the Great Octopus/Potato War

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 WarBoering!

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

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

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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The Dairy Continuum

Camel cheese does not relate to this in any way, shape or form; to repeat, this has nothing whatsoever to do with camel cheese.Cheese diaries

Now, I’m not sure where this comes from. It could be something I vaguely remembered from a PJ O’Rourke book, from back when he was funny. That would put it in the mid Eighties, I think. Or it could be something I read in an Eighteenth Century French manuscript, or maybe Cotton Mather. Then again, perhaps cave inscriptions…who knows?

All I know is, dairy is immortal. It simply mutates into more expensive forms of dairy.

  • Spoiled milk is buttermilk
  • spoiled buttermilk is yogurt
  • spoiled yogurt is cottage cheese
  • spoiled cottage cheese is cream cheese
  • spoiled cream cheese is … cheese
  • spoiled cheese is … more expensive cheese
  • and so on…

This makes total sense to me, if not to my clean-living roomie.

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and now a word from our sponsors…

Grimshawe’s Decimal Underwear

Stolen from Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.

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