Posted 8/31/2010 08:09:00 PM by Douglas

Barry's getting some new furniture.

While President Obama was on vacation, his West Wing office got a bit of a face lift, complete with a new rug, fresh wallpaper and paint, and new furniture -- all done at no taxpayer expense, the White House says.

It's about time. They hadn't changed the upholstery on the couch since Clinton was in office, and there were some interesting stains on the cushions, and he just flipped them over.

Posted 8/31/2010 08:04:00 PM by Douglas

I've never really liked the highly overrated movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's. It didn't make the sad story of a prostitute in New York any more palatable because she looked like Audrey Hepburn. It's still a sad tale.

The witless dawning in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by contrast, is that you are ready to be an East Side prostitute if you can look, and dress, and sing like Audrey. And Audrey, for all her charms, was not just a virgin, she was a Crackerjack virgin, done in life-like plastic, but engravable. She was about as real as Shirley Temple, and as huggable as Lassie.

Lassie wasn't the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the movie, but I get where this is going.

But Mickey Rooney got not so much as a sniff for his hideous rendering of a Japanese character upstairs. Wasson makes it clear that George Axelrod was horrified by Rooney’s caricature. It was director Blake Edwards who liked it. Afterwards, no one was happy. Rooney’s performance remains a startling revelation of American attitudes in the “hip” Kennedy era, and a disgrace. But the film’s treatment of the whore character, and of women in general, is only a little less vulgar and deluded.

I never read the book. I never will read the book. That character is forever claimed by Audrey Hepburn's dazzling beauty, no matter how ugly the story is.

Posted 8/30/2010 08:24:00 PM by Douglas

Web comics are even worse then normal comics, but this one made me laugh, literally, out loud.

Posted 8/29/2010 05:25:00 PM by Douglas

I can remember Jack Horkheimer on PBS from the mid 80s. He had a passion for the skies like no one you've ever seen on TV. When the web came along, he had to change the name of his show from "Star Hustler" to "Star Gazer" because they got tired of people landing on their website and complaining about the lack of porn. Well Jack is no longer with us. You will be missed.



Keep looking up!

Posted 8/29/2010 12:58:00 PM by Douglas

Another marginally interesting demonstration of the enormity of big numbers. I like this one better, because it uses money instead of the metric system.

Posted 8/28/2010 01:44:00 PM by Douglas

The saga with the strippers and the church continues. I guess they're both not done drumming up business for one another, since this has been going on for quite a time

Strippers dressed in bikinis sunbathe in lawn chairs, their backs turned toward the gray clapboard church where men in ties and women in full-length skirts flock to Sunday morning services.

The strippers, fueled by Cheetos and nicotine, are protesting a fundamentalist Christian church whose Bible-brandishing congregants have picketed the club where they work.

Thus spoketh the lord, "lo, ye that be fueled by Cheetos and nicotine shall be cast into the lake of fire!"

Laura M____ — known as Lola, stage age 36 but really 42 — hid behind a sign proclaiming, "Jesus loves the children of the world!" as the preacher extended his hand for a shake.

I know strippers have stage names, but a "stage age?" Don't all women have a "stage age?"

Also, and I don't want to be mean to these girls, but don't strip bars in Ohio have weight limits? I think I know where all the Cheetos went.

As with most stripping jobs, I'm sure it's temporary.

Posted 8/28/2010 10:57:00 AM by Douglas

I love it when life imitates Office Space:

A worker was paid for 12 years without ever showing up for work at a Norfolk, Virginia, agency funded by federal, state and local money, officials say.

On behalf of the city attorney's office, Norfolk city spokeswoman Terry Bishirjian referred to a statement released on Wednesday that said, "The city attorney's office, with the approval of Womack, took appropriate steps to prevent any further payments to the employee and the employee was terminated."

Turns out, he was terminated 12 years ago, but through a glitch in payroll, he kept getting a check. So they "fixed the glitch."

Posted 8/26/2010 08:22:00 PM by Douglas

There is a large social stimga in this country against lazy, sell-centered assholes:


In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

Posted 8/26/2010 07:15:00 PM by Douglas

NASA has used music to wake up the crew on-orbit since the last days of the Gemini program. Since then, the dorks in the Mission Control Center have picked some of the most horrible music, usually an inside joke with one of the crewmembers, to annoy the rest of the crew and engineers in the MCC. As the shuttle program winds down, they're asking you, the ambivalent public, to pick from their self-culled Top 40, two songs to be played on the last shuttle flight. The horrible list can be found here, but if you want to upload your own submission, go here. But please, even if you don't care (and you don't) please vote for anything to keep those star trek nerds from getting the top spot. As long as it's not the worst band of the 20^th century, Rush. Can we put them in orbit?

Posted 8/26/2010 06:58:00 PM by Douglas

At the end of the 20^th century, CEOs of the world's biggest companies wielded more power, money, and control over people's fate than the men that controlled small to medium sized countries. "Management" became the buzzword that meant you made it in business, and the MBA diploma-mills churned 'em out by the thousands, while the billboards on the side of the road begged for even more. The 21^st century, primarily the internet, has changed all that in less than 20 years. Will the business world learn in time?

The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

Until they have to, or someone comes along and figures out how to do it better than you can. RIAA, GM, print media. I'm looking in your direction. The ability to collaborate on the net is astounding, but:

Even the most starry-eyed techno-enthusiasts have a hard time imagining, say, a Boeing 787 built by "mass collaboration." Still, the trends here are big and undeniable. Change is rapidly accelerating. Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.

At the end of the day, we have to make something, for gawd's sake. Wall Street can't just keep sweeping up the crumbs of other people's production without creating anything. The world's "Financial" center shifted from London to New York when the UK decided to become a "service economy." It won't take the bloodsucking beancounters very long to figure out they didn't move far enough east when the United States has resigned itself to swapping it's own socks with one another.

Posted 8/25/2010 09:07:00 PM by Douglas

I'd have a much more favorable view of "moral naturalists" if so damn many of them didn't get it wrong all the damn time:

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view. Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pain.

There sure are a helluva lot more people trying to convince others that they way they lie, cheat, or steal is OK that there are trying to convince people that salt doesn't taste salty. Some things just aren't relative. Or shouldn't be.

Posted 8/25/2010 08:48:00 PM by Douglas

"Our daughter isn't a selfish brat; Your son just hasn't read Atlas Shrugged:

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.

You see, that Elmo ball was Johanna's reward for consistently using the potty this past week. She wasn't given the ball simply because she'd demonstrated an exceptional need for it—she earned it. And from the way Aiden's pants sagged as he tried in vain to run away from our daughter, it was clear that he wasn't anywhere close to deserving that kind of remuneration. By so much as allowing Johanna to share her toy with him, we'd be undermining her appreciation of one of life's most important lessons: You should never feel guilty about your abilities. Including your ability to repeatedly peg a fellow toddler with your Elmo ball as he sobs for mercy.


Look, imagine what would happen if we were to enact some sort of potty training Equalization of Opportunity Act in which we regularized the distribution all of Johanna's and Aiden's potty chart stickers. Suddenly it would seem as if Aiden had earned the right to wear big-boy underpants, and within minutes you'd have a Taggart Tunnel-esque catastrophe on your hands, if you follow me.

Oh, I follow you. That's hillarious.

Posted 8/25/2010 07:12:00 PM by Douglas

It's a tough thing to remake a song, especially one people like. Most artists try to "make it their own" by singing it as it was never intended to be sung. That's why, with these exceptions:

• I will survive: Cake
• Mrs. Robinson: Lemonheads
• Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight: Michelle Shocked

Most remakes suck. Such is the case with Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence:

While this account can’t be completely authenticated, DM’s chief songwriter Martin Gore allegedly wanted the song to be much slower and balled-esque—and to primarily feature his vocals. Fortunately for us, Gore was convinced by keyboardist Alan Wilder and producer Mark “Flood” Ellis to mold the track into its now infamous sound, which in addition to lead singer Dave Gahan at the forefront features a guitar line Gore wrote that will forever be proof that musical genius often takes the simplest forms.

Today, what really gets me is that the album is now 20 years old. The same time has passed since Violator as had passed between that time and the release of Led Zeppelin III.

Posted 8/19/2010 08:35:00 PM by Douglas

It's been a sweet year, Neptune, but we're richer for having known you.

The planet Neptune will be in opposition — when the sun, Earth, and a planet fall in a straight line on Aug. 20. The planet will be exactly opposite the sun in the sky, being highest in the sky at local midnight. Usually this is also the point where the planet is closest to the Earth.

This opposition is special because Neptune will be returning close to the spot where it was discovered in 1846, marking its first complete trip around the sun since its discovery. Neptune is close, but still not quite at the finish line of its first orbit since being discovered yet. That will occur in 2011, according to NASA.

This is significant because the discovery of Neptune is a true story of scientific discovery:

The planet Uranus was discovered more or less by accident in 1781 by Sir William Herschel, in the course of his search for deep sky objects. As time went by, Uranus' position wasn't quite what astronomer's predicted, and mathematical astronomers began to suspect that there was another planet out there whose gravity was influencing Uranus' motion.

In the mid-1840s an Englishman named John Couch Adams and a Frenchman named Urbain Le Verrier independently calculated where this new planet would have to be located to have the observed effect on Uranus, but both had trouble getting observational astronomers interested in looking for it.

Finally the German astronomer Johann Galle actually looked at the predicted location and discovered the tiny blue-green disk of the planet that eventually came to be known as Neptune. The date was Sept. 23, 1846.

The numbers don't add up, so point your telescopes. . . there. . . and you'll find another planet. That's a lot of complicated calculations, when the best calculator was a slide rule.

Oh yeah, suck it Pluto. You're still just a fart in the wind.

Posted 8/15/2010 01:54:00 PM by Douglas

It's not a concert unless someone is flinging feces at the stage:

A sheriff says reality TV actress Tila Tequila complained that audience members pelted her with stones and feces during an outdoor music festival in southern Illinois.

Hardin County Sheriff Tom Seiner told a Carterville TV station it happened early Saturday at the Gathering of the Juggalos. That's a weekend festival based around the band Insane Clown Posse and other groups from Psychopathic Records.

Who would have ever guessed an Insane Clown Posse gig would have got out of hand. I wonder if it was something like this:

Posted 8/10/2010 09:46:00 PM by Douglas

So puberty starts earlier in girls nowdays, even earlier than it did 10 years ago. Ok, I can see a downside to that, but let's have an article that was written to idiots to explain that fact. Can we?

More common than you might think. Fifteen percent of the 1,239 girls studied between 2004 and 2006 showed signs of breast development at age 7, including 23 percent of African American girls, and 10 percent of Caucasians (up from just 5 percent in a landmark 1997 study).

Ok, I'm scared now. Why?

Early puberty is also simply confusing, increasing the odds that girls will develop low self-esteem, eating disorders, and depression — which, in turn, can trigger premature sexual activity.

And that's where you lost me. The problems with millions of girls hitting puberty before they're ready is a problem but because it leads to low self-esteem, eating disorders, depression and sexual activity? I had not idea that's what caused it. I also are all women a few mg/L of estrogen from a low self-esteem eating disorder, or blowing a guy in the alley? This article would have me believe that they are. It's good that men generally hold the decorum in society:

Beyond that, make sure you talk to your daughter about how to deal with advances from older boys or even grown men. "They don't necessarily think, oh, here is an 8-year-old girl," says Walker. "They say oh, look... she has breasts, she's old enough."

Oh right, we don't. Men just walk around all day looking for things to cram their wieners in, regardless of age. As long as there are boobs. Depressed, low self-esteem, eating disordered boobs.

Posted 8/10/2010 09:30:00 PM by Douglas

Churches protest strip clubs all the time. Fine. Now a strip club protests a church.

Strip-club owner Tommy George rolled up to the church in his grabber-orange Dodge Challenger, drinking a Mountain Dew at 9 in the morning and smoking a cigarette he had just rolled himself.

Pastor Bill Dunfee stepped out of a tan Nissan Murano, clutching a Bible in one hand and his sermon in the other, a touch of spray holding his perfectly coiffed 'do in place.

Inside the New Beginnings Ministries church, Dunfee's worshippers wore polyester and pearls.

Outside, George's strippers wore bikinis and belly rings.

Both men agree it is classic sinners vs. saints. But George says it is up to America to decide which is which and who is who.

One thing's for sure, this phony controversy is good for the bottom line of both of them.

Posted 8/09/2010 06:19:00 PM by Douglas

Let's see, for lunch, I think I'll try the doughnut burger with cheese, add the bacon, and a small side of fried butter. Oh yeah, and a diet Coke!

Their newest offering? A burger served between two Krispy Kremes, known simply as the doughnut burger.

Customer Danny Shields, 22, Indianapolis, said the burger was well worth the price. He got one with bacon and egg, which can be added for an extra cost.

At the deep-fried butter stand, twin sisters Rayanna Bibbs and Rachel Bibbs, 18, and their friend Rachel Endres, 16, all from Indianapolis, quizzed operator Blake Reas about the concoction. He said he picked up the idea from a vendor at the State Fair of Texas last year.

"When they say deep-fried butter, you think a butter stick," said Rachel Bibbs.

But that's not what it is. Blake Reas freezes the butter and covers it in cinnamon before cutting it into cubes and frying it in something that's been at the fair for years: funnel cake batter.

I wonder if you can get a punch-card for a free angioplasty?

Posted 8/09/2010 12:34:00 PM by Douglas

What a great day this was. I hope everyone celebrated at 12:34:56.7, this 8/9/10. It was a magical tenth of a second

Posted 8/08/2010 04:10:00 PM by Douglas

360-Panaramoic of a P-51 Mustang.

Posted 8/08/2010 03:47:00 PM by Douglas

Great color photos from the 30s and 40s. One thing's for sure, life was hard on a lot of folks back then. But things are rough all over. Like when you forget to put a Diet Coke in the fridge, and then you want a Diet Coke and there's not one that's cold. That's horrible.

Posted 8/08/2010 03:39:00 PM by Douglas

I think this is a joke. I hope this is a joke:



This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the fat guy's testimonial:



I wonder how this brilliant idea was pitched to the venture capitalists that fronted the money for development. "Hey, I got this great idea. It's a stick you put toilet paper on to wipe your ass. Whadya think?"

Posted 8/05/2010 06:20:00 PM by Douglas

I don't know why I find this collateral damage of our ridiculous "war on drugs" so hilarious, but I just do. Imagine taking a stroll on the beach and finding a huge bale of illegal drugs, washed ashore after smugglers ditched their cargo.

At least a dozen times in the last year, small fortunes in illegal narcotics washed up on Texas beaches after being lost by seaborne smugglers scrambling for new ways into the United States, according to federal officials.

The drugs, wrapped in plastic and potentially worth millions of dollars on the streets, were turned in by beachcombers, fishermen, park rangers and deputies. The lost loads popped up all along the coast — mostly cocaine, followed by marijuana and methamphetamine.

About 800 pounds of marijuana washed up on South Padre Island in one shot, 24 kilograms of cocaine in Jefferson County, and another similar-sized load of cocaine near a remote beach of High Island, according to Houston's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a coalition of law-enforcement agencies here and in coastal counties.

The latest known Texas find came in May, when a woman strolling near Galveston found a barnacled black bag with 37 pounds of cocaine pressed into bricks.

I'm sure they all get turned in, right? Right. Moronic law enforcement official, could you make an asinine statement about how this quantity of drugs might someone be significant, and not represent a drop in the bucket of the illegal drugs that are smuggled into the country, each and every day:

"Somebody is hurting over those kilos of cocaine," said Sgt. Joaquin Cantu of the Kleberg County Sheriff's Office. "I'd say the runners would be in a bit of hot water, especially if word got back to where they came from that they'd lost a load."

Hear that, America? We're out of drugs because a smuggler had to dump his load in the Gulf. No more drugs. Yay?!?

Posted 8/05/2010 06:08:00 PM by Douglas

The foundation of any successful democracy is tricking other people into paying for your shit. Enter Jerrold Nadler (D-uMB) and this masterpiece:

In other words, the various tax brackets would apply to residents in certain regions at higher income levels versus other parts of the country. A family with an income of $50,000 or even $1 million in Manhattan would pay less federal income tax than a family with the same earnings in Omaha. The bill is called the Tax Equity Act, but a more accurate title would be the Blue State Tax Preference Act.

Bravo, Mr. Nadler, bravo. Way to tax the shit out of someone else's constituents in order to subsidize your constituent's base.

Posted 8/05/2010 06:01:00 PM by Douglas

I've seen The Breakfast Club more times than I care to count, and I probably did notice most of these things before, but what stands out is the last, unnumbered thing we were supposed to notice:

During the opening montage we see Bender's locker with the phrase "Touch this locker...and you die, FAG!!!" in permanent marker. Tell the principal he raids Barry Manilow's wardrobe, you're punished. Write one of the most offensive words to gay people on a locker in plain view of anyone walking down the hall, and it's totally cool

What that tells me is that we're raising a generation of complete pussies. Ok, bullying is wrong, I get it. You're not supposed call people names. But life gets substantially harder after high school, and crying because someone calls you a name is really, really gay.

Posted 8/05/2010 05:55:00 PM by Douglas

So the supreme court has three chicks now. I really don't find that too terribly remarkable that she's a woman, but that she's one of the four out of nine that are from New York City.

"The four are a portrait of the city, each carrying distinct New York traits to Washington. 'Kagan is so Manhattan, Scalia is so Queens, Ginsburg is so Brooklyn and Sotomayor is so Bronx,' said Joan Biskupic, the author of a biography of Justice Antonin Scalia."

Anyone see an anti-Staten Island bias here?

Fuck Staten Island, what about the rest-of-us-bias?

But even more disturbing is that she's one of the eight of nine that are Roman Catholic.

Posted 8/04/2010 06:23:00 PM by Douglas

That fancy computer you carry around in your pocket can also make phone calls, although pretty soon, you won't want it to.

We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

All things considered, it is a fairly invasive form of communications considering how passive texts and emails are. Considering just about everyone can get texts and emails on their phone, why bother calling if you just have a quick message?

Posted 8/04/2010 06:17:00 PM by Douglas

Nice flow-chart, but it's not going to help me with the order of the lyrics to Hey Jude!

Posted 8/03/2010 08:40:00 PM by Douglas

So the sun is exploding:

Night owls take note: A spectacular sky show of rippling auroras may be on tap for late Tuesday through early Wednesday, according to astrophysicists, and the phenomenon may be more widely visible than normal.

On Sunday cameras aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured an eruption on the sun's surface that hurled tons of plasma—charged gas—directly toward our planet in an event called a coronal mass ejection.

If you had a space station, it would sure be a bad time to lose cooling, would it?

NASA says it needs more time to prepare before sending two astronauts on a spacewalk to replace a broken pump on the station's cooling system. The pump failed over the weekend and knocked out half of the space station's cooling system, which keeps electronic equipment from overheating.

Managers had been hoping to do the first spacewalk on Thursday but decided workers on the ground needed more time to work on the repair plan. A second spacewalk will be conducted a few days later to complete the repairs.

Should be an interesting EVA. Should go something like this: