further proof that the end times are upon us

Octopus vs Scottie

There you have it, nothing less than solid proof that the Cthulhoids have arisen. Not only has R’lyeh broken the surface once more, freeing Cthulhu to stalk once more among men, slavering with bloodlust and howling with madness, but His legions on the ocean bottom have seized control of the distilleries the Scots, so foolish, so blind, located together on a remote island, hemmed in by fog and shunned by mainlanders; a strange, lonely, broken-down place, where the very air corrodes the greyed stone from which the town is hewn. The townsfolk, isolated and inbred as they are, provided little resistance, arming themselves only with bulky helmets and a peculiar, non-Euclidean weapon consisting of a bizarre and abhorrent arrangement of pipes and airsacs. Their precautions were as nothing against the powerful arms and ravenous beaks of the briny legions, although the invaders did have to stuff their earholes with kelp against the terrible assault of the sonic waves.

Make mine a double, but I think I’m sticking with something further inland: tequila. That’s made from cactus, right?

Willy Pickton had a point?

mmmmmm-mm good!

Perhaps you’re familiar with the tale of Willy Pickton, the Port Coquitlam pig farmer who picked up and murdered several dozen women from Vancouver’s Downtown EastSide. Perhaps you’ll even recall that I went for coffee with the fellow once and lived to tell the tale.

After he’d killed his victims, he took souvenir parts and the rest he put through the wood chipper, alternately feeding the product to his pigs or packaging it with ground pork and sending it to market as sausage meat. A friend of mine made a quarter of a million dollars from the pork marketing board, who hired him to get the price back up (it had fallen by half).

According to the Japanese sommelier robot, we don’t taste like chicken. We taste like bacon. Or prosciutto.

Well as everyone knows, all journalists are hams.

…when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated. Japanese unveil robot wine steward [South Coast Today]

Quiz: the Interview interview

Be a journalist; or smell just like one!

This is the pop culture quiz given to hopeful job applicants at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Ah, remember the Eighties? Well it seems so does whoever wrote this quiz: I’m a little surprised it doesn’t have Peter Beard and Maud Adams on it, but maybe there’s a Page Two I haven’t located yet.

See how well you do, and yes, it appears that the last one is a typo. I thought it was that scam artist John Hawkins but no, they really meant Stephen Hawking, with whom we are, of course, intimately familiar, featuring as we do his Christmas album. Oh, and did you hear Romeo is divorcing his wife? No idea if it’s for another nurse or just for physical protection, but if there’s a god in heaven Elaine Hawking will end up with David Gest.

I have ticked off the ones I can identify; how’d you do, and if it’s “not well” can I have your job?

From The Smoking Gun:

Barry Diller Checked box symbol
Joel Schumacher Checked box symbol
Bridget Hall Checked box symbol
Ellen Von Unwerth Checked box symbol
Phillip Taaffe
Michael Roberts
Faith Popcorn Checked box symbol
Helmut Lang Checked box symbol
Karole Armitage Checked box symbol
Joe Dolce Checked box symbol
Kevin Aucoin Checked box symbol
Julian Schnabel Checked box symbol
Wayne Maser
Donna Tartt Checked box symbol
Hamish Bowles Checked box symbol
Francesco Clemente Checked box symbol
Harry Evans Checked box symbol
Miuccia Prada Checked box symbol
Michaelangelo Signorile
Bob Colacello Checked box symbol
Polly Melon (sic) Checked box symbol
Douglas Coupland Checked box symbol
Jack Pierson
Tibor Kalman
Juergen Teller Checked box symbol
Rei Kawakubo Checked box symbol
Tina Brown Checked box symbol
Gabriella Forte Checked box symbol
Liz Smith Checked box symbol
Billy Norwich Checked box symbol
Sophia Coppola Checked box symbol
Jason Weinberg
Lillian Hellman Checked box symbol
Terri Toye Checked box symbol
Steven Klein
Victoria Bartlett
Peter Lynch Checked box symbol
Steven Hawkin (sic) Checked box symbol ?

the way of Nigella

Why hello there Nigella!Hello, boys!

There’s one celebrity cook the men will always tune in for, and it’s former It-Girl, now It-Woman Nigella Lawson. As famous for filling out her sweaters as she is for deep-frying Dove bars, she may be the Private Benjamin or Lisa Douglas of the kitchen, but she’s to be congratulated on bringing the sexy back to food. Martha Stewart, by comparison, is a prim Edna Mode prescribing sauteed zucchini blossoms not because they’re yummy, but because they’ll look good with the seared squab. Mario Batali is some kind of cross between Trimalchio and Mr. Creosote, swelling visibly on-camera till he threatens to burst his Crocs.

But Nigella, while she has an alarming tendency to take up with the wrong kind of fellow, does have an endearingly earthy style. In other words, she turns the men into testosterone-addled horndogs and reminds the women about all their appetites, which is a public service of a sort.

Here’s The Way of Nigella, a piece in The Morning News from a couple of years back, dropped in a comment on Gawker for which I will find the credit later (have I mentioned I’m lazy?). Nigella on raising your own shrimp, preparing soothing comfort food, and dining out at cheap Chinese counters:

I’ve found that it is hard to find good shrimp, and Nigella, the English Muffinso I’ve started farming them myself. To the inexperienced onlooker, two-phased intensive shrimp farming might seem like a daunting task. While it is hard work, I always feel rewarded. How I just love the marine smell of raw feed on my hands. From hatchery to grow-out pond, I am responsible for keeping out disease, looking after salinity conditions, and making sure that there is enough circulation in the water. When I look into my special concrete larval tanks, I am looking at thousands, if not millions, of potential shrimp-kabobs. It is the perfect blend of embracing nature – my private bountiful sea – and expectantly knowing that I’ll be feasting on lemon-buttered scampi over linguini that results ultimately in blissful domestic satisfaction.

always use authorized mechanics, and RTFM

Stolen from EliseTalk, via Fark.

Of course, I’m one to talk. I use my manuals to even out my wobbly desk.

That blithe disregard of indispensable training materials bears not at all on my ability to produce such items, should you be in a hiring mood, by the way. I have, in fact, produced a procedures manual for an authorized Honda dealer and service shop, so I feel the pain of the poor sod who poured the sweat of his brow and the expense account of his employer into the production of the manual for the exquisite Lotus Elise which you see here.

I said, rtfm!!! And it hit toolboxes on the way down, too

I handed them the tire tools and opened the Owner’s Manual to the jacking instructions so they would be clear. We went over all the instructions and they assured me I was in good hands.

We (my father-in-law and I both left)

1 hour later I get a call about the “accident” and that I needed to come down…