Best Politician Of 2011
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 26, 2011 by admin in Politics
One thing you may want to avoid if you ever go into politics is getting on our annual Best Politician list. Of last year’s contenders, two are dead, one was ousted by crazed bankers from his Caligula-like Videocracy, two are facing civil unrest on a scale not seen in Russia since the early 80′s, and one was terribly disfigured during his transformation into a Sith Lord.
One thing you may want to avoid if you ever go into politics is getting on our annual Best Politician list. Of last year’s contenders, two are dead, one was ousted by crazed bankers from his Caligula-like Videocracy
The Horrors of Cheese
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 11, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
What’s in a name? Well, a LOT, when the name is something like “Stinking Bishop” Never mind your milk, these cheese facts will make your BLOOD curdle.
As much as I love cheese, I’ve always figured the first person that ate it must have been in the same frame of mind as the first guy that ate lobster. You know, the old joke about how hungry he must have been to be walking down a beach, see a lobster, and think to himself “Mmmm! That looks yummy!” There’s something similar going on with the cheese story. Sure, we all derived our first nourishment and comfort from the milk of our mothers’ bosoms, but let’s face it. Once you’ve moved on from all that, it’s kind of a weird stretch to look at a cow’s dangling doohickeys and decide to give it a go. And the weirder part is that having done so, someone then had to leave the results of their efforts laying around long enough to curdle, look at it and smell it, and say to themselves “Mmmmm. This will be DELISH”. A rather disturbing series of choices, if you ask me. I mean, while it’s not THAT hard to rationalize the whole milking of mammals thing, even the pastoral tribes of East Africa, who subsist only on the milk and blood of their herds (yup, you read that right, the BLOOD), wouldn’t THINK of eating cheese. And apparently never have; they don’t even have a word for the stuff. Similarly, it’s only in certain parts of Asia that people eat cheese. The distaste for cheese amongst Asian people can in fact be fairly intense; for instance, if you want to make your Japanese guests make a subtle “vurp” face, bring out the cheese platter. I learned this years ago when I lived in San Francisco. I often took the bus up Columbus Avenue with a Japanese friend I worked with. One day, I made the observation that as the bus progressed through Chinatown and more Asian passengers boarded, it smelled more and more like seafood with each passing block. He asked if it bothered me. “No”, I said, “I actually kind of like it”. He replied that he wished he could say the same about the bus leaving Chinatown, clarifying his thought by saying “because you know what it smells like when the bus fills up with white people? CHEESE”. So cheese, it seems, is sort of a defining aspect of western culture. And “culture” is the keyword here; it takes a lot of bacteria and hard work to create the plethora of moldy, discolored, and lumpy biological phenomena around the globe collectively known as “cheese”. We’ve rounded up a few of the more amusing and disturbing examples of the world’s dairy experiments below. Read the rest of this entry »
Occupy Christmas – 15 Gift Ideas For The Young Occupier In Your Life
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 29, 2011 by admin in Holidays
Parents, face it. If you cut off your good-for-nothing radical kid this Christmas, you’re only punishing CAPITALISM ITSELF.
 How can Santa bring you presents, if you don’t know what you want? |
So, you did your best to raise your precious snowflakes to be eager little capitalists. You clothed and fed them for eighteen years, then you sent little Justin and Ashley off to the finest schools your burgeoning debt and education loans could buy. And how do they repay you? They major in political science or philosophy, start THINKING and stuff, and before you know it, they RUN OFF TO JOIN THE OCCUPATION. Well, don’t give up the fight. If you disown your precious snowflake NOW, you’re doing two things to help them win their silly war against the fear and consumption driven world we lovingly crafted for them. First, by cutting them off, you’re just encouraging them to embrace their anti-consumer follies even more, running the risk that they’ll discover that money isn’t everything. Yup. Crazy as it sounds, some people ENJOY a modest lifestyle, and this peasant-like “every day’s a gift” attitude can be contagious. Second, by not spending thousands of dollars on them this Christmas like you always do, the OCCUPATION HAS ALREADY WON. Your “punishment” only punishes CAPITALISM ITSELF. So as crazy as it seems, the best way to prevent your youngster from running off and becoming some kind of vagrant, park-dwelling commie is to HELP THEM DO IT. That’s why we’ve rounded up this list of Holiday Gift Ideas for Occupiers. Read the rest of this entry »
Looking Forward To Death From Above 1979′s New Release Coming Out In 2012
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 27, 2011 by admin in Music
That’s a lot of prepositions and dates for a single overlooked band, but these guys were replacing nipples with other body parts in their videos WAY before Lady Gaga and Die Antwoord’s Yolandi Vi$$er.
One thing I love about the demise of the major record labels and the explosion of indy releases over the last decade is that just when I think I’m caught up on things, I run across some bizarre pop treasure that leads me on the YouTube equivalent of Wikiphilia. You know, when some quirky video or song by some under-recognized artist leads to discovering an entire new world, i.e., the world of bands with 307 video views. This happened the other day when someone sent me a link to the creepy but clever Sexy Results video (NSFW, if breasts with mouths aren’t safe where you work) by Death From Above 1979. Although Die Antwoord’s Yolandi Vi$$er had eyes for nipples in the video for Evil Boy
F-16s and Football
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 19, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green
The U of M jet fighter flyovers on football Saturdays are more fun than a clown on fire, and probably comparable in price, depending on the clown.
 This is what football stadium flyovers look like in other countries. |
I live in a town that is home to one of the best college football teams in the country. Although I’m not a huge football fan, I still guess that’s kind of cool. Although sometimes I think the local university may have its priorities screwed up; whenever I look at the largest college football stadium in the country, I remember the time a few years ago when a friend of mine was tutoring one of the team’s star players, and he broke down crying in the second session, because he literally couldn’t read.
But that’s not what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about jet fighters. For at least the last two years, the university has commissioned US military jet flyovers for games. I guess it’s really invigorating to have these thunderous machines of destruction fly over the stadium at halftime. That must be why the Israeli military does nightly machbusting flyovers of Palestine. They just want to INVIGORATE the families and children that live there. But what does all this invigoration COST, I wondered. So I did a little research. It appears that a conservative estimate of the operating cost per hour of an F-16 (the jets in question) is about $3,000-$5,000 (source, PDF). So today, when those four jets “invigorate” the entire town, the base cost could easily be about $12,000-$20,000.
This made me curious about two other things. The first was, how far could a typical gas-guzzling SUV drive on the amount of fuel these jets consume? There is of course no scientific source for this kind of comparison, but we did our best. GM cleverly doesn’t have to rate the mileage of its H2 Hummer because of its GVWR, but if you average the figures here, you come up with exactly 10 miles per gallon. Likewise with the F-16′s fuel consumption, the figures are highly technical, not broadly advertised, and are influenced by things like altitude, airspeed, and whether or not the craft is in afterburner mode or not. The range of consumption though is 55,000-90,000lb/hour, so we averaged that to 72,500. One pound of standard F-16 fuel is about 6.85 gallons, so in an hour, the jet could use 10,583 gallons. That of course means the fuel the F-16 uses in one hour could take a Hummer 105,830 miles, which is about five times around the Earth, or half way to the moon. Your choice. Your results with the Toyota Prius will be a little different, you’d be able to go 582,065 miles, so you could go to the moon and BACK, and still have enough gas to drive around the Earth almost six times.
The second question was WHO THE HELL PAYS for this? We have an inquiry in with the university, and local news sources say it’s all part of a “military appreciation event”, which includes a pregame tailgate for Michigan “Gold Star” families, university staff, and student veterans. But we suspect in the end it’s your tax dollars.