The Economist opines on lolcats. So does Time.
Teh kitteh goes primetime
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Category Archives: Culture
Immigration blues
Dear Minutemen:
I don’t doubt that you have a deep and abiding love of this country. I don’t doubt that you believe you are doing the right thing. I may completely and absolutely disagree with you, but at least you are being honest about your beliefs and feelings.
And those beliefs and feelings have become increasingly horrifying to this particular proud American. Please try to remember that a lot of (perhaps most) Hispanics were born here, and therefore have every right to be in this country. Harassing Catholic Churches will get you nowhere–and please, please, please stop making Bill Donohue seem like a reasonable man!!!
CP
Two by two they went…
From Bloomberg (via HuffPo), there is a story about a trend among billionaires to buy their own personal submarines:
The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world’s richest people. Journeying to see what’s on the bottom aboard a personal submersible is a wretched excess guaranteed to trump the average mogul’s stable of vintage Bugattis or a $38 million round-trip ticket to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket.
Luxury-submarine makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.
“Everyone down there is a wealthy eccentric,” says Jean- Claude Carme, vice president of marketing for U.S. Submarines Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based bespoke submarine builder. “They’re all intensely secretive.”
Who owns the estimated 100 luxury subs carousing the Seven Seas mostly remains a mystery.
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned his boat builder that loose lips sink ships.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, but there may be a trend that it quite troubling here. We have heard about the disappearing frogs and honeybees, but now our billionaires are retreating to the bottom of the ocean…
What do the billionaires know that the rest of us do not? Be afraid…
San Antonio, fuck yeah!
From the Spurs’ biggest fairweather fan, hell yeah! Another NBA Championship from the dullest team in the league. Here are two reasons why the Spurs kick ass:
1. Our MVP got to snog Eva Longoria at the end of the game (cause/effect?)
2. San Antonio can win a championship and somehow not immediately resort to widespread rioting (suck on it, Chicago!)
So obvious, it just ain’t funny.
Humor is a difficult art–oftentimes it involves merely pointing out the truth of things in an unusual way. Last night marked the final actual premiere of “Lil’ Bush” on Comedy Central, where the prgramming is usually funny. Displaying W. and his cronies as a gang of playful scamps seems somehow…I don’t know…really frickin’ disrespectful to everything that has gone wrong in the world over the past six years, as well as not funny. Plus, portraying Cheney as an incoherent eater of live chickens (his speech is somewhere between Kenny and Boomhauer) might be taken as a compliment by the man himself at this point. Actually, the character reminds me a bit of Non from Superman 2 (Geek Hall of Fame!) Anyway, here’s a clip–admittedly, I stopped paying attention about halfway through (I think at the point when the elderly Barbara Bush seduces a prepubescent Cheney):
Is this the level to which our culture has sunk? Far be it for me to criticize lowbrow humor, for I usually love it so. I give this show about two more episodes–it’s not even as good as Comedy Central’s predecessor show.
Hey, remember when "bad" actually meant "good"?
I just forced myself to actually sit through the MTV Movie Awards, thinking there would be some funny movie spoofs, like in past years. Instead, I basically got a 2+ hour commercial for “Transformers: The Less-Animated Movie than the 1985 version (hopefully with less cheesy music).”
Leaving aside how sucky the Transformers movie is likely to be (although there’s at least one scene I’m enjoying) and how excited I nevertheless am to see it despite the massive cultural guilt trip I will doubtless go through 10 seconds after the movie ends, I have a question about something Shia LaBoof (not even gonna try to spell it) said when accepting some award: “The movie’s gonna be sick.”
I guess I’m showing my un-hip age, but why is “sick” a good thing? For me it conjures images of phlegm and vomit, among other things. The Wiktionary entry for the word really didn’t help much, as it gave one possible definition as “(slang: excellent): cool, rad, wicked.”
Have I finally been completely passsed over by the younger generation (I’m 32, which ain’t that old), such that I will no longer be able to understand anything said by anyone born after, say, 1980? Or is something more sinister at work here???
Today in strange tattoos
I have occasionally entertained a bizarre urge to get another tattoo, but this makes me doubt I could ever come up with anything cool enough (via strangemaps):
“I wanted something unique, something nobody else had. But every idea I had – it had already been done,” says Britta Oelschlaeger. The 33-year-old photographer, who hails from the city of Hannover, knew she wanted a large tattoo on her back. Eschewing more popular designs as elves, dragons, dolphins and roses, she looked for ten years until she found this 1896 map of her hometown. “I’m a fan of Hannover’s football team and I’m completely crazy about maps,” the artist explained her choice of tattoo.
It took the tattooist 7 hours to etch the outlines of that late 19th-century city plan on her back, and it will take many more to etch in the various hues of brown and green to give it the exact look as the original map. According to the AP press report, Oelschlaeger’s daughter is absolutely thrilled with her mom’s cool and original tattoo. Hannover is the capital city of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s constituent Länder. 1896 happens to be the founding year of Hannover 96, Oelschlaeger’s favourite football club.
The best book on global warming that wasn’t actually about global warming
Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov–both a short story (1941) and a novel written with Robert Silverberg (1990).
I cannot speak to Asimov’s original motivation in writing the short story in 1941, but the plot certainly seems relevant today in many ways: A group of scientists make discoveries strongly suggesting an impending global cataclysm, which much of society rejects. In this case, a planet lit by six separate suns, whose people have never known a moment of Darkness, faces an eclipse (during a period where only one sun is visible) by a heretofore-unseen moon, leaving half of the planet in total darkness for about fifteen minutes. During this time, the stars finally become visible for the first time in recorded history. For people who have an instinctive fear of any sort of darkness, this cause widespread insanity and the breakdown of civilization. A religious cult preaches that the Stars are divine punishment for the sins of humanity and predicts the End of the World. In desperation to get some source, any source of light, panicked humans set fire to the cities. It turns out that this is a repeating cycle: the same eclipse occurs every 2,049 years, with approximately the same results each time.
Luckily, we are not headed for any comparable conflagration anytime too soon, but these stories are some interesting food for thought.
Honestly, does the world need this?
I’m never one to stifle the creative or expressive urges of another, but does the world really need a blog entirely devoted to explaining Marmaduke comic strips?
I suppose the answer is yes. As of today, there are 244 posts.
Perhaps I’ll start a blog dedicated to that 1980’s paragon of fucked-uppedness, Arnold:
Up yours, George Lucas
Thanks to Atrios for reminding us that this exists: The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I was four years old when it aired for the first and only time ever, and for the longest time I couldn’t quite remember if I imagined the whole thing after drinking some bad juice as a child.
Then I found it on ebay (VHS, of course). It took about six non-consecutive days to watch the whole thing, because I could only handle 20 minutes at a time. I urge you strongly to watch the five-minute clip linked above–it pretty much shows you everything you need to see, and you HAVE to stick it out to the end, when Carrie Fisher sings.
George Lucas supposedly hoped that this never see the light of day after its one airing. While it has its fans, I must say that is one decision by George Lucas I wholeheartedly support, at least in principle.
On the plus side, the special gave us Boba Fett for the first time.