Saturday, March 28, 2009

What the gently caress are you talking about?

Flipping through the ol' internets and looking at the Vince Offer shots I noticed a curious phenomenon. Apparently, because internet forums restrict coarse language (fuck, amongst many other words) the users at the website somethingawful.com have begun inserting "gently caress" where the f-bomb would go. Fan-gently caressing-tastic.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Techn-opolypse, courtesy Barry Goldwater

Now that the Republican Party has apparently declared intellectual jihad on such bastions of knowledge as academia, the news, and scientists I've been rooting through some old thinkers of the conservative movement to see if there once existed some good ideas. I came across these videos of old campaign commercials on the internet archive, and was extremely impressed by Barry Goldwater's mix of homespun imagery, an almost literary conceptualization of Evil, and the verbosity of his own language. The second video takes you through some of the boilerplate talk show points about "big government," but then Goldwater adds a much colder element: that large government is eroding our very identities as individuals. His descriptions of government touch on physical aspects of everyday life creating a poem of a weakening substance. The tag line further promotes the viewer to absorb the subtle implications of Goldwaters message, "in your heart... you know he's right." Here's the downloadable file.


Also, Barry G. looks a little bit like Bevis, no?

Thursday, March 5, 2009

J-E-LL-O

This story makes me want to kill Bill Cosby just so his ghost can look down from heaven and smile.


Apparently, those wacky scientists at the South Pole have been getting into some Jello wrestling. Every dyed in the wool nerd I know is a pretty strange person who often didn't get a lot of ass. It looks like all that changes in the South Pole. Binge drinking (and murder), 16,000 condoms and 5 months of darkness!

Monday, March 2, 2009

The Red Menace

Doing some daily reading, I enjoyed this piece in the NY Times about the rhetoric of socialism from the conservative camp. I found it interesting because a) I'm taking my first Econ class right now and b) I got into a heated email exchange with my uncle late in the campaign because he was insistent on calling Obama a socialist/communist without actually knowing the differentiation between those terms.

I suppose if an attack line works, use it. But still, it's a bit like the old days of playing Tekken against some kid who just uses the same combo move the entire match.


Aside from, as the article points out, the different shades of San Fran, Swedish and Venezuelan socialism, my Economics text keeps reminding me that we actually live in a state of Welfare Capitalism, where the government regulates and manages whole aspects of the economy. As the GOP casts about for a new leader, they may want to look at a famous pseudo-socialist of their own: The trust busting, environment preserving, Cuba invading TR!



UPDATE: Apparently, some in Fort Worth think a "Marxist Revolution" is being conducted in the White House! You know when Ron Paul's kid shows up at a rally you've got a message that's sticking.