My sainted college roommate

Blessed Charles of Austria looks exactly like my old college roommate Dion Buzzard.

One or the other

Either everyone writing on the web has gotten a lot dumber in the last few weeks or I've entered some manic phase in which every typo and grammatical error on a page may as well be lit up in bold flashing type. The last straw tonight:

The 2009 budget deficit could be close to $2 trillion, or 12.5 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the record of 6 percent set in 1983, according to David Greenlaw, Morgan Stanley's chief economist. Two weeks ago, budget analysts said the measures might push [the, dammit!] deficit to as much as $1.5 trillion.

Rules of thumb

• application of Islamic legal principles = more dead women
• a new Cabinet level office = another area in which nothing will improve, forever
• "nationalized health care" (as heard on NPR this morning) = adequate health care for the rich, rationed low-quality Canadian health care for the rest of us
• nationalized health care = the post office running the hospitals

More to come as I run across them.

Buttons

This button at the NOW store is about as morally defensible as "Against slavery? Don't own one." It's amusing to recall that the Democrat party was the party of slavery as it is of abortion.

Tip o' the hat to Scott Bilik.

A king with style

Andrew Cusack takes a look at the new King of Tonga and likes his duds. Personally, I think I could pull off the President Taft look:

The great Twinkie experiment

The guys at Eisenbrauns are running a five-year-long experiment to determine the practical shelf-life of Twinkies. The test for year three was conducted last Tuesday by their webmaster whilst wearing the famous Eisenbrauns cuneiform t-shirt.

Now that we have that cleared up...

Using your browser url history to estimate gender

• Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 1%
• Likelihood of you being MALE is 99%

The capacity for contemplation explained?

Perhaps men are natural contemplatives.

Good for buyers

I'm no economist, but it seems to me that there will be some nice bargains for home shoppers coming up real soon now.

The curse of a common name

Now that neo-Nazi moron Bill White is in the news again, it's time to post my periodic reminder that I'm not that Bill White. From my website:

Notice: I am not that Bill White. I post this reminder occasionally in case someone googles for me and thinks I'm Bill White the neo-Nazi from Maryland. I'm not. He's 11 years younger than I - according to the wikipedia entry above, he was born in 1977 and graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1994. I was born in 1966 and graduated from Findlay High School in Findlay, Illinois, in 1984. I'm also not any of these Bill Whites (though I did receive a pleasant email a few years ago from a citizen of Houston, Texas, recommending a planting of trees along some street).

Recent searches

Most recent google searches that brought people here:

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Top 15 google searches:

• ubuntu
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Paint It, Black

Via Nancy Nall, what was the top song on the radio (in the US) the day you were born? Mine was the Stones' Paint It, Black, aka the theme song of that 1980s Vietnam teevee series. Not sure what that means in the rock-n-roll zodiac. I've heard the song lately on the oldies stations and enjoyed it.

My theory of dystopian fiction

There's a current crop of apocalyptic movies: "I Am Legend," "Children of Men," "28 Days Later," "Doomsday" to mention a few. It seems to me that when done well, they're echoes of our own spiritual dystopia.

Man was created by God and was living the life he was meant to live until a catastrophe hit and wiped out life as we knew it. It wasn't the usual trigger you find in dystopian stories, a virus, an asteroid or a nuclear war; it was a mysterious crisis (well, sin, to call it by its common name) in the human heart that wrecked our lives and drove us from our homes, and led to millenia of suffering and death.

Any good dystopian fiction will examine our real-life fall (the original fall and our tragic personal falls) and try to provide an explanation of this dystopian life in which we "do not understand our own actions; for we do not do what we want, but we do the very thing we hate."

This is why the word 'gobsmacked' was invented

The Red Army Choir (yes, that Red Army) teams up with a Finnish band, the Leningrad Cowboys, to perform a traditional American tune.

Googling the past

• Google, 1924
• Google, 1960

I'm pancakes

Hat tip: Rosamundi.

A note to proprietors of restaurants

If you serve coffee at your restaurant and you cannot guarantee that the waitress will be by once a minute or so, simply give me an entire pot of coffee and some mechanism to keep it warm.

Your well-tipped waitress will thank you.

Chicken catch-a-blogger

Someone arrived at my blog yesterday by googling for a chicken cacciaguida recipe. Perhaps Cacciaguida can devise one.

Twice as strange

The other day I woke up thinking about fake vomit - the stuff you used to buy at the gag store at the state fair along with itching powder and whoopie cushions and those hand buzzer things. I awoke wondering whether fake vomit is still made in America or had it been shipped off to China along with all our other noble manufactories? And what did the Chinese think of it - the guys working in the fake vomit factory? (In my sophomore year of college we shook our heads when we learned that a classmate had dropped out of school to go to work at the onion ring factory.)

Waking up like that is strange enough. But later that same morning as I scanned the blogs, I found this story. Rest easy, America - not everything has been shipped to China.

Chicago's venerable gag factory Fun, Inc., was profiled in the Tribune last Wednesday. Fun, Inc. is the home of the finest hand-made fake vomit in the land, made tenderly by a company vomitmaster who keeps his secret recipe close to the chest.

Why superheroes wear capes

Or, Superman as the new Hercules: a fascinating detective story from Chris Knowles.

The Hai Mary

Yes, it's the Lolcat Bible. "O rly, i iz a virgn remembr."

26 Ceiling Cat sended Gabriel, a hovr d00d, to Nazareth (dat is a citi in Galilee)27 to a virgn naemd Mary. She wuz engajded to a d00d naemd Joseph.28 Gabriel wuz liek "O hai Mary, u iz realli nice. Ceiling Cat iz wif u."29 Mary wuz kiend of worrid about dat.30 But teh hovr d00d wuz all "Doant be afraid. Ceiling Cat iz happi wif u.31 U iz gonna hav a kittn. Naem him Jesus.32 He wil be graet. He wil be teh kittn of Ceiling Cat an his daddi will give him David's chaer.33 He wil r00l Jacob's house forevr."

34 Mary wuz liek "O rly, i iz a virgn remembr."35 Gabriel wuz all "Ceiling Cat wil take caer of it."36 Elizabeth iz goin to hav a kittn n evribodi seded it wuz imposubl."37 Nothin iz imposubl for Ceiling Cat."

38 Mary sed "I is happi to do Ceiling Cat's work. Liek u sai." N Gabriel lefted.

Calling Jeff Foxworthy

If you repair your broken gun mufflers with a bent curtain rod and a yard of camoflage duct tape, you might be a redneck.