“The most annoying, condescending thing that friends, fans, journalists, and people from my previous life would do,” he remembered, “is tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Enjoy the ride.’ As if the five of us weren’t completely aware that fame can be a fleeting thing.
It was like, fuck you.
Enjoy the ride being an accountant.”
Ted Allen of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy via The Vulture
stolen from Corporate Casual
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At last a twisted genius has applied some higher math skillz to the age-old question of just how deadly is the red Starfleet uniform?
Answer: pretty damn deadly.
Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53%
14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt)
Probability of a red-shirt “incident” when Kirk has a “conquest” = 12%
Which leads to some truly fascinating conclusions:
As the data shows, Captain Kirk “making contact” with alien women has an impact on the crew’s survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.
Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).
I particularly love the Powerpoint presentation. Surely, surely, those wizened old Admirals would enjoy the slides as well, for getting in those needed snoozes. Yes, the whole intricate and elegant article on the morbid red shirt is really a stalking horse, to distract you from the fact that, like it or not, you’re reading a comparative analysis of bar graphs vs Powerpoint vs pie charts. It’s as if the anonymous Fellini of the flipchart from Ross Perot‘s campaign finally busted a nerdish nut and this is the offspring.
May he live long and, yes, prosper.
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Make it from scratch? Puh-leeze! There are easier ways to satisfy a craving for seafood. Who needs the real thing when Japan and McDonald‘s do fake so very well? This tag team of Giant Octopus and Enormo-CollossoGigantor Squid is enough to put any budding Iron Chef off.
stolen from Pink Tentacle, which has a collection of several such bizarre, Mel-Brooks-ish Japanese-Neanderthal-vs-Gigantic-Ancient-Beast commercials.
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And, really, shouldn’t it be spelled “doughnut” if only for old-time’s sake? He’s an old-fashioned boy at heart, ya know.
Looks to me like ol’ Homer here is simply taking advantage of the “Special Relationship” to coax the Cerne Abbas Giant into a friendly game of ring toss. You’ll notice that Homer is proudly wearing tighty whities, while his British counterpart goes sternly commando. This is traditional with what’s known in a certain crowd as “Special Relationship Games:” the Yanks just do it to the Brits over and over and the Brits just take it. Just be glad it’s not lawn darts they’re playing.
According to the Sun, Limey pagans are threatening to perform terrifyingly effective rain dances that will wash away every trace of the offending Yank. Oh, that’ll teach ’em! A bunch of loopy New Ageists holding hands and pretending to be Lakota Sioux.
I have a feeling this is Churchill‘s fault, but I’m gonna blame Thatcher anyway on general principles.
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Here is the latest video from Osama bin Laden, apparently released a few hours ago (Sunday, July 15th) although there is no way of knowing when it was actually recorded. There is some background from LauraMansfield.com:
He himself said ‘By Him in Whose Hands my life is!
I would love to attack and be martyred,
then attack again and be martyred,
then attack again and be martyred.’Those are the words of Osama Bin Laden in a short clip from a longer As Sahab video.
According to CNN, however, the original video was 40 minutes long instead of the 50 seconds of bin Laden which made it to YouTube. The rest was, essentially, a motivational tape encouraging viewers to think positively of martyrdom as a career choice.
Bin Laden glorified those who die in the name of jihad, or holy war, saying even the Prophet Muhammad “had been wishing to be a martyr.”
“The happy (man) is the one that God has chosen him to be a martyr,” added bin Laden, who was shown outdoors wearing army fatigues and looking tired.
The authenticity of the video could not be verified, but it appeared on a Web site commonly used by Islamic militants and carried the logo of as-Sahab, al-Qaida‘s media production wing. It was not immediately clear when the video of bin Laden was filmed.
Bin Laden was last heard from in a July 1, 2006 audio tape in which he voiced support for the new leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and warned nations not to send troops to fight a hardline Islamic regime that had recently seized power in Somalia.
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raincoaster 