Yep. I’ll be by to pick up my winnings from all you cowboy-favoring losers out there.
It seems, from a casual surf around YouTube, that they do these kinds of trials all the time.
And the gun always loses.
The ninjas advance to the second round, where they will face this year’s dark horse: Spartans. Place your bets with the tellers now, ladies and gentlemen.
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Thanks to the ever-resourceful and only seemingly-benevolent Colin in the WP forums, I now have a timely, sensitive, and highly effective method of payback the next time I’m stuck at a public computer beside some mouthbreathing, grunting microcephaloid. Or the next time you are!
Make sure the offending lower life form can see your monitor. Close your eyes in a moment of prayer, perhaps moving your lips slightly in an inaudible entreaty. Then sigh deeply, look heavenward, and hit this link:
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It comes as no surprise to those of us in other nations that the United States needs professional help.
They have recently begun advertising for it.
Unfortunately, while the advertising gives every indication that this is a good old-fashioned show business audition in that great Hollywood Baby-I-Can-Make-You-A-Star tradition, the bait and switch factor here is of a standard of viciousness that would give even CAA pause.
They’re actually looking for “Arabic-looking people” to play the enemy in live war games. Oops, did we not mention that? Sowee!
They came with dreams of working on a movie set, or at the very least of earning some respectable cash as a walk-on extra, encouraged by a mysterious advertisement printed recently in a Berlin tabloid.
But the reality was different for dozens of Arab-speaking applicants at a supposed casting session, only to be told they were wanted to play Iraqis and Afghans in a US wargame planned for later this month.
I can certainly see the War Games Marketing Manager vetoing a “apply here to get treated like Iraqis by the US Army” format, but a little more disclosure and, perhaps, a lot more cash, might have resulted in an uptake ratio greater than the reported four out of dozens.
…many turned back at the door when asked: “Do you have anything against working for Americans?” …One Moroccan man refused to take part, saying: “I will not help the Americans hurt my brothers…”
“We’re looking for more realism,” said Reggie Bourgeois, executive officer of the US Army’s Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC) in Bavaria. “The more actual culture we can inject into the exercise the better it is for our soldiers.”
“After all, we’re in the business of dealing with the culture.”
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No word on what happened to Julio.
Pour one out to that fallen giant of the American wine industry, Ernest Gallo. The rapidly-cooling Gallo rode his genius for marketing to the top of the affordable yet un-poisonous American wine market, turning a small, family concern who sold mostly to fugitive, chainsmoking Basques in the California hills into a giant international corporation with the most modern of production techniques, churning out their trademark carafes of Chardonnay like Ford popped out Model T’s.
According to legend, Ernest and Julio Gallo started their first winery in 1933. Using a $5,000 (£2,500) loan from Ernest’s mother-in-law and Julio’s savings of $900.23, the two brothers rented a cement warehouse in their home town of Modesto, California, and began making wines. With the help of a recipe they found in some prohibition-era leaflets in the basement of Modesto library they made ordinary wines for the bargain price of 50 cents a gallon, half the going rate. In their first year in business, they made $30,000 and an empire was born.
And pause, for a moment, to contemplate the meaninglessness of the so-called death of the irritatingly dense and famously obscure French Intellectual Jean Baudrillard.
Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take place. “Dying is pointless,” he once wrote, “you have to know how to disappear.” The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries, and asked Baudrillard: “What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?” Baudrillard replied: “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.”
Baudrillard, whose simulacrum has departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
And finally, we have America’s answer to the French Intellectual: the costumed superhero. Remove your cowl, clutch your cape to your heart, and stand with me, united in grief, over the senseless slaughter of Captain America.
As a symbol of waning imperial power, it is unmistakeable. Captain America, the stars-and-stripes wearing, blond and blue-eyed “pinnacle of human physical perfection”, is dead. The Marvel comics superhero, aka Steve Rogers, is gunned down by a sniper in the latest instalment of the comic.
The death of the man who was rejected by the army because he was too scrawny, but went on to take a “super soldier serum” to turn him into the ultimate warrior, came as a blow to his creator, 93-year-old Joe Simon. “We really need him now,” Simon told the Associated Press on learning of the death of his creation.
What do you say; I’m wondering if they’ve checked alibis for the Justice League…
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I stole this from Iain Dale; wonder why it is that I read so many right-wing UK blogs…Iain, Guido, Boris…the only leftie blog I read over there is Bread and Circuses, and Juvenal‘s hardly party line. (some of) The Tories over there seem to be a little more human, a lot more intelligent, and a good deal more interested in debate than the right-wingers here in North America, who seem primarily interested in sending as many black people as they can to Iraq, deporting anyone particularly tan (Jessica Simpson gets a bye, but now that she’s brunette all bets are off), eliminating the minimum wage, and marrying their cousins.
Still. Smart thing this soldier said. I’d buy him a drink if he were routed through Vancouver. And can you imagine an American right-wing blog putting that up if he’d said “Republican“? I think not.
“I suppose the only thing worse than being blown up by a mortar on Sunday morning is having two senior Conservative Party figures visiting you on a Monday morning” – William Hague, accompanied by David Cameron on visiting an injured soldier in Basra, who replied:
“It’s about on a par, sir”.
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raincoaster 