Bacon

Baconbaconbaconbaaaaccoooonnnn. Bacon. Just add bacon.

Because many of the things I'm about to say regarding Reprobates have already been beaten into the ground, I will try to keep this letter short. For starters, I recently overheard a couple of unbalanced snobs say that homophobic bloodsuckers have dramatically lower incidences of cancer, heart attacks, heart disease, and many other illnesses than the rest of us. Here, again, we encounter the blurred thinking that is characteristic of this Reprobates-induced era of slogans and propaganda. The only way that we can fight Reprobates, the only way we can beat it, is to begin the debate about its grievances. To a lesser degree and on a smaller scale, I fully intend to reveal the constant tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces of dialogized heteroglossia resulting from its fibs. That's the path that I have chosen. It's doubtlessly not an easy path but then again, I call upon Reprobates to stop its oppression, lies, immorality, and debauchery. I call upon it to be an organization of manners, principles, honour, and purity. And finally, I call upon it to forgo its desire to sweep its peccadillos under the rug.

In a Reprobates-led society, people who keep our priorities in check will be suppressed, vilified, hated, imprisoned, exiled, and killed. Why is that relevant to this letter? Because all Reprobates really wants is to hang onto the perks it's getting from the system. That's all it really cares about. Many of Reprobates's morals have been criticized for being slanted in favor of a particular stance. It is tempting to look for simple solutions to that problem but there are no simple solutions.

I have one itsy-bitsy problem with Reprobates's philosophies. Videlicet, they stand in the way of progress. And that's saying nothing about how you might say, "Social stability and family unity are two things that mad sad sacks have no concern for." Fine, I agree. But if you were to try to tell its acolytes that anyone who questions its warped view of the world is a threat to its tottering sense of reality, they'd close their eyes and put their hands over their ears. They are, as the psychologists say, in denial. They don't want to hear that Reprobates has remarked that it should be a given a direct pipeline to the National Treasury. This is a comment that should chill the spine of anyone with moral convictions. To make sure you understand I'll spell it out for you. For starters, if you look back over some of my older letters, you'll see that I predicted that Reprobates would feed us ever-larger doses of its lies and crackpot assumptions. And, as I predicted, it did. But you know, that was not a difficult prediction to make. Anyone who has bothered to learn even a little about Reprobates could have made the same prediction. Reprobates has had it easy all its life. There, my ranting is finished.

Behold, the Complaint-O-Matic!

Ryanair is thinking of charging its passengers to use the toilets while in flight. What could possibly go wrong?

Meet my new shordurpersav: Tucker Max.

Thanks again, Jeff!

Duct tape - now available in nuclear grade!

Bacon is over as an Internet meme, the pirateninjazombies craze is officially "tired" - how are hipsters and /b/-tards alike going to get their yuks on next?

My prediction: sumo wrestlers. Thanks, Jeff!

A møøse ønce bit my sister ...

Something just can't be made funny

Even Yakety Sax failed us.

As a corollary, other renditions aren't terribly amusing either.

$0.002 = ¢ 0.002 "if you look at them on paper-wise"

The braintrust at Verizon talking cash cash money.

Star Trek: The Next Next Generation - Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

HI THERE BILLY MAYS HERE FOR THIS GREEN & WHITE EPOXY PUTTY SHIT

Farewell, George!

GBSF. That is all.

Michelle and Barack do what together now?

Hey, I don't care what you do in private but it seems odd to broadcast it on the news ... especially on Fox "News" ... in Detroit ... on live TV.

Ben & Jerry create "Yes Pecan!" ice cream flavor for Obama. For George W. they created ...

Dear Neighbour,
you are not invited to my party

Awesome collection of really useful Unix admin scripts - link.

Mike Rowe, star of Discovery's Dirty Jobs, used to hawk all kinds of things on QVC.

Including, it seems, the best-named product EVAR.

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?

Say Clem?

Yeauh?

Ya dun seen Jim Bob's new limuzeen"?

yeauh. Shur is suweet.

yep. Wish'n ah hayd wunudem fer me, the missus and all the june'yers.

yeauh.

(they) can count your money...

What's scary is that, based on the latest polling numbers, there are approxmiately 50,000,000 idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who would cheer an idea such as this.

Anyone know the citizenship requirements for Australia? . Sure they're hated by most of Asia but that would be a huge step up from here.

Déja vu: a recent xkcd webcomic recapitulates my own Leopard upgrade experience.

Attention WalMart Shoppers!

Their prices just can't be "beat". 

Believe it or not, reading Reprobates requires college-level reading skills. It says so on the Internet, so it must be true.

So Amazon has announced its e-book reader, the Kindle. This means I can now spend $400 on a device so that I can then buy books in softcopy for $10 each rather than, say, $20-$25 for real, actual books. The real draw of this thing though is supposedly its abilty to hold 200 or more books and enable you to carry them around with you - this is a good thing if you're tired of having to trundle around a wheelbarrow with you to carry your physical book collection with you.

I'm not sure who the target demographic is, but the video overview shows someone who could be a student carrying the thing around. That makes sense on one level, because I remember carrying at least 187 books with me between classes when I was in college. Actually, no I don't, because I didn't. I carried maybe one or two books with me, tops, and a notepad. "Ah!" you say, "But college textbooks are reeeeeally expensive, so this thing gives instant payback!" which, yeah, it might if a) college textbooks were available for purchase in softcopy and b) college students weren't able to buy all the textbooks they need second-hand from last year's users for, you know, $10. Plus - show me the college student, who, given $400, wouldn't immediately turn it into mad quantities of weed, beer and Ramen, possibly not in that order.

It has what looks to be one piece of cool technology, which is the display technology and which is touted to be almost as good as real paper! - for $400. Yeah.

So then what of the device's aesthetics and its behavioral design? Jeff Bezos' stated design goal is to make "Kindle disappear in your hands", as in, have the experience be as immersive as a (real) book. I can see what he means by saying a real book does this, but my larger concern would be over reading this thing in public where it may well literally disappear from your hands - along with your wallet, cell phone, iPod and any other valuables. But then you watch the video demonstration and, right there at 1:01 in, the dreaded phrase "page turn buttons" (emphasis mine, but it hardly matters) surfaced, and my heart sank. I was thinking - oh, hey, page turn gesture, like the iPhone ... but no. Stinkin' buttons. It gets worse - "Use the select wheel when you want to choose an item on the page or menu". Groan. So much for immersive, and disappearing in your hands. Plus, one other little kicker - "the display doesn't use backlighting, so just like paper, it's as easy to read outside in bright sunlight as it is inside your living room or office" - and, just like paper, is illegible unless you have pretty strong frontlighting. Again, the iPhone (and other devices) have already solved this problem - it's called a transreflective LCD, and it works very nicely.

To sum up - FAIL. As a device, ironically, I believe, because it doesn't have enough advanced technology in it - no touch screen, no colo(u)r (thus no killer app), and no transreflective goodness. As a cultural artifact, it will also FAIL because, oh yeah, FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS.

But, hey, go ahead. Be a good American, buy several of these things and use them in the manner suggested by the device's name, and also by the residents of the state next door to mine who refer to "books" by a different word.

Nerd (red) alert.

Can not move bowels in the urine the pond.

Bi(ke)sexual

Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward.

Paging Paul - paging Paul. Boy, you got some 'splainin to do - "Fart in the Duck".

Unfeasibly large

The MTV show Pimp My Ride (not to be confused with that other show, Ride My Pimp) has spawned a video game that, apparently, and not surprisingly, "sucks".

So anyway, before I found the scathing review referenced above, I followed a number of useless links served up by Google in response to the query string pimp my ride wii review, most of which were pages talking about a review of the game, or which contained the keywords in otherwise unrelated contexts, but eventually I hit gold.

Yes, our old friend keyword-driven advertising strikes again, and this time the lucky company is BizRate.com, a pretty reputable p2p business ratings site, where somehow the keywords noted above translated into the following howler:

... but apparently they didn't stop watching even once they figured out the movie was about a very different kind of Pajama Game.

In American media, hearing the words "a very special episode of ..." before this week's episode of your favourite sitcom-slash-drama means that said show is about to jump the shark and become crap.

In British media, it apparently means your favourite newspaper column is about to end with the word "cunt".

REMEMBER KIDS CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL AND TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!

I wanna talk to you about the Cannonball Run - no, not that Cannonball Run, this one, the one the movie was based on. See, it's a real thing - or at least, it was a real thing, but now there's also the Gumball 3000, and that's also hella fake, so what's real any more? Where's the real Two-Lane Blacktop-style outlaw driver action?

I'll tell you where it is - right here, buddy. And here, but most especially here, and here.

"It's hard to be a Don Juan...

...when you've got a chinchilla on your..." SFW? Maybe... Music video is a treat and the test drive is worth trying for the n00b.

Fun with automatic reference generation - nice title this guy has (yes, I was looking for my own name, no, I'm not in there). Bonus points for the way the title was (incorrectly) inferred from the borderline-patronizing usage as applied to the "Equipment Maintainer" in the next paragraph, in an apparent "local boy made good" kinda reference.

(POSTING REDACTED)

"There's no way I'll work with Jennica again. I was really shocked what that cunt said to me."