Monthly Archives: September 2007

RIP: Pavarotti

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I’m late on this, but I’m sure you’ll understand it took me some time to work through my feelings. Pavarotti was a greatly talented man, and perhaps the highest iteration of a particular type, ie the man possessed of immortal talent who doesn’t mind trotting it out at his Mom’s every damn Sunday dinner, or singing at a friend’s birthday party, or showing up for any benefit concert that will have him, provided they lay on the pasta spread.

And I love people like that. To the other, equally talented individuals who hoard their gifts as if they are MRE’s in the face of Katrina, we say: can I buy you an enema, darling?

Luciano Pavarotti, perhaps the greatest opera singer of the 20th Century, and disco diva/supermodel Grace Jones, at a benefit for Angola.

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Build your own Bionic Woman: free after rebates!

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Lindsay

Is this the right place to pass along the information that Angelina Jolie‘s pickup line used to be “five bucks if you can guess what’s real”?

Yes, yes it is.

In related news, the OSI, a branch of the CIA has released a statement via Funnimetrics indicating that, if you wait for the next 30% off sale at Future Shop or something and use all the rebate coupons that have been gathering dust on top of the tv, you can live every Seventies’ adolescent male’s dream and build your own bionic woman, FOR FREE!

For realz.

With the decreasing price of computer equipment and electronics in general, the parts for a bionic person, at one time a prohibitive six million dollars, now costs less that three hundred dollars. During sale weekends at Fry‘s electronics, the OSI claims it can lower that price to zero, or free (sales tax not included). The new motto for the bionic woman project will be, “better…stronger…faster…and cheaper…”

“I remember we had to buy this big Betamax VCR to observe Jamie and Austin’s training. That thing cost thousands…” said retired OSI head of bionic projects, Oscar Goldman.

The government study cost seven million dollars.

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the Great Octopus/Potato War

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Octopus Potato War

You won’t have heard about this in school, unless, that is, you went to school in Y’ha-nthlei like some of us. The War of the Roses, the Thirty Year’s War, the Boer War…Boering!

The Great Octopus/Potato War is far from over, althoughNapoleon and Marengo its origins lie in the mist-shrouded vales of distant history. The blog No Sword has unravelled the tangled accounts and written the definitive (so far!) history of these great and bloody battles. It is the opinion of this blogger, as well as the entire staff of Miskatonic University, that great historic events should be understood and explained in terms of art history much more often than they typically are. We can but hope to enrich our knowledge of the Battle of Marengo by analyzing the conformation of Napoleon‘s famous steed in the great portrait, and to reach a level of understanding of the American Revolution through a paintstroke analysis of Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Let us begin by examining the famous picture more closely. [ed note: yes, by all means let us begin thusly!] The octopus soldiers display a confidence that borders on arrogance. One claims to be able to do the work of eight men — clearly a hubristic miscalculation, unless he believes that humans and by extension potatoes can only use one arm at a time.

Nevertheless, the octopus troop is clearly unwilling to go on the offensive. They taunt and spit, but do not attack. This insulting treatment can only have be an attempt to provoke the potato soldiers into an ill-advised attack on the octopus position, and it seems to have worked precisely as intended…

Earlier in 1868 alone, they had already taken heavy losses in the brutal East-West Fart-Off (東西屁ひりくらへ — left, right) even as they provided logistical support for another, unrelated Fart Battle (屁合戦兵粮 — left, right) elsewhere…

This gem of military art history appreciation (truly, it’s as if Toynbee himself had fathered a love child with Sister Wendy!) comes our way via Japanprobe.

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the Random Fortune Generator

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20 sided dieStolen from The Virtual Roadside, via the Generator Blog, and truly random in that fewer than half of the results are actually fortunes. I did get “you will have a fight with your supervisor” but given the fact that I am completely unsupervised, it fades towards meaninglessness…as does everything, really.

But it’s okay. I’ve still got my poetry.

A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about

whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they

got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, “The

medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam’s

rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat.”

The architect did not agree. He said, “But if you look at the Garden

itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden

and the world were created. So God must have been an architect.”

The computer scientist, who’d listened carefully to all of this, then

commented, “Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?”

mouldy oldies: why did the chicken cross the road

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Subservient Chicken crosses the road if you tell her to!

Stolen from the Silliness.org blog, which got it from god-knows-where, same place we all got it from: the email hole.

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

DR. SEUSS
Did the chicken cross the road?
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes! The chicken crossed the road,
but why it crossed, I’ve not been told!

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
To die. In the rain.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

GRANDPA
In my day, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

PAT BUCHANAN
To steal a job from a decent, hardworking American.

ARISTOTLE
It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

KARL MARX
It was a historical inevitability.

SADDAM HUSSAIN (this used to be Hitler, then Qadaffi)
This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

RONALD REAGAN
What chicken?

CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK
To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

FOX MULDER
You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it?

FREUD
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossing the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

BILL GATES
I have just released chicken 99, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook-and Internet Explorer is an inextricable part of chicken.

EINSTEIN
Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken?

BILL CLINTON
I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken please?

GEORGE W. BUSH
I don’t think I should have to answer that question.

JERRY FALWELL
Because the chicken was gay! Isn’t it obvious?
Can’t you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the “other side.” That’s what “they” call it, the “other side”.
Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And, if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like “the other side.” That chicken should not be free to cross the road. It’s as plain and simple as that.

LOUIS FARRAKHAN
The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the “black man” in order to trample him and keep him down.

THE BIBLE
And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, “Thou shalt cross the road” And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

COLONEL SANDERS
I missed one?

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