Category Archives: humor

White Slavery in the Twenty-First Century

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If Eliza Armstrong were alive today, I know exactly what she’d be doing: running interference on her overlord’s stalker, fighting over table scraps, and contributing keyword-heavy posts on the state of the chimney sweeping industry to some faceless blog network for five bucks a post.

Oh, a blogger’s life is not all Champagne and Caviar, my friends. No, nor Skittles and Beer neither.

Alas, not even Smarties and Orange Crush, most days.

It all starts so innocently. You LiveJournal, perhaps, or you get a bit of a reputation as a Tumblr.

You see a blog job listed on MediaBistro. You think it’ll be fun. A laugh. Something you do in between vigorous rounds of Scrabulous and the performance of whatever lucrative, yet cushy, professional tasks the future holds in store for you. Someday.

As this video exposé from BarelyPolitical (via Valleywag) demonstrates, you could not be more wrong. Long hours in murky darkness, scant rations of Chex mix and RedBull ( or cheap knockoffs, if you work outside Silicon Valley), and a polyester duvet that you have to share with the owner’s poorly-housebroken bulldogs are the lot of a typical blogger.

And your overlords? Raising a toast to themselves at Balthazar.

a medical emergency

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You can’t blame her, really.

Medicinal Marijuana for emergencies only

Well, have you?

Relativity and Seafood: An Update

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That's just the steam escaping

If Einstein taught us anything, my friends, it’s that perspective is reality. Now, we’ve looked at the issue of perspective and seafood before on the ol’ raincoaster blog. Lately the meme has spread, yea even unto the highest reaches of Automattic, where Matt has examined the eternal question from the Anuran point of view.

With the passage of time often comes new angles, new viewpoints, new horizons, and raincoaster herself is not exempt from the machinations and wearings of temporal transit. Indeed, from my new vantage point as a parenting blogger, I find myself shunning the simple, yet easy and cheap, cartoons of yesteryear and engaging more authentically with photographs, as they are more accurate, indeed almost narcissistically so, representations of the real world and thus, more relevant to my more introspective, navel-gazey daily life now. No more cheap jokes with line-drawn crustaceans! No, our new standard demands more; it demands typical scenes that could be taken from my very life!

Baby Lobster, and doesn\'t she look pleased?

Service with a Smile

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I know, I know, it’s old. But it’s damn funny. If airlines normally ran ads like this they’d never have an empty seat.

Yes. I. Went. There.

Spoiler Alert!

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