From Jonnynexus:
France keen to act against Gaddafi, US hesitant. Should we start joking about “burger eating surrender monkeys”?
March 18, 2011
March 17, 2011
March 14, 2011
The iBoob saga
Jesse Brown recounts the story of the iBoob app:
Idiots worldwide rejoiced when news came that the iBoobs app, censored by Apple, had found a home in the Android Marketplace.
For those tragically unfamiliar with iBoobs — how can I describe it? It’s boobs. They jiggle. A settings screen lets you adjust things like “boob weight,” “stifness,” and “gravity factor.” If any of this turns you on, I’d like to introduce you to a killer app called porn.
iBoobs is a Freemium product. If you upgrade from the free ”iBoobs light” app to the $2.10 paid app, you can toss the boobs around with the tip of your finger. Or at least, you could last week. It seems that Google has since followed Apple’s lead (at least partially) and banned the paid version of the app.
If your imagination isn’t enough, there’s a YouTube video of the application here.
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I’m not sure what a “paprade” is, but apparently Toronto had one
I guess the weekend staff were celebrating St. Patrick’s day a little early, as not only the photo caption (left) but also the pa(p)rade directions leave you a little misdirected:
The parade begins at Bloor and St. George Sts. and heads west to Yonge, where it turns south and goes to Queen and then heads west again to University, ending just south of Dundas on University.
The streets are expected to be closed from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., making driving to the parade difficult.
Highlighting mine. Going west from Bloor and St. George won’t get you to Yonge Street for a fair amount of time:
H/T to Chris Greaves for bringing this to my attention.
March 9, 2011
Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, and Amy Okuda panel discussion
And, part two, with Wil Wheaton’s immortal advice “Guys . . . when a woman joins the game, don’t be a dick.”:
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March 8, 2011
Conan, channelled through a 4-year-old
From the amusing Reddit thread “I’m 4 years old AMAA”:
gaadzooks
what is best in life?[. . .]
lynn
My 6-month-old has an answer for that: “To crush your parents’ sleep schedules, to see them flee before your diapers, and to drink the lactations of their women.”
Edit for honesty: credit for that one goes to my husband.
H/T Radley Balko for the link.
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March 7, 2011
QotD: Mercantilism
You actually had a short, but interesting chapter in your book explaining why you think our trade balance with China is mostly irrelevant. Could you give people a short, but sweet synopsis of that argument?
Adam Smith was the first to point this out in the Wealth of Nations. The common wisdom at the time, mercantilism was the name it went by, was that the way a nation got rich was by exporting things. In return for the exports they’d get gold. And Smith’s going, I’m paraphrasing broadly here, “You can’t eat gold, you can’t kiss gold, and gold won’t keep you warm at night. Gold is just gold.”
He said the exports, that’s real stuff, and you’re giving it away in favor of gold. He said imports are the good thing. Imports are when you’re getting something you like. You’re getting French wine. You’re getting American tobacco. You’re getting furs from Russia, getting whatever they were getting back in those days. He said exports are the way you pay for those imports. So imports are Christmas morning. Exports are January’s Visa bill.
People getting so upset because everything seems to be made in China — I understand it on the level of the jobs have moved overseas. I think it’s probably an important thing to remember that if the jobs hadn’t moved overseas, they probably would have just gone away. So, it’s not like the Japanese have all of our car making jobs.
John Hawkins, “The P.J. O’Rourke Interview”, Grendel Report, 2010-10-11
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March 6, 2011
The economics of urinal cakes
Tim Harford uses Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” to explain the economics of urinal cakes:
Dear Massimo,
When I read the first sentence of your letter, I was wondering where you were going with this. Not to worry: your question is easily answered. The 19th century French economist and essayist Frédéric Bastiat anticipated it with his famous “broken window fallacy”. A broken window seems good for the economy because it creates work for the glazier. But Bastiat pointed out that the money that the window-owner pays to the glazier is money he can’t spent on something else. The glazier is richer, but the tailor or the restaurateur or the escort girl is poorer. The broken window hasn’t stimulated the economy at all.
In short, don’t think you’re doing anyone a favour by aiming squarely at the urinal cake in front of you. And don’t even think about aiming at the urinal cake in front of someone else.
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March 5, 2011
March 3, 2011
Sneak preview of the next Guild comic
Whitney Matheson has a preview of the next comic starting the members of The Guild. This one is about Tink:
This should be in the stores by mid-March.
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March 2, 2011
QotD: Humour
A German I know will on occasion tell you his father died in the concentration camps. He waits for the concerned and properly sympathetic faces and then adds that he got drunk and fell out of a watchtower. Europeans find that boorish, faintly crass and rather tasteless; the English love it. It’s a proper joke, and a German doing it is double bubble. The surprise is that neither the Europeans or the English realize that it’s not a joke at all, his father really did fall out of a watch tower and it’s poignant and sad because his son never knew him, never met his dad.
A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, p. 112.
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February 25, 2011
“epistemicfail” calls on liberals to stop the evil Koch brothers
“epistemicfail” is trying to rally liberal and progressive forces to recognize and combat the evil that is embodied in the Koch brothers:
The KOCH brothers must be stopped. They gave $40K to Scott Walker, the MAX allowed by state law. That’s small potatoes compared to the $100+ million they give to other organizations. These organizations will terrify you. If the anti-union thing weren’t enough, here are bigger and better reasons to stop the evil Kochs. They are trying to:
1. decriminalize drugs,
2. legalize gay marriage,
3. repeal the Patriot Act,
4. end the police state,
5. cut defense spending.
Who hates the police? Only the criminals using drugs, amirite? We need the Patriot Act to allow government to go through our emails and tap our phones to catch people who smoke marijuana and put them in prison. Oh, it’s also good for terrorists.
Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like:
1. CATO Institute
2. Reason Foundation
3. cancer research ($150 million to M.I.T. – STOP THEM! KEEP CANCER ALIVE!)
4. ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Family_Foundations
The Kochs basically give a TON of money (millions of dollars) to the CATO Institute. Scott Walker, $40K? HAH! These CATO people are the REAL problem. They want to end the War on Drugs. Insane, right? We know that the War on Drugs keeps us SAFE from Mexicans and keeps all that violence on their side of the fence. More than 30,000 Mexicans killed as of December! Thank God Mexican lives don’t count as human lives. Our government is doing a good, no, a great job protecting us and seriously, who cares about brown people or should I say non-people? HAHAHA! Public unions are good, government is good, and government protects us from drugs and brown people. The Kochs want to end all that. Look, as far back as 1989 CATO has been trying to decriminalize drugs. Don’t worry, nobody listens to them because they are INSANE.
Let’s hope they heed his call.
February 24, 2011
February 23, 2011
February 22, 2011
A tale for our times
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link:
A modern Romance novel
He grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear. “Just relax.”
Read the whole thing.
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