Tag: Painful Truths

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Headline competition

A snippit of a Twitter conversation, with slight explanations. No animals were injured in the making of this post; we may have a disappointed badger however…

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/302515197451583489

Chubby Checker Sues HP Over Penis Size App

Posted by majestic on February 15, 2013

WIKI CHUBBY CHECKER 2Some men might be flattered if a penis size app was named after them, but not Chubby Checker, reports WebOS Nation:

Attorney Willie Gary of Stuart, Florida, has filed a federal lawsuit in the United States District Court, Florida’s Southern District, against HP and Palm on behalf of performer Ernest Evans over the Silicon Valley firms’ hosting of an app titled “The Chubby Checker” hosted in the webOS App Catalog. The app, a play on the stage name of Mr. Evans – Chubby Checker, was created by developer Magic Apps, was designed as a calculator for estimating the penis size of a man given the input of his shoe size.

The app was downloaded 84 times before being removed from the App Catalog in September of 2012 and no longer available in the store on device or in the App Catalog web listings. “Chubby Checker” is held as a trademark by the Ernest Evans Corporation. The lawsuit claims that HP and Palm’s “use of the name ‘Chubby Checker’ in its app is likely to associate platiff’s marks with the obscene, sexual connotation and images,” and that Evans has “received no compensation for the unauthorized use of the Chubby Checker name and trademark”.

Additionally, the lawyers allege that customers that have looked at or purchases The Chubby Checker app “are being misled into believing that the plaintiffs have endorsed the defendant’s app.” Up to its removal, The Chubby Checker had clocked fewer than 100 downloads. The lawsuit is demanding that HP and Palm cease sales of the app bearing the trademark of or similarity to Chubby Checker and triple damages of the profits HP derived from sales of the app. When listed, The Chubby Checker retailed for $0.99; with sales of no more than a hundred copies and the 30% cut taken by Palm and HP from the App Catalog, damages could total upwards of $90.00…

Body Search In Arboretum Reveals Big Beaver

Published Aug 28, 2010, 12:00pm

A search for a body near the arboretum this afternoon ended after police found comedy gold floating in Lake Washington.

Sometime between 2:00pm and 3:00pm, someone called 911 and reported that a body was floating amongst the lily pads in Lake Washington, on the northeast side of the arboretum.

Patrols officers and the harbor unit responded to the scene, closed off the park, and found the “body.”

It took officers a little while to reach the floating “body” but when they did, SPD spokesman Mark Jamieson says they discovered the “body” was actually a “large, dead, decaying beaver.”

In other news, has anyone seen Courtney Love lately?

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/302524921899266048

Gordon Ramsay’s Porn Dwarf Double Eaten by Badger

U.K. tabloid Sunday Sportrecently introduced the world to Percy Foster, a 35-year-old dwarf porn star whose career was just beginning to catch fire. It was all because an observant production assistant on the set of Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It’s Up Your Arse We Go had noticed how much Foster looked like celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. But just as Foster was set to join the rarefied ranks of celebrity lookalike dwarf porn stars, tragedy struck: The body of the 3′ 6″ performer has been discovered in a badger’s den, partially eaten.

According to Sunday Sport‘s follow-up account, Foster was found “deep in an underground chamber by Ministry of Agriculture experts ahead of a planned badger-gassing programme near Tregaron, west Wales.” They write that “expert CSI teams had to use fingertip technology to remove his body from the six-foot-deep burrow.” (I have no idea what fingertip technology is, but I imagine it’s akin to one of those claw cranes you find in arcades and drugstores.)

Officials have not yet ruled out suicide, and adult film producer Dexter Yamunkeh’s comments — in which he intimates that Foster may have cracked under the pressures of being the world’s leading Gordon Ramsay-lookalike-sex-dwarf — certainly don’t invalidate the possibility:

“Percy was a little guy with big problems. He was doing well but he was under pressure, 24/7, like everyone in this goddamned business.”

It’s more than a little curious that the internet, aka God’s porn dumping grounds, contains not a single reference to either Percy or Dexter prior to these two news items. But that’s just the cynic in me talking. So tonight, we pour out a little (and I do mean little) gin in memory of poor Percy. We may never get to see his work in Midget MasterChef: Assbasters 7, but his memory will live on all the same.

I stand (or, after reading that last article, sit) in awe of the power of the internet.

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Random thoughts from a random mind.

Sometimes you find wisdom in the oddest places. One of those today was the comments at Ms. Althouse’s blog, where a discussion had begun regarding atheism and religion.

Illuninati said…

I believe the term to describe people in the post Christian Western World is Neopagan. Pagans can be polytheists or atheist, religious or nonreligious. One characteristic Pagans all share is that they have no objective moral standard, in other words they have no moral core. What passes for morality among pagans is nothing but a reflection of the current popular culture.

Because Pagans have no objective moral standards, they have no defense against totalitarian leaders such as Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc. Because the leaders dictate the popular culture in which Pagans live, Pagans internalize their leaders whims as moral imperatives. The leaders become their Gods. In Pagan Rome, the common religious experience which tied the empire together was emperor worship. In Germany their god was Hitler, in Russia it was Marx and his disciple Lenin, in China Mao, among pagans in the US many view Obama as God like.

I can’t argue with that at all. I’ve had my own struggles with this question, and have come to my own personal decisions, none of which I care to share here. Let’s just say I feel very sorry for a true atheist.

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We’re all gonna die!

Global Warmening causes asteroid encounters?

CNN anchor Deb Feyerick asked Saturday afternoon if an approaching asteroid, which will pass by Earth on February 15, “is an example of, perhaps, global warming?”

Moments earlier, before an ad break, she segued from the Northeast blizzard to a segment with Bill Nye “the science guy,” by pointing to global warming: “Every time we see a storm like this lately, the first question to pop into a lot of people’s minds is whether or not global warming is to blame? I’ll talk to Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ about devastating storms and climate change.”

asteroid_strike589

As the man says, you just can’t make this stuff up.

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Ammo B. Gone

Wonder world and ammunition went? Donald Sensing has a pretty good clue.

sportsmanswarehouse

But why did Walmart sell out so quickly after the Sandy Hook shootings? The reason is simple. My source says that the very day of the shootings, managers of licensed gun stores went straight to their local Walmarts and cleaned the shelves out. They took the ammo back to their own stores, locked it up and let it sit for a couple or three weeks. Then they put it out for sale at double what they paid.

Ah, capitalism at work. You could hardly blame them.

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Thank you!

Found on Twitter

A calm, well-reasoned epic rant, that most of you can immediately relate to:

[jwplayer mediaid=”1617″]

I think Rand Paul (!) may be my new hero. Note the dismissive way he’s treated- “You plebeians, you proletarians, you serfs- shut up! We know what’s best for you…”

Most of our ‘representatives’ in DC sincerely think they are cut from a better quality cloth than us crackers and flyover folk. Maybe it’s time for tar, feathers, lampposts and rope to come back into style…

 

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A practical suggestion…

… for our current economic straits, from Samizdata:

fired

My proposed means of stimulus is the mass firing of government employees.

Every government employee fired aids the economy in three distinct ways.

First, there is the direct cost of the salary, benefits and retirement of those employees, which must be sucked out of the rest of the economy through coercive taxation, weakening it. Each dollar we leave in the hands of ordinary people is a dollar they can then proceed to spend on things they really want, which is always better for the economy than a coerced expenditure.

—

Second, there is the cost to the economy of the negative work most government employees do. Although a small fraction of government employees are engaged in jobs that would exist even in a free society, such as designing bridges and the like, most employees in a modern government spend their time interfering in the productivity of others…

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Third, there is the cost to the economy of having someone essentially idle. Most government employees do nothing of actual use, and there is an opportunity cost to that.

I think the benefits of such a proposal far outweigh any negative effects, and it (the proposal) should be implemented posthaste. The traffic improvements alone in cities such as Mobile, Atlanta, and Washington, D. C. would make it worthwhile.

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Why I Love Neal, part XX

For those who don’t know, Neal Boortz was until recently a talk radio host in the Atlanta area, and had been since the Seventies. He specialized in libertarianism and offending people, not always in that order. Now that he’s in retirement he’s taken more to Twitter. A sample:

https://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/297177334803468288

https://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/297178041430470657

https://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/297179088051912706

https://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/297179170973306880

https://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/297180500752232449

Herman Cain is his current replacement in the old show. I wish Herman luck, but he is not The Talkmaster. There can only be one.

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The Black Dog

I have found a name for my pain. (No, it’s not Batman.)

In the past few weeks, I have been extremely distracted by the move to the Undisclosed Location and all the jarring and uprooting and just plain hard work that entailed. But there’s been another issue, an elephant in the room I didn’t want to acknowledge, partly because I couldn’t describe it.

As usual, I fall back on the words of those more educated or who simply write better than I can. One such is The Diplomad, who came up with that name.

Apologies for the light blogging these past few days. Having one of those periodic visits by what Churchill and others have called the “black dog.” A little one, mind you, but nevertheless it interferes with my ability to engage in witty repartee of the blog-type. Let me explain. I am not talking about some clinical depression. I am talking about the black dog that bites you when you read the news, and see and hear the politicians–Democrat and Republican, American and foreign–prattle on about anything and everything except the facts. There are so many facts out there the size of elephants or at least the size of CTU President Karen Lewis, yet the world’s politicians manage not to see them and to see, instead, what they believe in.

Black Dog. Yes, I’ve been bitten by that fellow as well. It’s hard not to look at what is going on in our country today and not feel just a touch of, if not despair, then a strong sense of foreboding.

I spent the last sixty-odd days working side by side with folks you would call the “salt of the earth”-  the people who fix things, make things, make things happen in the background that is never seen unless it stops working. The folks who keep society functioning. The one universal thread I saw was a sense of “preparing”, a quiet withdrawal back to the near and dear, a vibe you only feel when something like a big hurricane is coming- it’s big, it’s inevitable, and it may tear your life apart, but you ready yourself as best as you can.

I think I know what it is, and am afraid of the knowing, so I turn from the macro to the micro and just get on with things. Now is a time for casting aside the trivial and unimportant and shoring up that which really matters, for a storm is coming and none of us knows what it will bring.

The Black Dog. I like that. It fits.

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A semi-sorta kinda-positive look towards our future

Which I find refreshing and a little encouraging, as it is my wont to look at the most terrible outcomes and see them coming true. (Many posts on this blog will back this up.)

Ms. Hoyt, however, due to her quite different experiences in life (which you’ll have to read about in her blog to learn of), has a- well, not necessarily positive outlook, but one that on reflection may be a lot more accurate and a bit less dismal than my own.

Here are some bits and pieces from her post “It All Ends In Chickens“. (Seriously, it does.)

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that this country is in for a very rough time, maybe the roughest time we’ve ever endured, simply because what can go on won’t, and because in a time when technological change is pushing is towards greater individual choice, responsibility and freedom (yes, I can expand on it) our exquisitely trained “managing” class (not just in government, companies, churches, charitable societies are all on the same boat) has been TRAINED to hate our foundational principles and to idolize Europe’s centralized system which was moribund back in the seventies, and which is now completely at odds with the direction of the technology.

—

I can’t fully tell you all the ways in which America is different – or how little the rest of the world “gets” us.  I just can’t.  I can’t even explain it to them.  My brother, for instance who likes reading history (though mostly historical fiction) was once telling me about this history book he found and how it was probably something I couldn’t get here, so he’d send it to me when he was done reading.  This is when I sighed and informed him that back then (pre-Amazon which changed my buying methods) I belonged to the history book club, and I’d read that book a year ago, and by the way there was also this, this and this.

See, in Portugal they have this idea of the US as “futuristic” which to them means that nothing that isn’t as new as tomorrow matters here.  The idea of oh, my plumber, who is a civil war reenactor and can tell you what a soldier ate for breakfast on any given day of any given year of the war (perhaps a very slight exaggeration, but very slight, trust me) and who spends his time, money and considerable skull sweat studying the civil war, doesn’t fit into their idea of America.

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Yes, some areas will go Mad Max.  I was telling a friend shortly after Sandy that he really must have a backup plan in case NYC goes all “Escape from NY” because I don’t have enough guns to go in and rescue him.  (Will NYC be one of the areas that goes Mad Max?  I don’t know.  Actually I think they’re first on the list of “most likely to glow with radioactive light” – but that’s another aspect.)

In law and on paper, yeah, we’re headed to a total collapse that would lead to that sort of thing…  But the US, never having experienced that sort of collapse doesn’t know, bone deep, that collapses are never that absolute.  Having watched collapses – Zimbabwe – at a distance, we see them as absolute.

But humans are humans.  Humans are no more law abiding when society falls apart than they are when it’s whole – in fact, they’re less.  Even in a country as law abiding as the US (we are.  Truly) we’re each of us already violating three laws before breakfast because the d*mn things have multiplied to the point to obey one you have to violate the other.

When laws and rulers (yes, I know they’re supposed to be administrators, but most of them, right now, from corporate managers to the president, are under the misguided impression they’re rulers and acting as such) are suicidal, the normal person still chooses NOT to commit suicide.  And contrary to the Marxist view of society which has influenced many of us whether we know it or not (having it shoved down your throat for seventy years does that) humans are not in general “everyone’s hand against everyone else” unless a kindly government prevents their killing each other.  Humans, in general, are social animals who cooperate for mutual benefit.

Just a taste- read the whole thing for the full flavor. And a ray of (some) hope.

And to learn about the chickens.