Green Eggs and Ham

Although I've been eating ham almost nonstop since Christmas, this is particularly unappealing.

Dana Carvey as Tom Brokaw on Gerald Ford

Blatantly stolen from Jake Allen.

The Naughty List

The NFL custom jersey shop isn't so liberal as the stamp makers evidently, they have compiled quite the naughty list--sort of:

This rather bizarre conclusion is reached when trying to order a personalized jersey from the NFL Shop, the online merchandise site run by the league. Anyone trying to buy a jersey with the single word "GAY" or "LESBIAN" or "GAY PRIDE" on the back gets a rejection message that states: "This field should not contain a naughty word."

The wording was changed in the hours since this article first appeared and the NFL contacted. Now when you enter "GAY" and try to checkout you get the following: "The personalization entered cannot be accepted." This wording is no less offensive than "naughty" and doesn't change the issue. Especially when you can buy jerseys with "FAG" or "DYKE" or "HITLER" on them.

The project manager was showing off the functionality when it was first developed and I bet him I could get an offensive jersey order through in less than two minutes. I won the bet and it's the reason ‘smegma’ is on the list.

The mural of approved and verboten jerseys is a work of art in need of a grant!

Do You Want My Pere Noel

Merry Christmas to you too, Gunther.

When You Can't Go Home Again...

It takes a certain amount of hubris to Photoshop your head onto the cupid from the famous U.S. Postal Service LOVE stamp and send it out into the world.

Nick Slepko, 28, a former Arlington resident, said "hubris is sort of implied" in his decision to create his own vanity postage stamp, using one of three Web sites that now offer do-it-yourself postage. The vanity stamp program was launched by the Postal Service in May 2005 and was expected to have its most business this month.

Web sites offering do-it-yourself postage, such as Nick Slepko's take on the LOVE stamp, have personalized the act of sending mail the old fashioned way.

Letter mail has been flagging, so the customized postage has been a boon for the Postal Service, said spokeswoman Joanne Veto. More than 20 million of the stamps have been sold, and the program's trial period has been extended for another two years.

Some users say the stamps have become a tiny and unlikely canvas for the kind of family animus that often pervades the holidays -- like faux-cheery holiday letters of years past.

As Slepko put it: "What better way to say dysfunction than through the post office?"

He thought putting a "LOVE ME!" plea on a sheet of stamps would be the perfect gift for his prickly mother, Tess.

"She's the most un-mom a mom could be," said a teasing Slepko, who is a consultant living in Ukraine. "She's not a big fan of children in general. I had to potty-train myself."

Animated Christmas Lights - Pixar/THX intro

Happy holidays everyone. :)

Kochalka song makes Rolling Stone 100

Via Newsarama:"Britney Spears didn’t make the list, but the song by James Kochalka Superstar about the pop diva was named one of the 100 best songs of 2006 by Rolling Stone magazine.

"'Britney’s Silver Can,' which imagines Spears pining for her lost love, Justin Timberlake, came in at No. 90, sandwiched between John Legend’s 'Show Me' and 'Buttons' by The Pussycat Dolls. 'Kochalka, a very funny moonlighting comic-book artist, makes the definitive tune about Britney’s rough past few years,' Rolling Stone said of the Burlington-based multimedia underground star.

"Kochalka, in an e-mail, joked that he would have ranked himself a little higher, 'but it’s amazing to be on the list at all.'"

Want more Kochalka Superstar? Fine, here's the video for "Wash Your Ass":

Militant Anti-Christmas Terrorism, Part Deux

Al Qaeda is everywhere this year, first Sweden, now Cincinnati :

Two Christmas grinches were arrested Monday, accused of stabbing a 12-foot-tall inflatable Frosty the snowman with a screwdriver. The Hamilton County Sheriff's office said two 18-year-olds were charged with criminal damaging, and the investigation continues to snowball.
...
"The question I have is, 'Why me?' And why Frosty?"

* * *

In Ukraine, on Orthodox Christmas they dress up like sheep and ask for candy, but on Old New Year, they dress up like devils and steal your outhouse. I hope that pictures will be forthcoming.

Dudeism

Via The Presurfer: Still not sure what to get that someone special this holiday season? How about an ordainment as a Dudeist Priest?

"As an ordained Dudeist Priest you can legally perform all varieties of religious ceremonies in most U.S. States (check with your local County Clerk first). Preside over a wedding, a funeral, a bris, a baptism, or even a pet-spaying ceremony with pride and authority!"

Spit Art

credit to John.

A new spin on Virginia Woolf

If I had my bachelor's degree to do all over again, I would seriously consider designing an "alcohol and culture" major and taking the bulk of my classes with Eric Felten. Oh well, I can't turn back the clock but at least I can read his "How's Your Drink?" column every week. Here's an excerpt on what Kingsley Amis suggests for those who like to stay home to do their drinking:

"The English novelist Kingsley Amis liked a good drink or three and wrote a couple of books on the hobby. In On Drink, he includes a section on how to outfit a bar at home... No. 1 on Amis's list of 'Bar Kit' essentials is a refrigerator of one's own."

"'Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food,' Amis writes."

Looking for a Last-Minute Gift?

Pick up a little nightmare-inducing-flesh-eating-super-cyborg-mutant-critter at Insect Lab. via Presurfer

Militant Anti-Christmas Terrorism

This article from the AP is like an episode of Arrested Development.

Swedish Christmas Goat Survives Attack
Fri Dec 15, 8:14 PM ET

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Vandals tried to set fire to a giant straw goat in central Sweden but failed to burn down the traditional Christmas monument, which has been soaked with flame-resistant chemicals, officials said Friday. The overnight raid was the season's first attack on the 43-foot-high Christmas goat in the city of Gavle, 90 miles north of Stockholm. The goat has been burned down more than 20 times in the last 40 years in what has become a yule tradition.

"Somebody tried to set fire to the right front leg, but the flame-resistant chemical worked 100 percent," said Kurt Lagerholm, chairman of the goat committee.

"There's smell of gasoline and the ribbon is a bit smutty, but otherwise it's unhurt," he said.

Since it was first erected on Dec. 3 in 1966, the goat has been hit by flaming arrows, run over by a car and even had its legs cut off — surviving only 10 times beyond Christmas Day.

This year, officials doused the straw goat with flame-resistant chemicals and set up two 24-hour Web cams to try to protect it, but Lagerholm said the overnight attackers managed to sneak past the cameras by coming in at the only angle the cameras did not reach. The suspects were still at large Friday.

Last year's goat was burned down by vandals dressed up as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man. They were never caught.

Pear Trees in Demand,

Virginal Dairy Workers Not

According to a clip from ABC News, the yearly cost of the items in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is tracked by PNC Bank (the background sound might making you lord leaping batty though):

What’s really surprising is that our index follows overall Consumer Price Index trends. To think that the cost of a partridge in a pear tree would mirror what’s going on at Target, for example, is pretty interesting.

Marc and Matt Movie Review: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Director Martin Scorsese is best known for such gritty street dramas as Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed. This reputation, however, tends to overshadow the breadth of his many films. He has directed such divergent films as The Age of Innocence, Kundun and The Aviator. One of these films that is atypical to the Scorsese stereotype is the 1974 film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Read more...

This movie stars Ellen Burstyn as Alice Hyatt, a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage until a Coke truck accident kills her husband. Her foul-mouthed son, Tommy, is superbly played by Alfred Lutter III (of Bad News Bears fame). Alice moves across the southwest in search of a job and a man, while subconsciously yearning to reclaim her lost innocence in the town of her youth.

Country music and vampire flick icon Kris Kristofferson plays the man who she falls for, in large part because of his well-developed facial hair. Her pleading “Can I touch your beard?,” in fact, begins their rollercoaster relationship.

The movie was nominated for numerous Golden Globes, and Burstyn received an Academy Award for best actress for her performance as Alice. Hers is only one of many memorable performances in this film, though. An overlooked actor – who received no nominations but definitely stood out in this film – was Scorsese mainstay Harvey Keitel. He first appears as an unusually normal character, but in true form does his thing by mid-film. Fans of Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs will appreciate this earlier example of his dramatic talent. Laura Dern also shines in her delightful uncredited role as a girl eating an ice cream cone.

Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster also makes an appearance in this film. Long before Panic Room and Flight Plan, she showed off her tough self-sufficiency playing an alcoholic ten-year-old with a prostitute for a mother. She befriends Tommy and shows him, briefly, the wild side of life.

This movie shows a realistic, though sometimes negative, view of families. Alice is caught up in the popular social trend of the time which contends that one shouldn’t punish children physically. Tommy, in turn, is a self-centered brat with little respect for authority. Alice’s dissatisfaction with her marriage translates into her secret gladness when her husband kicks it. While the Focus on the Family crowd might not appreciate such a depiction, the movie comes across as more true to what the institution of marriage involves for many people as a result of these details.

Scorsese’s direction of this film is a bit jarring at points, and the strangeness of some of the sequences points to an unusualness that is often overlooked in day to day life. Michael Medved ignorantly states that Scorsese is “grossly overrated,” but once again with this film Scorsese shows why he is the best director of his generation. While perhaps not his finest or most thought-provoking picture, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore does succeed in reaching into what American life truly is. It is certainly a classic worthy of watching.

Pretty Walloony

What if you had a revolution and no one really cared?



For those not in the know:

Suddenly and shockingly, Belgium came to an end. State television broke into regular programming late Wednesday with an urgent bulletin: The Dutch-speaking half of the country had declared independence and the king and queen had fled. Grainy pictures from the military airport showed dark silhouettes of a royal entourage boarding a plane.

Money quote from the pedophile socialist Freemason Elio di Rupo, the Minister-President of the Walloon Region:

Never in my long political life have I seen such worry. Anguish came from around the world.

Why can't they learn to live in (complicated) harmony like the Baarle villages? Money quote:

Enclaves! Nice. Enclaves inside enclaves! Nicer.

Alan Moore on Sex, Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire

Via Newsarama: "Sexual openness and cultural progress would seem pretty much to have walked hand in hand throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the West, and it wasn't until the advent of Christianity, or more specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and those processes relating to them. Not until the Emperor Constantine had cut and pasted modern Christianity together from loose scraps of Mithraism and the solar cult of Sol Invictus, adopting the resultant theological collage as the religion of the Roman Empire, did we get to witness the effect of its ideas and doctrines when enacted on a whole society.

"If we take a traditional (and predominantly Christian) view of the collapse of Rome, then conventional wisdom tells us that Rome was destroyed by decadence, sunken beneath the rising scum-line of its orgies, of its own sexual permissiveness. The merest skim through Gibbon, on the other hand, will demonstrate that Rome had been a heaving, decadent and orgiastic fleshpot more or less since its inception. It had fornicated its way quite successfully through several centuries without showing any serious signs of harm as a result. Once Constantine had introduced compulsory Christianity to the Empire, though, it barely lasted for another hundred years."

Teenar, Girl Guitar

Teenar, The Girl Guitar - a vintage mannequin transformed into an electric guitar [helping pedophiles achieve their rockstar dreams since 1986].

via Ubergizmo.

Crazy Man Dancing In Best Buy

Butt-print artist no longer welcome at high school

Via The Obscure Store: "Monacan High School art teacher Stephen Murmer was placed on paid administrative leave recently after school administrators learned of an online video in which he's demonstrating how he paints with his buttocks.

"Murmer operates a Web site showcasing paintings he makes with his rear and genitals. The site, on which he goes by the name Stan Murmur, features his work and the video [It looks like he's taken everything down].

"School Board Chairman Marshall W. Trammell Jr. said he has seen a lot of things during his 15 years on the School Board, 'but this is probably the most unique [incident] that I've ever seen.'"