Winter Wonderland

I stumbled upon some great Thomas Kinkade art over at somethingawful.com


http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/
articlepics/photoshop/06-09-06-kinkade/livestock.jpg

Has there been a kitschier art fad? I cringe everytime I walk into an office full of that crap.



Here is the whole show.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/
paintings-light-ii.php?page=1

The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time

From Scalzi
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003030.html

My Favorite - right ahead of the Village People

Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas (1998)

This PBS/WGBH special featured linguist and social commentator Chomsky sitting at a desk, explaining how the development of the commercial Christmas season directly relates to the loss of individual freedoms in the United States and the subjugation of indigenous people in southeast Asia. Despite a rave review by Z magazine, musical guest Zach de la Rocha and the concession of Chomsky to wear a seasonal hat for a younger demographic appeal, this is known to be the least requested Christmas special ever made.

Too funny. I've add several new links to the blogroll, including Scalzi and Wil Wheaton.

Lost Ending - It's a Wonderful Life

Old SNL classic. Notice how much Lovitz looks like Cheney.

I Hate Fruitcake

And I Have Special Underware

Dim Bulb Signs Energy Bill

Congress shall be blamed too. Mandating vehicle mileage - isn't the price of gas doing that? Banning the incandescent light bulb - see my rant back in February on that.

Where is the real energy policy? Stop all this political bullshit and do something that will work. Fast track nuclear power, do research into satellite energy, figure out how to recycle more waste into fuel. Tell the Arabs to go eat their oil.

Never happen.

Neutered

Any questions as to the decline of Europe?

IT WOULD seem to be the most unusual type of cut the armed forces have faced in many years but for some Swedish women the issue was no laughing matter.
The female squaddies protested to the European Court of Justice that the lion insignia on the crest of the Nordic Battlegroup was simply too male.

It was argued that, in the 21st century, the image was something they could not identify with.

They subsequently won their case of sex discrimination and so it was ordered that the king of the jungle should become a sexless beast and its genitalia were removed.

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/world/Roar-deal--as-army39s.3594782.jp

Huck!

Sitting Cold In The Dark

KATIE COURIC

"Do you think the risks of climate change are at all overblown?"

MIKE HUCKABEE

I don't know. I mean, the honest answer for me, scientifically, is I don't know. But here's one thing I do know... we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

Closer

I know this has been around a while, but it is funny.

Looking For Trouble

At the risk of being told I'm picking on Christians again (I thought I'd been rather balanced).

Top 15 Quotes By Famous Atheists

1. Creationists make it sound like a ‘theory’ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night — Isaac Asimov

2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie

3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

6. The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. — George Bernard Shaw

7. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile. — Kurt Vonnegut

8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright

9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

10. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. — Samuel Clemens

11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

12. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon

13. The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church. — Ferdinand Magellan

14. Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. — Woody Allen

15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

Pigs On The Wing

Well if you're both a Pink Floyd and a Simpsons fan such as myself you must appreciate this promotion. Too bad it lacks the dark brooding sky of the albun cover.



Mimicry is flattery, no?

Spiderpig, spiderpig....

Dum Dum Dum Dum Dum

Meshuga

OY! In an effort to be grin maybe there should be one less crazy night.

It's not enough that The Vatican has enlisted on the side of carbon neutrality in the Climate Wars. The Jerusalem Post reports :

" a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet... encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

"The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

Tom Wegner, who heads the public relations firm Update Marketing Media, spread the campaign via mass e-mails "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment ... will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide."

http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/12/
candle-in-the-w.html

the answer is obvious

the LED Menorah
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/index.php?topic=Projects&page=11

Flavors of Geek

The name of this blog was derived from yours truly's personal tendencies. I am a computer geek having spent close to 30 years working with these odd little machines that have come to rule our lives. (Best Buy's so called Geek Squad is a successful marketing device but in my book most would not be even an adequate trainee.)

The term geek originally referred to sideshow performers often noted for biting the heads off chickens, snakes or bats. So I guess Ozzy may qualify. I'm thankfully missing from this sect.

But I'm as much a geek in other ways. Science, history, politics and just general trivia consume much of my reading and tv watching. To my friend's chagrin I often come up with facts on topics from left field and while I'm sure they are interesting to some they may often fall to the Cliff Claven, what the hell are you talkin about? school of bar talk.

Well I have a whole new source and by god it's a damn good one.

http://www.damninteresting.com/

So much great reading. WOW!

"Holy shit."

Inside the cockpit of the cruising airliner, Captain Bob Pearson was understandably alarmed at the out-of-the-ordinary beeps that were chiming from his flight computer. On the control panel, an amber low fuel pressure warning lamp lit up to punctuate the audio alarm.

First Officer Maurice Quintal, copilot of Air Canada Flight 143, checked the indicator light to determine the cause of the computer's complaints. "Something's wrong with the fuel pump," he reported.

The mustachioed Captain Pearson pulled out the trusty Boeing handbook, his fingers dashing through the pages to find the specifics of the warning. To his relief, the troubleshooting chart indicated that the situation was not as perilous as it might seem: the fuel pump in the left wing tank was signaling a problem, a minor issue considering that gravity would continue to feed the engines even if the pump failed.

"You know," he commented to Copilot Quintal, "I would not take this air…" He trailed off as the computer blurted out another four beeps, and the indicator panel lit up like a Christmas tree decorated with bad news. "Oh fuck," Pearson lamented, "we've got to go to Winnipeg."

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=744#more-744

And just so you know - here is the Wikipedia entry defining Geek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek

Good Thing She's Cute

Foxworthy isn't much better as he keeps saying hun-gry instead of hun-ga-ry.

Sad Sad Sad.