82. The Mesopotamians were always going on about how their society had decayed, looking back on the good old pre-Sumerian days when Dwighteisenhower ruled the land.
I don't get here much lately. Nice to peek in now and then, especially when Ace hosts cheerleaders like the Reubenesque cutie above. And it's clear I've got nothing to say. So I'll be going now. Carry on. (As I know you shall.)
Astro-Monster: I'm shocked, shocked to see this is only available in 240p. A cinematic classic like this deserves, nay, demands to be available in 1080p, even for this stirring trailer! Oh, look, at the end, a link for the Monkees Screen Test…. 
The urban myth when I was young ('way pre-Internet) was that you could leave a quarter overnight in a can of warm coke and it would be dissolved in the morning. (And/or your big brother fished it out.) I always assumed warm & flat were key. A sealed bottle of this stuff should not be as active because of the pressure? suggested the guy who never took chemistry and therefore can offer up any old ignorant idea.
Was it here I read this joke? Hope not. A Muslim, a socialist, a homosexual, and a black man walk into a bar. The bartender says, "What'll it be, Mr. President?" [crowd groans]
Q: How many Congresscritters does it take to screw up our light bulbs? [A: That's not funny!]
If you took the total national debt in pennies and laid them side-by-side in a gigantic circle, they still wouldn't be big enough to fit around BO's ego. [h/t to Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, Spider-Man Annual #1, 1964, for inspiration on that one.]
It's been quite a year! My kids are all employed. I converted my vanity website and our old long-stagnant cafe-and-stage business site to modern-style content management. Some fifty years after I first spliced 16mm film together, I finally reached a life-long goal of editing video digitally. Also, I started following PoliNation (when I can). There were rough spots in 2011 -- really, really rough spots, some of the hardest in my life -- but here we are at the end of the year, still standing, however shakily. Persist we much!
Y'all have a happy 2012, and if I'm not seen much 'round these parts, imagine it's because I'm happily engaged in mopping up after 2011 and forging ahead toward success. Or sleeping it off.
REGISTER! VOTE! A.B.O!!!!
Happy New Year to you, JJ. Thanks for all the great years bringing us our good friends A&J!!
Happy and save 2012 to all the folks here.
Belated Merry Christmas to all, God bless us every one. I've been wondering, just how much does one have to hang around here to become a fully qualified moron? (Or is this one of those questions that if you don't know, on here, don't ask, and most assuredly don't google image-search?) Thought I'd share this....
This morning I tuned in the radio to mid-interview with Tammy Duckworth. You may have heard of her? I hadn't. Link to full MP3 interview. I tuned in at 6:40. Quoting from shortly after that....
TD: "I entered a few days of utter despair, because I thought I had crashed the aircraft and I deserved to lose my legs, and that's why my legs were gone. ... And then my husband realized what I was thinking, and he said, 'No, no, no, no. You and Dan, you guys landed the aircraft.' And he found a picture, my unit mailed a picture of my bird sitting in a field, as pretty as she can be, with a hole under my seat and a hole above my head. And then I was fine, y'know. I lost my legs, but until I passed out, I was trying to do my job, and that's all I ever needed. ... I lost my legs, but I did not lose my honor, and I did not lose my commitment to my men."
Merry Christmas. The Grinch - great choice. Greatly enjoying your work, and looking ahead to your "New Look" (says a fan old enough to remember Batman's "new look").
Merry Christmas, weirdos. I don't get to comment much, nor lately get to read comments much, but the world would be worse without Weird Universe, wouldn't we all agree?
Here's a link to something I wrote for Christmas back in nineteen-aught-ninety-six, sorta my own 'Yes Virginia,' weird in its (my?) own way. Enjoy with a dash of salt.
Santa, Dear Friends
For those who may have come to doubt the old elf
@ Mindful webworker IF YOU WROTE THIS back in "nineteen-aught-ninety-six"(BTW that would be 19096,which has not occurred yet and is 17,085 years in the future!) Why does it state at the bottom of the page "Originally posted on CompuServe's Religion Forum, as message #113182, in section 5, Religious Education and Research on 1988 Dec 24, at about twenty minutes to midnight, under the subject, "Once More for Santa!" ?????
Posted by Tyrusguy on 12/24 at 03:22 PM
Tea Party: Bitter, raaacist clinger nutbags. (Just look at these thuggish protesters!)
Ron Brown: A self-inflicted gunshot wound as the plane was going down? Same as the suicide death of the air traffic controller under whose watch it went down. Some respect for the self-deceased please! (Bill Clinton showing last respects)
And the idea that TWA800 was shot down is just more crazy conspiracy theory just like that nut who said, “My God! Somebody’s shooting at that airplane!” (Crew of British Airways jet flying behind Flight 800.)
Can’t recall — did you already link to the Time cover? ;)
The theme song for Moochelle's separate vacation budget considerations
http://youtu.be/NzspsovNvII (It's Free!)
It always bears repeating:
Let coke heads have LIBERTY to burn up their sinuses and brains and voila! you destroy the whole black market problem. A twofer, seems t'me.
We have met the enemy, repeatedly over the decades, and as testified by the history of the United States between the 18th and 21st Amendments, the problem is not liberty; the problem is PROHIBITION!
102 ...Whatever you do, DON'T look it up on google images.
Surely you meant to make that a link! Shirley!
Decades ago, playing Scrabble with my younger sister, I was saving up to play all my letters (50 bonus points for you non-Scrabblers) and all I needed was an open "S." Suddenly there it was, but it was my sister's turn. She put down an "I" to make "IS" and ruined my opportunity late enough in the game I knew I wouldn't get another one. I banged the board, letters went flying, sister yelled, but then I explained and conceded, and she utterly commiserated and we laughed. Then Mom flew into the room and sent us both to our rooms for fighting, despite our laughter and attempts at explanations.
Now, isn't that a more interesting story than some dude kicked off a plane? Baldwin? Who? I thought they made pianos. (My subscription to Who's Who in Celebrities Today lapsed some time back.)
228 The Godfather and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer....
Never saw that series, but mostly because one night flipping channels on cable I stumbled across that famous scene where the red-nosed reindeer's head was in the bed....
I was terribly concerned that there was a disturbance in the force, something missing in the universe, until I reloaded the page and read
206 Obama is a stuttering clusterfuck of a miserable failure.
Posted by: Steevy at December 06, 2011 04:56 PM (vd4t0)
All is right again.
Wow. Can't believe I read the whole thing. (Except for a couple of tl;dr posts.)
We didn't ask for Santa. He came into our house unbidden along with the firstborn. When a cousin eventually "enlightened" our daughter, we had to give her the speech about how now you're Santa, too. Which she, in turn, delivered to her brothers when the time came. It was sweet. They're in their twenties. Neither faith nor reason negatively affected by childhood fantasies revised.
One year, I nigh caused cranial paroxysm for an atheist correspondent on a discussion forum, by posting a little treatise conflating "the truth" about Santa and divine influences. My correspondent couldn't imagine that I didn't see the irony of my thus proving God to be a fairy tale.
Santa, Dear Friends,
Oh, you think you're hardened and steeled for anything. Kleenex alert, indeed! Then, the moment of the first bit of applause, uncontrollable lacrymation. Well done. The drama sneaks up on you. Of course, you didn't take Bob's warning and had to use your sleeve. And by you, of course, I mean me.
It's been a long time since I was in high school watching on TV as our returning Nam vets got spit on and cursed at, but I can't forget and all the more appreciate for the contrast how they are honored now. (Alas that their war seems to be going much the same.)
We just had two locals not come home alive, nineteen-year-old Spc. Sarina Butcher, of Checotah, the first female Oklahoma National Guard soldier killed during wartime, and 26-year-old Sgt. Christopher Gailey, of Ochelata, funeral here today. (Patriot Guard is on patrol; threat of Westboro slime.)
Spc Butcher (KJRH)
Sgt Gailey (E-E)
[Hi, Polination. I've had a busy couple of months. Nice to be getting back to Grudges & all.]
Reinforcing about the dialup warning. On allegedly-high-speed but often cranky cable, it took over a minute to DL! 7.5MB, 3051x1633 image.
Thanks vary mooch, yogi, for the link to this digital record of the classic Bosch work!
I so appreciate the digital universe! Back in the 1960s, Mom acquired a collection of slides of famous paintings. Back then, presuming you couldn't go to all those museums or find full-scale prints, slides were about the best way to see them! Starry night on the big (home) screen! Now, with detailed digital photographs like this, one can zoom in practically as if you had a magnifying glass.
And hardly anything cries out for extended detailed examination as much as Bosch's weird universes!
Regarding the curious political comparisons:
What is meant by the remark about tea party "zealots" protesting Gordon's pension I can't even guess.
Is the intended suggestion that the brilliant businessman Stark would use his honestly-gained wealth and influence to openly oppose crony capitalism and runaway government waste that destroys the economy and undermines businesses large and small? That would be a worthy Iron Man.
How about Lex Luthor owning much of the media, which don't report on his funding dozens of organizations engaged in disinformation and vote fraud, destroying banks for his own vast gain, controlling markets to manipulate national elections, working toward his own evil form of world-conquest? That would be a real super-villain!
You don't just sneak back in quietly, do you? :)
On an article on Ace of Spades about this same subject, Hoffa's violent rhetoric, there's a comment that I thought at first was a joke, being almost exactly like a sarcastic comment previously posted, but which I think may be serious.
"Let's remember, Sarah Palin painted a "target" pointing very directly at Gabby Gifford's district. I don't see how anyone fair could ever really compare what Hoffa did to that. He didn't target specific people and didn't mention Guardsmen at all. So let's be real, what Mr. Hoffa did just wasn't remotely the same...."
Joke or not, some people seriously think like that! One can hardly summon the energy to address the fallacies inherent here, but I bring it up for one reason: the "targeting" that the Palin map did clearly regarded elections, and of all the people targeted, only one got shot, by a loon whose politics are irrelevant except that he was unlikely to have ever seen or heard of the map. The Loughner-Palin connection is just one of those "say anything" lefty-lunatic memes, of course. Like, Bachmann was thinking of John Wayne Gacy instead of John Wayne. Jaw-droppingly ludicrous.
However, when you have someone exhorting unions with what is clear violent rhetoric, the idea that they're only talking about elections gets a little iffy. Maybe a lot iffy. Sarah has hunted moose. Unions have a long reputation for severe violent tactics, and I'm sure I don't have to offer any of the wealth of evidence for that one. Another commenter in the same Ace page said, "The Hoffa remarks reached far and wide, and I've fielded two out-of-the-blue inquiries from acquaintances in real life about what is involved in buying guns and keeping them in the home since yesterday morning."
So, there's silly spin like the Sarah-shot-Gabby connection, and the lunatics who believe it, which may be politically reprehensible, but is physically harmless. And then there's the real threats, the kind that lead to real violence. The kind that Jimmy's dad found out about, I'd say.
I admire Sarah so much, and I'm sure she knows she's not just sacrificing her privacy and painting a target on herself, just by speechifying, much less if she runs; she's putting her very life on the line.
Sorry for my keyboard running over. I'll just end with: This is going to be one interesting election.
