of Americans are Standing Around on Carpets

Young Evolutionary Biology Professor Challenging Older, Dominant Full Professor for Research Assistants

INTERNATIONAL EXPLOSIONS TASK FORCE RECOMMENDS REDUCTION IN EXPLOSIONS

Adorable Kittens Convinced Blanket-Covered Toes May in Fact Be Blanket-Covered Mice

Spiderman, Shelob Duel Leaves a Big Sticky Mess

Neo-Druid CPAs Gather at Stonehenge for Summer Solstice of the Fiscal Year

Mystery Death as Hiker Singing, Whistling, Chatting while Rattling Cans and Blowing Horns in Pristine Back-Country Has Head Torn off by Bear

Today's Urgent Art History Panel Topics:  "Hear that, Cracker? I'm Going to Go Medieval on Your Assessment of 14th Century Venetian Portrait Painting"

AS PROMISED DURING EVENING DATE, 5.9 "LOVEQUAKE" ROCKS STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA

Alan Greenspan Forgets ATM Pin Number

AP (Vienna): Reuters Correspondent in Austria is So Lazy She's on the Verge of Making It All Up

Reuters (Vienna): AP Correspondent in Austria is Too Emotionally Immature to Move On With His Life


ALASKANS DIG IN, BRACE FOR 3 MORE MONTHS OF SPRING

BREAKING NEWS: Dude Drops Plate

PACIFIC PUDDING SHARK HAS SPOON-SHARP TEETH

U.S. ARMY, ATTEMPTING TO REPOSITION IN IRAQ, ACCIDENTALLY DEFEATS TURKEY

OPPONENTS OF EDIBLE CARS PROPOSED TO EASE URBAN PARKING CRUNCH SAY SYSTEM COULD INCREASE OBESITY; PROPONENTS POINT OUT THAT AFTER CARS ARE EATEN, PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO WALK MORE

Coming Up on Headlines: Grape Nuts- Healthy Breakfast Cereal or Crunchy Gateway to Sexual Depravity?

ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE THWARTED BY KINETIC STUPIDITY

Jobs Picture Great For Lazy

These Brittle, Depressing Korean Crayons Tell Me This Toy Store is Doomed

Coming Up on Headlines: Are You Putting Your Family At Risk With Your Random, Drunken Automatic Weapons Fire?

Doubly Remarkable

- "Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security." 

Remarkably the name Osama bin Laden does not appear in this article. 

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The New Yorker asks the logical follow-up question.

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Brad DeLong:  "Fire His Ass Now"

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For combat preaching

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A Brasillasecond

The amount elapsed between the time you select a Sergio Mendes song on Pandora and a Cialis ad appears.

Nighthawks (Palo Alto, 2012)

No, guess again

Clouseau: [answering the phone] This is Monsieur Gadoire - who is this speaking? 

Dreyfus: Don't you know? HmmHmmm! Can't you guess? I'll give you a clue - this is the man who hates you. This is the man who more than anything else in the world would like to see you dead and buried! 

Clouseau: ...are you the headwaiter that works in the little bistro on the Rue de Bazaar? 

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Watching this movie 40 years on, it is incredible how fresh Sellers' performance is.  Everything in the movie is stale and dated, from the Palace Hotel in Gstaad to Plummer's disco collars.  But Sellers is nine kinds of perfect.

I'm in

Ooh, ahhh....!

Nice to see they put the financial servers behind a locked gate...because that stuff's confidential, you see...

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If you wait long enough, it will show up on Youtube

My favorite beer ad.

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I have to agree

Senior scholar Sheikh Abdullah told Saudi online news site Sabq that it was “a lie and slander” to pay money to companies to create Twitter followers – thought to be a common practice among celebrities and religious figures in the kingdom.

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Read this to the kids today

A really nice little piece on the problem with hate.

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Why I don't own a smartphone

All the cool kids have iPhones.  Obviously, I need an iPhone.  Except, wait...Steve Wozniak says Android is better.

Oh.

So obviously, I need an Android phone.  Maybe this one?  Ha!  Sucker!  That runs Gingerbread.  It won't run the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.  You have to have Ice Cream Sandwich!  Without Ice Cream Sandwich you might as well buy one of these, or a brick with the word "Android" written on it in crayon.  You tool, what were you thinking?

So, I go to the Verizon store (I'll actually be making phone calls, so I really need Verizon).  They have 74 phones.  Of those, three run Ice Cream Sandwich.  So, I'm all ready to buy me an Ice Cream Sandwich phone when a voice inside my head says...are you sure Ice Cream Sandwich is the latest version of Android?  Is that your final answer?

So I take out the Blackberry my company makes me carry, and "surf the web" using its "browser" to "Google" the phrase "latest Android version."  Which, it turns out, is not Ice Cream Sandwich.

It is Jelly Bean.  And, as this video proves beyond any doubt, you would have to have a heart of stone and a mind of mush to buy any Android phone that does not run Jelly Bean.  It is superior.  It is as fast and beautiful as science can make it.  Sure, you could buy an Ice Cream Sandwich phone, if you were a blind cretin.  But we are better than that, we are not the kind of people who buy shabby, outdated phones with inferior technology.

But...  There's always a but, isn't there?

Is the new Project Butter Jelly Bean phone really better than an iPhone?  Really better?  Let's ask someone who has an iPhone:

The entire conceit of Jelly Bean is a phone that's better without you messing with it. And this is dead on, aligned with an iPhone. A phone should be beautiful when you turn it on for the first time. A phone shouldn't just be intuitive on its own, it should have intuition of its own—it should know what's best and right for you without you having to decide. This is antithetical to the DIY/hacker/dimly-lit workbench mentality Android has used to attract tech's most virulent nerds, who think the solution to bad software is using more software. Jelly Bean steers toward an awkward and tenuous inbetween, and if Google's going to slowly shift toward a Phone-Knows-Best attitude, I'll continue to reside in the iPhone's perfect, topiary-filled dictatorship. Because my phone should know best. It should be a tool that makes me smarter than I could ever be on my own, not some pixel erector set. Apple demands this, Google laments it. 

And that's just not enough to jump ship if you've been spoiled by Apple. Jelly Bean applied a powder coat of loveliness, overdue speed, and helpful tech mothering to the user experience, but doesn't change it fundamentally. The sprawl of unruly widgets, of over-information, of inexplicably absent features—that's all there. It just looks nice and moves better.

Now I'm very confused.  But, luckily for me, I have years of experience in consumer electronics purchasing, and even more important, I have known the Laird for 45 years or so and have internalized many of his Grandmaster Electronics Purchasing Principles.  What Would The Laird Do?

I hear his voice in the remoter reaches of my middle temporal cortices, and it is saying "what are your objectives?  At what must this device excel?  What is your objective function?  Frame your specifications precisely!"

And as I work through this exercise, I realize that maybe I don't need a phone at all.  I already have a phone, I use it to make calls.  It does this well.  So why am I trying to replace it?  Maybe I should keep my phone and get another device to do all those other things!  Yeah, that's the ticket...

Christianist Pseudo-Historian Fail

Publisher pulls Barton's lying The Jefferson Lies.

Checkmate, Obama!

Romney explains “every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent” in taxes.  

So that's that, let's get down to the real issues, shall we?

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So confused

You dawg, we heard you like tweets in your blog so we made blogtweet so you can tweet while you blog about tweeting.  In your blog.

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Listen up Libertarians - wake up and smell the coffee!

"You are a libertarian. How about voting just this way one time."

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Don't get to say this often

"Mariners' perfect game."  (link)

David Stockman: You call that a budget?

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

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Obama obviously a wizard

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To be fair, you can't show blowjobs on network tv

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Better, I think

If we all pitch in, we can beat this thing!

(link)

Oligarchs and Racists Clad in the Skins of Dead Elephants

"The people behind these efforts at disenfranchising large groups of voters (the young, the old, the black, the brown) are not Republicans, since clearly they have scant regard for our republic or its values. They are oligarchs and racists clad in the skins of dead elephants." - George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones author, at his blog.

Pick a side

The New York Times reports on a recent nuclear security breach - the worst in our nation's history.  You have to watch those nuns.  They don't put up with much, and there's no holding them back (“we’re free as larks,” Sister Rice said).

I rather like them, but the Vatican is not pleased:

The Vatican’s “doctrinal assessment,” issued in April, accused the nuns of a host of transgressions, including featuring speakers at conferences who did not adhere sufficiently to Catholic beliefs, advancing “radical feminist themes,” permitting “corporate dissent” on church teachings against birth control and homosexuality, and being silent in the church’s fight against abortion and same-sex marriage while pouring energy into working for the poor and disenfranchised.

Funny thing: I've been through the New Testament a number of times, and don't recall any mention of these doctrinal assessments.  A quirk in the translations, perhaps?  But that document is very clear about pouring energy into working for the poor and disenfranchised.  And that clarity, undiminished for two millenia, will remain long after this regime and its "assessors" have passed from the scene.

In this modern world it's often best to avoid taking sides.  One can be apathetically neutral in the name of intellectual honesty, telling oneself that it's important to stay objective, not get too caught up in things.

But sometimes a rooting interest, at least, is appropriate.

I say:  Go Nuns!

The Euro was fun while it lasted.reuters.com/article/2011/1…

— Dr. Kapital (@DoctorKapital) August 12, 2012

Oh, Pandora

"To help Mitt Romney become the next president, Romney for President, Inc would like to use your email address — tap OK to let Pandora share this info," the message read.

(link)


If only there were some metaphor for a threshold event full of unintended and unfortunate consequences...

"I'm Not That Innocent!"

Things Losers Say, Part V

"I disavow the policies advocated by Paul Ryan."

(link)

Things Losers Say, Part IV

"I select Paul Ryan as my running mate."

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Whoa

Mexico, a decided underdog, won the country’s first Olympic gold medal at the London Games — and first significant international soccer trophy of any kind — with a lively 2-1 victory over Brazil at Wembley Stadium on Saturday.

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Buzzblog: Crowdfunding Cockpunched

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Not exactly sporting to bring that up, old man

The GOP is counting on America’s notoriously short-term memory...

Republicans want to obliterate any trace of the administration that told America there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and led us into a devastating war; turned a $5 trillion projected budget surplus into a $6 trillion deficit; gave the largest tax cut in a generation to the richest Americans in history; handed out a mountain of corporate welfare to the oil and gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, and military contractors like Halliburton (uniquely benefiting the vice president); whose officials turned a blind eye to Wall Street shenanigans that led to the worst financial calamity since the Great Crash of 1929 and then persuaded Congress to bail out the Street with the largest taxpayer-funded giveaway of all time.

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Mitt Romney With A Moustache.

Mittstaches.  While the captions aren't much, the moustaches bespeak the unbespeakable.

Things Losers Say Part III: Making Thomas Dewey look Relaxed

“Likability plays less of a role in an election like this where you have a single issue that dominates the national agenda," said Neil Newhouse. He is the pollster for Mr. Romney, pictured above. 

I added that last part. 

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." - Herb Steinproject-syndicate.org/commentary/no-…
— Dr. Kapital (@DoctorKapital) August 11, 2012

Things Losers Say, Part II

Polls can change next week, in theory.  I'm sure they will move around. However, winning campaigns rarely say things like this:

"It’s the middle of summer. It’s the doldrums. It’s the middle of the Olympics,” a senior Romney adviser told reporters gathered for a briefing at the campaign's Boston headquarters. “There's not been any national news, anything that would push these numbers from minus-three to minus-nine points. That's a huge shift. You have to have some kind of precipitating event to move numbers like that."

It's the heat. It's Breaking Bad reruns. It's voters off kayaking in Patagonia. It's August polls where the number on the phones get sticky from occassional slurpee spills and gum up the red state prefixes.  Also, no one knows our secret plans for next week. 

The shift also comes as a barrage of swing-state TV ads have hammered Romney on taxes and his business record. Romney, of course, is also on the air with his campaign and outside groups supporting him maintaining a 2-to-1 spending advantage over President Obama and his allies.

"Mark my word guys, there will be another couple of polls next week that show something, potentially show something different,” said the senior adviser. “I don't know. It’s just-- it’s unlikely that--. People are not paying as much attention to this process as we think they are, as we'd like them to.”

Things Losers Say, Undoubtedly Part One.

Please stop talking about my taxes, please, Mr. Obama?  Pretty please with sugar on top? 

Mitt Romney, battered by Democratic attacks over his Bain Capital record and taxes, is calling on President Obama to agree to a truce over his business career.

“Our campaign would be — helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature,” Romney said, according to excerpts of an upcoming interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd released Friday.

Romney said he would prefer the campaigns “only talk about issues,” and claimed that “our ads haven’t gone after the president personally. … We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.”

I don't know about you, but I laughed and laughed.  Not quite as hard, inexplicably and embarassingly as about this, but still. 

Waiting for the video....

I know, I know, "best left unsolved"...yeesh

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On a BROKEN LEG

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Poe in a chart

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Romney: My Pet Death Squads

Grain of salt here, but Bain capital - 40% of its initial funding - appears to have been financed by the fun families who financed and arranged and actually participated in El Salvadoran death squads.

UPDATE: LA Times confirms the basics. The Ts are uncrossed, but goddamn, what a dirty pile of money.

Fascist Punks. If Only Someone Had Warned Us.

http://youtu.be/QJUuxouy1Fg

Cue "Eye of the Tiger"

One factor made the 2012 grind bearable and at times even fun for Obama: he began campaign preparations feeling neutral about Romney, but like the former governor's GOP opponents in 2008 and 2012, he quickly developed a genuine disdain for the man. That scorn stoked Obama's competitive fire, got his head in the game, which came as a relief to some Obama aides who had seen his interest flag when he didn't feel motivated to crush the opposition. Obama, a person close to him told me, didn't even feel this strongly about conservative, combative House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most. At least Cantor stood for something, he'd say. 

When he talked about Romney, aides picked up a level of anger he never had for Clinton or McCain, even after Sarah Palin was picked as his running mate. 'There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought he was an honorable man and a war hero,' said a longtime Obama adviser. 'That doesn't hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.'

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Olympic sports of yesteryear

The Economist compiles a list of Olympic sports that did not stand the test of time.  Come for the club swinging, stay for the "plunge for distance."

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Old school news-paper war on the Peninsula

After learning about the stash of racks, angry executives at the Metro and the Daily Post drove over the Merc's headquarters to confront their rivals, but were ordered off the property by Mercury News personnel.

Wait. It gets even better.

Security guards then reportedly threatened to arrest Daily Post co-publisher Jim Pavelich "if he didn't put down a rack" of his that he found in the Merc's back lot, according to an article in today's Post.

 (link)

We're on Mars, bitches!

I  cannot believe that crazy Rube Goldberg delivery system actually worked.  Holeee Toledo...!

Pics or it didn't happen...it did.  More here.

Professional camera work

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Graham Greene's little game

On this subject of hating people, there is an old Art Buchwald essay about it.  Thanks to Google, I have located a copy, right here in the September 20th, 1960, issue of The Ottawa Citizen.

I complain about modern times occasionally, but this really is convenient.

A new thing to hate, and enjoy the death of

I'd thought is was just a cheapie one-off gym in a quonset hut on El Camino Real.  But no, I randomly noticed a link that says Crossfit seems to be good but really sucks, and that linked to this LA Times story that proves Crossfit people are bad. 

Just when I was working up the energy to get all indignant about how we can let a bad thing like Crossfit get so out of hand in America, I see the Romneys are coming for them.

See ya, wouldn't want to be ya.

Today's (Heavily Negotiated) Mid-Day Playlist

• Mas que Nada (Brasil '66)
• Pretty World
• The BBC
• Hard Knock Life
• What I've Done (acoustic/alternate)
• Mas que Nada (Rafferty)
• The Interceptors
• Mas que Nada (Gillespie)
• Ozone Madness
• The New Breed
• Hobbit Trailer
• Gillespie and Muppets
• It's Not Easy Being Green

Once more into the breach, Mr. B?research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g…

— Dr. Kapital (@DoctorKapital) August 4, 2012

WTF am I reading?

Team USA could only eke out a survival win against a tough Lithuanian squad that matched up well at every conceivable angle.

(link)

Happy cows

Journalistic worst practices

Bob Garfield: Washington's press is the cabin boy of the political class – do quote me on that

At its worst, the game can allow the vice president of the United States to leak phony intelligence to the New York Times and later refer back to the leak as independent journalistic confirmation, leading to invasion and hundreds of thousands of deaths and a trillion dollars in squandered treasure. 

On the plus side, the Times scooped everyone.

Your move, Bruins

It seemed like the race to the bottom in Los Angeles academia had been won with a single, stunning coup.  Since UCLA created the famous Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, it has been very quiet in West Adams.

Too quiet.

And now we know why.

Behold: The USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy (link)

And what will you do now, UCLA?

What will you do?

It's Only Pravda Right?

So I wonder what put the fire in the eyes of those two at the G20 Summit? Certainly Syria was a major component, but Putin's later comments gave me quite a chill:

The Russian Federation has fulfilled all terms of the agreement. And even more. I shut down not only the Cuban Lourdes but also Kamran in Vietnam. I shut them down because I gave my word of honor. I, like a man, has kept my word. What have the Americans done? The Americans are not responsible for their own words. It is no secret that in recent years, the U.S. created a buffer zone around Russia, involving in this process not only the countries of Central Europe, but also the Baltic states, Ukraine and the Caucasus. The only response to this could be an asymmetric expansion of the Russian military presence abroad, particularly in Cuba. In Cuba, there are convenient bays for our reconnaissance and warships, a network of the so-called "jump airfields." With the full consent of the Cuban leadership, on May 11 of this year, our country has not only resumed work in the electronic center of Lourdes, but also placed the latest mobile strategic nuclear missiles "Oak" on the island. They did not want to do it the amicable way, now let them deal with this," Putin said.

But its just Pravda right? Right my smarter, more worldly friends? It is comforting that (1) only the wack-job sites seem to be reporting this; (2) I can't find any credible sources that even quote Pravda; (3) I cannot find an independent reference to any mobile nuclear missile systems, code-named "Oak".

Looking back on the Cuban Missile Crisis, man that was some scary shit!

"Your Higher Education Job Search titled 'Art' found 1 (one) new opening"

Classical Art and/or Architecture Faculty

The Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University invites applications for an appointment, expected to begin July 1, 2013, at the level of Tenure-track, in the field of Classical Art and/or Architecture. Candidates should have specialization in any area or time period within the field of classical Greek and Roman art and architecture. We also encourage applications from candidates with research interests in the Roman Provinces or Late Antiquity. The appointee will teach and advise students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Candidates should demonstrate excellence in both research and teaching.


Basic Qualifications: A Ph.D. or equivalent doctoral record is required.

I guess it's time to cram. 

So...if they're happy we can pay them less? usatoday.com/news/health/we…

— Dr. Kapital (@DoctorKapital) August 2, 2012

Wow...just wow

Every time I think Cracked can't be more stupid and juvenile they do something like this and totally redeem themselves.  Someday they will go back to that men's magazine well and come up dry.  But today is not that day.

Tough crowd.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-3…

— Dr. Kapital (@DoctorKapital) August 1, 2012

Creepy, elitist, and yet clueless...

 ...yup, it's from Harvard.


If you misuse a comma or mix up "your and you're," don't expect to get hired by iFixit's Kyle Wiens. He's not the only stickler—a growing number of employers are adopting a zero tolerance approach to grammar. That means one mistake could cost you the job, even if you're otherwise qualified.

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Lively Fark thread is here.