RIP: Pavarotti

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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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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pic o’ the day: today the world has beautiful colours

Today the world has beautiful colours

Gawd how i luvs me some exploding dog.

steal this: don’t block the blog letter

Don’t block the blogHere is a really quite flawless letter that cjwriter wrote to the Turkish Ambassador to Australia regarding the recent banning of all WordPress.com blogs in Turkey (and, indirectly, Albania, because Albania gets much of its internet access from Turkey). I suggest, as he suggests, that you copy and adapt the text and send it to the Turkish embassy in your own country. Judyb12 has supplied an abbreviated list of them:

Turkish Embassy: USA
Turkish Embassy: UK
Turkish Embassy: Australia
Turkish Embassy: Canada

RE: Freedom of Speech

Dear Mr __________,

My name is __________. I live in ______ and I’m writing to you regarding an action a Turkish court has taken that is of great concern to me.

On August 17th, 2007, the Turkish Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance blocked access to the WordPress.com domain. The ban on WordPress, a blogging platform hosting some 1.3 million blogs, was a response to a suit filed by lawyers for Adnan Oktar alleging that defamatory statements had been made about their client by several blogs on WordPress.com.

The ban has resulted in all blogs hosted by WordPress.com being made inaccessible to Turkey. I feel very strongly that this is an overreaction. I am a blogger on WordPress; I have done nothing wrong, but my readership is being impacted.

Even more serious is the fact that there are many innocent Turkish bloggers on WordPress.com who now cannot access their blogs or are being forced to use other means to access them. It is a violation of their free speech and that of readers from all over the world.

Please understand, this is not about whether Adnan Oktar was slandered, or about the Turkish legal system; I respect your country, as I hope you respect mine. But it has gone beyond that. Now it is about innocent Turkish bloggers being forced into silence, and countless others being denied the freedom to be read. The court could have ordered that the offending blogs and any subsequent offenders be blocked, but instead ordered the complete ban of WordPress.com. It’s the equivalent of closing a library because of a single offending book, rather than just removing the book itself.

Many websites and blogs on both WordPress.com and on other platforms are initiating campaigns in support of Turkish bloggers, and I am writing to you to express my concern, and to ask that the Turkish authorities reconsider their position.

Yours sincerely,

____________.

Steal, copy and paste at will! Vive la Resistance!

the anticlimactic fortune-teller!

Not nearly as amusing as the Fortune Cookie Generator, but still cheaper than a real Gypsy, this is, however, more likely to be accurate given my well-known diner burger fetish and the fact that I eat at relatively crappy restaurants most of the time.


Your Anti Climactic Fortune


Deep into your future, I forsee: Cold french fries

The Anti Climactic Fortune Teller

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