It just struck me that you could probably divide the solid majority of Americans into people who primarily get their dose of news, politics, and opinion from The Daily Show and those who get it from South Park.
And then I couldn’t decide if this is another sign of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization or, getting down to the numbers and the historical quality of news sources, actually an improvement.
It seems that if I’m going to go with the will of the people, I have no choice but to write about the all-time most popular search string we ever get. So be it.
Although they have been a truly enduring fixation of humanity, the presence and purpose of the female breasts remain something of a puzzle and a source of speculation to evolutionary biologists and anthropologists. While all mammals have mammary glands and most of them have nipples that swell into teats when there are nursing young, the female human is the only one that has permanently swollen teats from puberty on. There are plenty of reasons for women NOT to have breasts; they’re unwieldly, metabolically expensive (as completely unnecessary fatty tissue), and when they’re particularly large, they cost their owners a good deal of pain due to the back strain of having what amounts to a pair of weights up front day in and out. They don’t even need to be larger than average to make running more problematic for a woman than they are for the average man. What’s even worse, they’re prone to cancer- and there isn’t even a nursing advantage for offspring in large breasts; it makes things only more awkward for the infant and mother alike. The question of why we’re saddled with them is therefore more compelling than it would be for a feature with fewer costs. It’s trivially obvious that breasts carry a large sexual selection advantage for the female, but why?
It’s a warm, happy spring day, the birdies are singing, the lumber is arriving, and where my thought process should be is the same sound you get when you hold your ear up to a seashell.
So, since I tend to work better when given some form of guidelines, because what I thought would turn out to be more read/commented on than others never is what actually IS, and just for the sake of trying a new way to punt: what SHOULD we write about? Ranting or wonking improv on demand… at least, as best as we can muster.
Think of it this way- the next inevitable step if this doesn’t work is us dressing Kodos and Kang in humiliating outfits and photographing them, which is more likely to lead to our untimely deaths than wild success…
*And for the purposes of this experiment, I’m going to pretend that it’s NOT simply because she’s a thousand times more popular than we are… and justifiably so.
(Inspired by Tam. Also, it may say I posted this, but it was a collaboration with frequent changes in manning the keyboard.)
*click*
“Tonight on “Retarded Jobs” watch as Jim-Bob swims naked through the Bering Sea while chained to a prime 100′ tall tree to shovel pig shit in Russia and pick up crab traps with his pecker on the way to - ”
*click*
“And if you leave before my arms, which are WAY too muscular for a guy who stands around and waves all day for a living while shouting, drop, then the other guy gets the race and this giant vein on my forehead will jump out and beat your ass until Nate decides if the race was - ”
*click*
“Hi, I’m Redhead McDouchebag and I’m here to embarrass the chefs of your home town!”
*click*
“Tonight on Bullshit History, did aliens build the Pentagon? Did the Reptilians have a hand in the creation of 9/11 Truthers? Did Katie Couric really shove -”
*click*
“Next on Wild Reality, we’ll be sending a celebrity and a few dozen nameless sidekicks to find the last unpestered big cat in this branch of the Milky Way. Join us for this never-before footage and speculation about whether the Jewel-Spangled Pouncer can survive having its home address broadcast globally-”
*click*
“Coming up next on Places You Can’t Afford To Go, we’ll be sending this hot chick to enjoy drinks on the beach, and this stringy middle-aged guy to eat lobster nostrils and contract a tropical disease for your amusement. Tonight only, featuring a special clebrity guest chef to bitch about the depressing existential ramifications of drinking with hot chicks and eating lobsters halfway around the world.”
*click*
“Welcome to the Rugged Channel. This afternoon, we have these guys we paid to go hunting, these other guys we paid to go fishing, and one or two more that we paid purely to make sure the sponsor gets mentioned at least fifty times per half hour. In the evening, we’ll have young men on angry livestock.”
*click*
“Now you might think a stand mixer is a complicated and expensive piece of kitchen gear, but with a little science and this disposable ballpoint pen I’ll show you how you can avoid the unitasker and build your own planetary gear -”
*click*
“As he’s dropped into the wilderness with nothing more than an insane credit limit and a film & safety crew of dozens to survive…”
*click*
“..and unless we get this profile perfect down to the color of shoes he’s wearing our writers may have to actually learn something about guns or the culture outside of major cities because - ”
*click*
“Woo! I’m a dumbass!” “I’m a hot chick!” “I’m a dumbass!” “I’m a hot chick!” “I’m a dumbass” “I’m - WOAH FREAKY SHIT!”
*click*
“We find once again that judicious application of hipness and dramatic camera cuts to the problem immediately reveals a solution…”
*click*
“It’s time for Young Adult Hour, where each and every show has been carefully focus-tested to meet the attention span and continuity needs of stoned college students.”
*click*
“Welcome to the Metrosexual Network, where we show YOU just how stressful and dramatic it is to be rich and incredibly attractive!”
*click*
“These yuppies are about to learn that breaking a sweat sometimes produces profitable results. Will their manicures and relationships with their therapists survive?”
*click*
“And when elected, I will TAKE those profits and -”
*CRASH*
Here are some simple signs you might recognize to note that your wild-eyed days of thrill-seeking youth are dwindling:
1. When the bank informs you that you’ve paid too much into escrow for the last year and sends you a check, your shopping list has fewer battery-operated gizmos from EOTech, or heat-generators from nVidia, or even go-fast gizmos from Jeg’s and more things like “32′ of chainlink, 15 2″x4″x8′ studs, 100′ rabbit fence… ‘Hey honey? If there’s anything left over do you mind if I finally get some new boots? These are getting some holes big enough to read through.'”
2. You realize that you deal with the bank that much and have an escrow account.
3. It occurs to you that you couldn’t waste the check on hookers and blow even if you wanted to, because you don’t know where they are anymore.
Oh well. Once we finally get a roof on the wood shed and plant some grass in the dust-bowl out back maybe there’ll be enough left that I can run Cat6 cable to every room like I’ve been planning…
Remember the hilarious Onion video in which an Al-Qaeda representative gets pissed off at a 9/11 Troofer for stealing the credit from AQ and giving it to the U.S. government? No? It was really funny; here’s a refresher:
9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says
Anyway, it turns out satire has already been outrun by reality. AQ is accusing the Iranians (Shiite) of spreading conspiracy theories that Israel is behind 9/11 in order to undermine AQ (Sunni).You can’t make this stuff up, folks. It’s also a good illustration of how profoundly self-centered- dare I say it, parochial and arrogant- the Troofer outlook is: it automatically discredits the poor little brown folk as not being capable of doing something that clever and effective. Therefore, WE must have done it… in the outlook from over the sea, the finger falls on the other all-powerful boogeyman, the JEWS.
Via John Ringo.
So in the process of working up a good head of steam about the RailRunner and anything else stupid at which I could turn a few hostile brain cells, it was noted that our Friday Night in Los Alamos Kit (beer) was rather low. By luck of the draw, today I happened to be wearing one of my favorite shirts for when I don’t give a damn if someone is offended (or when I give even less of a damn than usual). Standing in line while the soccer mom ahead of me gathered her uterine dumplings kids and reassembled her overnight bag purse I hear a question directed at me from the bag boy not involving “paper or plastic?”
“Hey, are those Colts?” he asked, gesturing at my shirt. I looked down.
“Some of ‘em,” I replied, “but there’s something for everybody.”
“That’s cool. I thought I saw some 1911s on there.” At this point, I was caught off guard.
“Well of course there are!” chimed in the early-20s cashier, a petite female who couldn’t weigh more than 115 soaking wet as she gestured at the appropriate locations on my chest. “How can you have any sort of decent collection of pistols without at least one 1911?”
Y’know, after the rest of that conversation I think I can hold off with the scorched-earth mindset for a while.
Not content with having spent about half a BILLION (and counting) on the pointless and severely misguided “eco-friendly” RailRunner light passenger train between Santa Fe and Albuquerque in order to move a few hundred people over the last 8 months or so, the construction crews involved in this corrupt kickback-athon decided to make things more directly abysmal by cutting a fiber optic trunk. As it so happens, it was the trunk carrying the data to and from our little nerd ranch.
To say we are unamused would be like saying a man struck by lightning is feeling a bit under the weather. It may be accurate, but it doesn’t quite do the situation justice. Ranting to follow once we finish clearing the bit & byte backlog generated during the downtime.
I know I’m a day late and a dollar short, as usual, but this year it took me a bit of head-scratching to figure out specifically what was pissing me off about filthy hippy gaia hugging circlejerk day. Was it the hippies? No, that couldn’t be. Much like Eric Cartman, my hatred for hippies cannot become more intense without physically manifesting itself as a glowing orb which would follow me around occasionally bellowing things like “BRING ME THE HEAD OF ED BEGLEY JUNIOR!” or “MARTIN SHEEN MUST BE PUNISHED IN THE FLAMES OF A THOUSAND POUNDS OF STYROFOAM!” Could it be the child-logic driving such inanity as “If we recycle six pounds of plastic we’ll make enough of a difference to effect($change)”? No, that sort of thing never made me do more than roll my eyes. The protests? Maybe I’m sheltered, but I haven’t seen a protest yet that couldn’t be navigated with a few sharp elbows.
“So what, pray tell, is actually drawing your ire this year?” you ask. This year, it’s the popular slogan they’re using to push this shit.
“You are here.
You will never be anywhere else.
Take care of it.”
If this isn’t the “official” (“in that we agree to a common consensus of non-offensive but not mandatory or hierarchically agreed upon oppression of free expression of the sentiment of….”) slogan for gaia-circlejerk day, too bad. I’ve seen that distillation in more than a couple spots, and each time it has preceded a healthy burst of colorful invective laced with specific suggestions for the hippies to follow, anatomical improbability be damned.
“You will never be anywhere else.”
And some people have the sheer fucking brass clankers to call ME a pessimist? If the shit you’re smoking makes you really think this then you are doing it WAY wrong. Last I heard, that stuff was called “happy herb” among its myriad names for a reason. If instead of thinking “man, we like, totally have people booking flights to space man! Mars is just around the corner man!” you think “Man, we’re never getting off this rock. We’d better all go back to the native American harmony-with-earth* style, man because we’re never leaving, man!” then you either need to go beat your dealer’s ass, or get a job as an insurance adjuster.
I know there isn’t a lot of room for brain function between the never-ending search for cheetos and whatever ganglion-driven process it is that makes patchouli so appealing to this crowd to allow for any sort of any sort of higher math or powers of observation, but I’ve got some news: we’re pretty well along to being Somewhere Else already. We’re not there yet, but it’s getting close. Unless you’re some old fart that took cowering to a cave when those big flaming sky-birds launched the little beeping tennis ball, we WILL be somewhere else. And probably soon enough that the dumbfuck hippies that came up with that monument to ludditism will be sitting around trying to figure a way to keep the water in the bong in microgravity thinking “Man, remember when we said we’d never be anywh- hey, cheetos!”
Now someone bring me the head of Ed Begley Jr. already.
*Just don’t get me started. Just don’t.
Lawdog displays the latest edition in the inexorable march of the image macro to cause him to laugh uncontrollably. I sympathize; I laughed like hell the first time I saw Hitman Monkey, I did last night when Stingray found it elsewhere, I did when I saw it at Lawdog’s, and I suspect that even after nuclear winter, if you showed it to my half-dead corpse, you’d still get a bit of a giggle out of my carcass.
That said, the all-time internet champion of this effect on me is this image:
I have no idea who originally created it. I know only that I saw it first years ago, that it made me nearly collapse on my keyboard laughing, and that it still has the exact same effect on me no matter where I encounter it. I don’t know why it’s so funny, especially when the same pun in other contexts has left me cold. It remains the mysterious Humor Atom Bomb of my soul.
