Go check this out. Via Reddit.
Just so we’re clear
It’s now legal to kidnap, torture, and hold US citizens without charge as long as you insist they’re “terrorists.”
I’m sure this will never be abused at all.
Our kind of Krewe
The next great hit in British gangster films is here
ZOMG HAWESOME.
This may be the best action scene in the history of cinema, from the Indian film Enthiran:
Picture SPLOSION
I’m now caught up:
- Christmas in Mississippi, mostly of interest only if you’re related to me;
- New Year’s Eve at Heathen Central, of interest if you were here, but unaccountably unable to remember all of it;
- A few snaps from the Marathon and Half-Marathon, wherein my wife and mother-in-law kick all kinds of ass; and
- A few I took at Natachee’s yesterday, mostly of my little buddy Carl.
Enjoy.
Dept. of Crushing Disappointments
“Everybody Skype? Everybody Post?” Jesus fucking CHRIST, Lou, really? For fucking HP, of all things? You’re fucking killing me, man.
Sigh. That right there is plenty enough to avoid the almost certainly doomed hail-mary tablet from what used to be Hewlett Packard, which ate what used to be Palm. Fuck ’em both.
Howlin’ for AWESOME
The Black Keys’ action-movie-spoof video is fanTAStic, even if it is hosted on IO9’s failtastic new site.
The New York Post is a national treasure
MOAR MOAR MOAR music
Radiohead cover Joy Division rather well, I think.
Bernard’s Voice Has Aged Well
Acoustic Bizarre Love Triangle:
Nothing. Nothing more perfect than this: Playmobil Joy Division
Sofa. King. Perfect.
See Also, for comparison.
As always, the Onion nails it.
Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New Macbook:
CUPERTINO, CA — In his first major product release since stepping in for an ailing Steve Jobs last month, interim Apple CEO Tim Cook faced a storm of harsh criticism Monday after unveiling a grotesque new version of the company’s popular MacBook that many in attendance described as “disgusting.”
Cook presented the bizarre, malformed new product to stunned silence during a media event at Apple headquarters, revealing a device that, while vaguely similar to a computer in certain respects, appeared to be encased in a thick, flesh-like coating that was visibly moist and engorged.
“Oh, my sweet God,” Apple employee Kurt Starfeldt said after viewing the MacBook up close. “It appeared to be discharging some sort of mucus-type substance from the headphone jack and making these weird murmuring sounds. And then it started quivering at one point when Tim was demonstrating how to use the touch pad. It was quite upsetting, actually.”
and
One customer, who had been anticipating the release of the new MacBook for months, claimed he felt “nauseous” when multiple software applications running at once caused the computer to started wheezing.
“I tried to force-quit some of the programs, but it got all slow and began to turn this sickly purple color,” Bill DeLain, 39, said. “Finally I hit the eject button and a tray popped open and spit out a bunch of teeth. Why does it have teeth?”
“I am now, George. I always have been.”
Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller in Our Town, ca. 1989, shot at Lincoln Center from a production that won a Drama Desk award for Best Revival.
You always thought this show as corny. Watch this now, and tell me that again.
(Hat tip to @LolaJRS over on the Twitters.)
Ow.
Note the sick enthusiasm with which Apple festoons extra snowflakes to better represent the unchristian conditions in which I’m now working.
In case you were feeling too happy
MeFi points us to the sad case of William ‘Refrigerator’ Perry, 25 years later.
#webfail: “If the model sounds like TV, that is no accident.”
The Gawker network has adopted a new design that, more or less, genuflects towards TV as its guide instead of the random-access, user-driven way the web has worked before. It’s more about video and “appointment programming,” at least as they explain it. Oh boy!
Denton explains why you’ll probably stop reading his sites now. Of course, he doesn’t actually think that’s going to happen, but in the last week I’ve dropped 3 from my own personal rotation because of the shakeup. Your mileage may vary, of course.
In case you forgot why Green Bay is awesome
The team is owned by the citizens of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and operate as a public nonprofit — an arrangement that the NFL has taken great pains to ensure doesn’t get replicated elsewhere.
Stay Classy, Jerry.
Ticketholders were essentially turned away at Cowboys Stadium after Jones’ bid to set the attendance record resulted in about 400 unusable seats.
The ticketholders were offered a few options, including SRO seats or the ability to watch the game on “big screen TVs”, along with the possibility of refunds of a multiple of the tickets’ face value — which, of course, ignores the fact that many tickets were bought on the secondary market, and that most attendees spent nontrivial money getting to Dallas, staying in hotels, etc.
Nice one, Jerry!
The Onion remains perfect
Two recent examples:
and
Do NOT miss the 2nd one.
Best Wrestling EVAR: “How is this legal?”
This is the most awesome video you’ll see today: the Osirian Portal completely OWN these poor boys with sekrit Egyptian hypnosis moves!
Doomsday, you’re on notice. I thought your Dyketron 3000 — the Lesbian Robot from the Future! — couldn’t be topped, but it turns out actual wrestling has become even more hilariously absurd than your show. I eagerly await your response.
Oh, Fox. Just when we thought you couldn’t sink lower.
Via MediaMatters:
If you follow the link, you are taken to a page on Fox Nation that claims Obama “misquoted a familiar Bible verse” during his address yesterday:
President Obama misquoted a familiar Bible verse during a faith-based address at the National Prayer Breakfast.
“Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint,” the president said during a speech to several thousand people at the breakfast.
But the actual passage, from Isaiah 40:31, states: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Somewhat ironically, while Fox Nation appears to be positioning themselves as the arbiters of authentic Christianity, they seem unfamiliar with the fact that there is more than one version of the Bible.
Obama was quoting from the New International Version, while Fox Nation was pointing to the King James Version to “debunk” him.
This would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
Everything Old is New Again
Are you 30 to 40 and an aspiring musician, or were you when you were 20? Did you lust after those cassette-based 4-track recorders? Are you sure kids today have no idea how good they’ve got it?
Well, if you’ve got an iPad, I’ve got some good news for you.
You should go watch this
There are two parts so far. It’s really, really well done.
Of course, we’ll ignore all these suggestions
We’d be a shitload better off if we’d pay attention to Mark Bittman’s food manifesto, but I doubt it gets any traction; it starts with “end subsidies on corn and soybeans.”
Ah, airport security. You never stop being hiliarious
According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife’s name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.
Official Heathen Four-Word Review of Bernie’s Burger Bus
Burger meh. Fries awesome.
Wait. What?
Earlier this week the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety issued a relatively uncontroversial report saying that urban roads are safer than rural roads in terms of traffic fatalities, since urban roads generally have slower speeds and better access to hospitals.
The Governors Highway Safety Association (last spotted blaming pedestrian fatalities on Michelle Obama), however, begs to differ:
Many traffic safety groups such as the Governors Highway Safety Association argue that such comparisons don’t accurately reflect how safe a state’s roads are. A better measure, they say, is whether states have enacted proven safety enhancements such as motorcycle helmet laws and primary seat belt laws, which allow police to stop motorists solely for being unbuckled. […]
Judith Stone, president of Washington, D.C.-based Advocates for Auto and Highway Safety, says the group does not consider fatalities when issuing its annual report card on states. “We look at laws and whether they’ve been passed,” Stone says. (Emph. added)
Advocates of stronger laws say it’s difficult to persuade a state such as New Hampshire, which has no seat belt or motorcycle helmet laws, to enact such rules when its death rate is below the U.S. average. “States like … New Hampshire could certainly save more lives by passing stronger laws,” says governors safety association spokesman Jonathan Adkins. “Legislators note these states have relatively low fatality rates and tend not to see the benefit in passing stronger laws.”
These are my famous last words.
As a veteran of Sid Meier’s games, I was wondering this, too
So, about Egypt:
Great. Now I’m having Counterstrike flashbacks.
Some kids made a video using real footage and CGI’d first-person shooter graphics.
Update: Actually, turns out they’ve done these for lots of video games.
Today in Ukelele Covers
Bohemian Rhapsody by Jake Shimabukuro.
Not for nothing, but one takeaway lesson from this post might be that “No Depression has a great set of videos you may have missed.”
Annie are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
Hawesome
Confessions of a Disney Employee. Long, but worth it.
Nobody Knows Who You Are
Ok, true believers, check out this cache of Electric Company Spider-Man skits, some of which feature Morgan Freeman.
Watch a few. I didn’t remember them being quite this trippy.
This is not a good idea
Canned Whisky. Ew.
Lies, lies, lies
I’ve been meaning to point this Slacktivist post and its followup out for a while, and now’s as good a time as any.
As always, Fred Clark is worth reading all the way through. For both posts.
A moment, from the second post:
I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” When they say that “abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country,” simply say, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn’t require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn’t ever really there in the first place.
I don’t care if they win. They’re my Oscar picks.
I’m very, very pleased to see Winter’s Bone get the Oscar noms it deserves, for Picture as well as Actress (for teen lead Jennifer Lawrence, soon to be seen as Mystique in the upcoming X-Men prequel) and Supporting Actor for Heathen-fave John Hawkes (of “Deadwood” fame).
Seriously, see this film.
Best. New York Times Story. EVAR.
Warning: Do Not Play Inside
MOAR SPIDERS
This video is pretty cool: time lapse footage of a spiderweb being built, plus slow-motion footage of subsequent bug capture, and — as a bonus — some spider-on-spider food theft.
Heathen Science: On the Case
Once again, prepare yourself for loathing
The Buffalo Beast list is out. Enjoy.
Prepare yourself.
This may be the finest image on the entire Internet.
What a smoking gun looks like
NYT:
A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials told the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they had serious reservations about the bishops’ policy of mandatory reporting of priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities.
The document appears to contradict Vatican claims that church leaders in Rome never sought to control the actions of local bishops in abuse cases, and that the Roman Catholic Church did not impede criminal investigations of child abuse suspects.
Hold them accountable.
Stuxnet Explained
The NYT has a nice long piece on Stuxnet today. Basically, it’s pretty much clear now that the worm that did major damage to the Iranian nuke program was a joint project of the US and Israel.
This is what “cyberwar” looks like. We released a targeted computer virus that did real-world damage to an enemy’s offensive capability.
No, Erin, We Will Not Be Serving This
Ew.
How you are probably wrong.
How many spaces do you put after a period?
If you said anything other than “one,” you are unequivocally and completely wrong.
If you think two is correct, it’s probably because of your (outmoded) typing training:
Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology — the manual typewriter — invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type — that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule — on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Like a Boss
Mark Ingram is so awesome that he’s already signed a 7-figure deal with a sports marketing company before he’s even been drafted. I guess a national championship, a Heisman, and no hint of NCAA impropriety will do that for you. Go Mark!
(Just don’t go to the Pats, please. Or Dallas. Christ, please not Dallas.)
Joe Mathelete FTW
The Most Perplexingly Meta Acting Career in Hollywood — or, in other words, Sheeeeeeiiiiit.