Operation Crab Grass

Bloggers watch Bush's feeble attempt at speechifying about Iraq so you don't have to. Of particular interest was Blah3's notation: "There's an incessant banging that's been going on throughout the speech so far - like Bush is going all Katherine Hepburn on the podium. And he's bragging about new sod in a soccer stadium."

Silly us! We didn't need to send the 4th Infantry Division to Iraq! We needed to send Cletus Fuddrucker's Landscaping Service!

More fun with Anagrams

This website, which is now a book, had a great idea: Create anagrams of famous author's names, then use that anagram as a title for a story/play/poem in the style of said author. The results are hilarious as we have Edward Albee's "A Wee Bladder", A. A. Milne's "An E-Mail", and William Shakespeare's "Is a Sperm Like a Whale?", among others.

With much respect (and sheer awe), allow me to reprint the short but sweet Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Errol Flynn's Not Dead":

He grabs the rope with withered hands,
Swings through the air and softly lands;
Girt with a silver sword he stands.

That rotting man is Errol Flynn;
He bares a grey and toothless grin,
And like a zombie eats my skin.

Ironically, they haven't used any with the dead grandparents in them

In the classic MST3K episode featuring "Manos: The Hands of Fate", Joel and the bots present an invention they call the "Cartuner". To paraphrase Joel, the device combines dodgy, ambiguous cartoons and mixes them with stifingly unfunny cartoons in order to make them funny.

Well, it looks like somebody got the idea to mix up Family Circus with the works of H.P. Lovecraft (via Boing Boing):



Hank Hill said it best: That boy 'aint right.

My vote for "Best Screen Capture & Caption of 2005"

I laughed my ass off over this when I first saw it a couple of weeks ago. It comes from a review of The Gingerdead Man over at Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Knowing the context helps understand it, but I still think it's damn funny on it's own:

"'Whaaat a friend we have in Jeeesuus...' Everybody sing!"

"Rot in Peace"

There's a very haunting slideshow over on Slate concerning the decay of structures as they are overtaken by nature. For obvious reasons, this picture and description particularly got to me:

In this slide, Vergara's photo of the derelict reading room of the Camden Free Library in New Jersey, a thicket of saplings reaches toward a tattered ceiling's filtered light. Historian Elizabeth Blackmar detects in Vergara's photos an "aesthetic pause," which leads us to wonder how we could have avoided the wasting away of these 20th-century landmarks - and to reflect on what we are to learn from their demise.

Huh?!?!

I just got wind of this story from Workbench and my brain is still boggling. Apparently, Jennifer Aniston recently posed partially nude on the cover of GQ and conservative columnist John Derbyshire expressed his distaste for it. Not because it was indecent or immoral, mind you, but because she's in her mid-thirties:

"While I have no doubt that Ms. Aniston is a paragon of charm, wit, and intelligence, she is also 36 years old. Even with the strenuous body-hardening exercise routines now compulsory for movie stars, at age 36 the forces of nature have won out over the view-worthiness of the unsupported female bust."

"It is, in fact, a sad truth about human life that beyond our salad days, very few of us are interesting to look at in the buff. Added to that sadness is the very unfair truth that a woman's salad days are shorter than a man's -- really, in this precise context, only from about 15 to 20. The Nautilus and the treadmill can add a half decade or so, but by 36 the bloom is definitely off the rose."

I'll repeat my post title query: HUH?!?!

Most of the reactions to this comment has been along the lines of the irony for a National Review columnist to be expressing such Lolita-ish tendencies. My gripe is much more basic: How the hell can you call this woman unattractive? I do not count myself among her many ardent fans, but I can recognize beauty and she's in no way lacking in that department. Heaven forbid this guy watch the remake of Thomas Crown Affair lest he become physically ill when 45 year old Rene Russo gets nekid.

If this is the kind of grand divide between liberals and conservatives, then vive la difference! Still, it makes me worry about those poor fifteen year olds in red states.