Posted in International on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
OK, so the Queen’s Concert has been pretty good, including the bit where the projection was done on the palace walls. Kylie was great. The special effects and sets were a lot better than I expected.
And the Queen sure looks happy in the picture below.
The only thing that would have made this picture better is if Lady Elton John were standing between the Queen and Camilla.
Posted in Academia, Humor on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
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Posted in Child Abuse, Pop Culture on June 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Posted in LGBT, Sports, Wingnuts on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
If you’ve been following gay rights since at least 1999, you might remember baseball player John Rocker and his infamous Sports Illustrated profile at that time in which he managed to offend pretty much everyone — including gay and lesbian activists — with his gems of wisdom about gays, having to ride public transportation with non-white people, and so on.
Rocker could have gone on to have a middling career as a baseball player — his skills were apparently overrated and short-lived — but he was hot enough a male specimen that he could have skated by on just his looks had he not been a total idiot.
Now he has a book out and the web site Vice.com has a take-down of him and the book:
John Rocker’s cultural relevance roughly coincided with that of the Baha Men, but unlike those advocates for Loose Dog Awareness, Rocker never had the sense to recognize his moment was over. The former Atlanta Braves closer still reenters the spotlight periodically to beg the media to write about how the media ruined his life.
John Rocker: super hot and super stupid.
Finally, in response to the clamoring of absolutely no one, Rocker has gathered his wit and wisdom into a volume called Scars and Strikes, in which he rails against the press, the Obama administration, immigrants, people who don’t speak English, and the metric system, probably. To give you an idea of the target audience, the book was given a lengthy write-up at WND.com, an insane right-wing news site where Ann Coulter and Jack Abramoff are featured columnists, and a column that labels itself “Voice of Sanity” ponders the question Obama and Stalin: How They’re Alike.
Rocker was once a fearsome weapon in the Braves’ bullpen, but he gained infamy after receiving a Sports Illustrated profile by Jeff Pearlman following the 1999 season in which he said appalling things about minorities, gays, and the 7 train. Rocker has never denied a single word that Pearlman reported, only that his words were “taken out of context,” as if a full transcript of their conversation could lend clarifying nuance to calling a black teammate “a fat monkey.” Like a true bully, he also loves to play the aggrieved party, painting himself as a martyr to political correctness.
In terms of what Rocker has to say, WND’s “exclusive interview” contains nothing new. What is eye-opening is how much his tough-guy victimhood jibes with the Pouting Good Ol’ Boy undercurrent of the Fox News set during the Obama era. Take, for example, this stinger, in which the Rocker’s views and the writer’s POV become impossible to discern from one another:
“When, he wonders, will the concern for the offended stop outweighing the concern for those exercising their rights as Americans? Why are the ‘offended’ always right?”
You can read the rest of the article here.
Posted in Sports on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
It’s called Beep Baseball, and I still can’t hit a ball with two perfectly good eyes.
Posted in Academia, Education, Wingnuts on June 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
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Posted in Children, Parenting on June 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
First came the breast feeding three-year-old on the cover of Time Magazine. (Which did not bother me at all, btw, except that it exploited a perfectly natural thing to sell magazines.) But this. This is different:
I wonder what she does when the kid is constipated.
Posted in Democrats, Politics, Republicans on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
He is so much better at retail and trench warfare politics than Barack Obama is, and my guess is it’s all about experience. Obama has simply not been a politician long enough to be able to tangle effectively with the likes of today’s GOP and its enablers.
Obama seemed to acknowledge as much last night at a fundraiser in New York when he bemoaned following Clinton on stage, where Clinton got off one of the best applause lines of the evening:
“[W]ho would have ever thought that the Republicans would embrace the austerity and jobless policies of what they used to derisively call ‘old Europe.’ I never thought I’d live to breathe and see, here they are saying, let’s do the eurozone’s economic policy — they got 11 percent unemployment; we can get up there if we work at it.”
Clinton knows how to turn their rhetoric back on the Republicans, and Obama is still learning. That is, if he ever learns in time.
You can read more about last night here. Although, notice how Politico manages to use the Right’s derogatory term “Bubba” to describe Clinton.
Posted in Humor, International on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Leaving it to the people at the Daily Show to nail the ridiculousness of the Diamond Jubilee celebration press coverage. You can watch the entire awesome clip here since I cannot seem to get the program’s clips to embed properly.
Posted in Consumerism, Personal on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
watching TV and was just thinking that nobody can make you feel inadequate without your permission. Except Martha Stewart.
Posted in Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, International, tagged Welfare queens on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
“We Yanks cannot seem to get enough of this Queen,” an NBC analyst just gushed on national TV, her voice carried over a picture of Liz wearing a crown so encrusted with jewels one guesses that Liz’s head might flop forward at any moment.
Nice work, if you can get it.
I have the day off and OMG, I’d almost rather have to endure a day of Olympics hype than have to listen to any more of the drivel that comes out of the mouths of American and British journalists covering the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth in that country.
She’s so selfless! She’s given her entire life in service to the British people! And not just the British people, but also to all those poor black, brown, tan and yellow people in the far flung reaches of the Commonwealth!
Puh-leeze, queens.
Sixty years of raiding the British public treasury — and that’s just during her reign — and she’s such a selfless giver!
Even that hateful bitch Mother Theresa at least took a vow of poverty.
If my ability to live in various castles and ride in style on private yachts and buzz around town in Bentleys, Rolls Royces (and gilded carriages for special occasions) was predicated on my willingness to trot around the world and act interested in seeing yet one more indigenous tribe somewhere dance in colorful garb, you can bet I’d put on some sensible shoes, grab a tiny sensible purse and get to it.
What a remarkably easy, if stultifying, way to make a living. After 60 years I’d probably have moments when I’d like to hang myself from the Tower of London, but then I’d think of my summers in Scotland and say to myself, “Stiff upper lip, old girl. It beats being a pensioner living in a council flat somewhere.”
Not only that, but it’s worth noting that the old gal and the coterie of self-hating closet cases who make up her male household staff have managed to go all these years without once making comment on the most important civil rights issues of our time involving LGBT people.
Pfhhht!
Posted in Pop Culture, Social media on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in International, Poverty, Republicans on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
You don’t need a Nobel Prize in economics to figure out this bit of self-evident information: when consumers don’t have extra money, demand is stagnant, the economy cannot grow, and the only people who make money are the people who have tons of it already. Yet you cannot seem to get it through the thick heads of the austerity freaks who think contracting the economy and shoveling money at the rich and rich bankers is the way out of a recession that is in danger of becoming a worldwide depression.
Yet even a person who does have a Nobel Prize cannot seem to reach these people, who all seem immune to reason.
So I took away two main points from this BBC video featuring Paul Krugman and Britain’s answer to the tea baggers: 1) Krugman is far more patient than I am and 2) their austerity hawks are just as clueless as ours. They even spout the same ridiculous John Galtian sound bites.
Posted in Christianism, Pop Culture on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Why is it we cannot show two people having sex without an X rating, but somehow it’s OK to show all manner of blood and mayhem?
That’s fucked up.
Posted in Christianism, Wingnuts on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
If I were being interrogated for a crime I did not commit, they could just put me in a room with this video playing on a loop, and eventually I’d crack and admit to just about anything.
I love it when fundies sing about the joy of their Lord and Savior with blank looks on their faces.
Posted in Christianism, Wingnuts on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I don’t know what’s funnier, that someone might want to go to Bible college but just can’t seem to commit to the idea — methinks you need to choose another calling — or the really funny Glamour-Shot-gone-wrong of the crazy-faced “college” president at the bottom left.
Posted in Animals, Weird on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Stuff him and turn him into a flying toy.
Posted in Memes on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in Animals on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I can’t really explain what it is about this overweight cat and his languid love of boxes and other strange places in which to lounge and play, but I am a Maru fan as much as the next person. Here is his book. I’m not buying it. The intertubes are full of Maru pics if and when I should need a fix. But give his owner credit for riding the wave. I’d have done it before now.
Posted in Animals on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
