Category Archives: Culture

the ultimate blog posts

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TIAThis is a clever strategy to promote your blog: tell anyone who will listen that you were a guest blogger on one of the most popular blogs, and given how pathetic the search boxes are on most of them, corroboration, if it existed, would be impossible to find anyway.

So Wired has done a handy-dandy list of the ultimate blog posts for each of the top blogs, sorta like that time I pitched the Province on the “single welfare foster mom of Aboriginal, dyslexic pit bull orphans wins lottery, gets impregnated by Brad Pitt, steals car from Surrey mall” story, and it shouldn’t be long now until she finally manifests and I can write the damn thing.

Ultimate blog post for raincoaster: Cthulhu rises from Rl’yeh, exposes Stephen Harper as an inhuman Fungi from Yuggoth and destroys him, all slavering right-wingers awake from their mind controlled walking comas, surviving Watergate Plumbers drop dead from the shock, worldwide communal anarchy is declared; the YouTube video (soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, bonus appearance by the Monkees)

While blogging has only reached prominence in the last few years, it was actually invented by the ancient Romans who built a majestic blog in 200 BC from marble, granite and links they stole from the Greeks.

“Blog” itself is short for “weblog,” which is short for “we blog because we weren’t very popular in high school and we’re trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people.”

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it…

blogdogs

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

Kottke: Elwin Festerator is the unsung inventor of the curly telephone cord. “I looked at a straight telephone cord, and I asked myself, Elwin, why can’t that be curly? So I went out and got my brand-new curling gun, and I curled the hell out of it.” Related link: New Yorker article on the Olympic curling team.

Daily Kos: Bush caught in three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Little Green Footballs: Bush enjoys triumphant three-way with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Gawker: Paris Hilton does pretty much anything.

Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.

Fleshbot: Same as Cute Overload, only with coeds.

MAKE blog: How to create a nuclear accelerator using a Flash drive, a Commodore 64 and a guy named Roger.

Metafilter: Unhelpful link text. Extra links added for padding that have little to do with the main topic of the entry. Are extremely loaded rhetorical questions the only thing that can save us now?

It’s a blog, Metafilterites. What do you think?

conclusive proof that there is no god

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Dave Fucking Eggers is doing celebrity interviews.

Three decades after the Monty Python team made the silliest film ever, it’s been reborn as a hit musical. And it’s even got the killer rabbit! As Spamalot prepares to open in London, Eric Idle tells Dave Eggers why this was something he had to get right.

But why was it something Dave had to do at all?

the liquor freedom indicator: bellwether of liberty

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Is that a gun in your pocket...oh, it is. 

I think we can abolish CSIS, MI6 and the CIA now. We have the Liquor Freedom Indicator to take and transmit the temperature of any geopolitical hotspots.

Imagine the savings: total cost = the bar tab for a double Johnny Walker Black on the rocks in a bar in the capital of each nation. Compare that to an estimated $30 billion for the CIA alone, $200 million for CSIS, and £776 million for MI6. Hmmm…

I shall get to work on the travel grant application immediately.

Americans need to know who their friends are and now. That’s been a tall order since long before Archie Bunker wondered what trick Nixon had up his sleeve pretending to make peace with the ChiComs. Our own State Department is standing proof that you can spend seven years at Georgetown, ace the Foreign Service Exam, and still not know your Assyrians from your asshole.

Today, the world’s a ball of confusion, right? War Churchill by Karshin Iraq, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Timor, Somalia, Gaza, Backwaterstan, and Toledo. The quickly shifting sands of foreign relations have increased the complexity of the U.S.’s ties, alliances, and uneasy truces from “merely knotty” to “what the hell are we doing?” If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, are asymmetrical, urban, guerrilla conflicts with non-state actors God’s way of making geography irrelevant?

Average Americans consistently demonstrate no understanding of expected return, octane ratings, and what the hell their legislators voted for last session. They’re never going to get ahead of the foreign policy learning curve unless someone can simplify the process. That’s why I try to distill all analysis of a foreign country’s structure, culture, and prospects for success down to booze.

So without further ado, I give you the liquor freedom indicator.

There follows an dryly exhaustive analysis of Pakistan, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Beirut, Northern Lebanon, Southern Lebanon, and Iraq. So to speak.

Still no word on Salt Lake City.

sexy Star Trek slashtube: Closer

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Every love story is better with a little Nine Inch Nails, right?

Or is that just mine…? Don’t answer that.

From Defamer.

stingrays: Steve Irwin’s back, and this time it’s personal!

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Stingray, silent but deadly 

Crikey! Steve Irwin is taking revenge from beyond the grave! 

Okay, I’m lying. But somebody is killing stingrays in apparent payback for what they did to Steve. While I’m naturally against indiscriminate slaughter of innocents, they are

  • A) not endangered and
  • B) just big, ugly fish anyway.

Toss a couple on theh bahbie and I’ll be roit oveh, maite!

from the Times:

At least ten stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on Australia’s eastern coast in the last week in what conservationists believe could be revenge attacks for the death of Steve Irwin, the popular naturalist and television personality…

But now it is feared that fans’ mourning has taken a new focus: stingray rage…

Michael Hornby, a friend of Mr Irwin and executive director of his conservation group Wildlife Warriors, said he was concerned that the rays, which are usually docile creatures, were being hunted and killed in retaliation for Irwin‘s death, which he said, would go against everything that the television star had stood for.

“It may be some sort of retribution, or it may be fear from certain individuals, or it just may be yet another callous act toward wildlife,” he said.

“We are disgusted and disappointed that people would take this sort of action to hurt wildlife. We just want to make it very clear that we will not accept and not stand for anyone who has taken a form of retribution. That’s the last thing Steve would want.”

Crikey! Steve and his Croc Buddy