BoJo Lego, yo

Boris is looking a little OT&E 

Readers of the ol’ raincoaster blog will be familiar by now with the jolly sight of author, columnist, politician and television personality Boris Johnson, the simultaneously elegant and devastating revenge of the gods upon the legended dignity of the British Tory Party.

He’s a photoeditor’s delight, rumpled suit accessorized with bike clips, rips, stains of uncertain origin, or pockets lumpy from collections of mysterious objects, with his blond hair in trademark Van de Graaff style, and, generally, a backdrop of pitchfork-wielding, outraged natives.

Now, here’s Boris as you’ve never seen him before: in Lego.

bojo lego, yo

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oh, fine. BE that way.

apathy

Someone, it appears, is going around reddit and digg and downvoting my beloved lolgoths.

Goths have no sensa huma.

But do I care? Fuck yes I care; these damn things are teh ossum d00dz! You think I’m doing this for money? You think it’s not more interesting than “dis site need tu emprov commentin it sux”? Or, god forbid, “latest partisan spokesperson slandered by opposing partisan spokesperson”? Puh-leez! Let’s just all agree Falwell was a self-righteous, shrill windbag who’s better off in God’s hands (take that any way you prefer) or feeding the worms, Obama isn’t black (whatever), and InsertNameHere is the next great hope of America and move the fuck on. And yes, I’ve read this article.

Someone at reddit actually said he downvotes stories just because it’s easier to click on than the Next button; you would think this would get a person banned, but no.

I have a suspicion that some people downvote things that are posted by their authors, official site policy notwithstanding, but that’s just a hunch. Could be that horrible woman from the political thread comments is stalking me.

Overall, I have to say that Stumble is best for hits, reddit second, and digg is pretty much hopeless unless you’re a tech blogger; it’s rapidly becoming irrelevant to the rest of the blogosphere by natural selection and reinforcement. Since non-techie stories don’t do well there, it attracts fewer non-techies, reducing the mental gene pool (memepool {making one word from two is very Web 2.0}).

I’d like to know how an rtr story that was posted to Press This got six positive votes, yet only two reads. Maybe they’re voting on the snippet? Who knows as long as it brings me some hits…waiting…waiting.

Slate did a lovely slideshow of lolcats and lolmemes and utterly left LolGoths out. WAAAAAH. I’m gonna play NIN and think about how to chop up other people while still spinning it as self-cutting!

And both today and yesterday my personal journal got zero hits. That’s rather surprising, given that flamewars and drama are hit magnets in my experience, but ah well.

I’ve still got my poetry.

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four nuclear towers assplode! with video!

Chapelcross towers falling down, falling down, falling down...

Am I being sensationalistic here? Perhaps a tad.

After all, the destruction of the 60 year old towers at the Chapelcross Nuclear Power Plant in Scotland was scheduled, professionally carried out, non-nuclear in nature, and the towers were out of commission not to mention enriched Uranium- and Plutonium-free.

But they blowed up good. They blowed up real good!

Here’s the BBC slideshow, should the YouTube prove too zippy a perspective for your nuclear tower blowing up pleasure.

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he’s got balls…and he wants you to eat them

portrait of the artist as a young head of livestock 

Well you gotta admit it’s the most creative use of liposuctioned human fat you’ve ever heard of. It can’t ALL end up puffing up Lindsay‘s pout.

And it’s Art!

Marco Evaristti, a Chilean/Israeli/Danish conceptual artist (oh, aren’t they all) underwent liposuction (to, from the looks of him, no avail) and made the suctioned human fat into meatballs, which he then fried in olive oil, displayed in a gallery, and canned.

Then it starts to get weird.

“What I’m trying to do with these works is to give society a jolt and make it ask questions,” the 44-year-old said in a telephone interview from Denmark, where he lives with his wife and children.

“And it can answer those questions, and in that way maybe we can be a little better as human beings.”

Evaristti’s meatballs piece consists of 13 tins of the meat on a long table, in an echo of Christ’s last supper.

He says the work is about the sanctity of the body and an unhealthy modern obsession with food and weight loss.

“Firstly, I want to show people that meatballs made with my fat are no more disgusting than the meatballs you buy in the supermarket,” he said.

“Secondly, it’s a dialogue with a modern society that lives to eat, rather than eating to live as it should be.

“You eat, and when you’re fat, you go to a clinic, have an operation, have your fat removed and you start to eat again.”

When he displayed the piece in Chile, Evaristti invited 12 people to join him in eating the meatballs in a last supper.

How did they taste? “Even better than my grandmother’s,” he said.

In all honesty, now I’m hungry!

Would you eat those meatballs?

I absolutely would; I would be so irrationally excited at a chance to eat those goddammed meatballs you cannot possibly imagine it because if you tried to cram all that joy between your ears and run it through your little grey cells it your head would assplode! Like the Death Star! With paranoia and magnesium flares and Wookiee co-pilots and a bombastic, derivative John Williams score playing in Dolby Surroundsound!

It would be teh ossum.

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Hey, you got your thetan in my cult! Well you got your cult all up in my thetan!

Xenu is my homeboyHow to drive Scientologists crazy for fun and profit. And that’s AFTER L.Ron and his minions have already warmed them up for you; they’re halfway there already!

“Your problem is that you are easily led.”

I thought about this for a moment. I didn’t actually feel particularly easy to lead, I decided, but perhaps she would have something to tell me I didn’t know.

Having allowed her point to sink in, she continued, “Do you want to be activator or activated?”

This was a bit cryptic, and I quite honestly didn’t get her drift, so I asked her politely to explain exactly what she meant.

“Do you want people to activate you, or do you want to activate them?”

“Well.” I hesitated, considering this rather either-or view of things. “Does one have to go around activating people to avoid being activated by them?”

“Yes.” She was very decisive about this. I had to admit that she had in fact just told me something I had never known before.

“I’m not certain that I agree. As far as I know I activate myself and other people do the same for themselves.”

“It isn’t that simple!” Again she was extremely decisive. This was interesting since it had always seemed that way to me.

“Do I have the right to activate people? Isn’t it their job and their right to activate themselves? You’d be taking a hell of a responsibility if you went around activating people, wouldn’t you?”

“Only for their own good!”

Now she was really beginning to interest me. Her logic was fascinating: To avoid being activated by people, which would be bad for me, I had to activate them, which would be good for them. (Quite apart from the fact that statements like “for their own good” have a tendency to stimulate my anti-authority neurosis and trigger off the little alarm bells.) This was becoming interestinger and interestinger, and I was becoming curiouser and curiouser about exactly who these people were. I was just about to find out.

“Now.” She fixed me with her gaze. “What you need is this book!” She held it up.

I leant forward and examined it. Large, cheerfully coloured letters on the front identified it: DIANETICS, by L. RON HUBBARD…

This continues for some time, escalating entertainingly, after which…

I leant back and waited expectantly.

She blinked, looked at me somewhat blankly, then blinked again. I waited expectantly.

She looked at her desktop and blinked at that. This didn’t look partcularly encouraging, but I waited expectantly.

Her next move was to place her elbows on the desktop, fold her hands together and start rocking her body backwards and forwards. She finally stopped rocking and started staring at me intensely. What she hoped to achieve by this was unclear.

I felt it was time to give her som encouragement and guidance.

“Dear Lady.” My tone was extremely patient and sympathetic. “You have to give me a sales pitch, you know. You aren’t going to sell me anything by just looking at me and clamming up.”

She frowned, and kept frowning for a while. Then, to my astonishment, she blew herself up like a frog, pointed at the door and screamed hysterically, “UD FOR FAEN!!! UD!!!” (This translates roughly as “Get the fuck out of here! Get out!”)

I rose politely while she glared at me balefully, quivering and looking very apoplectic. Having opened the door preparatory to leaving, I addressed her again.

“But Dear Lady.” My tone was full of fatherly concern. “You aren’t going to activate me into buying anything by throwing me out of your office. Have you paid money for these courses? Are you sure you haven’t been ripped off?”

That really did it! She shot to her feet like a champagne cork, hunched her shoulders, withdrew her head like a turtle, stamped on the floor and, gesticulating hysterically in the direction of the door with her index finger, her whole arm and her whole body, emitted an even more ear-splitting “UD FOR FAEN!!! UD!!! U-U-U-D!!!”

Out of concern for her observably imminent heart attack I withdrew.

Don’t miss the scientific conclusions and wrap-up on the site.