This is my first, and last, post about the damn wedding, and while I understand that some folks begrudge the not-insignificant stipend awarded by the British government to members of the royal family, I do not, because:
You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Wear Those Damn Hats!
Category: 40yrs
And In the World of the Surreal…
The CIA is touting its green credentials by revealing that they generate heat by burning shredded documents:
A press release from the CIA explains that their “burn after reading” practice conserves energy because the exhaust from their incinerator generates steam to heat water at CIA headquarters. Says the CIA:In addition to saving fuel, that process reduces the amount of waste–which would otherwise be destined for landfills–by nearly 1,000 tons per year. The CIA increases its recycling efforts each year, annually collecting over three tons of plastic, glass, cardboard, aluminum, construction debris, and other waste.
I dunno, I find this kind of …… odd.
Blogging by Candle Light
With the severe storms in the area, our power is out, so I am posting this via my mobile phone.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the modern and the historical.
Nature is Beautiful
I give you Cymothoa exigua:
Cymothoa exigua, or the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 centimetres (1.2 to 1.6 in) long. This parasite enters through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue. It extracts blood through the claws on its front, causing the tongue to atrophy from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish’s tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host’s blood and many others feed on fish mucus. This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ. It is currently believed that C. exigua are not harmful to humans unless picked up alive, in which case they can bite
H/t Atrios.
Deep Thought
H/t DC at Stellar Parthenon.
I’m hoping that this is some sort of elaborate hoax, but I fear that it isn’t:
Al-Qaeda has launched a magazine for women that not only offers beauty and fashion tips but also gives advice on suicide bombings.
The front cover of the glossy magazine, called ‘Jihad Cosmo’, features the barrel of a sub-machine gun next to a picture of a woman in a veil, reports the Daily Mail.
There are exclusive interviews with martyrs’ wives, who praise their husbands’ decisions to die in suicide attacks.
The slick, 31-page Al-Shamikha magazine – meaning The Majestic Woman – has advice for singletons on ‘marrying a mujahideen’.
Stop the world, I need to get off.
Quote of The Day
From the list 25 Guys to Avoid on Wall Street:
Avoid the guy who offers his clients ‘a very special opportunity’ to invest in anything. He has a problem with cocaine.
I will note the parallel between this guy and just about every ‘very special episode’ of a TV series with young characters.
They both involve drug abuse.
Worlds Best License Plate
So, of course, the DMV took it back:
Here is a Real Brain Teaser*
H/t Barry Ritholtz.
*No apologies for the pun.
Why Our Real Enemy is England
First, the royal wedding, and now this!“Lie back and think of England,” that’s what the web site says.
Royal wedding commemorative condoms.
Between this and reality TV, the Western civilization does not deserve to exist.
What if HP Lovecraft wrote Dilbert?
I was doing a Google™ search, and found this:
Clearly the British Isles Must Be Invaded For Their Own Protection
Click for full size
Yes, These Are Royal Wedding Commemorative Condoms
I came across a web page titled, “Lie back and think of England,” in which someone is flogging condoms commemorating the royal wedding.
Clearly they have forfeited any right to self governance.
Needless to say, this does not apply to the Republic of Ireland, who do not have the Royals as head of state, though their dealings with their banks does make one wonder about whether they are suited for self government, but that is a post for another day.
Stuckpocalypse
That, apparently is what the news bots are calling our Nor’easter, because I was not alone in spending 7 hours on the road to go just a few miles.
There were people who could not get moving until 4 or 5 in the morning.
There were lots of wiped out tractor-trailors blocking multiple lanes of traffic.
Still On the Road
I left work 3-1/2 hours ago, and I still have not made it home.
I am in the teeth of a f#@&ing Nor’easter blizzard.
Grabbing some food at the Hires convenience store and posting from the road.
Sharon* Is a Saint
Otherwise, she would have bludgeoned me to death with my own left arm years ago.
Case in point: I was going to bed last night, and my wife smelled something on my breath, and asked, “What were you just eating?”
I replied, “Dulche De Leche Girl Scout cookies ……… but you know something? I don’t think that they taste like they are made with real Girl Scouts.”
She glanced up, and asked, “Have you ever eaten a girl scout?”†
My response was, “I’ve earned my share of Brownie points.“
If I had married a sane woman, I would be dead now, and no jury in the world would convict her.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†Bless her soul, but double entendres were never her long or her strong suit.
Love is Tough
A hickey triggered a stroke for a woman in New Zealand.
Luckily, she recovered after a regime with treatment with anti-coagulants.
If Jews Run the Media,They Are Not Competent
Specifically, they report the story of an Agunah (Literally “Chained Woman) and the resulting protests directed at the ex-husband of a woman who refuses to grant here a religious divorce, a “Get”, which under Jewish law means that they are still married:
This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.
Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.
What a surprise, a Republican is being a selfish asshole.
While I do understand that he has issues with the custody arrangement, using the get as a way to extract concessions is beneath contempt.
That being said, I am aware of a number of these cases, and while I strongly object to these enforcement of these medieval (actually pre-medieval) religious statutes, I am aware that this happens dozens, if not hundreds of times a year.
What got to me was this paragraph:
Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.
(emphasis mine)
If the Jews run the New York Times, they are incompetent, because it misses two points:
- First, if Mr. Reiedman gets civilly remarried, and has a child, a likely thing for a 34 year old Orthodox Jew, the child will not be a mamzer, who would be forbidden from marrying other Jews, while any child that Ms. Epstein has will be a mamzer. (3500 year old religious law is such a joy, huh?)
- Second, it is possible for Mr. Friedman to get a rabbinical ruling allowing him to take a 2nd wife, while Ms. Epstein cannot.
- This has been done in some cases where a wife is in a persistent vegetative state, or completely delusional, since a get cannot be granted under those conditions, it requires the knowing receipt of the get by the wife, so permission for a “2nd” wife has been given with the the “1st” wife continue to be financially supported by the husband.
- In this case though, a rabbi approving a 2nd marriage is basically zero.
This makes the conditions of the Agunah unjust and unfair to the woman in the conflict. It is not, nor has it ever been, an equal imposition on both spouses, and a small amount of research should have made this unfortunate state of affairs quite clear.
Clearly, I need to contact the local president of my ZOG chapter and pass my complaint up the chain.
Well, The Next Time I Ask What the F%$# He is Smoking, I’ll Know the Answer
Everyone’s favorite hypocritical and corrupt televangelist cum politician, Pat Robertson has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana:
For a second it looked as if someone had mischievously switched teleprompter scripts on Pat Robertson, the tele-evangelist and founding member of the Christian Coalition. There he was on The 700 Club, a religious affairs TV talk show talking breezily about why America should legalise marijuana.
But this is the season for compassion and Mr Robertson – who usually makes waves nowadays only when he finds celestial or satanic cause for assorted disasters like the Haiti earthquake (a pact with the Devil to eject the French two centuries ago) or Hurricane Katrina (legalised abortion) – seemed to be serious. He said incarcerating people for taking “a couple of puffs” of pot might not be effective public or social policy.
Here’s a surprise, he’s significantly to the left of Barack Obama on this, probably because he’s at a point in his life where good government policy trumps electoral success.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?
Yes, someone at the CIA has a sense of humor.
They have assigned a group to look at the fallout from Wikileaks cable releases, and they are calling it the Wikileaks Task Force, generally abbreviated as WTF:
The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.
The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.
“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”
Heh.
Brought to You by Leonard Pinth-Garnell
Adventures in bad corporate damage control.
Specifically, because Wikileaks has said that they have a document dump from a Bank of Bank of America, Bank of America has started to buy up hundreds of nasty domain names in the hope of preventing the airing of criticism:
Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks.
According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of Directors’ and senior executives’ names followed by “sucks” and “blows”.
For example, the company registered a number of domains for CEO Brian Moynihan: BrianMoynihanBlows.com, BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianTMoynihanBlows.com, and BrianTMoynihanSucks.com.
You know, I REALLY don’t think that this is going to help when people realize that you were smoking cigars lit from the original notes of mortgages that you have foreclosed on, and that you used homeless orphans as ash trays.
More seriously, if Wikileaks has your documents, then people will go there, or to one of its legion of mirrors, to get that information.