I’m sure some of the liberals out there are racing to publish “America’s first birthday with a black president and what it all means” stories.
Me? I’m gonna sit on a chair made in China and get tanked on Irish beer and listen to English bands whilst eating German sausages with French mustard along with some Belgian fries… and I’ll do it wearing a shirt made in Honduras, jeans made in Malaysia, boxers made in India, and boots made in England but sold only through a Slovakian website… ‘cos that’s how I roll! Too bad I don’t have a Japanese car to drive to get to the party, no?
Seriously… Happy Independence Day, everyone! Have fun, but be careful out there!
Amusing true story: I stole the above graphic from the Bunny Ranch’s website. Here’s the NSFW page from Google’s cache.
You’ve probably heard the French band Nouvelle Vague before. Their music has been used in several TV shows and commercials including Sugar Rush, and a popular promo for the show L.A. Ink (which prominently featured Nouvelle Vague’s cover version of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself”).
For what it’s worth, the band’s name is a clever play on words: it’s French for “New Wave”, and it represents their “Frenchness” and “artiness” (after the ’60s “new wave” of French cinema), the source of all their music (cover tunes of old punk and New Wave favorites), as well as their actual style of music (which is bossa-nova, which is Portuguese for… “new wave”).
Anyway, the band has a new album out. This one is simply called 3, and it features an awesome cover of the Violent Femme’s “Blister In The Sun” on it. It sounds like it would be great to play at parties! Have a listen and tell me what you think:
Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire whose consecration set off a firestorm in the Anglican Communion, dissed the new Province in a recent interview. Robinson, derisively known as the “Simple County Bishop” (SCB) by conservative Anglicans, said in an interview that
“A church that does not ordain women or openly gay people – I don’t see a future for that.”
Oh yes, Gene… because that’s been a huge problem for the Catholic and Orthodox churches in the past 2,000 years!
Robinson could not explain why the Episcopal Church only gets smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more “inclusive”.
So I’m reading a book called The Great Mutiny: India 1857, which is about a rebellion of native Indian troops against their British masters. Like most rebellions, there were several underlying causes involved, but the impetus of the rebellion – the spark if you will, was when the British tried to introduce a new type of rifle cartridge that was supposedly covered in both tallow and lard, which offended both Hindus and Muslims respectively. I was struck by one passage in particular, which discusses what the British did to some of the rebels when they were finally tracked down:
Only those with the strongest stomachs, however, could remain unaffected when prisoners were blown away from the mouths of cannon, a punishment inflicted in the days of the Moghul emperors and subsequently adopted by the British in India…. The victim was lashed to a gun, the small of his back or pit of his stomach against the muzzle, then ’smeared with blood of someone murdered by a member of his own race if such could be procured’. When the gun was fired the man’s body was dismembered. Usually the head, scarcely disfigured, would fly off through the smoke, the fall to earth, slightly blackened, followed by the arms and legs. The trunk would be shattered, giving off ‘a beastly smell’, and pieces of flesh and intestines and gouts of blood would be splashed not only over the gunners but also any spectators who stood too close. Vultures would hover overhead and with grisly dexterity catch lumps of flesh in their beaks.
It’s not that the actual method of execution is so cruel. I’m sure if you were unlucky enough to be strapped to the cannon, all you’d see would be a flash of light and it would be over. But what a message such an execution method sends! Don’t mess with John Bull, eh?
Here’s a list of all the songs heard on the show Ashes to Ashes, updated to include season 2.
Season 1
Episode 1
Ultravox – “Vienna”
The Clash – “I Fought the Law”
Tubeway Army – “Are Friends Electric?”
The Stranglers – “No More Heroes”
David Bowie – “Ashes to Ashes”
The Passions – “I’m In Love With A German Film Star”
Duran Duran – “Hungry Like the Wolf”
Duran Duran – “Careless Memories”
Roxy Music – “Same Old Scene”
Episode 2
Tenpole Tudor – “Swords of a Thousand Men”
Madness – “The Prince”
Imagination – “Body Talk”
The Flying Lizards – “Money”
Visage – “Fade to Grey”
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – “Souvenir”
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – “Geno”
The Pop Group – “We Are All Prostitutes”
Heaven 17 – “Fascist Groove Thang”
Jon and Vangelis – “I Hear You Now”
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – “Show Me”
Chas and Dave – “Gertcha”
So… a “new life form” was discovered in the sewers of Raleigh, North Carolina recently:
Freaky lookin’, no? Although it looks like something out of the Alien films, they are actually run of the mill worms.
According to Dr. Timothy S. Wood, they’re really just “clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids”. He further states that they “[normally] occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo [sic] they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting”.
In this post, I showed you how to use Adobe Photoshop to make your own kubrickheader.jpg file for the default WordPress theme, so you could replace the boring old blue graphic with something a bit snazzier.
There’s just one problem with the my method: by default, WordPress will still want to display the blog name and tagline over the graphic. Although you can change the color of the text via the “Custom Header” applet in the Admin panel, this is not always the way you’d want to go about it. You cannot easily change the font, nor can you easily change the placement of the text. So sometimes your cool graphic gets “cluttered” with your blog’s name and tagline.
You could always go to Customer Header > Advanced and click the “Toggle Display Text” option, but this presents another problem: once you do this, the text will disappear, but the header graphic will no longer be clickable. So if someone comes to a specific page on your site via a search engine, they won’t be able to simply click the header graphic to go to your home page – they’ll have to manually edit the address bar back to your home page. And that’s just not satisfactory. What’s more, most people that are familiar with Photoshop would probably rather use the text tools included with the app to make their own text in the font, color, place and style of their choosing.
Mindy Kahling, known to most as “Kelly Kapoor” on the sitcom The Office, also a writes and produces the show. And when she’s not doing that, she’s running the funniest Twitter page in history. Seriously! I literally laugh out loud at a lot of her tweets!
Interestingly, although Kahling claims that Kelly Kapoor is just a character she plays, Kahling’s tweets and the posts she writes on her blog (”Things I Bought That I Love“) seem to indicate that there’s actually a fair amount of Mindy in Kelly.
Check out these tweets for some serious funny:
- I get it @samantharonson, you’re a big deal bc you have a washer AND a dryer.
- The common brown forest fox does not have a lot in common with the artic snow fox, and yet they can be friends. America, are u watching?
- For dinner I want to eat a box of cherry Pop Tarts and a can of Sprite. Instead: salmon and steamed broccoli. Fuck.
- “Gran Torino” is a great movie but it shouldve been called “Get Off My Lawn”.
- I just *knew* that the drivethru of the mcdonalds that was under construction would still be open. Kids, always believe in yourselves.
Television pitchman Billy Mays — who built his fame by appearing on commercials and infomercials promoting household products and gadgets — died Sunday, FOX News confirms.
Mays was found unresponsive by his wife inside his Tampa, Fla., home at 7:45 a.m. on Sunday, according to the Tampa Police Department.
Police said there were no signs of forced entry to Mays’ residence and foul play is not suspected. Authorities said an autopsy should be complete by Monday afternoon.
You’ve probably heard the French band Nouvelle Vague before. Their music has been used in several TV shows and commercials including Sugar Rush, and a popular promo for the show L.A. Ink (which prominently featured Nouvelle Vague’s cover version of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself”).
Mindy Kahling, known to most as “Kelly Kapoor” on the sitcom The Office, also a writes and produces the show. And when she’s not doing that, she’s running the funniest 
