Don't forget your Super Bowl bingo card today http://t.co/0hmeWeMIT9 pic.twitter.com/fA2UvlF9qv
— SB Nation NFL (@SBNationNFL) February 2, 2014
Update: Seattle, you’re drunk. Go home.
Seattle has lost its mind: Skittles-smothered Brie. For Super Bowl Sunday. Because beige vomit is for wimps. pic.twitter.com/QEbz2rcdsw
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) February 1, 2014
Part of a continuing series of reporting American events in the way American media reports foreign events:
This Sunday, the eyes of millions of Americans will turn to a fetid marsh in the industrial hinterlands of New York City for the country’s most important sporting event — and some would say the key to understanding its proud but violent culture.
Despite decades of exposure to the outside world through trade and globalization, Americans have resisted adopting internationally popular sports like soccer, cricket, and kabaddi, preferring instead a complex, brutal, and highly mechanized form of rugby confusingly called football. (Except for in a couple of instances, feet do not touch the ball.)
The two finest teams from the nation’s 32 premier league squads meet each year in an event known as the Super Bowl. (There is in fact no bowl.) This year, the game pits a young upstart team from the Northwest Frontier Provinces against another from the mountainous interior region led by the aging scion of one of the sport’s most legendary families. The winner of the contest will claim the title of “world champion,” although very few people play the sport beyond the country’s national borders.
Although the rules are complex — this video [embedded below] offers a brief overview — in broad strokes the contest involves two large teams of large men wearing large amounts of protective padding attempting to move an oblong ball down a 91.44-meter field by either throwing it or running with it while their opponents attempt to knock them to the ground with maximum force.
You can always trust Duffelblog to give you the latest US military news:
Marines Convert To Norse Paganism, Demand Horns And Wings On Helmets
CAMP LEJEUNE, NC — An entire rifle squad which has converted to Asatru, or Northern European Heathenry, has expressed disappointment in new Pentagon dress code requirements claiming religious exemptions to military uniform standards are not inclusive enough.
The Asatru devotees complain they are not allowed to wear their religious clothing in uniform unlike Sikh, Muslim, and Jewish members. Focused on historical Norse paganism, the Marines want to affix horns and wings on their helmets in order to accommodate individual expression of their beliefs.
“It’s the only way Valkyrie can identify the Kindred if we fall righteously in battle,” said Sgt. Bram Gunbjorn, who serves as both squad leader and gothi (priest) of his squad of housescarls, otherwise known as 3rd Squad, Second Platoon, Charlie Company.
The squad believes upon their worthy death in combat, the Valkyrie will lead them to Valhalla, the mythological hall presided over by Odin, the Allfather.
“I think these clowns have been reading too many comic books,” said battalion Sgt. Maj. Mike Brooks. “There’s no actual historical evidence Vikings or any Northern European groups wore that garbage into battle.”
Soon after the sergeant major made this statement, the horrified Marines submitted a complaint to their Equal Opportunity Officer on the grounds of religious intolerance.
Published on 22 Jan 2014
Get Konnected at http://www.thekronies.com
The Kronies are in action…Mandating, Tarrify-ing, Inflating, and Boondoggling their way to profits powered by their special konnection to the G-Force. Watch Big-G and his team stomp out competition!
H/T to Popehat for the link.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Maybe we should start emailing each other copies of the Constitution, so we can know that the government has read it.”
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, 2014-01-24.
… they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), 1889.
George said:
“You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”
George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.
How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with — oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! — the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!
It is lumber, man — all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness — no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need — a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work. Time to drink in life’s sunshine — time to listen to the Æolian music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us — time to —
I beg your pardon, really. I quite forgot.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog), 1889.
I’m not a programmer, although I’ve spent much of my working life around programmers, which is why I recognize the pattern so well: I’ve seen it in action so often.
The few times I’ve needed to create a program to do something (usually a text transformation of one sort or another), this has been exactly the way the “labour-saving” automation has gone. My personal version of the chart would have an additional phase at the beginning: I have to begin by learning or re-learning the tool I need to use. I learn just enough of how to use a given tool to do the task at hand, then the knowledge atrophies from lack of use and the next time I need to do something similar, the first priority is figuring out the right tool and then learning the same basic tasks all over again.
I started out with REXX when I was a co-op student at IBM. Several years later, I needed to convert a large set of documents from one markup language to another on a Unix system and that meant learning (just enough) shell scripting, sed and awk. A few years after that the right tool seemed to be Perl. In every case, the knowledge doesn’t stick with me because I don’t need to do anything with the language after I’ve finished the immediate task. I remember being able to do it but I don’t recall exactly how to do it.
Those who are still opposed to President Obama’s healthcare program will go to any lengths to ridicule and belittle both the program itself and the people who support it. Here, for example is one of the nastiest attempts to drag Obamacare into the public eye in as negative and mocking a fashion as possible.
I’m either on drugs, or the administration is this helplessly stupid. The Tell a Friend — Get Covered campaign, better described as “a tourist trap off Route 66,” began a six-hour live-streamed event Thursday afternoon that was advertised to “include stories, tips, helpful information and other details related to national health care options.” Really, it was as if the audio-visual club got wasted on malt liquor and hijacked public access television.
Get Covered, a partnership among state healthcare exchanges and the Obamacare missionary Enroll America, expertly fails to cater to young people. Its circus began Thursday with a dance-off between Richard Simmons and the contortionist Nathan Barnatt, overseen by the star of an Internet show whose premise is “drunk cooking.” How this is supposed to entice a 27 year old to pay $200 a month for health insurance, or even talk about it, is a question for the gods.
“What’s he doing?” Simmons exclaimed as Barnatt began to shake his body wildly.
“He’s extending his livelihood! That’s what he’s doing!” Hannah Hart, your host and creator of My Drunk Kitchen, responded in an endorsement of cardio.
Oh, c’mon. Is this seriously going to be one of those D-grade infomercials in which the participants force every line back to the bottom one?
“His moves are telling us something,” Barnatt whispered as Simmons took his turn.
“They are, and I think they’re saying, ‘Be flexible about your health insurance options,’” Hart responded.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Oh. Sorry. Apparently this isn’t a sleazy disinformation scheme by opponents. It’s a “good faith” advertising effort by supporters. Carry on, then.
The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been ‘democratically chosen’ does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by ‘the people’ — they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further ‘selection’ process is equally a nonsense: there are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all.
Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com
Wendy McElroy remembers one of the greatest publishing hoaxes of the 20th century:
On December 28, 1917, Mencken published the article “A Neglected Anniversary” in the New York Evening Mail. He announced that America had forgotten to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the modern bathtub, which had been invented on December 20, 1842 in Cincinnati, Ohio. “Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer,” Mencken lamented. He proceeded to offer an informal history of the US bathtub, with political context. For example, President Millard Fillmore had installed the first one in the White House in 1851. This had been a brave act since the health risks of using a bathtub were highly controversial within the medical establishment. Indeed, Mencken observed, “Boston early in 1845 made bathing unlawful except upon medical advice, but the ordinance was never enforced and in 1862, it was repealed.”
The actual political context was somewhat different. America had entered World War I several months before. The media was now rabidly anti-German and pro-war. Mencken was of German descent and anti-war. Suddenly, he was unable to publish in his usual venues or on his usual subjects. Thus, Mencken – a political animal to the core – turned to non-political writing in order to publish anything: A Book of Prefaces on literary criticism (1917); In Defense of Women on the position of women in society (1918); and The American Language (1918). But he was effectively shut out of the most important event in the world, the one about which he cared most.
Mencken did not just get mad; he got even. “A Neglected Anniversary” was a satire destined to become a classic of this genre. In his article, Mencken spoke in a tone of mock-reason, which was supported by bogus citations and manufactured statistics. His history of the bathtub was an utter hoax set within the framework of real history. The modern bathtub had not been invented in Cincinnati. Fillmore had not introduced the first one into the White House. The anti-bathtub laws cited were, to use one of Mencken’s favorite words, “buncombe.”
[…]
Mencken remained silent about the hoax until an article titled “Melancholy Reflections” was published in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926, eight years later. It was Mencken’s confession and an appeal to the American public for reason. His hoax had gone bad. “A Neglected Anniversary” had been reprinted hundreds of times. Mencken had received letters of corroboration from some readers and requests for more details from others. His history of the bathtub had been cited by other writers and was starting to find its way into reference works. As Mencken noted in “Melancholy Reflections,” his ‘facts’ “began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene.” And, because Fillmore’s presidency had been so uneventful, on the date of his birthday calendars often included the only interesting tidbit they could find: Fillmore had introduced the bathtub into the White House. (Even the later scholarly disclosure that Andrew Jackson had a bathtub installed there in 1834 did not diminish America’s conviction that Fillmore was responsible.)
Upon confessing, Mencken wondered if the truth would renew the cry for his deportation. The actual response: Many believed his confession was the hoax.
Jim Geraghty‘s congressman is retiring, so some have suggested that he should run to replace him. Here’s the speech he’ll never give:
I have been asked what I am willing to do to earn the great responsibility and honor of representing you in the House of Representatives. My answer is simple and direct: Absolutely nothing.
(Nervous laughter from crowd.)
My fellow Virginians, if you elect me to Congress, I promise that I will not lift a finger for the special interests, the corporate interests, the lobbyists, Big Oil, Big Business, Big Papi, the Big Ten, the Notorious B.I.G., or The Big Bang Theory. I won’t answer to them or any other one of our public discourse’s designated villains of the week.
(Cheering)
I can make this promise with confidence because I’m pretty sure I won’t do much of anything for you, either.
(Cheering stops)
This is an area where my principled commitment to limited government and my deep disinterest in dealing with your problems will align perfectly.
Do you want a deduction or tax credit written into the tax code to benefit your business? Well, tough, because you’re not getting it. Your business is supposed to thrive because it provides quality goods and services, not because it gets some special help from the IRS.
(Murmurs of discontent.)
[…]
Have you ever considered that maybe the reason Congress is so awful is you, dear voters? I mean, you elected these clowns. But even beyond that, most of the time when members of Congress interact with the public, they’re being asked for favors. The mail they get, the phone calls they get, most of the people who show up at their town halls – everybody’s asking them for something. Get more funding for this! Help us get money to do that! Make sure this agency spends more on this local project! Look, your congressman is not Santa Claus! […] Through your behavior and expectations, you’ve conditioned our elected leaders to think of themselves as walking ATMs.
Ask not what your country can do for you … because I’m sick and tired of your whining. Do it yourself.
(The crowd is silent and not happy.)
What do you say, Virginia? Are you ready for a congressman who has nothing to offer you but … well, basically nothing to offer you?
Crowd: BOOOOOOOOOO!
Guy in crowd: Hey, doesn’t Mary Katharine Ham live in this district, too?
Another guy in crowd: Let’s nominate her!
The crowd moves on.
No, really:
I'd do a series about a detective who's really clever but also understands human emotion, except who'd watch that?
— Paul Mather (@paulmather007) January 14, 2014
Sherlock as autistic, human-computer sidekick to a Watson who solves crime by actually understanding human motivation? Million-dollar idea.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) January 14, 2014
"Holmes, that business with the cigar ash was damned clever, but it was obviously the jealous boyfriend all along. You fuckin' nerd."
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) January 14, 2014
Then Watson totally wedgies Holmes.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) January 14, 2014
Maybe we can also do "CSI: Just Arrest The Guy With The Big Swastika Tattoo Already"
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) January 14, 2014
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