Last day of Gnat’s school. They had a picnic outside with a band: a guy with a guitar and a guy with a bass. Nice patter and good musicianship, but they should tour high school and teach the kids a very important lesson. Look at us! We’re in our late forties, excellent musicians, skilled in the Path of Rock, and in the end it’s parties for four year olds. No doubt they enjoy their work; that’s irrelevant. Point to young rockers: they are not living in a mansion with a limo in the bedroom with gold-plated champagne spigots in the backseat Jacuzzi; nor do they have a stable of foxy groupies waiting in the van. Maybe it’s enough to keep playing and enjoy what you’re doing — in fact, given that most who take up the Path of Rock fall by the wayside and forswear the Axe, they’re ahead of the game. A gig is a gig. And the audience not only loved them, but was entirely sober, for a nice change. Still: if you young rockers out there think that the Path will lead to awesome debauchery for, like, forever: heed the Bear. It’s not all TV sets tossed off motel balconies. Sometimes it’s leading kids around a meadow making choo-choo sounds on your wirelessly miked bass.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-06-03.
October 7, 2021
QotD: Music as a career choice
October 5, 2021
Lars Vilks, RIP
Mark Steyn remembers Swedish artist Lars Vilks, best known for his defence of free speech rights after coming under (literal) attack by Islamist terrorists enraged that he drew a cartoon of Mohammed:
Lars Vilks, 1946-2021.
Cropped from a larger image by OlofE via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.
[…]
Lars was very funny about his newfound celebrity: He carried with him a picture of a Pakistani mob that had been whipped into a frenzy by somewhat inaccurate intelligence, so they were all jumping up and down in the streets demanding “DEATH TO LARISH”. And for a while that day in Copenhagen we all called him Larish: “Hey, Larish, another beer?”, etc.
Larish was likewise a hoot about two of the first jihadists sent to dispatch him. He came home one night to find that a couple of Kosovars had set his kitchen alight. As they escaped across the snowy field heady with the warm glow of their glorious victory over the infidel, they chanced to glance down and noticed that that warm glow was because they’d accidentally set their trousers on fire. After some effort to extinguish the blaze, they were forced to abandon their flaming pantaloons and scamper off into the chill night in their jihadist BVDs. Alas, the best-laid plans and all that: in addition to being trouserless in a Nordic winter, they had neglected to remove from their smouldering pants the charred driving licenses and other identifying documentation. Police were able to track them down rather easily, not least because they were the only two men in Scandinavia taking a late-night stroll in their Y-fronts.
When Lars told this story in Copenhagen, the whole room was roaring with laughter. Afterwards we all went to dinner. And news came to us somewhere between the soup and digestifs that a one-legged Chechen from Belgium, seething with resentment at Lars and the rest of us infidels, had prematurely self-detonated in his Copenhagen hotel room while assembling his package and preparing to hop into Paradise. And we all had a grand laugh about that, too. As I put it that day, Islamic terrorists are like Yosemite Sam, forever shoving the stick of dynamite in their own pants – until one day Yosemite Ahmed manages to get it right. After the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in 1984, the IRA taunted Mrs Thatcher: “You have to be lucky every day, we only have to be lucky once.”
Those jihad incompetents with the smoking trousers would modify the line: We only have to be competent once. Al-Qa’eda had put a six-figure bounty on Lars’ head, and there was no shortage of takers. In Ireland, the gardai arrested four men and three women from Waterford and Cork for a well-advanced plot to fly to Stockholm and kill him. At the height of the so-called “Troubles” you’d have been hard put to find five men in Waterford willing to travel to London to kill Mrs Thatcher or Willie Whitelaw. But an obscure artist in southern Sweden? Pas de problème!
As the report in the Daily Mail shows, the circumstances of Vilks’ death are at the very least, suspicious:
Swedish police investigating the car crash death of a controversial artist who had survived multiple assassination attempts after drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed cannot explain why his car was travelling so fast.
Lars Vilks, 75, was killed on Sunday when the police car he was travelling in veered onto the wrong side of the road and collided with a truck in Markaryd, in the Swedish province of Kronoberg.
Both vehicles caught fire and the truck driver, 45, was taken to hospital with serious injuries, while the two police protection officers and Vilks were killed.
Investigators believe there were no external influences that led to the deaths and say the crash may have been caused by a burst tyre.
However, they are unable to explain why the car was travelling at around 100mph, according to witnesses, in a 68mph zone.
October 4, 2021
History Summarized: Sicily
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Oct 2021The plot twist of Medieval Italian History is that the main event was happening in the South — In the centuries before the Renaissance, Sicily and southern Italy were sporting one of the most spectacular cultures in the world, combining the greatest hits of Mediterranean history in one place. It’s way cool, you guys.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich, The Great Cities in History by John Julius Norwich, Great Courses Lectures “Muslims in the Court Of Roger II – 1130” from Turning Points in Middle Eastern History by Eamonn Gerron and “Renaissance Italy’s Princes and Rivals” from Renaissance: The Transformation of the West by Jennifer McNabb
This video’s topic was requested by our patron Salvatore Corasaniti. Thank you for supporting our channel!
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
2 days ago
I can’t even begin to describe how much Ancient Sicily Content™ I had to cut for time.
Fear not, Magna Graecia will get the spotlight it deserves in another video.
-B
October 3, 2021
QotD: Taxes
If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined.
If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed.
If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I — in my role as citizen and voter — am going to shoot you — in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck — if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”P.J. O’Rourke
October 2, 2021
QotD: Cat-haters
Steve H. “Time to Shoot All the Cats”, Hog on Ice, 2005-04-14.
September 20, 2021
History-Makers: Maimonides
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Sep 2021“From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.” Jump into 1100s Cordoba & Cairo as we take a look at the life of one of the Medieval world’s most boundary-breaking History-Makers: Moses Maimonides!
SOURCES & Further Reading: Great Courses lectures “Jewish Scholar in Cairo: Moses Maimonides” from The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age by Eamonn Gearon and “Maimonides and Jewish Law” from Great Minds of the Medieval World by Dorsey Armstrong. Britannica “Maimonides” https://www.britannica.com/biography/…, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Maimonides” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ma…, The Guide For The Perplexed, Mishne Torah and Commentary on the Mishnah by Maimonides
Special thanks to Yellow/LudoHistory for his assistance in checking over my script. You can check out his livestreams playing historically-inspired videogames over at https://www.twitch.tv/ludohistory
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
You Can’t See Memes on the Radio
Alasdair Beckett-King
Published 4 Jun 2021The hottest memes on 1940s radio. Support me on kofi (https://ko-fi.com/misterabk) and/or laboriously describe your favourite memes in the comments.
Carbon ringmount microphone model by Inlite: https://blendswap.com/blend/6724
September 19, 2021
QotD: Gender stereotypes
Apparently, it is more to do with the content of your character than the content of your underpants.
Fraser Orr, commenting at Samizdata, 2018-12-08.
September 17, 2021
QotD: Journalism
Colby Cosh, “A useless living dead”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-03-28.
September 12, 2021
Terry Pratchett: Discworld And Beyond
Biographics
Published 19 Mar 2021Dive into Discworld.
September 8, 2021
500 Year-Old Pizza VS Today
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 May 2021Help Support the Channel with Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
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Scappi Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4Ymv…
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Subtitles: Jose Mendoza
PHOTO CREDITS
Stuffed pizza from Giordano’s: By TNVWBOY – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tnvwboy…, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
Lombardi’s Pizza: By Beyond My Ken – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
Sushi Pizza: Quinn Dombrowski from Berkeley, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
Pizza Bagels: Mike Mozart https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepers…MUSIC CREDITS
“Bushwick Tarentella” – Thatched Villagers by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-…
Artist: http://incompetech.com/#tastinghistory #pizza
September 7, 2021
QotD: Calvin was right
Hobbes: “‘The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study In Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.'”
Calvin: “Academia, here I come!”
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes.
September 5, 2021
Kaylee Frye: Just Put The Cute Engineer In Danger | Firefly | Stuff You Like
Jill Bearup
Published 9 Jun 2012Kaywinnet Lee Frye: she’s irresistable. So in this episode of broken jump cuts, pointless-but-funny cameos, evening dresses and gushing, we explore the woman, the legend, the utter gorgeousness that is Kaylee. Firefly season episode 4 everyone!
QotD: Cavemen
H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918.
September 3, 2021
QotD: Drama critics
It’s a second-rate job, folks. Being a drama critic on Broadway wouldn’t keep a decent mind occupied 10% of the time. So you don’t even get second-raters. You get the dregs, the stage-struck but untalented neurotic who eventually drifts into criticism as a means of clinging peripherally to the arts. And most of your cruel critics come this way: they are getting their own back.
William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, 1969.
