the blog quebecois

Hawkin's Bazaar:

A curious clockwork, muscle bound beach hunk. Arms pump and head turns with a realistic push-up action. A suitable joke for girls that like guys to be in shape! 12cm

Features

Beach hunk, 12cm
Does press ups

In related news, Barbie™ is reportedly "vewy, vewy newvous."

Via The Red Ferret Journal

She's only human (we think).

If you can't quite place the weirdo, he was the star of this video making the rounds about a month ago. Warning: Link opens up YouTube video, with extreme moron content.

The Telegraph:

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

An interesting (and skeptical) look at the politics of global warming.

Just what the hell is wrong with the old-fashioned, romantic tradition of packing a pair of tin snips for your big date? Cuts through that underwire like butter.

we make money not art:

Bra Trainer is a fictional teaching aid designed by Noam Toran to instruct adolescent boys to overcome the intricacies of opening the brassiere. When initiated the machine mechanically demonstrates the basic principles of clasp disengagement. Following a short pause the machine then re-secures the bra ready for the next demonstration.

The piece is inspired from accounts of repressive post-war institutionalised sex education in the UK in which teachers were not allowed to touch any of the props (prophylactics, physical models of reproductive organs) unless using gloves or a stick.

That's still good advice while handling many teachers.

Jimmy Carter in a letter to sister-in-law Sybil (widow of brother Billy):

Lamentably, I killed your cat while trying just to sting it. It was crouched, as usual, under one of our bird feeders & I fired from some distance with bird shot. It may ease your grief somewhat to know that the cat was buried properly with a prayer & that I’ll be glad to get you another of your choice.

I called & came by your house several times. We will be in the Dominican Republic until Thursday. I’ll see you then.

Love, Jimmy

Idiot. Bird shot is a rather poor choice to "sting" a cat with. Rock salt I could see (and in nothing bigger than a .410-gauge); better still a Super Soaker with half-a-cup of ammonia or bleach added to the water. Further story here.

Animation via grow-a-brain

is a program that tracks some Wikipedia edits (only the anonymous ones, as registered members have their IP addresses obscured; and only a sampling of those, as the frequency of edits is too fast to comfortably read).

I'm not sure it has any practical utility, but it is interesting to watch.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-- Wilfred Owen, 8 October 1917 - March, 1918

Blaze your way through these squeezebox favorites:

Leichtensteiner Polka, Traditional
The Bowling King, Those Darn Accordions
Can't Touch This, M.C. Hammer
Ya Ya Wunderbar, Frankie Yankovic
Pictures of Matchstick Men, Status Quo
In Heaven There Is No Beer, Traditional
Ride The Lightning, Metallica

It's all a gag, of course, as you'll soon gather from some of their other offerings -- Cthulhu Karts and Grand Theft Ottoman.

I've put it in the extended entry, because there are sounds as it loads. There's a mute button at the top right that you can use to silence the game itself.

Well, last month, to be exact:

"Yes, we work out all our enmities and neuroses on the printed page, so we can afford to be nice to each other," Ruth tells me. "It's exactly the opposite at the Romantic Writers' convention. They're all a lot of backstabbing bitches."

US troops improving the Iraqi landscape, one IED at a time. Warning: Language; wanton destruction of Iranian property.

I'm thinking that this could be an invaluable resource in the year ahead: zombietime's Gallery of Unflattering Hillary Clinton photos.

*

The Band That Would Not Die™ is back! I've decided to feature these in more-or-less chronological order. Bonus: Because we improved markedly over the last year we played regularly, all of them will be better than this one!

I wasn't certain about including this. It's not especially notable musically, and the recording is not very good, with dropouts (I'm not sure if I had the recording levels up too high, or if the guitar pedals we were using -- some combination of flanger, chorus and distortion/fuzztone -- were interacting in some strange way) scattered throughout. (I'm not just talking about my inspired technical wizardry at the end, when I twisted the master volume control up and down, producing an effect uncannily like someone twisting the master volume control up and down.) I don't recall that we noticed it at the time, so it could also be the tape, which can (especially when it's some el-cheapo variety) undergo something known as "print- or bleedthrough" if in storage for long periods.

I never considered myself much of a musician. (we can tell! -- ed. ) However, I did consider myself a songwriter, something I'd been doing even before I learned to play (we can't tell! -- ed.) an instrument.

I only started playing bass when we formed our band. I'd heard that Sid Vicious literally hadn't played a note on the bass (he was, briefly, a drummer in another punk band) before Malcolm McLaren put together the Sex Pistols, and I figured: Hey, if that moron can learn it, I can too. (heh -- you just called yourself a moron -- ed.]

Shut up, ed. Don't make me come down there.

We needed an instrumental for the "rock opera" Don't ask! -- ed. we were working on and this piece seemed to fit the bill. I was finally starting to get comfortable with the bass, launching into descending or ascending bass lines 2! 3! 3½! measures away and miraculously hitting my target (usually). That might not mean a lot to you, but it meant a lot to me; and potentially it might have spared me some pain in the future. Bass notes are BIG notes, and you'd better hit them on time, because everybody notices them. Especially the drummer. Screw up his groove and he's likely to throw his drumsticks at you. And he usually has a lot of drumsticks.

Afterwards we stuck the cassette in the car and went cruising downtown with it blasting away. It felt like we were on the cusp of garage-band godhood or something. Mind you, we were pretty stoned by that time, so our perceptions might have been faulty.

Anyway, so here it is. (Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.) It's over seven minutes, so consider that you'll never get that time back if you decide to listen to it. Therefore don't bother writing me and complaining. You'll just be wasting more of your time, and mine.

Previous:

Just Like A Woman

that a certain would-be immigrant from Poland had quite the death wish [emphasis mine]:

GLIWICE, Poland -- A vodka bottle lies on the floor beside a coffee table featuring a half-eaten breast of chicken, an overflowing ashtray and large photographs of Robert Dziekanski's final hysterical moments before dying in the grip of Taser-wielding Mounties in Vancouver.

Widow Elzbieta Dubon, grief-stricken throughout her first interview with the Canadian media, manages a faint smile when asked what Canada meant to her common-law husband of eight years.

The smile somehow brightens and warms a pasty, alcohol- and nicotine-abused face that could be the visage of someone two decades older.

"Make sure he knows that I am smiling," Dubon, 46, said to a Polish interpreter while she nodded to a Canadian journalist.

"When Robert left he told me, 'Ella, if I go to the Rocky Mountains, and if I see a grizzly bear, I will walk up to it and kiss it.'"

Good thing the cops acted before he could take one of us with him.

An interesting animated .gif that will impress you with its artistry. Or possibly trigger an epileptic seizure. Your call.

6 kasane bashi: Eating just one dish continuously
7 mochi bashi: Grabbing a dish, glass, etc whilst holding chopsticks in the same hand
8 mayoi bashi: Hovering chopsticks over the dishes while humming and hawing about what to eat
9 uke bashi: Holding chopsticks when asking for more rice
10 kaki bashi: Holding a bowl to your mouth and shovelling food in
11 neburi bashi: Licking your chopsticks
12 hane bashi: Pushing away disliked food with chopsticks

I was thinking about going to Japan; but that's now off, for fear that I'd accidentally commit some ghastly faux pas that would require me to perform ritual seppuku in front of the Emperor or something.

So it's Hello, Disney World!

I ran across this at Dave Barry's blog back in October, filed it away, and promptly forgot about it. It concerns one Senator Larry Craig, who was much in the news at the time. (In case you've forgotten why, here's the Wikipedia link.)

I don't know why people are interested in what politicians eat, because it's usually brutally bad food to complement their equally brutal schedules; but this one is at least ironically amusing.

Still, when served a treat like this, start looking around for the family dog.

A simple, if frustrating puzzle. Click on any of the green dots, and the cat will move to any free adjoining dot. Your task is to prevent it from escaping from the board.

When my cousin came over to record, we'd usually have a cup of coffee (occasionally stronger refreshments were served) before heading down to the basement. In September 1983 the radio was ablaze with the news that the Soviet Union had shot down a Korean Air Lines jumbo jet that had strayed off course on a flight from Alaska.

So we were listening to some of that, when, inspired, I wrote down the first verse and pushed it across the table to my cousin, who read it and laughed.

That is the acid test of songwriting, innit? Make your cousin laugh -- next stop, The Ed Sullivan Show!

You will no doubt be amazed that the whole of it came together in twenty minutes. You're thinking: No way! That couldn't have taken more than ten, fifteen minutes, tops. Well, yeah, but we had to work out the harmonies.

Speaking of which, I never knew before that moment that my cousin could ad-lib perfectly good "Yahoooos!" The things you learn in the pressure cooker of the recording studio.

It was at times like that, with the world trembling on the brink of war, that the media (this was our theory, anyway) would turn our way and exclaim: "There's a couple of guys with guitars! They must have something intelligent to say about all this!"

As it turned out, we didn't. Like that ever stopped us.

Link Warning: Embedded QuickTime audio.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

Cancel my trip to Korea
The skies are safe no more
First they lost my luggage
Then they lost the war

The valiant Red Air Force
Locked in mortal battle
With a deadly 747
armed with cameras

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Chorus:

Rotten stinking Commie pinkos
Dirty Soviet tricky finkos
Hear this now, you murderous lackeys
Americans on that plane, by Cracky!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Verse:

A thousand heat-seeking missiles
Fired in comradely warning
Trespassers in Soviet airspace
Will not live to see the morning

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bridge:

Unscheduled stopover in the Sea of Okhotsk
But a Boeing makes for a lousy boat
Water rushing in, cold and green
Boeing's even worse at making submarines!
---------------------------------------------------------------------

[Rpt. 1st verse, chorus]
===================================

The Chase
Just Like A Woman

England's loss to Croatia in the Euro 2008 qualifying rounds got off to an amusing start, at least.

Ananova:

Tony Henry was trying to sing the national anthem in Croatian, but reportedly got the words wrong.

Fans say the mispronounciation helped the players relax before the game at Wembley where Croatia beat England 3-2.

The national anthem is written in old style Croatian, and there can be slightly different interpretations in English because it is a very lyrical language.

The line in which Henry slipped up should have been "mila kuda si planina" (You know my dear how we love your mountains).

Which is kind of suggestive all by itself.

But what he actually sang was "mila kura si planina" which means "Dear Penis, you are a Mountain" or "My Dear, my penis is a mountain".

Croat players like Manchester City's Vedran Corluka and Arsenal target Luka Modric started looking at each other and grinning when they realised what he was singing.

Croat fan websites have been calling for Henry to be given a medal of honour for helping the players relax, they also want him made an official team mascot for the tournament.

I think they should make the change official. It's much more intimidating than "You'll Never Walk Alone."

*

This hasn't happened to me (yet), but I recently ran across this Microsoft technical bulletin:

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

Yeah, that's really intuitive engineering there, guys. I know that immediately I hear the haunting melody of "Für Elise," my thoughts turn automatically to CPU fan failure. (I understand that Beethoven was plagued with the very same problem, made all the worse because he couldn't hear it power down.)

Like it would have killed you to put up a warning message or something?

What? What? I just see a cute iPod. You see other things, that's your problem, homo.

A Rorschach moment from the lads at b3ta

Christian Science Monitor:

By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the "Jena 6." White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests - the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.

There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.

A report by a local journalist that will further erode your trust in the MSM. If you had any left, that is.

During a patient's two week follow-up appointment with his cardiologist, he informed me, his doctor, that he was having trouble with one of his medications. "Which one? " I asked. "The patch. The nurse told me to put on a new one every six ours and now I'm running out of places to put It!" I had him quickly undress and discovered what I hoped I wouldn't see. Yes, the man had over fifty patches on his body! Now, the instructions include removal of the old patch before applying a new one.

Keeping the lines of communication open.

Via grow-a-brain