- As we run out of alphabetical names for storms, Sean Burke tracks our inevitable watery philological doom.
- An interesting study of gender differences in psychology concludes that said differences are less than you might think. Extra points for the research being done by a Dr. Hyde… …who is female!
- Yes, this may well be the greatest punchline in the world, at least for the next fifteen minutes. Cackle.
- Avoid Australian octopus sushi.
- This Cthulhu movie is going to be totally gay.
- Tiny, beautiful, Bugatti-like retro sports car. Want.
- From Adjab: the vodka bong/bong vodka project for the Dutch and the beer for children for the Japanese. Ooookay.
- Disney Princess Jewelry for the kids! With deadly poisonous child-stunting brain-eating lead! YAAAY!
Category: Uncategorized
Tibor Rubin
dberg refers me to an OC Register story (genital/genital or bugmenot to read it) about Garden Grove’s hometown hero, who is a genuinely admirable guy.
Anyone who picks maggots out of a prison latrine to clean the sores of his friends deserves the Medal of Honor and free beer for life. Especially when he’d already been in a Nazi death camp before he went to another war and got thrown in a prison camp again.
The army’s official site about him is more descriptive of his life in combat and has background on his life and a video of him which has some very affecting testimonials from his fellow inmates.
And now he’s the “Jewish Santa Claus” and gives out candy to the kids in his neighborhood.
Globalization and its discontents: the adult film industry
From this week’s CDC Morbidity and Mortality Report: HIV Transmission in the Adult Film Industry: Los Angeles, California 2004.
The first identified case was in a man aged 40 years (index patient) who tested HIV-negative on February 12, 2004, and on March 17, 2004, through regular monthly testing of blood samples, but subsequently tested HIV-positive on April 9, 2004. […] During the time between his two negative tests, the index patient performed in film productions in Brazil, engaging in unprotected sexual acts. While in Brazil, he experienced an influenza-like illness that resolved before his return to California on or around March 10, 2004. According to LACDHS investigators, upon the return of the index patient to California, he participated in film productions in which he engaged in unprotected sexual acts with 13 female partners. Three of these 13 female partners subsequently tested HIV-positive by PCR after having tested HIV-negative during the preceding 30 days. […] During film production, all three of the infected female partners had engaged with the index patient in specific acts associated with increased possibility of mucosal tears. None of the other adult film industry workers or private partners with whom these three women had contact during the 30 days before their diagnoses subsequently tested HIV-positive. As of May 20, 2004, the index patient reported having had no sex partners outside of work since February 12, 2004. The person who was the source of HIV infection for the index patient is unknown. […] Production companies in the heterosexual segment of this industry have generally not required condom use for any type of sexual act.
(Emphasis added.) So, here’s the drill. If you want to be a porn star 1) don’t let any of your coworkers go to Brazil and 2) Do GAY porn only.
T-bird
“Thunderbird is a marvelous drink for anybody wishing to affect a tough-guy, self-destructive rebel posture. Its surprising more rock stars don’t cement their subterranean posing by swaggering into their favorite dive watering hole and demanding a Donnington Brainstorm, which is a potentially lethal mixture of Thunderbird and vodka.”
Daily Lush takes on wino wine!
google insanity
why, when I search Google for “rio texas” does it give me two sets of results about things like the Rio Grande and Del Rio, TX with a set of results about Aristophanes sandwiched between them?
Screenshots at these links (large .png files, 65-70k apiece):
Uhh… WHAT?
The Bally Total Fatness people have lost their shit and sent me this in email:
You’re invited to watch Bally Total FitnessĀ® featured on the season premiere of The Apprentice, September 22nd, Thursday 9/8c .
Please join us in celebrating this unique event. Your local Bally Club will have TV’s tuned to The Apprentice so that you can enjoy this premiere episode while also getting a great workout. Many clubs will be hosting special viewing parties with activities including in-club events for special prizes featuring a commemorative Apprentice t-shirt giveaway. You will also have the chance to enjoy The Apprentice workout directly after the show or in the following days.
Instead, I’m going to start my Indie Rock Fantasy League.
There’s always room.
A very good thought from the Slacktivist: there’s always room.
“Never again” is a normative statement, not a descriptive one. It is a commitment, a pledge — not a statement about how things are, but a statement about how things can be if we work to make sure that it is so.
Pyramid of Blogs
Someone mentioned “voip blog” on irc and we were joking about what that meant, like maybe cold calling people to blog at them. I made some crack about getting all sorts of stereotypical blogger types (geeks, subculture victims, etc.) and telling them they’re doing VOIP blogging but actually having them do coldcall telemarketing. What to sell? Well, blogging itself! I thought we could have them sell “blogging kits” that included all kinds of useless crap and promised big profits from a home-based business. Ho ho ho. I even wrote celeb testimonial copy:
Hi. I’m Cory Doctorow. Many of you know me from my blog posts such as “Disney Dolls Again” and “Creative Commons Dog Toys”. Many of you have asked me: how can I be a Top Blogger? Well, the people at Blog Professionals Kit in a Box have a great answer.
Of course I’m way the hell behind:
You can get your very own copy of Blog In A Box right now for a Very Low Special Introductory Price of just $37 $27. This is an amazing value we are offering you. Get your hands on a BRAND NEW product that we believe will exceed our expectations with flying colors due to the increased attention blogs are getting for just a fraction of the regular price of $67. Remember that with just One Sale, Blog In A Box pays for itself! But you don’t have to stop there. Make it really work for you by selling it over and over turning it into a profit pulling machine!
Boy howdy! This is going to be even better than selling GRIT: America’s Favorite Newspaper was back in fifth grade!
bruised orange (chain of sorrow)
- Chicken restaurant puts on calendar of cows in armor.
- FTC finally gets around to investigating gasoline profiteering. Mm-hmm.
- It’s only a very small nuclear power plant radioactive water leak. Everything is fine.
- Visiting Motor Trend online? If you’re not a subscriber you have to watch not an ad banner, not an “interstitial”, not a “premercial” even, but an ULTRAMERCIAL!
- Post a pic of a dead Iraqi, get free porn! Wow, it’s like we decided to do the Vietnam war over using Apocalypse Now as a model!
- My mother remembers her father grabbing her and her brother from the movie theatre and dragging them home because of the great Anaheim flood of 1938. (She grew up in Santa Ana and was born in ’29). Yeah, we have floods here in the O.C. too.
Modest proposal: Triangle Square
Our local failing shopping center in Costa Mesa, Triangle Square (love the name), has been flailing for years. Their rent is high, they put the supermarket in an unattractive basement, and they’ve been shedding tenants including: The North Face, Whole Foods, several restaurants, Virgin Records, and their anchor Nike Store. It’s a ghost mall now with the exception of a couple of remaining stores, a pretty good sushi place, and a beer bar for assholes called The Yard House.
Since the only people who can afford to remain there are selling retail alcohol, they’ve decided to fill the whole damn thing up with bars and restaurants. The place is pretty much a block of concrete between three streets, with layers of retail spaces on top of layers of parking lot. How to set this up?
I have an idea!
Towering above the complex will be a huge water tower-like structure. This will contain tens of thousands of gallons of top-shelf alcoholic beverages, probably setting some type of Guinness record. There will be a permanent rotating light on this structure, and ad logos for the liquor companies. It will be called something whimsical like “The Drunk Tank” or “Well Well”.
On the top floor of the mall there will be some very swank bars, like the horribly named “Sutra” night club that’s there already. High cover charges, velvet ropes, mortgage brokers and their trophy girlfriends. Drinks will be $10 or so.
Each floor below will have a less expensive and less fancy set of places: a TGI Friday’s and a National Sports Grill in the middle, a Red Robin and a Shooterz further down, and at the bottom a shitty beer bar with bad pool tables. On one corner of the bottom level there will be a hipster bar that will be just as bad as the beer bar, but will charge as much as as the top shelf places.
The genius part is this: every level below the top is actually drinking the urine produced one level above. As the rich bro’s and ho’s piss out their Grey Goose and Dom Perignon, it gets filtered and realcoholized and served as Absolut and Sam Adams down below, before finally turning into Jim Beam and Coors Lite at the bottom. The hipster corner of the bottom level will get it as PBR.
I’m off to get venture capital now.
Be My Blog 