Internet keepy-uppy, with bizarre pseudo-japanese commentary.

"Pearls Before Swine" is a great comic strip, one of my faves. It appears every day in the Washington Post. All the more surprising, then, that they were able to publish this strip apparently without a garnering any protest from, oh, I dunno, these folks ...

This book appears, at least from the cover art, to be from the creators of goatse.cx. Warning: Don't look at goatse.cx at work. In fact, don't look at it at all.

Who says Open Source doesn't produce quality software?

Look what Google thinks of us. Highlights include:

• astounding date


• a grievous and vexing spectacle


• none other than strollette linda raine


• the blue cow


• indispensable to the existence of the elect


• really unchristian

Interestingly, The Blue Cow appears to be a bar in Singapore and is a suitably oblique reference, so I humbly submit the following as a candidate for the Reprobates logo:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive

Doh! Now I get it - there's no point in signing up for my rapture letter until I've got my ticket!

If you're Googling for information on clusters (such as you might find here), then don't do as I did and let your right index finger slip from the "U" key over to the "Y" key and then click the first link that comes up ... because it may look a little like a medical information page at first ... but it isn't ...

Of course, given the topics under consideration here, the name of this book's author is ... strangely appopriate ...

Ever twiddled the dial on a short-wave radio? Sure you have. We all know Karlheinz Stockhausen has. But what it is to be made of "the toneless recitation of random strings of numbers" sometimes heard on the shortwave bands, as the much-imitated (and, as noted in reprobates entries passim, often-bettered) Onion referred to it in this article that followed the 2000 Florida election debacle? I remember hearing these stations as a lad, and have occasionally since pondered their meaning, but British newspapers aren't even allowed to cover this topic any more, not that they ever did before, really.

However, Radio Netherlands has a great article about it, and Akin Fernandez's Irdial-Discs has even, if you have $250 to spare and really want to hear this stuff first-hand (or a simulacrum thereof), issued a 4-CD set called "The Conet Project" that also contains an 80-page booklet.

Of course, if you'd rather hear it live (and save yourself $250 and the shelf space occupied by 4 CDs and the accompanying booklet), you could always tune in and hear one of the more durable examples - the Lincolnshire Poacher, presented here courtesy of one Simon Mason. More stuff here.

GW learns his lesson - last year vs. this year.

It would appear The Onion are re-hashing old articles, but at least Mad Magazine are satirising them now. But wait, didn't The Satyr already do that?

The question I have upon reading this is: OK, just what kinds of web sites was this guy browsing?

Uhh ... GHB? GBH? He said, she said.

Ellen Feiss redux, but funnier...

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. This is sooooo wrong, but also very funny.

It's a pity there wasn't a site like this for X-Day, otherwise all you losers would be getting insulting email every Friday without me doing a goddamn thing...

A comment on the last site Shaun linked to - I don't think "citrus" really adequately describes the taste sensation you should expect when "eating at the Y". More like "scampi", perhaps ...

This is the funniest thing I've seen MAD magazine publish in a loooong time.

If you've ever thought "Kikkoman" would be a good name for a superhero, apparently you're not the only one.

No-one can say this is in bad taste. Apple, anyone?

The Post says this is Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri. I say it's our very own Dave Sandrowitz.

This is brilliant.

This classic slip-of-the-tongue would have been more understandable had the news guy been talking about, say, Jamie Lee Curtis and not J-Lo, but still ... I wonder if he still works for Fox News?

Thanks, Dave. The research was exhausting^H^Hve :-) Anyway, back to the one liners: Gamez for Grrrlz

Usually I would not post unless I had some news to share and a link or two to include. But, I think this is warranted.

Shaun, your post is absolute genius. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your analysis and I agree with your conclusions. Thank you for blessing us with such wonderful work.

Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for your edification a photographic essay on the changing sexual preferences of the white, north-american male - every Playboy playmate of the month from December 1953 through July 2002. A visual document of the changing shape of popular womanhood over the last 50 years, this collection shows that many themes are constants - symmetry of features, good dentristry etc. - but that a remarkable variation of key features has occured over the years. I don't propose to be truly objective about this subject, but if Eric S. Raymond can wax lyrical about what makes good porn (Reprobates passim), I think I can spare a few lines to comment on my perceptions here.

Va-va-voom

The playmates of the 50's and early 60's had a certain something that seems to be missing from the latter-day women - curves. Compare, for example, miss December 1954 with miss June 1993, or miss July 1963 with miss January 1992. The earlier examples make more of a virtue of the gifts most naturally bestowed upon women, whereas our more recent tastes appear to lean more towards the lean. As we move through the years, we seem to more favour women who actively lessen some of the features of womanhood. There is a clear transition from the curvaceous to the athletic, from the oft-sculpted to the self-sculptured. Waists, hips and thighs have certainly come in for a bit of a bashing. Miss September 1956 shows an ample amount of flesh, but she is far from obese or even overweight. She is, however, a lifetime in the gym and under the knife away from miss September 2000. Waists, as such, appear to decline through the 60's (miss June 1967) and disappear in the 70's (miss September 1975) to be replaced by solid walls of gym-toned muscle (miss January 1997). Only extreme corsetry appears to hint at a waist (miss August 1996). Hips have moved from child-bearing (miss June 1956) to child-like (miss October 1995).

A bit of a boob

In terms of breast size, there is a huge variation within any given year (cf miss May 1956 vs miss November 1956, miss February 1996 vs miss March 1996), but overall the trend is towards the petite. For example compare miss December 1959 and miss April 2002 at the smaller end, miss February 1959 and miss May 2002 in the middle and miss October 1959 with miss March 2002 at the high-end of high-beams. The shape of breasts has also changed, from the pointed torpedoes and A-bombs of the 50's and early 60's (miss October 1957, miss March 1963) along with more matronly examples around the same time (miss October 1956, miss October 1964) through to the manufactured spheroids of today (miss October 2000, miss November 2000).

In between times there have been marked shifts, the mid-60's showing a tendency towards the small with only one or two truly buxom wenches a year, and these tended to be extreme (miss February 1966, miss March 1967, miss March 1968, miss December 1968, miss March 1969) as if only to throw the smaller breasts into sharp relief. Interestingly these show up mainly in the Spring. The 60's also brought us our first afro-carribean playmate, introducing another dimension (miss October 1969).

The first breast implants were made available in 1962, and by the 1970's were in full swing (miss November 1970, miss October 1972) although some larger, seemingly natural specimens were displayed if only for their curiosity value, the models having not much else of merit (miss May 1974, miss November 1975). Mostly the fashions of the 60's followed through, however.

The 1980's kicked off with some better examples of augmentation (miss January 1980) which continued to "improve" across the decade - indeed the 1980's were indeed a time of marked contrast, between the natural norm (miss July 1983, miss September 1986) and manufactured monsters (miss February 1984, miss November 1984).

The 1990's kicked off with another advert for the plastics industry (miss January 1990), but mainly continued the trends of the 1980's (miss September 1993 vs miss May 1992), perhaps widening the gap between the extremes (miss July 1997 vs miss November 1993). It's really to early to comment on the new millenium, but things don't look much like changing (miss January 2002 vs miss October 2000). In fact it's difficult to draw the line between woman and doll in some cases, some models look positively manufactured (miss April 2001, miss August 2001, miss May 2002).

A bit of fluff

Hairstyles have gone through some changes over the years, too. Pubic hair wasn't shown until 1972 (miss October 1972) so it's difficult to comment before then, but it seems to have been alive and well (miss August 1976, miss September 1983) right up until the early 90's when it started somewhat of a decline (miss September 1990) untill we reach the ridiculous Hitler moustaches of today (miss October 1999). Much of this may be down to the size of swimwear changing, but we were distracted from pubic region by outrageous hair in other regions during the late 80's (miss June 1986) and early 90's (miss August 1991).

Apparent age

Whilst there have been nods to youthfulness throughout (miss January 1963, miss January 1964), the maturity of 'look' the models have had has in general moved from womanly (miss January 1956, miss June 1959) through girlish (miss May 1972, miss February 1981), to a look I'll describe only as 'barely legal' (miss August 1994, miss April 2002, miss July 2002). This, of all the trends, is most disturbing.

Catching some rays

As mentioned before, swimwear has been getting considerably smaller since the 50's and although it's effects are sometimes still visible (miss January 1997), the norm nowadays is for an even tan. Not so in the 50's (miss January 1958), in fact tans were few and far between, but as we can see swimwear is shrinking by the mid-60's (miss November 1964, miss March 1966), has a bit of a resurgence in the 70's (miss August 1970) until it's practically nonexistent by the 80's (miss September 1982).

Conclusions

For my money, playmates have evolved into highly commoditised 'product' by the slow eradication of what fashion has declared imperfection. Far from producing perfection, however, what we have is a bland indisginguishable mass - the whole has been sacrificed for a combination of features. I'd much rather sleep with the women of the 50's and 60's, but my modern eye has been trained by advertising (and perhaps my hypothalamus) to only see flaws when these women are presented for my auto-erotic entertainment. When true sexual fantasy kicks in, however, the barbie-dolls of today pale in comparison to real women. Long live miss Marks'n'Sparks - long live woman!

It's good to know that the Ewoks are almost certainly extinct. Now all we have to do is work on Jar Jar Binks. Or maybe not.

Gotta love those corporate anthems

Indeed you can, Ken, indeed you can.

You can find anything on the Internet. Some days, I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Man steals hotel coathangers, runs rings around barrister. Gideon Society turns other cheek.

Nice to see someone has spent their spare time productively - coming up with a new Internet error page.

Deep fried turkey is awesome. Turkey deep friers are quite a versitile invention. Of course, they can be used a tools to burn down your house... or your neighbor's house too.

Time's so short for the modern-day executive - there just aren't enough hours in the day, but to get on you need to apear to be well-read. How are you supposed to find the time to read all that dull classic literature? Well, now you don't have to! Now they've distilled all you need to know about the classics in handy PowerPoint slide format!

Holiday plans for Bali up in smoke? Why not try the Tau Ceti Ruckus, with FREE certain death at the hands of giant intelligent spider monkeys on your return.

...and, as I said to Ian and Ken this morning, prior to the start of our assimilation training, I have noted the return of famed musicologist, Super Greg!

Burger King? Disturbing, but disturbing...

Help get prostitutes off the streets, buy some cherry products.

Jeez, that's gotta hurt when they pull it off...

Ever heard of the conspiracy that man never landed on the moon, that it was all a carefully crafted American hoax? Well, here's the other side of that story...

Want to do your bit for world peace? You probably already are...

Ah, a wonderful pictorial on the exclusive real-estate market in lovely Surrey, BC.

We've all seen some very clever Shockwave and Flash animations. Heck, it seems no site is complete without a high-bandwidth browser-crushing Flash version as well as a pedestrian text-only equivalent (or perhaps you're just SOL if you don't have broadband at home).

Anyway, I am declaring the who-can-build-the-best-Flash/Shockwave-enabled doodad wars over. JJ1 Club won with some jaw-dropping Shockwave entries, of which this is a prime example.

The Inland Revenue appears to be diddling itself out of taxes so it can pay rent on it's own buildings. Sounds like something out of Yes, Minister.

God's PO'd about his alleged spokespeople, so he's launching an ad campaign of his own. I can't wait until he starts doing the chat show circuit.

Ever wondered what are the 300 most commonly used words in the English language? Wonder no more. Actually, that list doesn't include any of the words I use most commonly, but fear not, for they too can be found online, over here. And while we're (I'm) on the topic, check out this happy horseshit. Follow the instructions literally and some of the results are hilarious. Well, if you were really stoned they might be.

I am a subversive. I am seditious. I like posters.

Think that Operation Enduring Freedom is a silly-ass name. Try:

• Operation Destructive Sweet Baby Jesus


• Operation Spewing Virgin


• Operation Narcoleptic Cleric

These and more can be found here.

I have regaled as many members of this group who will listen (or at least stay still long enough) with my ravings about the book The Fermata by Nicholson Baker.

Now, it seems, there might be a film version. It'll have to be a Vivid Video release. The mind boggles - this is a book that forever changed the way I look at women at public gatherings.

To follow up on Dave's post from a week ago it seems that the Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 toy has found an unexpected audience. Several unexpected audiences in fact.

Most of this does come from Japan, but that's part
of what makes it so endearing.

OK, OK, Macs are cool but what about gamers?

And this isn't even from Japan.

And look! You can now buy Ellen Feiss swag!

I love Apple and their "switch" ad campaign. But who I really love is Ellen Feiss. Check it out - this chick is soooo stoned. Here's a transcript:

"I was writing a paper on the PC ... and it was like blee-bleep blee-blee-blee-bleep, and then ... like ... half of my paper was gone ..... (long pause) ... and I was like (longer pause) .... hunh? ... it devoured (barely suppressed giggle) my paper ... it was (a) really good paper .. and then I had to write it again ... and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good .. it's kind of (really long pause) ... a bummer. I'm Ellen Feiss and I'm a student"

You guys might have heard about this. But its still amazing to read.

Do your cow-orkers a favour. Take some chalk next time you go to the bathroom...

Note: jkkelley is my current ShorDurPerSav. This due in no small part to his physical and cerebral similarities to one Ignatius J. Reilly.

Warning: do not click here. Just in case you did click there, next you may need to (or get someone else to) click here.

More on the adult entertainment theme - this just in from Fitz (thanks). Guess we'll be hearing from Fitz at his new digs on Topanga Canyon Blvd around October 18 ...

Hustler as a women's magazine? jkkelley makes a good case for it on Epinions. Who knew?

Two good ones on The Onion this week: wine-appreciation tips and celebrity clothing lines.

And once you've got your beer goggles firmly affixed, it's off to Planet Prostate on the SS Ejaculation.

A big round of applause to these British researchers for proving what we already know.

One of the funniest things about the second item Shaun blogged below is the thought of being invited to send a photocopy of your arse to Sylvester Stallone's mum. 'Course, you have to pay for the privilege. I just hope Sly understands.

They did what with what?

Ok everyone, start practicing your labial flaps. First, you slowly retract your into your mouth well behind your upper teeth, then bring your lower lip forward rapidly striking your upper lip or upper teeth in passing. Also, these guys will give you a good butt-reamingding. Double funny if you're used to the English definition of "fanny".

Mute tourettes (thanks to Nick)

I've been obsessed with the End of Days these days. This is a great guide to humanity's endless clock watching.

I don't know about you, but I think an all out hedonistic orgasmic world sans physical and mental repercussions sounds like a lot of fun.

I'm glad I don't get forced to publicly admit to all the stupid crap I do.

Argh. Forget that last post. I can't seem to point to the Almighty Pager...

It's here - Shaun

Meeting running too long? Sales guy just won't stop talking to you? Now, you can always say "Sorry, I have got to answer this message".

Girls vs Boys:

A Girls Prayer:

Lord,
Before I lay me down to sleep, I pray for a man, who's not a creep,
One who's handsome, smart and strong,One who's willy is thick and long.
One who thinks before he speaks,When he promises to call, he won't wait weeks.
I pray that he is gainfully employed,And when I spend his cash, won't be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door, Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! send me a man who'll make love to my mind, Knows just what to say, when I ask "How big's my behind?"
One who'll make love till my body's a twitchin, In the hall, the loo, the garden and kitchen!
I pray that this man will love me to no end, And never attempt to shag my best friend.
And as I kneel and pray by my bed, I look at the creep you sent me instead.
Amen.


A Boy's Prayer:
Lord,
I pray for a nympho
with huge boobs
who owns a beer store......
Amen.

Asses of Evil

If you have a fear of being trapped in an elevator when the cable snaps and having it drop, say, 100 feet, then how would you feel about being in an elevator that could drop 35,000 kilometers?

Note to Shaun: if the BBC made a colo(u)ring book out of that annual report, I think they'd have a winner.

In other news, where do old domain names go to die? Why, Deleted Domains, of course. Act quickly, and you could be the proud new owner of offfffffff.com, fffffffffghhhhhhhhhhhhhh.com or even rferfffffffffffffffffffffffffffeeeeeeeeeeeee.com.

I can't see why people are alleging the BBC is dumbing down.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Edsger Dijkstra is dead.

What if the government mandated a new market, and no one came?

Got a couple of spare days? The UNEP's World Biodiversity Map is bloody fascinating, but can take a while to load.

Item: It seems McDonalds, Wendys et al might be in for a bigger lawsuit than they first anticipated. I wonder which one of them came up with what might be the cause, though?

Item: Kevin Bloody Warwick (as opposed to Kevin Bloody Wilson) gets a long overdue lambasting. Truly the Microsoft of the robotics world - every time he opens his mouth the fields moves back 10 years.

"Enrodelphiaroncomco announces gigundo accounting scandal that no-one really understands" - confused about who did what to whom and when? Read this handy primer and all will be clear. Or maybe it'll just give you a big ole' ice-cream headache.

We have arrived

Go to Google. Search for "reprobates." Go to Lycos and repeat the process. Go to AllTheWeb and repeat the process. Who'da thunk that this little ol' blog of nasty things would get so popular? BTW, Reprobates censures Yahoo and Altavista for not recognizing our greatness.

Celine Dion stalker wannabes.

Seems obvious really. Monday died on Tuesday.

I am a Simpson's fan. One of my favorite espisodes a supposed encounter with an alien who claims: "I bring you love. I bring you peace." I can't help but think that the UFO that the Air Force scared off a few days ago was broadcasting something very similar only to get Goose and Maverick on their tail.

There are a lot of things wrong with this. First, even with someone being killed, they'll never know the answer to their disagreement. Second, the article does accurately prove that you should never debate religion after a bar crawl in Texas with a loaded shotgun. Third, this article also firmly proves that people are willing to give up their cheap lives for stupid things.

Hello Klitty

A while back, Ken and I were having a discussion about why our government seems to continue its strong support for Israel. Jews are certainly not a major voting block in the traditional sense since there are no more than 12 million or so of them in this country. I suggested the usual money-power connection, the whole Hollywood-DNC lovefest, and even mentioned at a later time that many Christian fundamentalists have strong beliefs about the conversion of Jews and the state of Israel. However, my assumption was simply that the Moral Majority still has influence on the Republican party, so the religious beliefs of its members would have some impact on the political landscape. Little did I know. This is quite an interesting and sobering read and further explanantion for why many of our current political leaders feel the way they do about the Land of Canaan.

A grape is repelled due to high water content by a neodymium magnet no matter the pole. Since humans also have a high water content, would something like this happen if I put my head in between two of them?

Thanks, Shaun. Thanks a lot. Now I'm not going to get anything done today, what with all this anti-gravity nonsense to follow up on.

First, I went to the BBC News link Shaun posted and follow some of the links on that page. One of those is to the page on Quantum Cavorite. Aside: the author's explanation makes clear his choice of the term cavorite for the page; for some strange reason I was thinking about phlogiston on the way to work this morning, and the mental meme collision brought on by the sudden juxtaposition of these putative explanations of natural phenomena coerced me into noting this occurrence.

Anyway.

So the QC page has a link to an article in which the author is amazed by a demonstration of what sounds to me like simple diamagnetism. Well, the article is from the "Science and Technology" of Business Week (or is that Bizniness Wizneek?) magazine - which I wouldn't normally quote on science matters for the same reason I don't turn to Scientific American for investment advice.

Remember what I was saying about flying cars? Well apparently Boeing bought it and have now set up a research division, Project Grasp, to investigate the possibility of anti-gravity. It's all based on the work of a Dr Podkletnov, who sounds like a refugee from the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and claims to have discovered a way to lessen the effect of gravity by suspending objects over a spinning superconductive disc. No one has yet been able to sucessfully reproduce his experiment, and he conveniently forgot to tell any of his coworkers the details of his apparatus.

Strangely, Boeing would not appear to be the first to take this work seriously. Notably BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace and part of the Airbus Consortium) set up Project Greenglow, presumably named after the amount of management buy-in they got (i.e. not quite a green light) and NASA has the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program which appears to be in danger of having it's funding cut. Neither entity seems to have gotten very far with their research, but at least NASA has pictures of what it thinks it will be like to go really fast. One thing's for sure, neither of them were spending their budget on web design, and NASA had $1.7m

Apparently, part of NASA's problem was the vast amount of unsolicited "help" they received, some excerpts of which can be found here.

According to the Onion, fat people have already sued Hershey's and won.

I like this blog. I especially like this collection of rules of thumb.

What's on TV tonight? Now you know, courtesy of The Onion.

Aw, c'mon people. This is ridiculous.

So long suckers! I'm about to get whisked off to the future where I'll ride around in a flying car and shag green bitches all day! What? 10 bucks you say? Ah forget it.

"Attention shoppers: clean-up needed on aisle 6. Some idiot just poured sugar all over the place"

There's recently been a spate of blowgun dart shootings in DC [1, 2] - I have not yet seen the phrase "drive-by darting" in the media (*), but I'm hoping I will soon - so now I'm wondering whether police are going to be on the look-out for any pygmies seen acting suspiciously in the nation's capital.

* - OK, so they didn't say "drive-by darting", but they did say "drive-by blowgun assaults"

Looking for "the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions"? Look no further. And look who runs this interesting company ...

I think, deep in our hearts, we all knew this. What MSNBC studiously avoid saying though is that they (that is, we) are also better endowed, have better sex, more often, with more partners (and species of partners), and are better looking. But then, what else would you expect?

OK, it's rant time. Life imprisonment for hacking? A few keystrokes could bring down the U.S. economy? Who the hell are we fighting? Dr. Evil? Firstly, the U.S. (and global) economy seems to be doing a pretty damn good job on it's own - I doubt that someone DDoS'ing Yahoo could really make things that much worse and secondly, anyone who wants to (and even thinks it's possible to) bring it down over the internet isn't terribly likely to be that worried about life imprisonment in the U.S.

One interesting part of the bill is sure to bring down one of the internet's few success stories, the X10 camera, whose advertising recently outstripped porn for use of internet bandwidth. Apparently the law would:

Specify that an existing ban on the “advertisement” of any device that is used primarily for surreptitious electronic surveillance applies to online ads. The prohibition now covers only a “newspaper, magazine, handbill or other publication.”

Oh, and happy birthday air conditioning, 100 years old today. If the heat of global warming is bothering you, just crank it up.

Why exactly are you keeping that obsolete, ancient PC? For spare parts? What, you think NASA's gonna come looking for your old 8086 some day?

How about me putting my boot up your arse? Does that lead to self-esteem issues too?

"Whoa duuude! Try this, man, it's some serious shit!"

As I told Cameron today, "Goddamnit, sir, you're a goddamn fucking certified genius", and here's why: Cameron has identified the mystery sound clip that was in my head a couple of weeks back.

You people rock. Well, at least, Cameron does.

Accidental, my arse. Video games producers are all sickly perverts trying to corrupt our youth. Some stuff from the site (like this video from Metal Gear Solid 2) is large, but worth downloading.

Ever wondered how you actually run an Open Source project? Well, slashdot has an easy 7 step program.

Do you find colonoscopy photos erotic? Apparently some people do. Does that make this a porno site?

By the way, let me apologize in advance for the incredibly-annoying pop-ups that will flood your browser when you visit the "some people do" link. Now, get ready with those close-window mouseclicks, and go see what I mean.

Sam: Now Tobey, I want you to make like you're crawling up a wall

Tobey: But I just wanna dance!

Kickin' it greatest-living-cosmologist style with MC Hawking

I think we all saw this coming. David Hasselhoff wakes up one morning, discovers he is, in fact, David Hasselhoff, packs up, and heads to rehab.

I used to hear Don and Mike use the name to refer to any podunk town or out-of-the-way place, but now, through the wonder of the USGS Geographic Names Information System, I can definitively say that "Yes, Virginia, there is a Hooterville".

I am a little disappointed, though not terribly surprised, to report that there appear to be no place names beginning with "Fuck" or "Cunt", but that "Shit", or more specifically "Shite" is well-represented.

Punk Rock Lullabies. I'm disappointed there's no rendition of Jello Biafra's classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off. Perhaps the CD has one of those really annoying 20 minute silences at the end, followed by Napalm Death's rendition, just to keep you on your toes...

Apparently, the Office of Homeland Security is about as likely to fend off a terrorist attack as Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

The funniest thing I saw on my recent trip to England was this T shirt on some pimply-faced kid in a record shop in Guildford.

On the topic of music (which we weren't, but never mind), can someone help me figure out what piece of music I have stuck in my head? It's either late 80s or early 90s, probably a male lead singer, and the bit I have stuck in my head is about a one-second snippet where the female backing singers are singing (I think, the fidelity's not that great - maybe I should get some head cleaner) "Love shows no mercy". I think they sing it twice, but maybe the replay mechanism's jsut skipping. I think the second word is sung about a semitone below the first, the third is about the same pitch as the first, and the last word is drawn out over two or three tones - "me-err-cy" - sort of starting high and swooping down. If I could find the RCA jacks on the back of my head I'd digitize the snippet and post it here too. I've tried a lyrics seach on Google to no avail. That, by the way, is my way of saying it's not Seals and Crofts.

More proof, if any was needed, that photoshoppers can't be repressed. I'm surprised this took so long to surface - expect more and better. Still, the original image is condemned as morally reprehensible by Israel and the West alike, but now the kid's grandfather claims it was a joke. Poster child for reprobates everywhere?

Somebody let me know when they start the followup studies to this one.

"Mr Gallup said the findings may also apply to women who engage in unprotected oral sex and people who engage in anal sex. But he said further research was needed in these areas."

The phrase "7 of 9" has two meanings for me now:

1) The fabulously jugular Jeri Ryan who played a Borg character called "7 of 9" in some StarTrek spinoff

2) My score playing this game

This comes courtesy of BBSpot. It's one of the most weirdly haunting (and hauntingly weird) things I've seen in a long, long time. Hint: try the "n" and "p" keys.

AOpen are doing some wacky shit these days. They've released a PC motherboard made with vacuum tubes...

Who says there's nothing good and wholesome on Chinese TV these days?

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Tired

Two degrees of Rhett Creighton? Wired

I'd always wondered exactly what kind of light was emitted when a woman was said to have her "high beams" on. Now I know. Even scientitists, it seems, can be so blinded by the light of T-rays that they think it's a good idea to pick a moniker like, oh, "Star Tiger" and then retrofit it to be the acronym for a mouthful of crap like "Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers". I shit you not.

Strange how credulity works. Had I first seen the reference to this peculiarly under-reported technology on, say, abovetopsecret or some other high-quality source of science journalism, I wouldn't have bothered to read on.

Would you have been more or less credulous had you known that the developers of this technology, QinetiQ, were formerly part of the UK's Defense Evaluation and Research Agency?
- Shaun

We all knew that sex wins over booze but now we have political proof.

You know, I always thought of St-Leonards-On-Sea as being a pretty staid, sedate kind of place. A seaside town popular with the blue-rinse set. Basically, a place for those who find Hastings a bit too fast-paced (Hastings, fast, geddit? Never mind)

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned about some of the things you can do and see there ...

A collection of oldies but goodies. Some you've seen, some you probably haven't.

I drive the 405 every time I go to my company's HQ. So far, this has not happened to me. I guess maybe it's just a matter of time. Consider this: two people, three months, using their home computers.

Pop quiz: What's the most hated day of the week? Probably Monday, right? So, if you were a consulting firm, like, say, PriceWaterhouseCoopersLybrandUncleTomCobbleyAndAll, and you were going to change your name, what would you change it to? Monday?

Didn't think so.

I find it hard to imagine it "tested well with the focus groups".

Still. Nobody ever accused PwC of having a clue.

Further proof of that, then, arrived in the shape of this link, courtesy of Chris, who adds "I love it when the freaky little guy sticks it to the boring big guy". Thanks, Chris.

Remeber, cleanliness is next to godliness. And apparently, Ponyplay is next to Furvertism. Actually, the main site qualifies as my website of the week.

Man, now all we have to do is remember to wash. Why the fuck can't they ship it to Sweden or Belgium?

I've got a girlfriend,
With bows in her hair,
And nothing is better than that,
Is it?

Funny - when I read the Boston Globe article Shaun linked to, I found myself wondering if it were not itself a spoof. I mean, an article about someone being gullible, and one of the names quoted in it lends itself perfectly to the headline "Yu Bin Had" ... ? And the other name is Huang Ke, pronounced "Wanky"?

Truth imitates art. It had to happen sooner or later, if it hadn't already.

A "meating" of The Club Which Dare Not Speak Its Name was perpetrated last night at Smith & Wollensky in the District.

Last time we were there, we noticed that the walls were liberally sprinkled with plaques. We asked how to get one put up, and our waiter told us "just ask". So we asked. Our waiter then spoke to the manager, and the conversation went something like this:

Waiter: These guys want to have their names up on a plaque
Manager: OK
Waiter: It's a group name
Manager: No, no group names
Waiter: Yeah, but it's a good one
Manager: No group names
Waiter: They want Meat Club
Manager: (Pause) OK

So.

Photos are courtesy of Jeff. He emailed them to me today, but the labels didn't quite match up to the photos ... although it could have been much worse - the hostess could have been labelled either "PileOFish" or "JugOWine" (that's a double magnum, by the way), both of which would have been both grossly offensive as well as oddly appropriate in their inappropriacy. However, the photo that was labelled "OurHostess" was actually the bill, which implied that she rendered "personal services" to us totalling $831, which, sadly, she did not. She, too, had her own double magnums.

I never had a girlfriend with a Dad this cool, but that's probably not a bad thing either.

(you'll likely need ie to view the clip)

Mother-in-law jokes are so passe', so bad-Catskills-comedians (UK readers: working-men's club (the sort where chicken-in-a-basket is the culinary highlight) comedians), that I wonder if I should even share this. Then I remembered: it's not a joke if it's true.

One of the other items of note in this week's Onion is this story of a young woman's ordeal getting her 60-year-old mother online.

Well, as pathetic as that story is, there are a few things you should bear in mind:

1) The mother in the story (MITS) is more highly motivated than my mother-in-law (MIL)
2) MITS has successfully emailed her daughter - indeed, anyone
3) MITS has successfully navigated to and browsed a Website
4) MITS has mastered, to some extent, Windows
5) MIL has failed to master the complexities of an iMac

There's a saying - we can't choose our relatives, thank goodness we can choose our friends. It's just a shame we can't choose our friends' relatives (I'm lumping spouses in under the general category of friends, here)

You know, I saw that MAD back cover thingy in The Onion too, and discovered just how far I've wandered down the path of convenience over fun.

What I should have done:

• Downloaded the PDF
• Printed it out
• Folded it as directed
• Had fun!

What I did:

• Downloaded the thumbnail image
• Opened it in PhotoShop
• Cropped it like I folded it
• Had a, on the whole, miserable time

What does this tell us? Leave art in the form the artist intended! Style over substance! Fun! Fun! Fun!

(Note to Shaun: you could have just moused-over the graphic and you'd have seen it change - even more convenient, and even less fun! - Ken)

Does anyone else remember when MAD magazine was actually funny? When it was cutting-edge? Back before it was a division of AOL-TimeWarner? I do. My dad had a huge collection of the books on his shelf, and I devoured them all - "Hopping MAD", "MAD's Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", "Spy vs. Spy", "Good'n'MAD", "MAD's Dave Berg Looks At The Lighter Side Of ...", "The Kama Sutra" ... well, never mind what I read.

The point is, I learned a great deal about American culture and everyday life from reading those books. And though I didn't understand all the references to Nixon, or Watergate, or Vietnam (I was, what, seven or eight at the time), I found a lot of it genuinely funny, and I credit those MAD books every bit as much as I do Monty Python for my love of subversive, parodic humo(u)r today.

Incidentally, seems this guy gets it, too.

So it came as a mostly-pleasant surprise today when I came across this affectionate tribute to the genius of MAD magazine in the Onion, perhaps MAD's spiritual heir and successor to the idiot-king throne of biting satire and dead-on parody.

I say "mostly" because I found it just a tad uncomfortable that the article's content so unflinchingly references, some might even say mocks, the recent brutal killing of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. But, hey, the Onion may be accused of many things, but, just like its quintessential comedic ancestor MAD, shying away from controversy isn't one of them.

The Onion brings you the "Ask A ..." feature, but only reprobates brings you "Ask The Imam". This week's topic "Is having a Slave (girl) for sex nowdyas is allowed?" (sic). Thanks, once again, to John.

Eric S. Raymond (he of the Hacker's Dictionary, in which I have an entry (sense 2 was mine), and no relation AFAIK to Paul Raymond) on bad porn - required reading. Safe for work, but don't follow the links unless, like me, you have an HR director like mine, with whom I had the following exchange:

She: Australia's great if you're a woman. There are three guys for every woman.
Me: So you're telling me that all Aussie women are three-input?
She (punching my shoulder): Stoppit!

This is funny because it is so earnest (by which I mean, of course, so in the style of the late Jim Varney's character Ernest P. Worrell) - a Eurotrash (click the link and scroll down to the bottom of the page for definition) superhero. Thanks, John.

How to deal with small yappy type dogs, courtesy of Umbro

If you were a "normal" kid like me, you killed and ant or two with a magnifying glass and had fun doing it. If you want to relive those good old days, with a new modern twist, check this out.

Got a kid that likes to act out the last scene from the Blair Witch Project? Shykids make the perfect dolls.

It's a wonder the human race has survived so long considering that most of us are dumb as toast. It's even more surprising given that you need a computing degree to properly perform even the most basic day-to-day activities...

In the DC area, our local all-news radio station is WTOP. You can hear it here. This, on the other hand, is a dead-on parody of the format from the good folks at Modern Humorist. Or so.

I have a Porter-Cable framer's saw, and its base is made of magnesium, and when I found this out, like any pyro, my first thought was "I wonder how well it would burn?" Students of the history of cool computers may remember that the NeXT cube's case was also made of magnesium, and Simson Garfinkel, it seems, is a pyro, with access to exactly what you need to find out precisely how well one of them burns.

Handmade progressive utilitarian kilts.

Some people are a little bit unhappy about the very slow rollout of broadband in the UK. This guy was clearly none too happy when he registered for updates on broadband status in his area, but now his wish has come true!

On a similar note, some of the fun things you can do with those spare fields for address lines in on-line registration forms...

AMD buys NVIDIA? Read this important press release for yourself...

Apparently, wearing glasses impairs your hearing. "...I finally tracked it down to the sound bouncing around between my glasses and my eyes before being reflected into my ears"

Some kind-hearted cupid ought to introduce this guy to this girl.

Why you should always check behind you at the screen, when giving a laptop-projector based presentation...

I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story about a terribly decadent pop star who, back in the 60's, when this sort of thing presumably happened all the time, purchased an original Da Vinci pencil sketch, and (this is the great bit) erased it. Philistine, nihilist, art critic - take your pick.

Anyway, I bring this up only because of the confluence of two other bits of information:

1) this article on CNN (is it just me, or has anyone else had the experience of typing in "netscape.com" and finding themselves thinking "hey, how'd I end up at CNN's site", or vice versa? Yeahmanitellyawhat that dang ole' AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeCNN ya talk about SonyVivendiUniversal one them NewsCorpReutersBSkyBMSNBC just one big ole' conglomerate ...) and

2) The perps are clearly related to one of our own, via Ellis Island.

I've recently been annoyed by emails from a guy at work, addressed to a general mailing list. He's rather strident, and somewhat critical in his tone (he's French - who'da thunkit?), and yet his English is imperfect. I wanted to reply to him in the same imperfect style of English, but every time I tried to compose something, it came out sounding rather stilted. So, thought I, perhaps I could enlist AltaVista's famed Babelfish!

Here's the original:

I think your guesses are correct about our JavaScript interpreter, but you should check with Tony for the latest

which Babelfish rendered in French as:

Je pense vos conjectures suis correct au sujet de notre interprete de Javascript, mais vous devriez verifier avec Tony le plus en retard

So far so good. Now let's turn that back to English:

I think your conjectures am correct about our interpret of Javascript, but would owe you verify with late Tony more

Hmm. Pretty good, but it's starting to unravel, which, of course, is like a red rag to a bull to me. Let's translate it into German now. Incidentally, it's a shame Tony had to die, but it's all in a good cause.

Ich denke Ihre Vermutungen, die morgens, die ueber unser korrekt sind, vom Javascript deuten, aber wuerde Sie ueberpruefe mit spaetem Tony mehr verdanken

(See where the "morgens" bit comes from? The poor Babelfish could only interpret the weirdly verbed "am" as the conventional abbreviation for "ante meridiem". So now the whole thing takes place in the morning). So, for good measure, back to English, though, at this point, it's hardly fair to really call it English any more ...

I think your assumptions, which interpret in the morning, which are correct over ours, from the Javascript, but will you examine with late Tony more to owe

Damn! This thing is clearly on a roll. With cheese, and a slice of tomato. And a garnish of psilocybe ... so what now? Clearly, given that we've tried French and German, and I don't know Italian, Korean or Japanese (which doesn't stop me from speaking those languages, you understand, especially when drunk. Amazing how alcohol gives one such a flair for language, don't you think?), but I do know a little Spanish (she cleans my office), so let's spin the wheel again:

Pienso sus asunciones, que interpretan por la man~ana, que son excedente correcto el nuestros, del Javascript, solamente voluntad que usted examina con u'ltimo Tony m'as para deber

And finally, back to the mother tongue.

I think its assumptions, that they interpret by the tomorrow, that is excessive correct ours, of the Javascript, only will that you examine with I complete Tony but for having

Perfecto!

You too can build a supercomputer from spare, irritating parts found around the house.

Man, I wish I figured this out first.

A long time ago, in an allegory far far away...

This guy loves spam. Lots and lots of it. Not really surprising as he owns an Internet marketing company. Obviously, some editorial oversight has meant that his email address got accidentally deleted from the article, so to set the record straight it's BDennis410@AOL.com. That's BDennis410@AOL.com, for all you blog trawling, address hunting webspiders out there.

Angry young SlipKnot lookalike miffed that his iMac can't play Celine Dion CD's. Film at 11.

Apparently, Eejits are unparliamentary. You've got to admire Sir James Kilfedder, former speaker for the Northern Ireland Assembly though. When asked whether or not it was in order for a Member to "act the eejit", he ruled "The Member is not acting." In case you're unsure on usage, here's an example courtesy of Father Ted's Father Dougal, and notes from the BBC.

Kids'n'Fun'n'Guns!

Now available for download: STD Defender 2002 Screensaver ...

"Test your skills at STD Defender while testing your knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases. As you zap the viruses and bacteria, information will pop up and show you what you need to know about STDs."

The Onion gets into the spirit of the Silver Jubilee of the Queen's Silver Jubilee:

It's not terribly well-written, nor does it even offer very interesting game-play, but at least it's in poor taste. Thanks, John.

Ever seen those war movies where the guy throws himself on a grenade to save his best buddies? Well, the new iMacs are just those kind of guys - to save you from a fate worse than death, they heroically expire by choking on your Celine Dion CD's. I can't wait to see the CGI Apple ad for that one!

Slipknot fans get more than they bargained for on-line - little old ladies!

Verisign

Remember those TV shows that Japan created that caused seizures? Remember Steve Ballmer prancing about the stage at a Microsoft meeting? Remember all those tabs of acid you took? All I can say is, "Developers!"

For all you iApple users, who don't believe that anything iCupertino has ever put out could be associated with iCrap, I give you the iToilet...

Further proof that verbing weirds language.

Worth a read - honest lawyers!

Ah, just what I always needed. I can turn my whole word into porn with just a few clicks of the mouse. See? Even the venerable Washington Post can be improved with a liberal use of cursewords and lewd sexual references.

You buy a house. A nice new house in a nice new development. It's a dream house. And then that dream turns into a nightmare when the Redneck Neighbor moves in next door.

So who actually thinks she got a trophy that looks like that for her golfing prowess, hmm?

Good article in the Onion this week: why do porn actors have to use such foul language? I also liked this Onion STATshot:

So, was Hef an Enron investor? Maybe he's just trying to recoup some of his investment...

Oh my god....Canadian soldiers killing people ??? We'd better form a
government committee to assess this situation.

Help! Hong Kong Bin Laden kill Hong Kong peoples with Brain voice read write machine!

This is a smear campaign, honest! We're the world's most peaceful nation, and anybody who believes otherwise is going to get their head pounded in...

I think you Yanks put us up to it, as everybody knows that we Canadian's can't just modify our Armored Personnel Snowmobiles to go on water..

Stupid stories from Corporate America, brought to us by the magazine that wrote a feature piece in the May 2002 issue that strikes near to all our blogging hearts.

Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.

In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."

"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."


Hmmm. Maybe Bush isn't such a bad politician after all. Maybe he is just another slimy snake. Seems like he is slowly moving our focus on to other things. That's not a bad strategy, but he didn't seem to effectively convey his message to the editors at the Washington Post. Not surprisingly, they've been nice enough to inform us that the US military didn't get the job done when it had the chance.

Shaun, you're slipping. You missed an opportunity to include a link in your posting about the TA's. Because of that, we don't know if you believe the "wax tadpole" story to be a true example of corporate cluelessness about naming products and the way those product names read overseas, or whether you're implying that the TA's story is, like the "wax tadpole" story, merely a bit of urban cokelore.

Similar examples, of course, include the story of the Chevy Nova, the Commodore VIC-20 (sold auf Deutschland as the VC-20, for Volkscomputer, supposedly because VIC sounds like a noun derived from the German verb wichsen, meaning "to wank") and the Toyota MR2 (sold, in France, under the name "MR", because it's literal pronunciation in French of "emm air duh" supposedly sounded a little too close to "merde").

Soon, he'll be banging away in a federal penitentiary and the "stick" in his hand may be someone else's...

Next time you're in a hurry and you need a snack, you might follow this guy's strategy.

Elizabethtown, KY. I've stayed here. It is a surreal piece of America which includes an IHOP that has been turned into a strip club (Goebles Girls Girls Girls), a cement building with no windows labeled "Beer" and another one labeled "Girls," and a gas station which had an ad that read "You're ugly, your car won't start, and your dog died. Buy beer here." From this fine city near Fort Knox, I give you a case of Victor / Victoria or more accurately, Victor v. Victoria.

Apparently, the "Always With You" posters I mentioned previously were a caption competition. Who knew?

Oh dear, another "bite the wax tadpole" I fear. The Territorial Army in the UK has launched a new campaign to get people fit - getfitta. Unfortunately, in Swedish, this apparently translates to "goat pussy". Still, as the TA does a lot of its training exercises in Wales, this might be a more accurate description.

Back to the conspiracies!

Jesus is a Ball Hog.

Someone needs to come up with a scam to raise us $78,000,000. How are we going to dominate the world in unparalleled luxury without one of these? Can you imagine how much fun you could have in one of these babies in the Florida Keys?

Damn! And there I was hoping G Dubya was the fictional president. If I was an American, I'd vote for Martin Sheen and it seems like some people think they already have.

So, what exactly *did* happen to the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11? Actually, howcome there's no conspiracy theory to go with all this evidence? Perhaps it's here...?

Ancient pagan monuments? You can shove 'em up your...

Onanism a problem in your household? Need some 24/7 guilt? Paper your teenager's room with the DIY Pope. Maybe you need a little christian guidance at work? No problem! Whatever your profession, Jesus is with you always...

Someone die owing you money? Offer to buy the tombstone...

Can't be bothered to read all the spam you get in the mail? Then why not listen to the best of it instead? Hey, I *want* 13ft ejaculations now!

This just in: intelligent, insightful conservative commentator William Quick calls Reprobates "excellent". What's interesting here is that his pithy description of our lil' blog (and, presumably, his readership thereof) preceeded by a matter of days my linking to an article on hisblog, the existence of which I had been hitherto unaware.

What else is interesting is that this is the first independent confirmation I've ever had that this blog has been read by anyone other than us editors of Reprobates!

William Quick's keen characterization of Reprobates as "excellent" in fact tells me that not only is he, as I mentioned before, intelligent and insightful, but he's also witty, attractive to members of the appropriate sex, athletically and academically gifted, able to "hold his drink" and hung like a horse. In short, a lot like you and me.

So, I was discussing this whole scary middle-East warmongering type thing with Dave, and his observation was that it may all be "just over anxious hypothesizing by guys that prefer to read Jane's over Playboy". That juxtaposition of ideas left me with the mental image of Frederick's of Kabul, and their new line of adult clothing - the crotchless burqa.

Remember, you read it here first.

Uhh ... ok. Here's another serious and scary one. Take this in conjunction with the game-theory article of last week and you might want to make sure you've got ammo for your personal defense battery and all your canned food is still good from Y2K.

This is just downright disturbing.

OK - this is more like it.

Now I finally have a use for that old 60MHz first-generation Power Mac I have sitting in the basement.

OK, I get the message. A lot of the stuff I've been posting has recently become all serious, scary, and ... boring. "Give us more tits!" you say. Very well. This article does indeed contain a "tit".

For those of yewww who wike to swearch the w-e-e-e-e-b with Google

I still remember the first time I saw her. The haunted look in her stunning green eyes pierced my soul. I had no idea who she was, or where she came from, save for a vague notion that she was from the Middle East or Indian subcontinent, and probably underage.

Her face was on on the cover of a National Geographic magazine that was used in a ad for subscriptions to the veritable organization's house journal.

Her name, as it turns out, is Sharbat Gula, and after an extensive search, Nat Geo has apparently found her (again). The intervening years in Afghanistan, it seems, have not been kind to her. Read it and weep, for the days when you might have wanted to see her in Maxim are now, I believe, far behind her.

Those Canucks. I never grow tired of reading about their strange behavior.

Positive crank phone calls.

Britain accidentally invades Spain: Film at 11.

"If you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful and unfathomable being five times a day, if you are constantly told that you live in the world of Satan, if those around you are ignorant of and impervious to literature, art, historical debate, and all that nurtures the values of Western civilization, your mind becomes susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots." More here. Thanks, JB.

More of the same, or so, can also be found here, and here (this last one is linked from muslimpundit.com - site motto "Going after starry pan-Islamic futurists with a rubber glove and a sharp stick". I like it)

Uhh ... interesting article, ya posted there Shaun. You also trying to woo the KKK vote? Check the site's home page, or, for that matter, some of the other chapters of the article.

"What kind of woman doesn't get wet when she sees a good-looking man working swiftly and competently on some heavy machinery, giving orders, or typing software code at light-speed with 10 different windows open, including the debugger?" - claims this guide

Here's a great idea for a startup: charge people for random insults. You could have the "raving lunatic service fee - $25", the "fuckwit surcharge - $50" or the "loser tariff. $75.99" Ken prefers the "whiny shit customer tax."

MSNBC attempts to woo the KKK vote. Complete with mugshot.

Check the reason this guy's selling a 100Gb hard drive. I wonder if he's got any *used* ones...

A hard-hitting look at auto racing. Best enjoyed with speakers and a nice chianti.

Evil is bad. Discuss.

Is this what you should expect for travelling with a rail company whose name indicates they won't go all the way. By the way, I am baffled. How can the circumstances described in the article occur?

The lord moves in ass kicking ways

Ah, Florida. Your crystalline blue waters, your sandy beaches, your dumb redneck evangelical Christian podunk hick-town two-bit mayors and their stupid ideas. Thanks, Tim.

Get your Enron on.

2 words: Lego Cthulu

Oooh - the ultimate off-road vehicle. Surprisingly, not Land Cruiser-based. Thanks, Jason.

Consider the following a reverse search engine. It finds everything you weren't looking for... and more. Best of all, everything here is useless.

In a bizarre case of life seemingly imitating "art" (I use the term advisedly), when I was reading Shaun's recent post, I got the distinct feeling I'd seen something of this sort before in the form of an urban legend. I checked urbanlegends.com and found a whole section on similar stories (although, to be fair, these variants all involve evisceration), including one specific story that seems almost to contain a direct refutation.

Personally, the SAS story just stretches my incredulity a little too far. I don't believe it. The same questions keep coming back to me - how did this woman flush the toilet in the first place (given that the flush handle is not easy to reach when seated, presumably for good reason), and how did she manage to block the opening so throughly that she got sucked in far enough to get stuck? I think she's faking. I think the only reason this didn't go the whole hog and become an evisceration story is that faking evisceration would have required just a little too much dedication.

Ooh, pass the preparation H.

What were they thinking? Nominet (the steward of the UK's internet domains) recently put up the new '.me.uk' domain. What happened? Well, http://www.fuck.me.uk/ and http://www.suck.me.uk/ for two. They're going for 40 quid a pop, and the guy that owns fuck.me.uk is selling subdomains. well.fuck.me.

Someone once told me that, for the sake of my own happiness, I should never to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. That said, those Texans are either some dumb motherfuckers, or else the worst kind of racist bigots. Or both. You make the call.

Also, Modern Humorist weighs in on the issue.

And now, race fans, for something completely different. Thanks, Chris.

Another question for the Pop quiz:

Q3) Who gets to choose the new Archbishop of Canterbury?

a) The head of the Church of England (i.e. the Queen)
b) A comittee of prominent figures in the church
c) The incumbent prime minister

A3) c) - Tony Blair! A man whose term is notionally 4 years gets to choose the leader of the predominant church in the UK for the next few decades. Whilst b) - the committee makes a list of recommendations, Tony is free to ignore them (as Mrs. Thatcher did when she appointed George Carey), and whilst a) - The Queen is supposed to make the final decision, she will do so only on the basis of what Tony recommends!

He'll be wanting to fill the House of Lords (the Senate's rough equivalent in the UK) with a bunch of New Labour cronies next. Doh!

OK boys and girls: Pop quiz.

Q1) Mr Nazir-Ali is one of the leading candidates for which official position in the UK?

a) Mayor of Birmingham
b) Leader of the Labor Party
c) Archbishop of Canterbury

A1) Yes! Archbishop of Canterbury

However:

Q2) His nomination is being opposed on which of the following grounds:

a) He's a Johnny Arab
b) He was born Muslim
c) He is a recovering Roman Catholic

To find the answer, read on ...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Congressman for the Second District of Minnesota, David Minge. For our U.S. (read: slang impaired) cousins, go look it up.

Your 50p keeps a right wing activist in employment for 1.8 seconds

If ever there was proof that there is no God:

And Saylor was feeling emboldened. "I feel that if I don't succeed," he was quoted saying in the New Yorker, "it's an abomination in the eyes of God."

"Moral dilemma"? What "moral dilemma"?