Irony, thy name is Father Dino Bottino - "your fictional character is fictional, but mine is real". Ooookaaay ...

Presenting new, improved Reprobates®-brand humorous blog - now with added bacon!

Paul, Serge - you guys got some 'splainin to do. Swaffelen.

Mmmm, Bacon.

Breakfast of Champions.

Santa's GMail inbox (thanks, Chris!)

The Onion presents a Series of Unfortunate Incidents.

UPDATE: Yet another.

UPDATE UPDATE: And yet another another.

Bush is resting comfortably at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

And now here's your daily dose of WTF, courtesy of Dhamma Media Channel, in which a singing crocodile dressed as a cowboy teaches you to meditate.

A cartoon cat, who looks not entirely unlike another well-known cartoon cat, does unspeakable things with his owner who looks a bit like, well, you know, and the dog, who also bears a certain resemblance to another well-known dog.

Barfield Loses His Lunch

You got crap taking up space? Toby Jones has got room for it!

O, Canada! Land of funny names and people who say "eh" a lot, eh?

My mostest favo(u)ritest funny Canuck place name is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, but it's also good fun to get Google Maps to show you the way from Dildo to Climax.

It's even longer if you go via Intercourse though.

A Christmas Story is a sweet, nostalgic family film from 1983, and one of my favo(u)rites. It's cute, and good-natured, and pretty funny, too. To mark the 25th anniversary of the film's release, you can bid (with the proceeds going to charity, natch) on the opportunity to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in the house where it was filmed. Of course, the house is in Cleveland, OH - so there's that.

"But why", you are asking yourself, "is this being posted here on Reprobates? What's reprobative about that?"

Glad you asked. Scroll down to the bottom (bottom - geddit?) of the page about the house and there's an ad for a Chinese restaurant near Cleveland called Pearl of the Orient which proclaims that it's all about the "Color - Aroma - Taste". What worries me is that the owners of the restaurant seem to have - without irony - chosen as their logo the obvious acronym based on the restaurant's name.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and Santa Claus likes the "Color - Aroma - Taste" of POO.

All your time travel medications needs can be found here. That is all.

Editing & compositing has come a long way since the days of Superman: The Movie - it's done on video for a start, it's affordable, and it's widely available. Check this out - you'll believe a manJohn McCain can flykrump.

Couple of quickies related to the company that, above all others, I really love to hate.

The first comes from an article on AppleInsider (exactly how she got an Apple inside 'er I'm not quite sure, but I digress) on Apple's progress towards a full 64-bit kernel with Snow Leopard. Here's the quote:

Mac OS X and Windows x64 software

Apple also developed a clean 'fat binary' method for delivering cross-platform binary code, including both 32-and 64-bit versions in a single app bundle, or binary package. On Windows, 32-bit and 64-bit code has to be installed separately. Supporting library files on 64-bit Windows have to be put into System32 (if they are 64-bit) or SysWOW64 (if they are 32-bit).

This apparent contradiction relates to the fact that Microsoft couldn't change the name of the Windows System32 directory (originally named to distinguish it from the 16-bit System directory) for compatibility reasons, and that SysWOW64 is the 64-bit process that runs 32-bit Windows apps in a compatibility mode on Windows x64, called WOW64 for 'Windows on 64-bit Windows.'

Isn't that classic Microsoft? Let me quote the jaw-dropping part again - Microsoft couldn't change the name of the Windows System32 directory - just beautiful, and almost as mind-numbingly stupid as money quote #2 - Supporting library files on 64-bit Windows have to be put into System32 (if they are 64-bit) or SysWOW64 (if they are 32-bit). Gnnnnnn!!!! No possibility for screwing that up, is there!

The visionary world-changing geniuses up in Redmond could not possibly have anticipated that the world would someday migrate away from 32-bit computing to 64-bit. After all, such a move is unprecedented. Oh, wait - no it's not. Who'd have thunk it?

The second piece of schadenfreude (German for "douche chill") comes from th'Onion - a wonderful little fake news article that is so funny because it rings so true, in everything from the description of the phenomenon to the spokesworm's attempts to deflect the blame to someone, something, heck, anything other than the Beast.

Maybe you should just Get a Mac.

Edward ScissorShitterhands

Yakety Sax is the funniest piece of music evar

Yakety Sax + anything = humor. The proof is here.

A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

So ... Sarah Palin ... where to begin?

Failin' Palin. Put her next to Joe Biden and see Sarah pale in comparison. Caribou Barbie. Churchy Spice. Her Facebook page (bonus - Bristol asks her to choose between two names for her first grandchild - Twix or Spatula). The Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator. Onion Point/Counterpoint. Sarah Palin vlogs (start here - there's a whole bunch more good stuff at 23/6)

OK, that's enough for now.

Life can often be stranger than fiction - after all, life doesn't have to make sense. After the US Federal prison system banned smoking in prison in 2004, removing snout as a form of currency, inmates have turned to other items for barter, chief among them mackerel.

Yes, mackerel.

Hardly surprising though, really - after all, you can smoke mackerel. Some people also can smoked mackerel.

I'll get me coat.

Ouch!

I have a friend for whom the mark of a good curry is to burn thrice: once on the way in, once when it's in there and once more on the way out. This guy appears to have forgotten the final phase.

Parenting advice on flickr

Jon Stewart, known primarily these days for The Daily Show, also had a memorable turn in the stoner movie Half Baked in which he played the Enhancement Smoker, someone for whom everything becomes more enjoyable when you're ON WEED.

Ten years on, the drug of choice for Enhancement Smokers is now Salvia divinorum, and the Enhancement Smoker du jour is the affable (and very, very high) Erik. Here are his instructional videos on how smoking salvia can affect Driving, Gardening, and Writing a Letter to Congress.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? Find out!

Need more cowbell?

Look no further - all your cowbell-augmentation needs can be met right here. Get it while it's hotRIAA hasn't shut it down.

So, what have they been putting in our water to create rainbows from our sprinklers?

Must be the electrolytes.

What the heck is "spacetime fusion"? It's SCIENCE!

(Thanks Serge!)

Business Guys on Business Trips - sorta like We The Robots meets Get Your War On, which is a Good Thing.

(* - Not affiliated with Reprobates® brand humorous blog)

Fake Windows pop-under browser hijack spam FAIL.

This pop-under ad, complete with carefully-crafted "warning pop-up", appeared on my desktop recently - I love how they went to so much trouble to make it look exactly like a Windows error message, but didn't actually bother to check what OS I was browsing on.

But, hey, better safe than sorry, right? After all, Ebola, Marburg, Avian Flu, they've all made the species jump ...

As they say on Fark, "useless without pics", the key word here being 34FF.

When a small crane gets into trouble, you can always bring along a bigger crane to help it out.

So what do you do when a big helicopter gets into trouble? Why, you bring along an even bigger one!

This Flickr photo set is full of AWESOME and WIN. Also, ducks.

Cunt brings the art of anything

(OK, it's machine translation from Finnish to English, but still ...)

FAIL

I'm formatting a big hard drive at the moment so found myself at a bit of a loose end. Seems the guys over at failblog.org are Reprobates at heart - kind of a pictorial litany of failure. I especially liked this particular piece of design:

I Love Country Music

Of course I don't really. File under the "Damn, I wish I had thought of that" category.

Quick like a bunny, now - this - parody or the real thing?

(BTW - it's the real thing)

Kasparov harassed by remote-control helicockter.

Great tits cope well with warming

One day when you're at work and sober, get together with a sober work colleague and go see your boss - may be a good time to ask for a raise.

More go than whoa (unless you mean in the Keanu Reeves sense) - but still, whoa ...

But wait! There's more!

When you were a kid, did you own an Atari 2600? No, neither did I. Still, this is funny ...

FIRE FIRE!

Sorry Mr. Heater but you're yesterday's flame.

Heat your heart out

Super SizeHigh Me.

Bono estente! Hethethethethethe hethethethethethetheth, Sminki-pinki Disco lessons in Finnish. Boutros boutros ghali!

Hedgehog bomb? Hedgehog bomb!

Ass Pennies for confidence.

Following several lawsuits Microsoft finally open-sourced some of the code to Vista.

It explains much.

Ninja pu-riso!

Horsepital

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."

Goodnight, funnyman.

BeingBathing John Malkovich [NOT HOMO-EROTICIST]

When nature calls

"Does this toilet make my ass look fat?"

Headlines - love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay!

The BBC News site currently has a headline rivalling the NY Post's classic "Headless Body Found In Topless Bar", that reminds us all that there's none so blind as those that won'tcan't see.

... and cue study rebutting this one is 3 ... 2 ... 1

Of course, if it were accepted for distribution like mainstream medicines, it would have to include disclaimers such as:
Side effects include: lowered inhibitions and standards, loss of motor control, loss of motor car control, loss of driving license. Some users have reported that prolonged use results in them breaking out in handcuffs. Ask your barman if this product is right for you.

The Front Fell off

Bjørk vs. Diddy

Liberty Fillmore is The Cart Whisperer.

Today's "No Shit, Sherlock!" award goes to Italian doctor Maria Cerruto whose ground-breaking research suggests that High heels 'may improve sex life'.

In a planned followup, the good doctor is expected to also reveal that human female breasts are not only functional in providing nourishment for infants, but that, among certain subcultures, are also considered decorative in their own right.

Dave Secretary writes funny stories in (with one exception, towards the bottom) ALL CAPS, so they are easy to find when you're scrolling fast, as well as being all the more AWESUM for it.

He also draws poorly, with a bad drawing tool, and produces shite cartoons which he nonetheless protests "are gold", which is half-right. In fact, his deadpan blow-by-blow expositions of the cartoons' subject matter and the putative "joke" told therein are (mostly) gold - the cartoons themselves? See for yourself.

When I was seven years old, I remember approaching the radio with trepidation whenever it was switched on, for when it was on, it might start playing a particular song that made me very sad, and which I hated. The song was Terry Jacks' maudlin, saccharine and thoroughly weepy "Seasons in the Sun", although, to be honest, even though I had divined that the song was about someone dying, I really thought the title referred to seasons that had been spent living, literally, in the Sun, much as one lives in, say, London, or Wagga Wagga. But I digress.

So anyway, I was in Harper's Ferry yesterday and I stopped in at a coffee shop for a thoroughly nasty coffee, an experience which was made truly transcendently awful by the radio's insistence on wailing on and on about how we had had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun ... and of course I was transported back to 1974 and all that entailed. I quietly took my leave soon afterward and surreptitiously dumped the remainder of the dismal coffee in a trash can. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to jettison the lingering sonic memory of Jacks' lachrymose lament, and for the next 24 hours, that song buzzed around my head, occasionally swapping places with one of the other two songs that are stored in the same part of my brain.

Those other two songs, incidentally, are Billy Don't Be A Hero (or should that be an hero?) - understandable, since it was released in the same year - and, perhaps, less explicably, R. Dean Taylor's Indiana Wants Me. A friend of mine refers to this kind of apparently localized recall as the "cloud", and I think it fits. Those three songs, for me, are close together in the cloud.

So anyway, I decided to do a bit of googling and see if I could figure out anything about this cluster of songs, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I found a lot more hits for the Jacks' monstrosity than for the other two combined, and while I was combing through the SitS pages, I found something that made it all worthwhile - gearchange.org, which explains, among other things, exactly why SitS is so particularly gruelling to listen to.

Back in the summer of aught-four, I posted the following in relation to really black stuff:

None more black?

but in these more enlightened days, and since "they" now seem to have invented something even blacker, what can I say but:

Blacker than black

My only concern here is that the word 'ever' is hardly ever justified in these circumstances, and for the most part, we'd all be better off if they used a word that has more chance of being correct in the long term: 'yet'

Yes, as in 'yet black'.


Thank you, and goodnight.

Er, stewardess...?

Is it supposed to do that?