Radioactive Boars Rampaging Through Germany.
Boars are a fucking menace even without radioactivity. I once put three .30-30 rounds into a sow and still saw her run off. They root around, destroy trees and crops, and are actually one of the only dangerous mammals still left in southern forests. Adding radioactivity — and, no doubt, the superpowers that this creates — can only mean certain doom for all mankind.
The FBI is apparently trying to keep Wikipedia from using its seal in the article for same, and are blatantly misconstruing the relevant laws in their saber-rattling letter to the Foundation.
Fortunately, it turns out that the Foundation has actual, learned attorneys onstaff, who told the Feds to get stuffed.
Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.
Translation: “What you wish the law was has no bearing here.”
Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, “we are prepared to argue our view in court.” He signed off, “with all appropriate respect.”
Translation: “DIAF”.
It gets even cooler when you realize who wrote the Wikimedia Foundation’s response.
Please buy us some Monkey Shoulder Whiskey. KTHXBI.
Your Iron Chef America secret ingredient is …. HERE!
MSFT execs vetoed consumer-protection features in IE8 in order to protect the interests of advertisers.
Intuit is lobbying hard to stop governments from making it easy to file taxes, which would undermine (annual! repeated!) demand for their products.
You heard me. Stay with it.
The Intimidator is beautiful. And silly.
In the 70s, [James Williamson][1] played guitar and shared songwriting duties with Iggy and the Stooges, most notably on on the seminal Raw Power record. The band subsequently broke up, despite the success of Raw Power, and Williamson went back to school before, eventually, joining Sony for the bulk of his electrical engineering career.
Last year, Sony was issuing early retirements, and Williamson took one. The Stooges had of course reformed around 2003, but when Williamson couldn’t rejoin them they’d used their original guitarist Ron Asheton — who died suddenly around the same time Williamson retired, and all of a sudden a former Sony VP was back playing punk rock again (Video link, but short and worth it).
They’re making H. P. Lovecraft‘s “At The Mountains of Madness” into a film.
Good news: Guillermo del Toro is directing, which sounds like a great fit.
Bad news: James Cameron will produce, which I fear will drastically compromise the whole thing into a rote, by the numbers piece of crap on which they nevertheless spend a fortune.
Two sets. I’ve been remiss:
This entry into 5-Second Films is just the first of many you’ll watch. After all, at only 5 seconds each, you can afford to watch several…
And it was just as awesome as Rocks Off says it was.
The vaccination rate is low enough in some place to produce whooping cough epidemics.
A statewide whooping cough epidemic has not changed how Danielle Lawson of San Anselmo feels about vaccinating her 5-1/2-month-old daughter.
Lawson has declined almost all of the standard vaccines recommended for infants, including DTaP, which protects against whooping cough.
“I haven’t categorically ruled them out,” she said. “But I just think at this point she’s too young, and her immune system is still developing. Nothing goes into my baby right now, except for breast milk, so I don’t feel comfortable injecting her with strange chemicals.”
[…]
Unfortunately, public health advocates say, the consequences of rejecting vaccination are not strictly personal. Widespread vaccinations not only make disease outbreaks less likely, but they also help protect vulnerable populations like newborns who are too young to get shots.
“Anything that leaves people unimmunized and unprotected, thereby reducing the overall rate of protection in the community, would be a contributing factor when you have an outbreak,” said Dr. Fred Schwartz, Marin County’s public health officer.
Parents who do have their children vaccinated are troubled by others opting out, fearing outbreaks of disease.
“This is the first one to hit us, but how long until we have a chicken pox outbreak, or mumps or polio?” said Sara Sonnet of San Rafael, a mother of two young girls who are both fully immunized. “We take it for granted.”
The article concludes with this winner: “Others remain unconvinced. Lawson now avoids taking her daughter to the pediatrician, taking her to see a chiropractor instead.”
http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/ has what you’re looking for.
Firefox 4’s Tab Candy feature looks absolutely delicious.
Rachel Maddow pretty much destroys Fox and their embrace of the Sherrod controversy, and subsequent (and ongoing) blatant hypocrisy.
When the Brietbart injected this bullshit into the mediasphere, Fox couldn’t contain their glee, and led the charge to get Sherrod dismissed. Their full court press was positively frothy. But we shouldn’t be surprised that, once the whole thing blew up, and people saw the whole, unedited tape, and it became clear that Sherrod’s speech was in no way racist, Fox changed their tune — this time, tut-tutting that the Obama Administration had jumped the gun in firing Sherrod, and expressing outrage at anyone would rush to judgement without getting the facts straight.
We’ve been through years of this with the doofuses at Fox, but it still astonishes me that they are so craven and so clearly uninterested in actual journalism.
Um:
Twelve bottles of The End Of History ale have been made and placed inside seven dead stoats, four squirrels and one hare.
And at 55 per cent volume, its makers claim it is the world’s strongest beer.
More here and at the manufacturer’s site, where we find this:
This 55% beer should be drank in small servings whilst exuding an endearing pseudo vigilance and reverence for Mr Stoat. This is to be enjoyed with a weather eye on the horizon for inflatable alcohol industry Nazis, judgemental washed up neo-prohibitionists or any grandiloquent, ostentatious foxes.
No, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. (There’s another rundown over at Scalzi’s place, in case you weren’t keeping up.)
Would you like to snuggle the porcupine?
Constance McMillen has showed some rural fucktards in my home state that bigotry is really expensive. McMillen, for her part, has moved down the road to Memphis.
The Oatmeal points out that Aliens and Avatar are the same movie.
How about a wine glass that holds a full bottle? Check out the first Amazon review:
I am the third trimester of my pregnancy and I have put myself on bed rest. Any little convenience that helps with repetitive movement is a blessing, as staying in a relaxed state is critical to the well being of both mommy and baby. So having a large glass that negates the need for repetitive pouring of a wine bottle is one of those tiny little aids that helps add up to a state of relaxation. The only thing that could have improved this would have been the inclusion of a very long straw.
Excellent.
Last month, Texas Lt. Gov. Dewhurst insisted publicly that Phoenix, Arizona was second only to Mexico City in kidnappings.
Some journalists investigated, and found that (as expected) this was horseshit, and then said so, which irked Dewhurst.
“This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group,” Dewhurst told NPR. “It shouldn’t be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven’s sake.”
No, buddy, I don’t think so. Fact-checking politicians is exactly what belongs on the FRONT page, right where the American-Stateman put it. We live in a world where it’s astonishingly easy to do basic research; maybe you should try that before you go shooting your mouth off for political gain.
Into your own Old Spice voicemail.
…I give you Sharktopus. God save Roger Corman.
They’ve got Isaiah “Old Spice Man” Mustafa in-character answering comments from their Twitter feed over on their Youtube channel. It’s a freakin’ scream — and occasionally amusingly meta.
Funny Or Die isn’t always funny, but that’s kind of clear in the name, right? Anyway, this is one of those times. Precis: What would happen if a famous singer put on a disguise and sand their own songs at karaoke? Jewel finds out. It sounds hokey, but it’s sort of delightful.
Check out these dinosaurs. Seriously.
Alison Cook gets scattered, smothered and covered — and likes it!
MeFi noticed Danger Mouse not long ago; at happens, there are many episodes on YouTube.
In the same vein as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we find this excellent work.
A ProPublica reporter was followed, harrassed, and detained by BP security and Police as he attempted to report on the spill. From the shoulder of a public road.
Further, journalists are now being actively threatened with arrest and fines for reporting “the wrong way” on the spill.
WTF?
BP is clearly trying to limit coverage of this thing, and they’ve been doing it since day one. That’s understandable. However, we have a First Amendment here, and the media has an obligation to the people to report on what’s actually happening. It’s been often said that “news” is only the stuff someone else doesn’t want reported; the rest is PR. The government ought to be helping the journalists, not BP — heads oughta roll over this bullshit.
You can’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.
Prince remains a deeply strange individual, as one Daily Mirror writer discovered in a long-form, short-notice interview now widely quoted online (i.e., in reference to Prince’s antipathy for the Internet).
Radley has more, but it should be noted that the most prominent booster of the “we don’t care if you’re innocent as long as you had a trial” view is, of course, Scalia:
A three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected an Oregon man’s petition for habeas corpus relief (PDF). This despite acknowledging that the man has established actual innocence for the crimes for which he’s being imprisoned (sexual abuse and sodomy of a four-year-old). The reason: He was late filing his petition. By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent.
I still don’t want to click on your bullshit emails to find out when the goddamn party is, you fuckers. Please stop this.
There’s another Old Spice commercial. It, too, is one continuous take essentially devoid of CGI trickery.
The iPhone 4 has two-way video chat, right? Consequently: iPhone 4 Video Sex Chat Services Already Staffing Up.
He totally nails it in Lara Logan, You Suck. In case you missed the context, Logan has become the de facto voice of “establishment” journalism that is shocked — Shocked! — that Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings included the damning and insubordinate comments that sank General McChrystal’s career in his recent story.
Some choice bits:
Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.
and
See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an “element of trust” that you’re supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he’s got to be able to trust that you’re not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?
True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth — spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department — but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?
And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan’s own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.
But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon’s biggest contractors?
Taibbi makes another point:
[T]he reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard?
Go read the whole thing. Really. (HT: @wilw)
During the Argentina-Mexico match, the refs blew a call on one of Argentina’s goals; the man was offside, which should’ve invalidated the goal — but the officials missed it, and awarded the goal.
However, the cameras in the stadium DID see the action correctly, and the in-stadium replay made the ref’s error obvious to everyone there (in addition to everyone at home).
FIFA’s response? No more in-stadium replays.
Let’s be clear: instead of striving for actual truth and accuracy, their response to this is not that the ref should have better tools to determine correct calls at the highest level of the game; the response is to try to prevent the truth from being known immediately by those in the stadium.
Seriously, fuck them. How can an organization supposedly devoted to fair play care so little for truth?