Michele Bachmann Is Completely Unaware That China Is Communist
Actually, it's the last sentence that's the most troubling.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Good morning! It is time for your latest hit of Bachmannia!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Line of the Day: 2011-11-13
Romney made the jaw-dropping claim to a New Hampshire editorial board that his problem wasn’t flip-flopping — it was being insufficiently robotic.
-- Ruth Marcus
Holey Picture and Other Signs of Our Times
Happy Sunday!
Swiped from Photobombing.net, which you shouldn't visit if you've told yourself you're just about to get off the computer.
(Permalinks for individual posts where pix were found: 1, 2, 3.)
Man after my own heart
As the founding editor and publisher in the late 1950’s of Monocle, a “leisurely quarterly of political satire” (that meant we came out twice a year) …
-- Victor S. Navasky
Just sayin'
I am (BARELY) old enough to remember when a caption like this would have been unthinkable.
Despite our nature, and even despite, it sometimes seems, our best efforts, we make progress.
(source | previously)
Let's Get Scared
I had to stop reading Kevin Drum's "Tonight's Debate Highlights" when I came across this:
Rick Perry echoes Sarah Palin's explanation of her military experience:
Republican candidates were less terrifying when they were only saying "oops."
[Added] Also, from Herself with the crazy eyes:
"The table is being set for a worldwide nuclear war with Israel."
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Welp, there goes the Christmas bundling deal
Looks like the next phase of soaking the True Believers has hit a wall, reports Jack, in the Comments under the post on altruism.
And they could have made such sweet coin together.
Lettuce Praise
Yep. Apparently, GoVeg.com is really a thing. (One more and it'll be a trend!) And so are the garments. Who says you can't learn new things by clicking Web ads?
[Added] Idly clicking around at that p.s. link led me to something else, which will probably not please Prof. Tucker one bit.
When Autumn Leaves Start To Fall (updated below)
I was bemoaning the lack of color in this year's autumn leaves, so Ocean sent along a snapshot taken out her window.
Hard to say whether she was being sympathetic or triumphant, but far be it from me to question motive.
;)
Title, of course:
[UPDATE] While I was outside raking my brown and yellow leaves, I received word that the above is a mere cell phone snap, and then … whoa … I received another shot, taken with a camera that is for some reason incapable of making a simple phone call.
Thanks, Ocean!
I was going to say something about those Penn State students ...
... a couple of days ago, but thank JoePA the FSM I didn't. Because Massimo Pigliucci has pointed out someone who said it far better than I could have.
(After the preroll ad, I mean.)
Willard and his only friend?
Not that Willard "Mitt" Romney has any room to drop in my book, but he probably ought to be careful about becoming associated with the term barbecue. And appearing to be nuzzled by a pig will probably cause our friend Bill Scher to have another forehead-to-the-desk moment.
Aside to Amanda Zamora: You definitely want to be worried about becoming perceived as a tire-swinger.
Ever heard this word before?
Tannoy, as a verb; e.g.:
When she didn't report for work at 9am, the crew Tannoyed her.
And here's another example, a whole post in the Guardian.
According to Wikipedia, "Tannoy Ltd is a Scottish-based manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems," the name itself comes from "a syllabic abbreviation of tantalum alloy" and it was trademarked as a brand name "by 10 March 1932, on which date the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company was formally registered as Guy R. Fountain Limited." It is also claimed that the term became …
... a household name as a result of supplying PA systems to the armed forces during World War II, and to Butlins and Pontins holiday camps after the war.
The Wikipedians, like you, have become suspicious by this point that this entry has been written by, or lifted from, materials published by the company. In any case:
The term 'tannoy' is often used generically in colloquial English throughout the British Commonwealth to mean any public-address system, particularly those used for announcements in public places; although the word is a registered trademark, it has become a genericised trademark. The company's intellectual property department keeps a close eye on the media and will often write to publications who use its trade name without a capital letter or as a generic term for PA systems, in order to preserve its trademark.
(We shall resist the temptation to chortle, "Tannoy is the New Coke!")
Note that the two links up top are to a British news outfit and both use the capitalized form (or capitalised form, as you like), although they do appear to be using the term more or less generically.[1] Here are some more examples from the Guardian and the BBC, in which I see both upper- and lowercase. In any … um … case, I don't get a whole lot of meaningful hits when I GENERICISED TRADEMARK ALERT Google the term. Also, trying to go to google.co.uk just gets me redirected. So, English-speaking readers living outside the US, please advise: Is this a term you're familiar with, as a now-generic verb like xerox? Is this only the case in England, or is the same usage familiar in, say, Australia and/or Canada?
[1] Which reminds me. How long has the NYT been writing Champagne, instead of champagne, as any normal human being would? (When using the term colloquially, I mean, as opposed to occasions of mentioning the specific fussbudget region.) Make them stop.
I can say with confidence that they didn't always do this, although I am not going to look for the precise date when the style book got updated, because searching for something like that would be obsessive which I am not at all practically ever.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Eh, Peabody Award, Polk Award. 2, 1. Present, Gone. What's the difference?
Damn that LIBERALLY BIASED!!!1! ...
... Park Service?
A reviewer for the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre has recommended that Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling new book about the Lincoln assassination not be sold at the historic site “because of the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.”
(h/t: Eric Boehlert | pic. source: MyFaceWhen | title: cf.)
[Update] Also.
As final thoughts go ...
(Seen in the sidebar over at Skepchick.org. Turned out to be an ad linking to SMBC, which I am happy to do as well.)
Just came across a live version of an old favorite
This is Sigur Rós doing "Svefn g englar." (Which the Web's preeminent authority says is an Icelandic pun). Uploader JRandall says it was recorded in Philadelphia on September 22nd, 2001. Also, it's about eleven minutes long. These things may or may not have anything to do with anything.
If the recent asteroid and the water bears have filled you up with enough space for a while, probably best to save this one for later.
(h/t: Reihan Salam, in a tangential way)
Eh, to me, it looks more like a guide to NFL referee signaling ...
... but on this, I'd say reasonable people can reasonably disagree.
Bonus points if you can come up with a better replacement for "crap" than just "strange attractor." Parametric equations would definitely be FTW.
(h/t: KK, via email | pic. source)
Again, "News of the Weird" doesn't even come close
Remember that post about the splinter group of violent Amish? No, really.
In Comments for that post, Jack passes along a new development.
Left hand, meet right hand
It may say something about getting too big, or that communication lines need to be flushed out, or something, but in any case, when Gmail (a Google property) sends a piece of email from blogger.com (a Google property), whose receipt came about due to signing up via Feedburner (a Google property), to the Spam folder, something needs a bit of attention, I'd say.
I Want To Believe
(embiggen)
But, I gotta say, despite the characteristic skeptical take, the Rationally Speaking podcast on intelligent alien life is still quite interesting, and deserves a listen by all self-respecting nerds and nerdgassers.
Visit the show page to stream or download, or right click this link to download the MP3 directly. If you do the latter, visit the show page anyway for the links.
One issue that struck me as rather conspicuously absent from the discussion, especially given that both Massimo and Julia acknowledged that one has to be very careful of anthropomorphic biases in any SETI speculation: it seemed to me that the assumptions underlying most of M&J's thinking would imply a rather narrow definition of life (and, by extension, intelligent life). To her credit, Julia brought up extremophiles as one broadening of these assumptions; I think nonetheless that we should be careful in crediting ourselves for knowing completely what it means for something to be alive (even here on Earth), much less in believing that, say, life must be carbon-based, must require liquid water, and so on.
And speaking of extremophiles, thanks also to Julia for mentioning something I'd never heard of before just now: water bears in space, bitchez.
(pic. sources: Jolle Jolles at Mudfooted and Island Creek Elementary School)
[Added] See APOD for 2013-03-06. (h/t: TC)
Line of the Day: 2011-11-11
A lament that anyone who even occasionally tries to write seriously will appreciate, with wider applications, as well:
We are cursed to be plagued by our juvenalia and ephemera, while our substance yellows in clip folders.
-- Heidi N. Moore
And you thought Twitter was just people telling you what they had for lunch.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
The Whole World Is Laughing
Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.
Your savior of the Republican Party, ladies and gentleman.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
If you forgot that it's Election Day, maybe this'll serve as a reminder of what's at stake
Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
-- Jamie Raskin (attributed)
(Found as a result of Googling, thanks to @rightwingwatch, who appear(s) to be live-tweeting this debate, starting around here.)
[Added] If you forgot where you're supposed to go, check Vote411.org's Polling Place Finder.
Monday, November 07, 2011
Line of the Day: 2011-11-07
This is the "philosopher-politician" demonstrating his "mastery of policy matters." I'm sorry, would you like to super-size your colonoscopy? Some day, volumes will be written about how Gingrich managed to get everyone in the Washington smart set to believe he is a public intellectual with actual ideas, and not just the guy at the club whose life gets changed for him every time he reads a new book.My god, Caligula died centuries too soon. Today, if he'd brought his horse into the Senate, some careerist Beltway journo would find that the horse had whinnied some "interesting new approaches" to our "entitlement crisis." The horse would be on Meet the Press the following Sunday with David Gregory, who would ignore the fact that there is a fking horse sitting across the table from him and concentrate instead on something the horse had whinnied five years ago that seems to have been contradicted by something the horse whinnied the day before. And then Tom Brokaw would come on to mumble something about how horses were more politically savvy back in his day.
-- Charles P. Pierce, "The 2012 Election Field …"
Sunday, November 06, 2011
An understandably stolen picture
Cropped and 'shopped from some version of that Corona commercial?
If you zoom in -- for forensic purposes only, of course -- you can see the hat is not actually being held unless she's got superglue on her fingers.
But good for the model if she actually got more work.
(Source: some sidebar Web ad leading to this.)
Boy, this country sure has moved far to the right
Although I suppose it could be an error in the caption. Which I'm sure the hatless cop will laugh off without a problem.
(source)
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