Hillary, Please Stop: A Plea for Unity

15 May 2008 by machpie

From my hometown:

David Harpe makes a plea for unity because Hillary just won’t stop…


My entry:

And this one…

Crimes of Irony…

14 May 2008 by machpie

I drove home from a meeting at work this afternoon, and pulling into my drive noticed somebody had left a leaflet in my mailbox.  “Oh neat,” I remarked to myself, “somebody climbed all the way up my front steps to litter in my mailbox…”  (The mail wouldn’t have run yet).  What fun.

So as I’m walking to the front door I’m mulling over the nature of the (supposedly) Federal crime of leaving anything but mail in a mailbox.  I grab the offending propaganda, and it turns out to be–wait for it–an official Louisville Metro Police Department Crime Prevention Information tract!  And right on the front is the number for the Crime Tip Hotline.  If I call it in, think they’ll arrest themselves…?

Fire! A (Supposedly) True Story

9 May 2008 by machpie

I wasn’t there, but this was presented to me as a true story:

My friend Jeff started working in the kitchen at a nursing home with his buddy Bill.  Jeff and Bill are cooking away, when Jeff notices one of the fryers has ignited.  He asks Bill what they should do.  Bill’s response follows: 

 

Good friends are hard to find…
And good fiends are hard to fry…
Especially when the fryer is a conflagration.
Roast, sure, no problem, but frying under those conditions…? Fuh’gid aboud’it.
 

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, I made this up.
Yes, you can re-post it or link to it; please just credit it to me.

Citizenry Against Live Veggie Eating and Slaughter

8 May 2008 by machpie

Throw a steak in the fridge.  Leave it there for a month.  What happens?  Decay, maybe some animal husbandry at the insect scale, and probably a fungus farm of some sort.

Now get a bag of carrots.  Throw it in the fridge and a month later?  A miracle!  Life renewing itself!  Tiny tendrils of roots stretching, reaching, grasping for nutrients.  Tiny sprouts of greenery, yearning for the sunlight.  That carrot is alive!

Remember: eat a raw carrot, and you’re eating a live carrot!  Rrrrawwr!

 

 

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, I made this up.
Yes, you can re-post it or link to it; please just credit it to me.

Abbot & Costello Mini-Homage

7 May 2008 by machpie

Gotta ask…did anybody catch the A&C reference in the Baked! Ruffles post…?

If you haven’t a clue what the hell I’m on about, edumicate yourself at the Baseball Almanac’s Who’s on First page.  Seriously, one of the greatest comedy routines of all time. Audio here.

Still more lithographic comedy:

6 May 2008 by machpie

Think we have it rough trying to borrow someone’s cell phone when our’s loses juice? Put yourself in this guy’s shoes…

Public Domain Image from public-domain.zorger.com, Welcome Aboard from the 1881 book A Voyage in the Sunbeam, by Annie Allnut Brassey.

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, I made this up.
Yes, you can re-post it or link to it;
please just credit it to me.

You cooked those, How? Naturally…

6 May 2008 by machpie

So I scored a Free! bag of Baked! Ruffles® today. One of the ladies I do handywork for bought them by mistake and laid them on me (Layed them on me…?). Pretty good deal, I think, y’know, being free and all.

Actually, I like the Frito Lay line of Baked/Low-fat/Organic snack-ums. Except for the Cheetos, I think they’re as good or better than their standard, fried counterparts. Plus I can pretend I’m being healthy when I devour an entire sack of chips…

But here’s the funny bit: I just noticed that the full name of the snack item in question is: Baked! Ruffles® Original Naturally Baked Potato Crisps. Naturally baked? Really? Like, they laid them out on hot rocks in the desert? Or got them really toked up on some primo weed?

Seriously? Baked naturally? Is it just me, or aren’t all methods of cooking kind of…unnatural. I mean short of handing a Holstein a golf club during a thunderstorm and hoping for the best, isn’t cooking kind of inherently artificial?

I suppose certain arguments could be made for fermentation and dehydration. Throw an apple out in your backyard. A nice restaurant at first, but wait for it to turn to cider. Bug City just got a brand new bar and it’s name is Oh, Hell Yeah! Bees and wasps just go nuts for some juiced apple juice. And Dried! Jerkee-Yum: Naturally Baked Carrion Crisps? What dog/possum/vulture/etc could resist?

But since the Frito Lay probably makes about, I don’t know, a gazillion bags of these things a day, think they really have time to wait for nature to takes it’s course? That’s a helluva lot of little flat rocks in the desert sun.

Besides, even if they laid ‘em out all nice and neat somewhere in the Sonora, sure bet some damn scorpion on his way home from Juan’s Fermented Agave Palace would stumble across them and whammo! there they’d all go. Seriously, that’d have to be like the invertebrate equivalent of Krispy-Kreme®

And then there were Seven…

4 May 2008 by machpie

The original list featured only Six Deadly Sins

Woodcut from Gode Cookery Presents: Medieval Woodcuts Clipart Collection
Jacob’s Ladder; from Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Augsburg 1477.
“I think this is my own idea, but I also fully acknowledge that there are no original thoughts.” ~Repeticus Aurelius, 1358

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, I made this up.
Yes, you can re-post it or link to it; please just credit it to me .

Hurtling Screaming into the Future: Lithograph Comedy, ed. 1

2 May 2008 by machpie

The history of Exploration is a long and varied one. Fortunately, whole armies of engravures were standing by, ready to etch the whole thing at a moment’s notice…

“I think this is my own idea, but I also fully acknowledge that there are no original thoughts.” ~Repeticus Aurelius, 1358

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, I made this up.Yes, you can re-post it or link to it; please just credit it to me .

Sharing the Wealth:

2 May 2008 by machpie

In case you missed it on juergen_hubert’s Journal (which is pretty damn likely, since he’s over at the okc): Enough is Enough: A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianism by Aaron Diaz


In response to Too good not to share by juergen_hubert:

Enough is Enough: A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianism

Excerpt:

Here we see Klomp’s predictions descend from unsupported speculation to sheer fantasy. His recent cave painting, The Quickening is Near, explains in great detail different methods we may employ to transform words into some kind of visible format, but all are incomplete. The simple fact remains that words are sounds, not pictures, and no amount of wishing will change that. Even if such a thing were possible, it is doubtful that many would wish to store their memories externally. This author, for one, would prefer it if his memories stayed in his head and not on some cold, lifeless bark.

My favorite excerpt: Do we really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27-year-olds? In living so long and spending so much time ‘thinking,’ do we not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)?

This guy and Randall Munroe
(the guy behind xkcd) are doing the real work…

*sigh*

Sometime I feel just like lil’ Ollie Funt in the shadow of too many great Opuses… (if you know what that means without looking it up, I <3 you a little bit forever…)