This guy's really covering his arse...

Rosy Palm?

I'm not the great fan of Ain't It Cool News. There are too many inside jokes, too much lingo, and too many lonely guys wanting to be heard... kinda sounds like an Oracle dba convention. I came across this review of The Lord of the Rings and it is making rethink the site; there might actually be sound value in AICN.

It's not everyday you hear "They put a hell of a lot of rounds in it but they never found it''. What's worse?
1. That a camel got inside a Marine base and was just running around.
2. That Marines fired at the camel and have no idea if they killed it or not.
3. The author's feeble attempt at working "Hotel California" into the article.

My mentally deficient and drug addicted pet monkey wrote better prose than this after having banged on my typewriter for only fifteen minutes; minutes that he passed by with alternating smacks at the keys and swigs from a fifth of gin. I did say mentally deficient, but not completely unskilled.

I think we've all seen the Rice Boy pages, and we're familiar with the phenomenon - a young (usually Asian) punk buys a bog-standard family grocery getter typically in the Honda mould, and then tricks it out with a whole host of impressive-looking accessories that make the car look fast - PIAA headlights, big fat exhaust, bunch of "Type R" stickers, etc. 'Course, the really funny ones are those that only look fast.

Here, then, is the ultimate Type R-treatment, courtesy of Jason. You can bet this thing goes like shit off a shovel.

No links, no jokes, just a statement. So, DC finally rids itself of the congressionally appointed "Control Board" and gets full approval for its budget proposal. Good news, especially for me since I'm a resident of our fair, but beleaguered city. However, then I find this in the Washington Post:

House and Senate budget conference members eased a long-standing ban on District's spending money to lobby Congress. However, they maintained the prohibition on lobbying Congress for greater voting representation. Negotiators also killed a Senate-led effort to permit the city to spend local revenue on drug-needle exchange programs, a measure sought by public health and AIDS prevention groups.

I'm just curious about something. I live in America, right? I mean, I'm supposed to have the full right to vote since I'm not a convict (only because I've never been caught), but I don't having voting representation in the legislative branch of the federal government. That's right. Me and 560,000 other Americans do not have any voting representation in Congress. So, when I read that the city I live in has been granted to right to lobby, but that it can't use that right to lobby for voting rights, I am stupified. And not being able to use local revenue, revenue that is generated from the city's own residents, to pay for needle exchange programs? What kind of Nazi-fucks are making these decisions?

Sure, sure. Everyone says that if I want my voting representation so bad, I should just move to Virginia. But, what makes more sense? To give 560,000 tax paying citizens full voting representation or to expect them all to move?

Scatologists rise up! Stop sitting on that prize stool! Not only can you get your crap rated, you can get your dog's do done too!!

Is someone at Amazon.com trying to take a bite of fuckedcompany.com's pie?

Face it, we've all wanted to know what it is like to have breasts. Well boyz, this is a step in the right direction. Check out Anna's Chest (the movie behind it)... consider it training material.

This month's "Most Gullible" award goes jointly to John Simpson of the BBC (he who liberated Kabul) and Anthony Lloyd of The Times of London. They managed to mistake a 1979 spoof from the Journal of Irreproducible Results discovered in a bunker in Kabul for genuine instructions on building an atom bomb. To quote Anthony Lloyd:

"The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension but there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction."

I doubt this puppet has quite the mainstream TV career ahead of it that Basil Brush had. Still, it would have made an interesting new womyn's role model character on Fingerbobs...

Ho, ho, ho, little girl. Now scratch my sacks...

An amazing analysis on dumb weapons.

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us (since even those among us with the very slowest of digestive tracts have by now surely processed and put behind us our share of the estimated half a trillion calories consumed on National Turkey Day), let's consider a couple of alternatives to turkey for consideration next year. For the record, in the Stewart household, we had steak, but for those who are traditional enough not to want to rule out fowl play, I offer for your consideration the turducken. If that's not sufficiently different, then let me offer instead this tasty morsel.

If a dog is a man's best friend, I'd rather have enemies like these.

I'm sorry. The Tourist Guy made me do it.

Just do it.

If my gonads had not been so closely linked to my adolescent strife, I might have had the balls to do this when I was in high school.

Yes, Halloween has passed. But, this is too scary to wait until next year.

This just in: As the B-52's continue to pound K{a|o|u}nduz, hoping to force the Taliban into submission with their trademark campy retro-hip sounds and humorous lyrics, singers Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson are reportedly "bearing up quite well, thank you" despite the near-impossibility of obtaining the requisite wine coolers & industrial-size cans of hairspray. The B-52's, who flew in from their base in Athens, GA, have conducted huge numbers of sorties in support of the Northern Alliance's ground campaign against the embattled Taliban. This is nothing new, of course, for the B-52's who, in the course of their work, frequently "roam around the world".

This just in: Tired of criticism over the shifting vowel forms in English transliterations of Pashto and Dari-language place-names, which has resulted in the name of the city in northern Afghanistan being variously rendered as Konduz, Kunduz, and Kanduz, the International Society of Translators today issued a statement condemning their detractors as "u bonch uf cants whu con jost fack uff".

This just in: One early result of the high-level meeting between White House adviser Karl Rove and various Hollywood execs is a new star vehicle for rubber-faced comedian Jim Carrey about the fall of Afghanistan's capital. The movie gives us a parodying look inside the crumbling Taliban, with the windmill-armed humorist known for his wild-eyed mugging for the camera playing the role of the vanquished Taliban local leader. The movie is to be called "Kabul Guy".

Sure, there are plenty of lowlifes out there who have used 9/11 as another opportunity to scam people out of their money. But, not surprisingly, the one that looks the most innocent is often the most guilty.

How to use a Japanese style toilet

At 3,900 rounds per minute, the Lockheed-Martin 30 mm GAU-8/A seven-barrel Gatling gun (ex-"GE Minigun") in the Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt (aka the Warthog) has long held the record for the greatest rate of fire of any currently-deployed firearm.

All that will change, however, if a small Australian company gets its way ... it's right there on the front page - Mike O'Dwyer's machine gun design which has no moving parts offers a "variable rate of fire confirmed to one million rounds per minute".

A conventional machine gun delivers its rounds spaced about 300 feet apart. The Metalstorm's rounds depart the muzzle a mere 4 inches apart.

I bet the most sought-after one is Bin Laden...

Finally, something overtakes porn for sheer bandwidth abuse...

Following yesterday's surprise announcement, Turkey continues to prove itself an unexpectedly staunch ally.

I propose we show our solidarity with our Turkish brethren by choosing to eat something else on Thanksgiving (or Christmas, for Brits). Say, kebabs? No, wait ... how about MRE's? Turkish delight?

This just in: On the considered advice of Homeland Security Doofus Tom "Oak" Ridge, FedEx amends the wording on their mailers from "Do not enclose blood or diagnostic samples" to read "Do not enclose blood, diagnostic samples, or anthrax spores. Please".

Tom "Blue" Ridge is reported to be taking a well-earned four-day vacation to recover from "nervous tension" after this concerted effort.

Scum of the Earth:

1. Estate Agents (Realtors)


2. Recruitment Consultants


3. Beer Bandits

Fear the dolphin.

Been doing some coding recently, and wanted to share a quotation I came across long ago in The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerard M. Weinberg:

Last among the essential personality traits for programming, we might

add a sense of humor. The computer "Doth make fools of us all," so

that any fool without the ability to share a laugh on himself will be

unable to tolerate programming for long. It has been said with great

perspicacity that the programmer's national anthem is "AAAAHHHH!"

Then we finally see the light, we see how once again we have fallen

into some foolish assumption, some oafish practice, or some witless

blunder. Only by singing the second stanza "Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha," can we

long endure the role of clown.

This just in: Italy surrenders to the Taliban "just in case".

Most spam that you get with "interesting" subjects tend to lead to some type of porn site. When I got one recently with the subject "Attention Hose Draggers", this is the LAST thing I expected:

Why spend all your spare time dragging that hose around your yard?
Call TLC today at l-888-PICK TLC

We will be able to have a sales representative out this week to give you a
quote on an automatic lawn sprinkler system.

CALL TODAY AT 1-888-742-5852 FOR A FREE ESTIMATE!

yeti@home

Not getting enough different slants on the "current situation"? Try these on for size: Israeli-sourced intelligence news/analysis, US-sourced intelligence news/analysis, or, err, InstaPundit. I can't say, of course, where these links came from. Thanks, John B.

It's a shitty job, but someone's got to do it. A new spin on going postal.

It's dark and very very cold in Finland, so I suspect the Finns spend a lot of time indoors with not much to do. I guess a prime number shitting bear is the sort of thing you'd expect to occur to them over the long winter months.

Opt out of credit card and insurance offers?

If you read this article out loud, record it (mp3, wav, audio cassette, whatever) and then play it backwards, its hidden message appears to be "sell ORCL." Of course, if you were a "chartist," you would have already known this just by reading your horoscope. WTF?

A picture paints a thousand words? These guys have turned it into a game. Anyone remember the old games of tennis and whack-a-mole played out in ASCII art on USENET?

Kick if you love Jesus

I could spend hours on this site. Just in the last hour, I learned about C and black boxes. Gotta throw this in, otherwise my post surely will not pass the censors.

Never knew why I would ever want to install printer drivers anyway.

You may have thought the Ham(p)ster Dance was the ultimate in useless crap, but at least the Ham(p)ster Dance">Ham(p)ster Dance has an annoying tune that gets stuck in your head that can't be cleared by booze, hookers, boozed-up hookers, or hooked-up boozers. Here, then, is something much more useless:: Momo.

Following Shaun's announcement, I'm pleased to announced that the "Are we getting our money's worth?" award this month goes to Heimatgesichertsheitamtoberstandardtenfuehrer ... err, sorry, Homeland Security Office chief Tom ("Cheese") Ridge who is quoted by CNN as saying: "It is clear that the terrorists intended to use this anthrax as a weapon."

I am very glad he has clarified this for us - I had been vacillating for days (aside - does one need Vaseline in order to vacillate properly? Or at least without friction burns?) over whether the terrorists intended the anthrax as a peace offering, or as an apology. After all, you never know with terrorists.

Now, after a couple of weeks of intensive head-scratching, Tom ("Hergest") Ridge has at last cleared things up. Thanks, Tom. Good job.

I'd love see these guys be a supporter of NPR one day. Brought to you by who!??

Don't we all hate dead gerbils up our behinds?

The "Not looking so smart now" award this month is shared between the Bush and Clinton administrations. Back in July, the US scuppered an international effort to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, based on findings by the Clinton administration that the protocol "would put national security and confidential business information at risk."

Spot the odd one out:

Pikachu
Jigglypoof
Stufflebeem

Two of these are Pokemon, one of them is a US Navy Rear Admiral. You make the call.

This just in: Anthrax only sent to important people. Not you.

Looking for a great source of unsubstantiated rumors about top secret internment camps dotted around the US? Tales of hypersonic research aircraft over the Nevada Desert? Blather about the Omega Agency and the orders it issues that come from "above the President"? Then look no further than AboveTopSecret. Just beware, though, that the NSA will be watching you ...

Jane Doe found in McDonalds restroom.

Feeling depressed, anxious, or confused in the wake of all that we see every day on the news? Maybe you should BuySexToysNow.

Trial of the 21st century?

Mad props to Sergio for getting his war on.

Yep - the deployment of not one but two (count 'em folks) Spectre gunships to turn the Taliban into dog chow explains to me why the most promising new name for the territory under attack is "Half-gone-istan".

The choice of the nickname "Spectre" for the AC-130 is, to me, an intriguing choice. I can imagine few things less "spectral" than a 62-ton, 16,000 horsepower transport plane raining down withering firepower while turning lazy circles in the sky. I can think of few more concrete demonstrations of military might and resolve. Indeed, one of the reasons they're using these beasts during broad daylight is: because they can. If indeed it's true what they say, that there are many Taliban/al-Qaeda members who cherish the thought of death as much as Americans cherish life, then this thing is here to help them achieve that goal. Anyone else with a rather, say, better functioning sense of self-preservation (hell, if we had the time, I'd be happy to wait for evolution to run its course with these geniuses) should have ample reason, if not time, to rethink that position.

Let's face it, whether you're chewed up by 7.62mm bullets being sprayed at you by the pair of incongruously-named "mini-guns" (the same 6-barrel Gatling gun things you saw being supposedly used in "Predator" - yes, those mini-guns), ripped in two by the 20mm cannons, obliterated by the 40mm Bofors cannon, or just plain aerosolized by the 105mm Howitzer, you've probably eaten your latest kebab, and burned your last American flag.

And finally ... a survivalist writer and friend of mine (who has recently been commissioned by that most urbane of the highbrow journals, "Hustler", to write a "think piece" on surviving a terrorist attack) passed on the following interesting tidbit last night: by his calculations, a one megaton nuclear airburst strike, detonated at a height of 10,000 feet agl would be sufficient to ignite every turban within a seven mile radius. He offers no particular context or rationale for having performed this calculation, just kinda thought it was interesting.

Thanks to Ken for discovering this gem. The Spectre has been called into battle in Afghanistan. Let's face it folks this amazing piece of military hardware just kicks fuckin' ass!

Hmmm. Who says all the best cereals are for kids? Also, I think I've met a few of these people before?

This is just got old fashion terrifying. The sound you hear is the sound of your privacy being sucked up by the giant corporate/government vacuum cleaner.

Now, we'll all seen the amazing stick figure martial arts demonstration as rendered in Flash. Let's kick it up a level by putting each and every one of us in control of those kung-fu moves. Better yet, let's add Bruce Lee to the mix.

Serge (hi, Serge!) has alerted me to this little treasure trove of mirth & jollity. Thanks, Serge.

Is it possible to be so nonsensical you actually start making sense?

Warning! Friends don't let friends drink and do, well ... lots of things. Thanks, Mike.

"First and foremost, Tromix believes that a firearm or related product should entertain its user, and in the event such a refined product such as ours should stand out in the fields of hunting, self defense, home offense, or other such activities, so be it. Hence, Tromix cares not if it fits a specific application, as long as it is fun and entertaining to the user. We feel excessive noise, blast, recoil and a good fireball are a prerequisite to an invigorating shooting experience."

Nice discussion (and selection of photos) of pimp guns on ar15.com ...

Ever wonder why the shower curtain seems to attack you in the morning?

Another disheartening article about the CIA's continuing failure to measure up to the threat and the challenge it and, oh, the rest of us, are now facing from the Bin Man.

I had somehow managed to conflate in my mind this article and the one Shaun posted when talking with Mr Sandrowitz the other day, to the great confusion of us both.

However, I am now taking my medication again, the fog has lifted, and all is now clear.

By the way - the article I keep exhorting everyone to read is in the on-line edition of The New Yorker, a too-too-sophisticated magazine for and by those living closest to the North-East's largest ongoing urban renewal project. For some reason best known to themselves, and clearly far beyond the grasp of those of us not blessed with the good fortune to live in the city of overpriced shoe-box apartments, rude people and terrorist-demolished skyscrapers, the site has chosen to put the article on a page whose URL will one day change, as it is one of those "monthly spot" links. So - enough vitriol about New York and New Yorker magazine. It's a good piece - good enough to make everyone feel really good about themselves, and really bad about the CIA - so go read it while the URL is valid and not pointing to, say, an article about why the Hamptons will be so fabulous this fall, or where the best blintzes are to be found on the Upper East Side.

Forget earning Membership Rewards or United Frequent Flyer miles -- Check out PC Booty Call -- "a full service auction house for escorts, that offers you beautiful girls available through a consistent, reliable, and timely, fantasy service that you can bid on." It pays to use it, becuase you can "... earn Pimp Points towards a free appointment the more you use our service."

An interesting article on how ill-prepared the US's intelligence agencies are to combat Usama Bin Laden. This was written before September 11th, and contains such gems from operatives as "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

Having seen how much curry some ex-UK special forces operatives can consume, I can only assume this isn't a problem for British intelligence. To quote one: "My arse'll be like the back end of the batmobile tomorrow."

Old bin Laden bought the farm,
E-I-E-I-O ...

Lyndon LaRouche ... Teddy Goldsmith ... Roberto Calvi ... P2 ... my head is spinning.

I've mentioned LaRouche before. He's probably delusional, but if he's not, and if he's right, we're all in a heap of trouble.

Example:

"First of all, what has happened to the United States is on last Tuesday, the 11th, it came attack by a mysterious force, which I know is some kind of rogue operation inside the security screen of the United States. This did not come from the Middle East. It didn't come from Europe. It didn't come from South America. There may be people who are nationals from other parts of the world who were involved in this, but the operation is very sophisticated, and no one could do an operation like this, from outside the United States at present; there's no one who could do what was done here then."

I think he's dead wrong. I hope he's dead wrong. If you enjoy having your head turned inside out, check out this piece of agitprop.

Teddy Goldsmith is another interesting character - brother of James (Jimmy) Goldsmith, somehow implicated in the vastly complex and largely forgotten Iran-Contra scandal (remember that?) both descendants of Europe's Goldschmidt dynasty - he founded, among other things, The Ecologist magazine, and Howlett's zoo park outside Canterbury. Teddy Goldsmith's own bio, posted on The Ecologist's site, makes it possible to believe there's a link there between him, the Goldschmidts, the groups that have been protesting the IMF and World Bank meetings, Roberto Calvi, P2, the Mafia, the KGB, the CIA, the Catholic Church, the assassination of JFK, and the crashing of two airliners into the World Trade Center ...

For those who want to crank up their personal paranoia meters just a little higher, there's the NameBase, a search engine for citations to "names of individuals and groups involving : assassinations, organized crime, scandals, Wall Street and transnational corporations, foreign policy and media establishments, political elites from the Right and Left, Cold War history and intelligence". Surf away. Type in the name of any shadowy and/or influential figure you've ever heard of - James Bamford, Oliver North, George Bush (GHWB or GWB), any of the Kennedys, either of the Goldsmiths, Henry Ford - and see where the citations lead you.

Finally, if you've never read it, this'd be a great time to invest in a copy of the Illuminatus! trilogy and some high-grade hydroponic marijuana ...

Reprobates is pleased to bring you the following piece of financial advice (thanks to Tim for passing this one along):

If you bought $1000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.
If you bought $1000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79.

My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.

My email inbox, it suddenly seems, is full of exhortations to light a candle at a particular time and be photographed by a satellite, or to show the world (or my neighbor in the double-wide next door, at least) that I'm an idiot who actually reads chain emails and does what they say, or something like that.

Well, here's a suggestion I'm sure we can all get behind:

Show your support for bush at 7pm tonight, by slipping an extra dollar bill into your favorite stripper's waistband.

Boo-ya!

Now, for a limited time, Reprobates is bringing you a special section that is devoid of humo(u)r. How is that different from the usual drivel we serve up? you might well ask. Well, not only is it devoid of humo(u)r, it's also lacking in references to bodily excretions, gonads (with or without strife), drugs or any of the other, err, finer things in life.

So how does it qualify for inclusion in Reprobates? 'Coz I'm a moderator, dammit, and I say so. Yes, dear reader, Reprobates is a dictatorship, and the most important thing to remember about that is, you can't say "dictatorship", without saying "dick".

Anyway, the point is this. The Western world seems to be on the brink of ... something. There are more opinions, and more "information" (good, bad, correct, incorrect, or indifferent) available to the general public than at any time before any previous military action. I don't know about you, but I've been exposed to more information about the geo-political make-up of the Middle East than I ever wanted to know before. Some of it I sort-of knew, or thought I'd heard before, but suddenly, now, every little detail seems so much more relevant, germane, crucial. I was dimly aware, for example, of the British role in creating Israel, as documented in this personal screed that has been fairly widely circulated (this particular copy of it comes from, of all places, the 7-Series BMW Bulletin Board). Also on the same BB, however, is a piece about Afghanistan, too.

Some of what I've learned must seem hopelessly trivial to those people some of us went to college alongside - you know, the poli-sci students, and so on. Those same graduates must now be some of the most clued-in burger flippers around. For example, I learned that Iranians are not Arabs. At that revelation, some of you must be saying "Duh!", while others are saying to themselves "I had no idea there was a difference" and yet others are simply thinking "Mmm ... orange ..." But I digress.

It's also becoming increasingly clear that whatever is coming is probably (hopefully) not a war in the conventional WWI/WWII/Korea/Falklands/Vietnam/Gulf sense - the "enemy" is too sneaky to face a conventional force across anything resembling a recognizable battlefield. The author of piece on Afghanistan quoted above makes a fascinating and terrifying point - to draw the West into a pitched battle against Islam is precisely what Bin Laden wants, because he believes Islam will win.

One insight into the kinds of activities that the West will be increasingly undertaking can be gleaned from an article in Sunday's Washington Post about networks.

Bush is right when he says this won't be a short war - it took years for the terror networks to build up to their current level of sophistication, and it will take years to dismantle them. This will be an action that continues long after the spectacle of war fades from our TV screens, and we will know little about its methods and its successes, but I fear we'll know all too well about its failures.

Many in the UK wonder whether the US's new-found sense of outrage and horror towards terrorism will mean that the Boston & New York Irish will finally stop funding the IRA. Personally, I doubt it. I don't think most of Noraid's contributors are bright enough to make the mental leap, but there you go.

For one final link (because everyone likes links), I would like to remind everyone of the existence of my personal favo(u)rite wild card - Lyndon LaRouche. My biggest fear is that this man is not as deluded as he seems. Read just about anything on his site - particularly the stuff about terrorism - and make your own judgment.

Somewhere in a remote corner of Kabul, the voices of the Pakistani delegation can be heard uniting in song. Softly, oh so softly, the sounds drift to your ears through the fetid air ...

"Come, Mr Taliban,
Gimme me Bin Laden ...
Daylight come an' me wan' go home ..."

You're watching one of your favorite TV shows and you start thinking that the writers must have run out of ideas. Like the X-Files was after "Fight the Future". You wonder if you're the only fan who thinks that show has gone in the dumper. Well, you're not. And, as long as Ted McGinley doesn't show up in an episode, everything is going to be fine.

Monster Trucks... good. The Messiah... good. A Jesus Monster Truck... very good!

Just in case you find yourself in Montogomery, Alafrickin'bama, there are no Starbucks. In fact, the closest stores are near or in Birmingham, as you can see here.

Damn! Another disillusionment, it turns out NASA faked the whole moonshot program. Don't believe it? Here's undeniable proof.

Damn, Ken. You figured out my strategy of trolling old postings and reposting stuff that people might have forgotten about. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to find new, interesting, and possibly funny stuff through my own efforts. So, imagine how happy I am that a friend sent this to me today. I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek approach to what is widely considered the largest public health crisis Washington, DC has ever known.

This wasn't reported in the UK news when it happened. IBM tried to promote their Linux offerings with a hippy style "Peace, Love and Linux" marketing campaign, which included graffiti on sidewalks, reported by CNN and Mother Jones. I read about it in an imported magazine, and as far as I can tell it was limited to San Francisco and Chicago. I wonder if Lou Gerstner ended up doing the community service...

It's amazing how insensitive people can be before their first cup of coffee in the morning, nowhere moreso than in the home of Starbucks it would seem.

Dave - your posts are greatly appreciated. They would be even more appreciated, however, if they contained, uhh, new links (psst - the farts and poops pages have already been posted on reprobates! Pass it on!)

Anyway.

My attention has been brought to the following site which will be useful to those of you who wish to, say, join the "White Stun(t)az" (see Reprobates passim). Madd knowledge of gansta wayz can be found here.

I guess I've been feeling very "posty" lately. Maybe I just feel guilty because Ken periodically complains that people are not contributing enough content to this blog. Anyways, better to feel posty that gassy, in my opinion.

Make sure to read all the way through. You'll be rewarded with gems like:

Why is it that when you scratch your ass through two layers of clothing (your underwear and your jeans) your fingers still stink? (Question submitted by TREKCOP99)

As pointed out by Barb F., who contributed the term to the fart thesaurus, a fart can be regarded as "aerosolized poop," which means that microscopic fragments and droplets of poop are actually distributed throughout the gaseous matrix of the fart. When delivered from the anus with some force, the components of the fart can penetrate one's clothing and these tiny particles can be trapped in the fibers of the cloth. The particles are transferred to your fingers and then your nose when you scratch and sniff.

Aerosolized poop. If that isn't a good product idea, I don't know what is.

Don't miss the companion site, either. Another wonderful excerpt:

How does poop stay together, like in links? (Question submitted by Blink182 Girl)

In humans, soft poop is really one long, mostly continuous sausage before it comes out. It gets its "link" look because we tend to pinch off lengths of it with the anal sphincter as the poop emerges. If a person pinches hard enough, the poop separates into several turd units. If the person doesn't pinch that hard, the turds may stay connected. If you can remain sufficiently relaxed, you can produce an awesomely long poop that will coil up inside the toilet.

Awesomely long...I think I saw one once. That's the one my girlfriend still refers to as "The Baseball Bat".

So, you're an actor that has built a lasting career by combining a strange and overly emotive way of delivering lines, a hairpiece so bad that its a joke in its own right, and persistents rumors that you are homosexual. You almost lose all of it by aligning yourself with an internet company, which promotes itself by accentuating your weirdness in all its commercials. When that company fails and the commercials end, how do you know that you still have any worth? Because your fans still love you.

A bunch of geeks and management consultants jet off to troubleshoot in Ghana. Silicon valley's attempt to ruin third world economies now they're done with the U.S.? You decide...

As as person in software sales (as are many of the usual suspects are), I have sat through at least a dozen or two sales kickoff meetings. Starting early in the morning (usually hungover) you sit in a uncomfortable chair in a large, overly air-conditioned room in a hotel, bombarded with PowerPoint after PowerPoint after PowerPoint. Except at Microsoft, where Steve The Monkey Boy dances.

Only in LA. Some goons are attempting to get the stars to copyright their DNA. I wonder what the courts will decide to do with the "material" which infringes such copyrights? Imagine incinerating a hundred Tom Cruises...

So, am I now doomed to be a geek forever? If I am laughing at something like this, I may as well start my own computer club.

Well, this one certainly has legs. It's just going to run and run...

If I was a website admin, I'd want my site hacked by Fluffy Bunny. He likes to hit security sites like SANS and attrition. He replaces them with versions (SANS, attrition) that are much nicer, and have a cute little bunny to boot!

It's been a while since I posted. I needed to be inspired. I'd like to call the following selections "Fun with Flash".

I'm creeping like a Chester...

The second coming of the greatest flash animation I have ever seen.

This song could not be more true. I can still remember the days I held my gonads and thought about how hard my life was, waiting for the day I could get my hands on some drugs.

The last two come from the Stile Project, a excruciatingly perverse site. Dirty, nasty, and funny. Be warned...make sure nobody is around when you look at this stuff.

Hmm. Herbert Kornfeld and the White Gangstaz. Who's for real, and who's the product of an over-active imagination? Trick question.

What, then, are we to make of the Icy Hot Stunaz? (or is that Stuntaz? - check the URL)

Had enough of young, white, suburban punks who act like they're underprivileged black kids from the 'hood? Well how about young, black, urban women who act like overprivileged white chicks from the affluent 'burbs?

Paul is too lame to figure out how to post to Reprobates. So I'm going to post the link he emailed to me. Don't bother clicking here, though. It's shite.

According to the architects of America's stupid, wasteful, moronic, freedom-restricting, 6th-Amendment trashing (OK, get on with it - editor) War On (Some) Drugs, certain drugs are "gateway drugs" - meaning, presumably, that you, say, smoke a doob, get bored with the buzz (and ensuing munchies, or so I'm told) and bingo! next day you run out and shoot up with angel dust or snort some heroin or put cocaine in your ears or whatever.

Well, anyway, apparently this "gateway" effect is not limited to illegal & fun drugs. Looks like it may have happened with Viagra. Thanks to Chris for reporting this one.

First we brought you Dancing Paul. Now there's this.

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
That the Jim Morrison Simulatron
was not the coolest thing ever.

This is slightly eerie: something else on Congressman Gary Condit's home page as blogged by John F.: this link.

Ian and I are working in Charm City aka Baltimore, MD. Baltimore is famous for a number of things. For example, it recently lead the US in the number of syphilis cases, and is still the nation's heroin capital. However, it has been in the local news today for another reason.

Beautiful place.

Hey kids, want a summer job?

Whether interning in Modesto, Merced, or Washington D.C., working in one of Rep. Condit's offices can be an extremely rewarding experience.

Congressman Condit is looking for interns on his web page....

These guys have to be stopped! They're trying to make a drug so wussies can eat vindaloo!

Yet another play on "Am I Hot or Not", but this was very necessary. I am sure we can all find people, maybe people standing close to us right at this very moment, that we might want to snap a picture of and send in for review.

The Story of Mr. Beefy ... a very 1996 looking web page with some disturbing uses of ground meat for a puppet ...

Not sure how up you are on the Weekly World News, but one of their front page stories from a few years back is now the subject of a musical. Don't know about you, but I'm interested in seeing Bat Boy The Musical

I just didn't believe how ashamed marketing executives could be of margarine

Hey Shaun, thanks for the JotW. I eventually got the Lego depravity item to open, and thought I'd offer you, in return, Lego chef.

I think I might be going blind. Or want to. I can't tell.

• Lego depravity
  
• Balloon depravity
  
• Thumbnail depravity
  
• And just for Ken, Jesus of the week
  

How does this work? How 'bout if people decided to take the rest of the year off as paid vacation? Would that save HP a bundle or what!

There are a number of things it is acceptable to smack around on a golf course. But this is not one of them.

Granted, we all mix up lyrics. I have never, however made the following error:
Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London"
Misheard Line	He's the hairy handed gent who ran a muffin tent
Original Line	He's the hairy handed gent who ran amuck in Kent

More misheard lyrics are here

Another host to the bizarre: Need To Know, a veritable treasure trove. I learnt how to sit while I shit to avoid a stroke! Also, Monkey! Strange how the rise of LSD coincides with increased monkey-related crop damage...

The Visible Human Project + Teen idol (and semiconductor physicist) = Britney Exposed

I love tribute albums. I really like the way people can take a song, mix it up a bit, and then make money off of it. We need more bands like Hayseed Dixie.

It's Friday afternoon and I have blogaholism. This guy should have picked on Elmo. Everyone hates Elmo. Or Grover, the big blue fuck.

I remember my mother telling me not to bite my nails. She also told me I needed plenty of iron in my diet - I guess this guy just couldn't handle the duality of it all.

If I had a mynah bird at my house, it would be saying "No, I don't want to switch my phone service to AT&T/MCI/Sprint, thank you ...". Not this one, though.

A few weeks ago, The Onion posted a story about teens marking the site of a roadside tragedy with various tacky items, including a teddy bear, hastily-scribbled "We Love U" notes, and so on. It appears they didn't archive it. Too bad. The Richmond Review reports "An impromptu memorial of burned incense sticks, fried chicken wings, shrimp crackers, cigarettes and flowers" after this incident.

Huhwha?

Is it just me, or do the vocal stylings of Eugene Mirman ("the marvellous crooning child") remind anyone else of those of, say, Frank Sidebottom (not that you'll actually find any Frank Sidebottom tracks there)? Or maybe even Tiny Tim? No matter, Mr Mirman has some other funny stuff on the site too (click on the "by eugene" link)

Heisenpants

Suck and Feed ... Suck and Feed ... yes, it's what babies do. It's also what Automatic Media doesn't, at least not any more.

This is a damn shame. My question is this: could the current round of Web-zine & content-driven site implosions have been averted if micropayment technology had taken off? I mean, isn't it all about a revenue stream? I know I've banged on before about the webvertising implosion, but this is important.

CyberCash (aka CyberCrash), founded to do precisely that, foundered trying to do precisely that, retrenched as Glenn Melton's atavistic tendency told them to as a credit-card clearing house (mostly servicing porn sites, natch), and then went into the classic death spiral of rightsizing, downsizing and finally capsizing (OK, they were bought by VeriSign, but it was too good a line to pass up).

The same fate, or one equally dire, surely and depressingly awaits Digital (or Compaq's) Millicent or Jalda. Millicent, in fact, never seemed to even get off the ground, and Jalda's success seems tied to such other continually just-over-the-horizon technologies as 3G/iMode/Web-phones-that-work (anyone for Symbian?)

But what if sites were able to receive (a small amount of) money every time you viewed one of their pages? IMHO, if we are ever to return to the days of a robust and vibrant ecosystem of content-driven websites, then sooner or later, we (the collective we, that is) will have to come up with something more sustainable (and sustaining) than the Emperor-has-no-clickthroughs of webvertising or the sticker shock of cash-up-front for indeterminate value received of subscription sites.

Stop press: Darwin proved right, despite what the "Creation Scientists" would have you believe. Survival of the fittest, baby. (Incidentally, more refutation of the misguided lunkheads' babblin' can be found here, here and here for those who find there scientific belief systems threatened by the foregoing ;-)

And, from the same site, comes something that I just don't know what to make of ... it ... which ... erm ... but which has the definite look and feel of the Church of the SubGenius.

Boob goes up. Boob goes down.

Shaun's recent contribution continues to pay dividends. Further exploration of the site reveals a link to the fascinating zeppotron.com conspiracy, and Zeppotron.com is a veritable treasure trove of humo(u)r. Take, for example, Unnovations, or indeed any of the other stuff on the E4 (Channel 4 Entertainment) site.. This is some bizarre and very funny shit.

You can't spell Clitheroe without spelling "heroe", and you can't spell Scunthorpe without "S" (and "horpe").

But Clitheroe is also home to the Messiah, or so he says.

The creator (of the web site, as opposed to the (alleged) Creator) says he never responded, but "the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, and John Gummer, then a Cabinet Minister, had also received letters from the Messiah, and he sent me photocopies of their responses. The Archbishop's reply repays thought." The replies can be seen here. True enough, the Archbishop's response is a thing of beauty.

Footnote to Shaun's post (even though it appears above it - headnote? caption? whatever): be sure and trawl through the archives, too. Great stuff.

What do you get if you cross Viz with the classifieds section of a travel mag? This. "...Grow a beard, see things, cry in front of windows, befriend cutlery, declare yourself King!..."

Meta-item: upon inspection, it appears that a shocking percentage of my recent postings have been breast-related. Perhaps, like locally-based but nationally-syndicated afternoon butthead disc jockeys Don and Mike, I should take a leaf from Dr. Strangelove's book and simply learn to stop worrying and learn to love the boob.

What do you get if you cross a spice rack, a 19" electronics rack, a CD rack, and ... many others ... with one of those rate-random-things(*) sites? You get this.

* - I was going to link to the infamous AmIHotOrNot here, but it's gone! So instead you can go here.

From time to time on Reprobates, we discuss our collective fascination with huge dump trucks.

It's also no secret that I am an avid four-wheeler (where "avid" is defined to mean that I haven't actually been off-road in well over a year due to, err, other commitments). Four-wheeling enthusiasts enjoy looking at pictures of other people's misfortune (or misadventure). Clearly, then, the best picture of all would be one that combined both those fascinations, right?

If you were driving down the street and an attractive young woman invited you to lick her breasts, then if you were like most guys, you'd probably do it. Well, you might want to think twice about that.

So, that's the secret. I just need to feed my girlfriend chocolate and she'll act like a sex-crazed monkey.

Two other things have recently come to my notice. These also seem to naturally come in pairs. You can read about them here and here.

Then, when you're done with those, why not read the heartwarming story of a boy, his cat, and a two-pack of Fleet mineral-oil enemas.

Two things have recently come to my notice. Both just seemed to really stick out and demand I pay attention. Odd how these things come in pairs. Here and here.

"The defendant told police that he was looking for someone to perform a sexual act that involves kicking a man in the groin"

Is this available on video?

If you enjoyed dolphin sex, why not invest in a copy of "Dearest Cat"?

"Modern electronic-rock music, inaugurated in the early 1960s, is, and always has been, a joint enterprise of British military intelligence and Satanic cults."

Read the whole loony tract, and much other addled-pated Christian fundamentalist blathering at www.av1611.org.

This is awesome.

Hey, Pokemon, your fifteen minutes of fame may have ended a good thirty minutes ago, but you continue to inspire parody, and well, other things ...

If you haven't seen the Jokamel video from Comedy Central's TV Funhouse, then Ian tells me you can find it floating around the 'Net in DivX format (nothing to do with the other , now-defunct video format called DIVX) using a file-sharing program such as Limewire, by searching for the term jokamel.

But for out-and-out strangeness, you can't beat Apocamon (thanks for this one go to Danni Ashe, honorary blog contributor of the week ;-)

Ian also had a Pokemon rap video, but I deleted it, and can't recall where it came from. Ian?

Maybe it is my Tribe-sense tingling? Maybe the hairs on the back of neck stand up when people mention God in the news? But it sounds to me like CNN editted the very end of this article. I believe that Lynna Gotsch's actual quote was, "There's hope. God's promised to provide and He will provide. And stay away from borrowing any more money from those damned Jewish bastards!"

At the risk of not offending women, I present today's culinary masterpiece.

Ah, more religious absurdity. Thanks to the most talented player in basketball, Charlie Ward. This time, however, it is accompanied with a pop quiz.

"In the wake of the November election, how does DeLay reconcile his claim of a strong Republican-religious mandate for change with the fact that Democrat Al Gore actually got some 500,000 more votes than Bush? His explanation is not political but theological: A majority of Americans clearly favored Bush, but because people are fundamentally wicked, millions of them sinned by not voting. As he ruefully put it: "Nonvoters. Nonvoters not taking responsibility. We are, by nature, greedy and lazy and sinful."

Quote from a piece about House Majority Whip, Tom DeLay, in this past weekend's Washington Post.

This man is downright frightening.

So, although Halloween is a few months away, I am starting to plan my costume already. I am debating between this and this. But I may just wind up with some Historically Inspired Menswear

Who would j'do? Who was Jack Daniels? I've heard them all... or so I had thought. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here we go with What Would Journey Do?

Truer words were never spoken: "Nitrogen is not found in Ireland because it is not found in a free state."

Hey, we all need a little understanding. Most interesting thing I learned is that we won't be successful space travelers until Christ again walks the Earth. A bit depressing for all the young jews who dream of being astronauts someday.

For those of you that fancy themselves as gourmet cooks, a nice, explosive recipe you can whip up at home.

And now for something completely different.

Sexy Women Who Abuse Their Sexy Shoes in Various Ways. One of the message boards (I'm not going to tell you which, you're going to have to find it for yourself) includes the phrase "the very best kind of shoe sex". How about this variation for all the shoe fetish/car enthusiasts out there?

Husband rearing, anyone?

Balloon fetish?

"I can't buy crush videos anymore, because Bill Clinton made them illegal. How can I act on my desires in an ethical manner?" Perhaps the answer lies here.

"Help stamp out clown porn." Yeah, right. Tell it to Ouchy the Clown.

I think I'll start a page for people who get their online jollies from the Abuse-A-Tron.

You think you are a bad-ass. You think you are brave. You think you've had your fill of drink-enhanced experiences which surely your mother would faint if she ever heard. You think you know your chemistry. Well, combine the two and try drinking liquid nitrogren or put your fingers in molten lead. Go ahead, be a tough chemistry dude!

Do you know someone who could benefit from being placed in an assisted computing facility? Better yet, are you someone who could benefit from having that special someone placed in an assisted computing facility? LIke if, say, you just bought that certain special someone a goddamn iMac for Christmas and they still haven't figured it out ...

Couple of sites of interest: JetCityOrange, and McSweeney's. Check 'em out. The former is worth visiting if only for this gem, and the latter, likewise, for this.

This might be the most biting critical movie review I have ever seen. What the reviewer doesn't mention is that Tom Green stole my look, and I'm gonna sue!

I seem to be a) having problems with the Blog and b) using a lot of ! One might be causing the other.

Stop laughing at the whale!

And when this screws up and a gigantic middle finger gets unfurled, America gets to blame Canada!

Friends, they say, help you move, while real friends help you move bodies.

Unsportsman-like behavior.

Flight-related stories seem to occupy an unusually large portion of our consciousness. Perhaps because I have flown 250,000 miles in the past decade, mostly for business, and my office mate Ian does about the same.

Anyway, I somehow got into a conversation with my boss about what would happen if a 747 suddenly lost all engine power at cruise altitude (I think it all started with my assertion that one of the factors that goes into choosing a cruise altitude centers upon how far the plane would have to glide to make an emergency landing at a suitable airfield, and he repudiated it).

So, after a couple of go-rounds on this topic, he finally decided he was going to trawl the Web and see whether he could find any evidence to support my position.

He did. There's an amazing story that accompanies that description, too.

And then, once you're done with that story, read this even more amazing one.

Finally, to bring the story back full circle to where it started, the guy who presented the (true) story above is a flying instructor at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, which is the airport Ian & I fly into when we visit our company HQ.

I'm sure your mother warned you about playing with yourself, and about playing with your food. But did she ever prohibit you from doing both at once? (Today's secret phrase is "alien homo-melons")

It's not that often that an Onion article really stands out these days (yeah, yeah, it's not as funny as it used to be, just like Viz, etc., etc.), but every now and then you'll come across a real standout.

Even more bizarre than meat in a cone (a Lloyd's product, I believe, the Conewich, and it was in Orlando), is ManBeef. And, while you're at it, why not order yourself a bonsai kitten?

Author Bill Bryson believes that trainspotting is an affliction, a bona fide sickness, most likely Asperger's syndrome. What then is one to make of a site like Where's George?

In the men's room at Denver International Airport, the sinks are equipped with commercial bathroom fittings of a rather unfortunate design. It may not be obvious from the pictures, but when you put your hand under the, err, bell end, an infra-red detector senses its presence and causes a gobbet of mucoid white soap (at least, one assumes that's what it is) to be ejaculated into your outstretched palm.

Dance lessons anyone? (Ken adds: Paul? Is that you? I'll tear out your sink and eat all your toothpaste if it is)

Ken and I once saw "meat in a cone" sold at an airport way south of here. I thought that was pretty scary, but this could be even more bizarre. Mind you, if I were a contributor to version 2.5 of the Linux kernel, I'd probably have a ready supply of both in one of these.

For all of us frequent flyers, think happy thoughts while reading this informative guide to falling.

More on the Harvard "unbreakable" cryptosystem from Bruce Schneier.

Jesus now has a website and he is using it to find dates and to find women to bathe with. And I thought I was going to hell.

"When endowed with profound religious feeling, your skin becomes transparent and your blood begins to turn a thin watery hue until the light of the sun streaming in the window passes entirely through you. At last, having evolved into pure spiritual energy, nothing remains of your existence but a small pile of dirty underwear, damp socks, rumpled garments, a driver's license, credit cards and perhaps a small nail clipper," or so says Joe Frank

All your 15 minutes are belong to us

Many of the readers of the associated mailing list, I'm sure, will recall a time when we were obsessed with enormous dump trucks. Well, I was channel-surfing last night and happened to catch the last few minutes of the Jackie Chan chop-sockey flick Mr Nice Guy when lo and behold, what did I see but a Euclid R280 driving over a bunch of cars and through a house? Cool.

On a similar note, I wish to report a sighting of, umm, a monster limo. This thing was in LA (although it lives in Phoenix AZ). Built on the frame of a Ford F350, this beast had a radically stretched frame, a "normal" stretch limo body on the front two-thirds, and a pickup-bed at the back. It was also hugely lifted and riding on 46" tyres. Natch, it also had a full set of KC Daylighters across the top of the cab.

My mom always told me that selling cold hoppy beverages at wrestling matches that involve vegetables and mayonnaise is just asking for trouble.

Action figures + Religious figures + A healthy dose of violence = Jesus Christ Superstore

Finally, a better way to find my keys, my missing socks, and route my calls appropriately.

Clear some time people, there is a site of note. Ray Kurzweil is either a brilliant futurist, a hopeless LSD addict, both, or somewhere in between. He is in the Bill Joy camp of fearing what humanity will do with technology. Check out his AI site... the Brain and the Singularity sections are especially cool.

The Kallman Concern
Ken and I were discussing the Kallman Concern this week and realized that since the reprobates list is pretty much dead, in favor of the blog, this solves Joel's problem. Here's the thing, the reprobates list has been known to traffic some off-color content (stinky meat is the first thing that comes to mind.) Apparently, Mr. K would not want to open the email, but wait for someone else to open one of these HR-violation-laden emails and then tell him if it was safe to do so or not. Let's face it, if anyone from HR watched the average email flow, everyone would be fired.

But this blog solves the problem. There no obvious HR violation in the simple url www.blogger.com, and if something looks especially nasty, you don't have to click on it. Better yet, you could go over to that new guy's desk, you know, the one that doesn't shut up on the cellphone and laughs like an elephant, you can go over there and use his browser.

If ever you find yourself arriving at hotbot, or --heaven forbid-- Ask Jeeves Kids and just don't know what question to ask. Look to the more sophisticated No comments:

While I was digging around looking for resources to read up on the online advertising business, I ran into a nice error. Let me know if it's fixed when you go there.

The emperor has no ad revenues. The abject failure of the practice of dependency on online advertising revenue as a reliable income stream appears to have claimed another victim.

I don't get online advertising. I don't get the whole deal with clickthroughs. We are constantly bombarded with advertising in all media, and compelling ads are assumed to create and reinforce our brand recognition. Why isn't it true that online advertising does the same thing? Why isn't it enough to know how many page impressions you get? What's the putative correlation between the effectiveness of the ad and the clickthrough rate? How does anyone know I did or didn't buy that car, or book, or TV or whatever, just because I saw an online banner ad and yet didn't feel compelled to click on it?

Oh well, toodle-oo, Yahoo.

There's gotta be a bazillion great punchlines, but right now I can't find a single damn funny thing to say about this. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

If I could figure out how to gateway SMS messages to this 'blog, y'all could get the "benefit" of my incoherent ramblings whenever the muse chose to visit me. Imagine - nonsense, rants, whatever, whenever.

Looks like Ian and I are both blogging at the same time. That's probably why we both posted entries talking about the Aimster/igpay atinlay thing. Oops.

Anyone who is familiar with my vehicles knows I have an old MR2 that I'm planning to dispose of soon. John F. suggests I take a leaf out of this guy's book. He has clearly been busy scouring the 'net recently, because he also unearthed a frightening example of life imitating art. We may have to send them a "cease and desist" order ...

I'm in SoCal (again) and it's wet and rainy and cloudy (again).

I've been here three times in the past couple of months and it's been crappy weather every time.

Last time I was here, it snowed in Santa Monica.

"It never rains in Southern California" sang America. But then, they also said they'd been through the desert on a horse with no name, so I'm not sure they're really in any position to judge.

Speaking of aimster, Fitz has kindly provided an interesting cross-over article. It appears that some craftly little buggers have come up with a Pig Latin plugin for aimster that encrypts filenames, and apparently RIAA is not allowed to decrpty info that passes along Napster or Aimster and thus cannot police Aimster.

Do you want to decode DVDs (CSS) using Perl in real time? I wonder if aimster can support a multigig file transfer.

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