Continued Dean, “Just a flesh wound! I’m invincible!”
Kerry brushed off Dean’s remarks: “What is he going to do, bleed on me?”
I love the Superbowl! If not the fsckers who added the “you can’t rebroadcast, summarize, or talk about this event unless licensed by us” this year.
“The chances of Jackson’s breast reprising its appearance at the Grammys are slim, however. Jackson is only slated to be a presenter at the Grammys. Timberlake will perform solo, presumably out of reach of any women.” —E!
The guy was lining up to take the kick. He just looked totally confused,” Roberts said from his hotel room in Houston. “I was there, naked, apart from a plastic American football over my nether regions held on with Sellotape, doing a Riverdance in the middle of the Super Bowl, and nobody was coming after me… so I started to Moonwalk.” —New Scotsman [ah, what you miss, watching on TV!]
Lovely. Intense labours of love for their own sake are next to cleanliness.
Mister Luke, Prepare the Tin Foil Hats …
So some snooping and ‘breaking in’ has been going on for a long time… to cement the re-election of our popular president, among other things. I don’t know what to say to that, except… I know some people on both sides of the fence who have mused publicly that they would love to do just this. There’s something deeply wrong with our set of acceptable morals that makes everyone think
When my brightest and sweetest friends start wandering into this territory, I worry.
Watergate returns, in earnest …
Right on, Mr. Thompson! I particularly like his articulate dissection of the lossy and arbitrary separation of music into official genres, in which artists, industry, and critics all share a part. And his note of how much he can tell about someone by their walk and state of mind, in contrast to the more standard modern stereotypes.
Modern market illusions shattered, #613 …
In order to well and truly scathe somone, one must lead off with a compliment, and be polite, unemotional, and incisive in language. Consider this masterful article on Clark, which at first glance merely describes key events in his past, with quotes from Clark and his colleagues thrown in for added color. The best example of a scathing I’ve seen this season.
In contrast, the emotional content on, say, KickingAss, about GWB, bounces right off the old shell without much lasting effect.
Oh, it’s just too good. First, his name is Bartman. I didn’t realize any real person had that name. Second, he’s a total Cubs fan — went to spring training — and he teaches baseball for a living. And there’s a good chance he will spend his entire life wondering whether he single-handedly kept the Cubs from winning the World Series. Aeschylus couldn’t have worked up a better skeleton plot. Now all we need is an emotional family twist, the possibility of an anguished suicide, and a little editorializing by the gods who arranged all of this.
Third, the reactions in Florida are delightful [emphasis mine]:
In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush said an offer of asylum to Bartman might be a good idea…
…an oceanfront retreat in Pompano Beach offered him a free three-month stay if he needed to get out of Chicago.
[quoted from an article today on MSNBC.com]
Value judgement is ther name of a fantastic thought-channel, currently only in limited blog-format, but excellently constructed on a fetal level. And while I’m mentioning cute new channels, the DNC’s Kicking Ass blog is a cute gimmick that’s actually useful — there’s no other good source for images from official conferences and up-to-the-hour reflections of the stories and spins being passed about the Committee.
For Uncle Jerry and simple beauty. Sample program: 6-line IDE driver.
Homesteaders rejoice! DMCA can’t yet “lock you in”to your garage door opener.
“The homeowner has a legitimate expectation that he or she will be able to access the garage even if his transmitter is misplaced or malfunctions,” stated the Court.
It can however lock you into your default printer toner cartridges.
Artistic and otherwise. Could it be any other way?
I like J. Scott Wilson. Fine sense of the absurd. And he’s from Houston. Now if only we could combine this with Weird Al, the K Chronicles, and El-Al, to produce Kal-El…
Check out Bush/Orwell ’04. They got this site up fast…
Just a taste:
electric sheep’s Patrick Farley, perfectionist comic artist
Honda’s Rube Goldberg machine, [Flash; worth finding a fast downlink]
the smooth sooth of TVM’s FlyGuy
photosynthetic artistry
[From SCIFRAUD, a mailing list about fraud in science, from a listmember with long experience with fiesty exchanges.]
Dear Colleagues,
I post this information in the hope of preventing any of you from falling victim to the now-famous Nigerian Scam…
Those who wish to learn how to avoid falling victim to such scammers might find instructive the website in which the intended victim actually got money ($3.00) from the scammer… Following is the final e-mail by the intended victim:
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2002 17:01:58 -0800 (PST)
From: “Kindly Contributor”
Subject: I GOT YOUR ANSWER RIGHT HERE
To: “ESCOBER TONY”
Dear Mr. Anthony Obodo:
1. I write to you with great sadness and a heavy heart. It is
difficult for me to explain this to you, but the time has
come. Hold on to your seat.
2. Anthony, there really is no Lay-Z-Boy recliner. There’s no
ski trip booked to Zermatt. There’s no waffle iron or big
screen TV. I haven’t bought you a house, nor do you have
business class bookings on British Air. There is no pending
Western Union transfers, no visas, no cousin Harry. I am not
Kindly Contributor. But then, you’re not Escober Tony Sankoh.
There’s no $15 million, and I’m not getting my cut of $1.5
million. You are not in a refugee camp, and it is highly
unlikely that your criminal enterprise includes a pastor,
your momma, or a shot-dead sister.
3. There are only two established facts: (i) you actually
sent me $3.00 (HA!); and (ii) you are without doubt the
dumbest criminal on the planet. Consider your chain jerked.
4. This second point is worth dwelling on given its
incomprehensible magnitude. I cannot believe how incredibly
stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard
stupid. World-class, A-1, top of the heap, triple whopper
with cheese, supersized stupid. So stupid that it goes way
beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of
stupid. One-of-a-kind, global, universal, intergalactic
stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid
collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have
collapsed. Stupid so dense that no intellect can escape.
Singularly, extraordinarily, incredibly, bewilderingly
stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit
more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a
year. Quasar stupid. Your life is a monument to stupidity. I
am breathless that anyone or anything in our universe can
really be this stupid. You are a primordial fragment from the
original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so
uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of
stupidity that we know. A behemoth, a leviathan, a colossus
of stupidity.
5. Given the sheer immensity of your idiocy, I cannot in good
conscience send you back the $3.00 as requested. Instead, my
friends and I are going out tonight to jubilate and drink
some frosty cold beers with your money. We will celebrate the
fact that you will go down in history as the dumbest “419”
scammer in the history of scams.
6. As an aside, you may be interested to know that we are
also sending all your emails and information to the Ghana
Police Service, the Accra police, Ministry of National
Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, all the “Nigerian 419”
scam web sites, the US Secret Service, the Accra newspapers
and Interpol, along with your Mobitel cell number
00233-2760-7048. It is our fervent hope that they will hunt
you down like the scabby parasite-laced dog that you are, and
shut down your criminal enterprise.
Later, you knucklehead.
On yeah, one more thing: I ain’t your Daddy!
I wish I could write like that.
Cordially,
[name redacted]
There are some new stories to check out and comment on, about spiral narratives and coral reefs, and about modern tall tales. The latter would particularly benefit from your knowledge of modern online culture and urban folktales (not urban legends per se, but stories whose plots, morals, or other memes become part of daily narrative and conversation for years afterwards).
Narratives and Tall Tales: New Stories …
I can’t believe it. Sometimes even obvious hoaxes are for real. MSUK must have brought the Benetton PR firm on board…