And Then There Was The Time ...

... Huey, Louie and Dewey's gag turkey fell flat.

Image once again shamelessly lifted from (postmodern barney).

JAQing Off

Shorter Bruce Walker, at The American Thinker:

"Barry" Obama is a real nice guy to have a beer with, and is therefore eminently unsuited to be PUSA.

WARNING! WARNING! Actual Quote Follows! NONFICTION! NONFICTION!

As Robin of Berkeley observed in her truly scary article, Barack Hussein Obama may well be have been a traumatized victim in his youth, perhaps of sexual abuse. If he is, then Obama will have personality disorders which simply cannot be cured (read Robin's article for the details). If Robin is right, then at some point, the true, hopelessly sick Obama will show himself before a horrified nation. Average Americans will no longer like the president. They will, instead, be saddened and repelled -- and they will emphatically expel Obama and his supporters from power or influence in our lives. When folks stop liking Barry, the party is over. [Emphasis mine]

Gee, thanks for helping victims of child sexual abuse move past their trauma, there, you jerk.

And that link to Robin of Berkeley's horrible article will take you to another instance of JAQing off. She's just asking questions, guys. Of course, the questions are why is Barack Obama so strange? and did his drunkard father beat him about the head in Indonesia? and does he have Asperger's Syndrome or is he merely mentally ill? and did his mother leave him in the care of a self-admitted child-molesting Communist? so only go there if your blood pressure is crashing.

These articles, like Goldberg's opus Liberal Fascism, are just intended to get these smears into published form so that they can be referenced as authority on Obama by all kinds of smear artists. Now that Bruce Walker and Robin of Berkeley have produced these articles in which they wonder, in wide-eyed childlike innocence, if Obama is not, in fact, fucked in the head, people like Glenn Reynolds and Andy Schlafly can point to these articles as support for declaring that Obama is, indeed, fucked in the head and that this fucked-in-the-headness is the least of our worries. Don't you know he didn't tip Medvedev off to our intentions to arrest those Russian long-term spies?!?!

The Big Lie: you're soaking in it.

Thanks to Alicublog.

Molting

If I suggested to you that this time-lapsed video looked like the classic scene from Alien, wherein one organism comes bursting from the body of another, thereby killing it, would you be able to watch it with a quiet mind?



You're welcome.

Watch at YouTube.

More Fabulous With Every Passing Column!

I have no idea.

Watch at YouTube.

I Doubt It

There was a little-known, ill-fated, and short-lived attempt in the early 1970s to revive Star Trek as an intergalactic racing show.

Heavily influenced by popular movies such as Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit, and the latest fad from Japan, Speed Racer, the new show would feature Kirk, Spock and McCoy solving mysteries and getting girls along the illegal Federation muscle car street racing circuit.

But then they decided to make the franchise into a Saturday morning cartoon, and it was largely acclaimed as the better choice.

Picture credit: Retrospace Zeta. Sometimes NSFW.

Sometimes, I Really Despair

How to Draw Fantasy Females: Create Sexy Cyberpunks, Seductive Supergirls, and Raunchy All-Action Heroines

Comics aren't all about the T&A!

They aren't!

You have to believe me!

*sobs*

And Then There Was The Time

Ma and Pa Kent got turned into teenagers and Clark had to sit on them to keep them from doing crazy, irresponsible things like moving to Metropolis.



Superboy 126 was apparently published in 1966. Martha and Jonathan drink some kind of fluid plot-device that turns them physically into adolescents (signified by their use of pre-Depression slang), and apparently also regresses them mentally, because it's heavily implied by the cover that Superboy, an adolescent himself (and absolutely no fun at parties), has to take responsibility and prevent them from doing totally crazy things like deciding they no longer want to live in Smallville. Who would want to move to Metropolis, anyway? It's only the City of the Future. Better to stick around and do vague, nondefined things on your farm.

Much thanks to the Internet, and specifically (postmodern barney).

Oh. My. God.

This is hilariously awesome.

The influence of Gary Larson knows no bounds.

Wow (For Another Reason)

I can grok all the rest of her posture -- but why is she en pointe? What's "Ridgid" about that?

Via Retrospace.

Is *That* What They Call It These Days

One morning in the month of June,
As from my cot' I strayed.
Just at the dawning of the day
I met with a charming maid.
'Good morning you, whither?' said I,
'Good morning to you now',
The maid replied, 'kind sir' she cried,
'I've lost my spotted cow'.
'No longer weep, no longer mourn,
Your cow's not lost my dear,
I saw her down in yonder grove,
Come love and I'll show you where'.
'I must confess you're very kind,
I thank you sir,' said she,
'We will be sure her there to find,
Come sweetheart, go with me'.
And in the grove they spent the day,
They thought it passed too soon,
At night they homeward bent their way,
While brightly shone the moon.
If he should cross the flowery dale,
Or go to view the plough,
She comes and calls, 'You gentle swain,
I've lost my spotted cow

Oh Dear

Don't let this in your house! That's the first step in their plan!

I Have Obtained A Thing

Oh yeah, nothing's going to stop me from rocking your world with my fabulous digital art skills.



Oh yeah, I just rocked your world!

Dear Clients: I'm A Prole

I don't really care that you come from a "really distinguished family" on either or both of your parents' sides. Is that supposed to grease your way through our offices? 'Cause like I said, I don't really care (see above).

I pride myself on giving really good service to everyone who comes to the office or calls me on the telephone. Just randomly mentioning, while I'm asking for your name, that your folks were such-and-such whom I probably have never heard of is not going to get me to break out the good china, metaphorically speaking: everyone gets the good china.

All that's going to happen when you mention who your folks were is I'm going to get my proletariat hackles up. You won't notice when you're talking to me, but I'm definitely going to come here and complain about you on my blog.

And then you'll be sorry, because I control this part of the internet. If knowledger is power, then when I'm plugged into my blog I am slightly more powerful than I am at other times. TREMBLE BEFORE MY MINISCULE RISE IN POWER, CRETINS! MuAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAA!

Woman On Robot

David Gibbs III, a lawyer who in 2005 fought to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo on life support, told rally participants gay marriage would "open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina. "Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?" Gibbs asked. "Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots."

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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The Hand-Made Ones Are Always Best

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Titles. Titles Are Good.

Via Aaron Williams, here's a little one-minute painting that I think comes off well:



And here's today's Zappa video:



Another track off of Zoot Allures. This is a fan video. Get a load of the rhinestone-coated lips around 1:11 or so.

The Reason For The Season

Today is Columbus Day, a day when we citizens of the United States celebrate the discovery of our continent -- and maybe a couple others, too, but who cares? -- with a solemn day of having to wait another day for our next Netflix delivery.

And why, you ask, O my darling and O the delight of my eyes?

Well, I'd tell you a story, but why should I, when someone else has done an amazingly accurate yet concise summation of the political and socioeconomical forces at work behind this amazing discovery, without which we would not have this great nation of ours -- and a couple others, beside -- and doubtless without which we would all still live in the lands of our forefathers and yes this whole sentence is a question simply because I asked why?

Via Pharyngula.

Please Restrain Your Musical Genius

So you've spent a long day in the studio, recording your latest magnum opus for your latest record. It's a rockin' song, it stands on its own two feet, and it does what it needs to do and ends before people get bored.

Then the label calls. They've heard some of what you're doing with this song, and they like it so much they want to put it out as a single. That's great, it's a wonderful song, but it's a minute too short to be a single.

What can you do? Adding a verse is right out; it'll disrupt the perfection of the song. It doesn't work at a slower tempo; you'd have to slow it right down to snoresville to get another minute out of it. Anyway, your studio time is running out, you gotta get this done today.

And then you get a bright idea. All you have to do is repeat the chorus and fade out over a (long, excruciating) sixty seconds, but to keep people from being bored, halfway through, you kick it up a key. Walla! Musical perfection.

... Except not. Such a cop-out is apparently known as the Truck Driver's Gear Change, and some people want you to cut it the heck out. It seems as though the worst repeat offender is Michael Jackson, but no genre is safe, except perhaps "that hippity-hoppity stuff all the young coloreds really like these days" [/John McCainOld Man on the Front Porch].

Via Pandagon.

Terry Pratchett and the Epic in the Mundane

Excessive verbiage warning! Shorter me: Terry Pratchett rawks here read his latest book.

Please read this essay on Terry Pratchett and Discworld by Donna Royston.

Just to sum up for those who have (or won't) read the essay, Ms. Royston examines Pratchett's ouevre in depth by considering three books, The Color of Magic, Interesting Times, and Making Money.

At the end of Color of Magic, she argues, Pratchett presents us with this beautiful and epic image of Rincewind dropping off the Disc, over the Rim and into the void. She then says that Pratchett willfully turns away from the terror inherent in that beauty and finds joy and freedom elsewhere in his stories. While he does use fear and tension to great dramatic effect in the later books, he also begins to turn away from the bounding scope of that first book to focus on the infinite space bound within the nutshell of Ankh-Morpork.

Pratchett has said that Rincewind is his least favorite character, simply because Rincewind runs away from everything. While this invariably drops him further in it, to the point that in The Last Hero he comes and volunteers rather than suffer the indignities of the interim, it also has the effect of widening the scope of the story. In hiking his way across the Disc, Rincewind creates lots more land and people that Pratchett has to come up with and detail. Given the physical limits of his books, that pretty much means he's got less time to spend on each location.

We can see him tiring of this forced lack of detail as the books progress. Perhaps what Pratchett likes most of all is coming up with an engaging character and letting him or her loose on the world. He likes to play with the Discworld. Once he got tired of Rincewind, he wrote about Granny and Nanny and Magrat; Vimes and Carrot and Colon and Nobby; Ridcully and Ponder and the Bursar. In his last few books, written in the last 5 years or so, his established characters have started to take a back seat to the new ones. In Monstrous Regiment, Vimes and the Watch hang around the wings, and we see them through Polly's eyes, which amounts to seeing them again for the first time.

In addition, he's limited the scope of his books. A number of novels written since the late 90's have taken place wholly within Ankh-Morpork and its surroundings; these are mostly the Watch novels, although Moist von Lipwig gets as far as the brassica fields near Pseudopolis before his parole golem catches up with him, and no farther. Having so much time to detail the city, then, has allowed it to grow and develop. There's a street map of Ankh-Morpork now. The clacks, which seemed to come out of nowhere between one novel and the next, have revolutionized the city, and also provided one more vector for a threat to its Hegemony. Ankh-Morpork has grown from a parody of Lankhmar and Greyhawk into a pastiche of New York, London, and Hong Kong, even as its citizens become more real and empathetic. The stamp-collecting craze in Going Postal has a visceral enthusiasm behind it, as the Ankh-Morpork mob becomes something other than a threat. Pratchett introduces new characters, no matter how briefly, and makes it easy to connect with the ones you're supposed to be sympathetic with, and to despise the bullies and petty people. Even the time-travel gimmick of Night Watch becomes something more than a mere gimmick, because it ties well-established characters together. For instance, we finally know how Reg Shoe came to have his particular brand of social activism.

In any less capable author's hands, this focusing-in on the lives of a few people might become petty and trite, as their problems and the solutions they find utterly fail to shake the foundations of Pseudopolis. Pratchett has a gift for making us really care about the widow's mites that are at stake in Making Money, and he really makes us root for the little person whose problems may not matter to the Great A'Tuin, but really can spell the end of the world for the people involved.

Pratchett has achieved a level of mastery that few other authors have reached before him. He is a fitting role model and hero for every aspiring writer and dreamer in the world. Hopeful authors could certainly do much worse, and little better, than follow in his footsteps, even though they hardly ever leave the banks of the Ankh anymore.

I'm Dreaming of a Mars Snowfall

I'm dreaming of a Mars snowfall
It's never been observed before
Where the craters get scarred
And Phoenix tries hard
To see snowflakes on the ground

I'm dreaming of a Mars snowfall
With ev'ry photo sent along
As long as NASA says go
And may all your regolith be white