Sadly No Salutes the Smiler on his Nomination!
Left: The 2012 Republican Nominee. Right: A villain from the comic Transmetropolitan
Even though we here at Sadly, No! Industries make our living* mocking and skewering the train wreck of crazy that is our esteemed colleagues on the right, let no one say we are too petty to extend congratulations when they are due.
So we say, to Mitt Romney, congratulations on securing the Republican nomination**!
Sure, it was his to lose. And lose it he nearly did. Despite the fact that Republicans have always been good authoritarians religiously handing the nomination to whoever’s turn it is, and despite the fact that this year’s pool of nominees was so weak, Crazy Eyes Bachmann thought she had a chance, Mitt Romney still nearly managed to give it away.
Indeed, the Republican base has been desperate from the beginning to find a Not-Romney, any Not-Romney, to be their Non-Mormon Great White Hope. Their desperation was punctuated by the revolving door of losers and nutcases that briefly flirted with front-runner status. Secessionist Rick Perry, Serial Adulterer Newt Gingrich, Failed Pizza Business Owner Herman Cain, even perennial joke candidate Ron Paul got his brief time in the sun. But not even the frothy mixture of Santorum could withstand inevitability as Romney limped forward, bloodied and battered.
And really, truly, we must say, that this great man, certainly has deserved better from his base. They have been concerned that the Smiler isn’t enough of a sociopath for them, that he won’t hate the same people, hold the same grudges, or cackle and clap at the same misfortunes as them.
And that’s unfair, because the Smiler is a glorious sociopath. Truly, our political system has never before seen someone so nakedly and universally concerned for power for its own sake, so completely unable to think of others as people, or been so completely lost when it comes to human interactions.
Sure, this prevents him hating with the proper fervor that the right-wing demands in their Generalisimos, but really, as long as his paymasters are directing his callous boot in the right direction, does it truly matter?
I say, no, no it shouldn’t. After all, Mitt Romney is so very talented at stumbling into cruelty that no other candidate can manage to top, a true sleeper candidate for the sadist voter.
I mean, should we worry that the Smiler will forget to continue to neglect and add suffering to our nation’s African American population, when he was perfectly willing and eager to add unnecessary suffering to his family’s vacations? It would be relief enough to know that the Smiler enjoys making single-digit aged children strain their bladders and bodies on long car trips entirely to artificially save a couple of minutes here and there, but no, he went the extra mile.
By strapping his terrified Irish Setter, Seamus, to the roof of the car, he showed his true qualifications. After all, a person who was willing to risk the life of a family pet and terrify it into shitting itself shows what it truly means to be a compassionate conservative in Bush’s mold. And by dealing with its terrified howls and messy aftermath simply by hosing it down to clean off the car, the Smiler proved his conservative credentials by valuing property over squishy organics even in the heat of the moment amidst sobbing appeals from his kids to stop. That’s true moral clarity.
Oh sure, you might stop and wonder, but isn’t that animal abuse?
Sigh, and that’s why you silly libs will never understand conservative values. It’s only animal abuse when a black football player mistreats a dog. When a rich white person does it, it hardly even rises to the level of amusing banquet conversation.
And truly, it is the Smiler’s more recent responses that best encapsulate this. Novice rookies unworthy of a Vice Presidency might show remorse or even acknowledgement of why people might have been upset. But not the Smiler! He knows that the only problem was the attention it received. And his Stepford Wife model knew the real crime of the story, which is how the liberal media won’t acknowledge how the dog loved that traumatizing life experience and truly not abusing their dog would have been the more bastardly option. Why Mitt Romney, has even gone so far as to note the scandalous attention his torture of dogs has received when no one is looking into how 6 year old Obama personally killed a dog to use as a side-meat for the boy he beheaded in Indonesia.
Truly, a complete failure to comprehend basic reality or human response shows his mettle better than any stump speech or baby-eating ceremony could.
But really, why should the Smiler be dinged on any of that? After all, on the all important “who would you have a beer with” criterion, the Smiler still proves himself admirably.
After all, let us not forget his strong sense of humor. When a trooper decided to engage the Smiler in a prank war by short-sheeting his bed, the Smiler knew the proper response. After all, any war, even a prank war, is a call to manly sweaty action and using every tactic to win. As such, the Smiler knew his bunker-buster was pretending to be the hotel manager and writing a note in official stationary telling the trooper that the maid responsible was fired after a complaint from the esteemed rich dickweed. Said trooper was shocked and awed by the Smiler’s comic timing and knew better than to cross that line again, I’ll tell you.
Or what about his many timeless quips about his hardships growing up. Like the time his dad was getting flak on his campaign because he fired a huge amount of workers in the state and was hoping none of them would remember his face come election time? But the band he hired kept playing the theme song of the state he sent all the jobs to. Even today, the very thought cracks the Smiler up. No wonder his face is so often locked in a grim rictus approximating upward facial movements.
But it’s all good and proper being connected to the common folk, but a true Republican candidate also remembers who are the true job-creators. After all, the Teabaggers have been loud and clear over who the real Americans needing relief have been this last 4 years. That’s right, obnoxious racists unable to handle a black president the poor beleagured 1%.
It’s been rough for the ultra-wealthy. People have been making vague comments about returning tax levels on them to the historic low levels it was in the 1990s and mean old hippies roamed the streets yelling at them simply because they broke the world’s economy and expected a bonus for it. Luckily they were able to buy off the police forces to “take care” of that problem for them.
But still, if one wants the respect of the right-wing, one must be hyper-aware of the hyper-importance of our Feudal Lords and Masters.
And on that score, no one has been more on the ball than the Smiler.
Oh sure, candidates like Ron Paul talk a good game, but only the Smiler has lived that life, breathed that life, and continues to fail to imagine any other life.
Sure, other candidates may have riches, but only the Smiler can boast making more money than people will ever make in their lives as an unemployed slob. And only the Smiler remembers to rub the salt in the wounds (warning, pops up video, so if that’s a problem, do not click) of the human refuge that are our nation’s lazy shiftless unemployed.
The Smiler knows that any man worth his solid gold cadillac has 10 grand in pocket for throwaway bets. The Smiler knows that the only thing better than enjoying a NASCAR race is owning a NASCAR race. The Smiler knows that working hard is demonstrated by using your daddy’s money to buy companies and fire the workers to artificially raise the stock price before dumping them. And the Smiler knows that the only true joy in life is knowing you have someone’s financial security in your hands and crushing it like a grape. After all, if you can’t enjoy simple pleasures like firing people, how will you enjoy bigger pleasures like running a former super-power into the ground or killing millions of foreigners to sate the bloodlust of shirtless 40 somethings still living in their parents’ basements?
And yet the right-wing still hems and haws and isn’t sure that the Smiler can be enough of a bastard to be their one and only.
Though to be fair, to our rich and merry band of material generators, there is a lot to process and not much brainpower to process it. There’s the fact that he’s Mormon, the suspicion that he only seems to disregard women rather than out and out loathe them for posessing vaginas that make right-wing men wish they could force themselves to be attracted to, the fact that he’s Mormon, the willingness to support a vaguely liberal idea to win elections in a liberal state, the fact that he’s Mormon, only resignedly supporting death sattelites to patrol the Mexican border instead of gleefully supporting them, the Mormon Mormon Mormoness of Mormon Proportions, and finally, the fact that he’s Mormon.
But the Smiler will out in the end. After all, he is the natural candidate to the right wing’s campaign against democracy. Sure, more and more candidates agree that America was so much nicer when only rich white men were allowed to vote on anything, but only the Smiler shows the utter disdain for the election process. The Smiler is perfectly willing to say anything, do anything, support anything, denounce anything if it will get him a step closer to power for its own sake.
And he doesn’t care if it insults the intelligence of the American people. He knows that with the unlimited funds made possible by Citizen’s United, it no longer really even matters what he says. Cause who really cares if even the dim bulbs of the right-wing are starting to notice that they are unwanted excess to the equation? Will the low-information voters remember that when they’re worrying about how Obamacare is gonna force government into their Medicare?
Sure, Romney may not believe in shit other than the power (acquiring it, exploiting it, keeping it), but come election day, the conservative base will fall in line, rationalizing their choice over the coming months to realize the many ways in which the Smiler truly is their chosen sociopath. Their dark id to unleash on our nation. Because above all else, and above all fears of Mormoness, he possesses the most important qualification:
Not being black.
And really at the end of this long and tiring Primary, that really always was the most important thing.***
So congratulations, Smiler, may you keep our Mango hunts ever financied.
*For a given value of living. Luckily we are snark-based lifeforms who can survive entirely on the rotten mangos of right-wing blogs.
** Oh sure, technically, he’s still not the official nominee, but frankly, I’ve been sitting on this exact post way too fucking long and if the entire news media and Mitt Romney himself want to pretend the primaries are over, I’m more than willing to play along.
*** And now that I’ve gotten this out of my system, overlong mango-shreddings will continue unabated.****
**** No seriously, you have no idea how long this has been sitting on my back burner, in one form or another, just waiting for the inevitable.
True story.
While looking for my picture for the Smiler, I came across a number of wingnuts trying and failing to link Obama to the Smiler because Obama smiles.
Thus missing the biggest point of the Smiler. His cold dead eyes. There are no laugh lines for the Smiler, no hint of joy, just the repetition of that most basic of political functions, the smile, an empty gesture to hide the raw sociopath hiding underneath.
Once again, conservatives seem to grasp the vague notion of critique, but are unable to apply it in any way other than complete and utter fail.
And yes, this is the post I hinted about months ago.
yay warren ellis, his comics are freaking good and he wrote a gi-joe series where cobra was competent (they also blew up moscow in the first ep)
Honestly, if anything Obama is worse than that. Romney is at least faking his inexplicable joy about being a bland managerialist automaton. Obama’s inexplicable joy about being a bland managerialist automaton is genuine.
WILLARD ROMNEY, EVERYBODY
Transmetropolitan! That’s the comic about Cory Booker’s life, right?
Got pissed at the commenters on LGF (don’t post there, just lurk), so I came here to whine. Everyone there figures since they didn’t find coke in his system when he croaked, it couldn’t have been drugs. Sudden death could happen to anyone!
I did a quick google of “cocaine and heart disease” and got 500 bazillion hits on Whitney Houston.
I think IOKIYAR should be IOKIYAPWM (privileged white male).
Okay, excuse me while I wallow in my two minute hate.
Right, back. Here’s FOX News explaining why blackity black black Whitney Houston’s blackity black corpse is a-moldering in the grave and let that be a lesson to you:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/03/23/whitney-houstons-death-what-is-atherosclerotic-heart-disease/
As for Breitbart, it’s absurd to think he could have been killed by pure white pow
der. As the 54th Chairborne will readily inform you, A Black Man Did it*.*With his superpowers. Because Obama has superpowers, like Cory Booker. How do you think they hypnotize the nation to take power, hengghhhh?
Oops, I have of course mixed up Transmetropolitan with Ex Machina.
Gah, comix fail.
I like BKV’s dialogue. He has all these different dialects and voices. I liked Ellis until I figured out that all of his characters are the same. Also, he will get “sick” and spend years not finishing that kinda cool series you subscribed to and sorta got into but are getting really frustrated about because it’s been half a decade now? but guess what, look who’s on Livejournal, posting on random threads and occasionally making an ass of himself? I thought LJ was for housewives and college students who are procrastinating by writing vampire porn and sharing scanlations and writing somewhat indiscreet rants about what some other poster said to them on page three of the comments of someone else’s LJ post.
Oh yeah, and TOKYO STORM WARNING sucked. In fact, everything Ellis does that has any connection to Japan sucks. Ellis, get real: you don’t speak Japanese, you don’t know spit about Japanese culture, and you haven’t watched more than a handful of anime (hint: SPEED RACER does NOT, I repeat NOT count), I’d put money on that. Also, the plot, characters, concept were all BORING.
Ooo, I saw a shiny cool thing, let me repeat it, also, Japanese are weird, amirite? IS NOT A STORY.
Ahem.
still bitter about the good money I gave up in the pursuit of not a gator’s brief ellis flirtation
What? you think I give it up to everyone?
i regret, I only have one dollar USD to give, etc.
w.r.t. Breitbart and Winehouse I think the drug aspect has been overstated as a result of meda bias – not an anti-Breitbart or an anti-whoever bias, but a pro-agony bias. Pain is an ennobling and significant thing that we must endure, sez the healthy young man with the perfect organs.
In Winehouse’s case, here’s a woman who developed emphysema while a teenager and began going on enormous drug benders the moment it was feasible; in Breitbart’s case, here’s a man who spent his entire adult life screaming and drunk and coked out of his mind. These are diseased people and they died young because of that, not because they self-medicated until the creeping death was gone. A confusion of cause for effect.
Winehouse probably wouldn’t have lived to 40 in this century. Whether Breitbart or Houston would have seen 60, who knows. Blessed are the self-medicators, as society will treat them like a disease.
We see the Japanese / future-cyborgs / gonzo set as we are, not as they are.
still bitter about the good money I gave up in the pursuit of not a gator’s brief ellis flirtation
Just so long as your brief Ellis flirtation included reading “Nextwave”…
Cerb, this one mat have been a while gestating, but it was worth it.
Thanks for explaining the essence of this excrescence’s appeal.
I think it was Perlstein who had the great piece on Mitt living through his father’s Passion where his political aspirations were ended over actually having principles and speaking uncomfortable truths (Vietnam is a losing bet and the Generals are lying about it), and it’s evident that a young Mitt swore that would never happen to him.
Mitt is the living advertisement against aristocracy. You really cannot determine sweet fuck all about the merits of a politician based on the merits of their parents.
Got pissed at the commenters on LGF (don’t post there, just lurk)
I got banned there after my first post – which was mildly critical of Israeli policy.
While things are sucking I am a skeptic, but: 5 Reasons Mitt Romney Is Doomed Against Barack Obama
The Smiler has telegraphed his campaign strategy. It’s “Lie & Buy”.
Lie all he wants about any topic, take either and/or both sides of any issue.
Then when someone complains or highlights the discrepancy, buy huge quantities of commercial airtime, to accuse or obfuscate. By November, so many independents will say “they both do it, I hate ’em both, I’m staying home”. Reduced voter turnout from 2008 is the goal. Unaffiliated voters who only vote every four years, college kids whose registration is questioned, and people who can’t get off work for two hours to go vote are the target ‘discouragement demographics”. The only drawback for him is he will also target old people who vote in person.
OT, and pardon me if someone has already mentioned this, but…
Famed Watergate era douchebag Chuck Colson – who miraculously transformed himself from a non-religious rightwing asshole into a religious rightwing asshole – died yesterday. I am every bit as immobilized by grief as I was after hearing of the death of Andrew Breitbart.
That was epic, Mr. Cerberus.
Best thing I’ve read in weeks!
Thank you!
When ever I hear the nick-name ‘Smiler’, I can only think of ‘Smiler’ Grogan from “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”. Jimmy Durante, Come on! “It’s under the Big Double-Ya!”
Oddly, Mittens was a successful cold hearted corporate pig dog. Whereas “W” was a failed cold hearted corporate pig dog, yet still managed to be selected President. Sigh…
“You call that a Bourbon Manhattan? I’ll show you how to make a Bourbon Manhattan!”
One can’t can’t help but be reminded of An Oak Tree.
When did LGF become less than actively evil, anyway? I mean, I didn’t expect the uncomfort with Pam Geller hanging out with actual Nazis would evolve, but evolve it seems to have.
I mean, that’s what seems to do it, isn’t it? Human beings are motivated by fellow-feeling and spite, and one of the most enriching experiences is seething in hated in good company; but sometimes the good company wants to seethe at people you don’t want to seethe at and that just seems to throw a switch in your brain so you find new people to be hate-buddies with.
Oh, they’re both equally bad entrepreneurs: they destroyed value in companies then parachuted out with purloined money for their backers. It’s just that Romney did it when it was fashionable and had a respectable name – “venture capitalist” – and W did it in the 70s for his dad, before it was cool, and back when it was just thought of as nepotism and incompetence.
They’re both actually pretty good at what they do, but only the guy hiring him wants a kidnapper to be good.
When did LGF become less than actively evil, anyway?
For the most part they’re pretty liberal these days. They’re still very pro-Israel, however.
These days I amuse myself looking at I/P-related articles and figuring out which of the shrill-lords are trolls, which are regulars with earnest opinions, and which are hasbara parachutists. Lots more of the last than the first two anymore; you can always tell them from their stubbornly on-message screeds about how every nation has a right to defend itself from the Moslem bacillus because of the Holocaust ergo vote Republican. (This is especially peculiar because I’ve yet to meet a Jew with the wrong horse on the I/P question who isn’t also a Democrat.)
Oh, single-issue voters, is there anything you can’t ruin.
Awesome post Cerb. I’m glad someone with a soapbox finally pointed out the obvious: the man is a sociopath on the order of Rick Scott, Chris Christie, or Scott Walker. Captain Quint said it best:
You can see it in the eyes… he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he looks at you, he doesn’t seem to be living.
I think a lot of people see it, even many of the teabag vandals see it, but since Reagan and Clinton let the sociopaths take over, we (as a nation) have become conditioned to think it’s a qualification for leadership.
since Reagan and Clinton let the sociopaths take over, we (as a nation) have become conditioned to think it’s a qualification for leadership.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Actress gal I used to know taught me a trick…………….if you want to see what someone in a photograph is really about, cover up the bottom of their face and just look at the eyes.
Go ahead, try it with Mittens up there.
Do it now, while there’s still plenty of time before bedtime.
Not to whore it up, but the mixture of complex post-capitalist sociopathy and Mitt Romney has been a mainstay on my blog anymore. I even did a story on that precise subject around the same time Cerb did this thing, why not.
(I’ve also had a seemingly endless appetite for false names for Romney, as the one I came up with on the spur of the moment in 2008 – Pendejo Brighamyoung Jr. – flew too close to the sun in its arrogance.)
I’m wondering what Sadlynaughts have to say about the thing I’ve been hearing around about Romney being to Obama what Kerry was to Bush.
And of course, they’ve just unveiled the dog-whistle-rific “Obama Isn’t Working” slogan, which one fervently hopes will be met with “that’s pretty rich, for a guy who made over $20 million last year from the interest on the vast wealth he built by destroying American jobs rather than by working and who only paid a 13.9% tax rate, to be calling anyone else out for “not working.”
I’m also really enamored of the “Osama bin Laden is dead and the American auto industry is alive” for pushback, since it cuts off at the knees two of the most pervasive myths about Republican competency – on national security and economics.
I’m still wondering how much money it would take to close a 55 point gap with Latino/Hispanic voters and a 20 point gap with women. I’m hoping the answer is “there isn’t enough money in the world.”
I’ll close with a pedantry alert: …the human refuge that are our nation’s lazy shiftless unemployed. I think you meant “the human refuse…”
Well, certain things some people do aren’t real work. You know, you wouldn’t call them a job: maid, President, bodega owner, Attorney General, etc.
what Kerry was to Bush.
Whadya mean, rich-boy faux candidate that nobody really likes, there to give the illusion of choice, that if he should happen to win by accident the 1% would be just fine with it?
MMmmmmmmmm……………..COULD beeeee……………………….
20% for the National Front in the French elections, their all time record. And with an 80% turnout. Fucking fuck that’s fucking depressing.
You’re reading it wrong. The FN is traditionally an anti-European protest vote, and in that capacity would probably have an outright plurality if it weren’t for the Left Front’s emerging third-party status. Hollande and Sarkozy both share a disquieting amount of austerian dogma and the European public is generally revolting against the certainties of the European political class.
To a degree this is right-wing but to a larger degree it’s anti-system, and Le Pen probably got a lot of disaffected leftists unwilling to sign on with Melenchon for whatever reason (social radicalism, proposing a 100% marginal tax rate and generally acting as though the Mitterand-era capital flight had never happened, rumblings about a Sixth Republic and a new constitution, you name it).
On the other hand, it would be foolish to take this analysis too far and claim that all or even a majority of the voters for Le Pen were not reactionary, or that if elected Le Pen would not be horrific and contrary to basic democratic norms. The public has just generally lost faith in the ECB answer to the depression – lost faith in the idea of a financial crisis generally – and whoever can capitalize on that angst stands to gain a great deal.
And on the first hand, the only especially crazy thing about Le Pen is racism – Melenchon is a pompous, power-hungry demagogue with ideas more radical than any major candidate in recent European history, and he was still polling in the high teens last I checked. A less crazy Melenchon would have had a serious chance of breaking through into the runoff.
if you want to see what someone in a photograph is really about, cover up the bottom of their face and just look at the eyes
Agreed, JR, I’ve been doing that for years – sometimes just in my mind’s eye, in real time. It’s what made me dislike Bill Clinton from the first moment I saw him in 1992. His eyes said, “I’m so desperate to win this, I will do anything, say anything, promise anything, and I have already sold my soul.”
(And I couldn’t believe myself when, 14 years later, I saw him interviewed on 60 Minutes, and found myself longing for the days of his administration. Anyway…)
Notice that there’s an added factor of the eye muscles… do they pull the outside corners of the eyes down? Do they make crinkles like crows feet? Very few sociopaths can manufacture these parts of a smile at will. Some, like Mitt, have inherited or cultivated permanent creases at the eyes…
That $10,000 bet is what’s called a “crazy lie”. Many rubes will believe him because he bet 10 gran on it. Who would bet $10,000 dollars when they knew they’d lose? That just doesn’t make any sense. He must be telling the truth.
We call it tranya! Hahahahahaha!
Tomorrow’s the Big Ass Day.
.
The “Big Ass Day”, Jeffraham? What, pray tell, does “big” modify here?
We need to speak nicely to Willard or he will send his unholy rat army to devour us.
Could we start a birther-like movement to make Mitt Romney prove that he is not, in fact, a robot?
We need to speak nicely to Willard or he will send his unholy rat army to devour us.
It would be great if he could find a running mate named Ben.
Ben Quayle.
Willard/Ben 2012 would be a great bumper sticker.
Ahhhh, my weekend is now complete. Thank you, oh mighty Cerberus, for the dose of sanity.
Even here in south Georgia, a reasonably snakey place, it’s surprising to find a couple of big ole water snakes having a good snog right in the carport.
Ben Netanyahu.
Snakes, in so many other ways the Alicia Silverstones of nature, love to “make out” with their relations and little infant snakes.
In a recent study
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/03/robot-prejudice.html
A white robot may very well be preferable to a black man in the mind of a wing-nut. There may be absolutely nothing that anyone can to do sway the 28%. The swing voters, however— the ones who, for instance, wouldn’t know whether to vote for Jesse Jackson or George H.W. Bush— could possibly be influenced by friendly animal noises, starbursts, and brightly colored balloons.
The difficulty, per this study, is convincing the wing nut that Mitt is a white robot.
Apropos of nothing: there’s white people made of gas, you know what I mean.
Robot, sociopath, or both?
Alright, Cerberus, plenty of evidence offered that he is a sociopath. BUT– most psychological profiles say charm is an element seen in many/ most sociopaths.
Charm is utterly absent in the simulations of the RomneyBot 3000. Ergo, he is not a sociopath. But perhaps robots lack true “society” and therefore cannot be sociopaths by definition
The “Big Ass Day”, Jeffraham? What, pray tell, does “big” modify here?
Ass, of course. Nobody rides for free!
Speakin’ of which, I now pimp other people’s pussies.
.
Oh, wiley – that was just someplace we stopped for a butt break. Rode a big loop, about 300 miles all told but started and ended in Portland. I was totally wiped last night and even today I’m using up my Advil supply, hence the untimely response.
Sure, this prevents him hating with the proper fervor that the right-wing demands in their Generalisimos, but really, as long as his paymasters are directing his callous boot in the right direction, does it truly matter?
Word.
Refuge works too if you factor in that the under class is where most of the humans are these days, having been forced into refuge by the unhumans of the 1% and their remorae.
Btw, JP, it ain’t _that_ kind of pickle, k?
I was really just tryin’ to ask if you were both on one bike, or separate bikes. 🙂
.
Glibness or superficial charm – the hair, the look, the smile, the easiness with an anecdote. If he didn’t have it, he wouldn’t have survived to adulthood. I mean, that one “here’s a fun story about firing people” thing – the crowd didn’t tear him apart and eat him, did they? Sociopaths do well in business but have to really be oiled through politics – Bush basically inherited the Presidency, Romney has been struggling to flop his dong over the line for two full election cycles now.
I’ve known several perfectly nice people I’d be ready to comfortably call sociopaths; it’s sociopathy combined with psychotic self-devotion that makes the kind of horrible person Romney is.
I like this comment from wiley’s link:
Looks like the spambot’s blown a seal.
Looks like the spambot’s blown a seal.
(wipes mouth) That’s just ice cream.
Who said “irony is dead”?
The man who invented permenant press.
It’ll be interesting (for values of interesting which include the spectator appeal of a paint-drying contest) to see how the glibertarians take the Rmoney candidacy. Their whole schtick about rich people who stay rich by moving money around being “job creators” should go nicely with a guy who made money by destroying jobs, and is not bashful about it.
The man who invented permenant press.
Why do irons have a permanent press setting anyway?
I’m sick of these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking carport! /Samuel El Manquécito
Could we start a birther-like movement to make Mitt Romney prove that he is not, in fact, a robot?
Already done, but they think he’s a Messican, not a robot.
Very Interesting post about Robot.
I have a Strong Curiosity about Robot.
Thanks for the Post.
Could have been haiku,
Had it been better worded.
Bastard haz a sad.
Romney a robot?
inquiring minds want to know
Demand DNA!
DNA not proof
Romney could be a cyborg
More bucks “Steve Austin”.
Why do irons have a permanent press setting anyway?
Phukktiffano. I’m still trying to figure out why they have commercials on cable TV.
Robots and haiku
Like Jonah Goldberg and snacks
It is not pretty
Jonah craves more snacks
Corn prices go through the roof
Invest in Cheetos
Decisions decisions. Teh Ho brought home the new season of Sherlock Holmes. There’s a Wallace and Gromit marathon on one of them cable channels. Hard decisions.
Tonight’s Mad Men ep
Sang the praises of HoJo
My stomach, he turns
Romney the Smiler
What, was he built in Stepford?
He’s creeping me out
There’s Jonah Goldberg
He’s a fucking idiot
All there is to it
WHY SO SMILEY? He’s got hundreds of millions of reasons to smile.
Folly = thinking that Obama is unbeatable in November; Willard is one Eurozone FUBAR away from the Whitehouse, & the gap between him & Obama will likely become razor-thin by summertime.
I think the important race in 2012 is down-ticket – where the vast majority of seats in play are the Democrats’ to lose. Dems need to remind voters what a total slacker Boehner is (PART-TIME CONGRESS LOL) & ask them if they want more of the same for another four years.
When I was a kid
Robots could get the job done
This new kind blows goats
I’m not sure about these cookies. They don’t look like you made them. Did you make those cookies? You didn’t, did you? No, no. they came from the local…7-11 bakery, or wherever.
Ask not for…um… whom
The Smiler is… um… smiling
It ain’t for… um… you
One ought to have a good reason for smiling broadly. The reason should be apparent to observers, or easily explained. If the real reason(s) for smiling were stated, how would observers feel?
Romney smiles like a fighter trained to assume a stance. I don’t mean to ascribe mastery to him, just reflexivity. His reasons for smiling are bad (masking of genuine emotion, aping of sunny Reagan?) and/or weak (embarrassment/nervousness).
The official reason for Romney’s smiling is the stupidest imaginable: he is just a happy guy who particularly enjoys campaigning for the presidency, debating Ron Paul, answering reporters’ questions, etc. He reminds me of Tom DeLay posing for his mugshot, or later discussing his felony convictions on TV. DeLay literally could not have appeared happier. Sure, a few people are beguiled, but the rest think you’re a sociopath.
I don’t mind everyone who smiles alot. There are people whose gentle-to-beaming daylong demeanor seems genuine and unforced. I suppose it’s my problem if I’m annoyed with them. I do hate strangers telling me to smile, though.
Please put this on Amazon as a review for his Magnum Dopus. Either way it is the most cutting snark I have seen in a while.
Exceedingly well done. Moonshine?
Christina Hendricks
What a beautiful woman
Love me some red heads.
You’re reading it wrong. The FN is traditionally an anti-European protest vote, and in that capacity would probably have an outright plurality if it weren’t for the Left Front’s emerging third-party status. Hollande and Sarkozy both share a disquieting amount of austerian dogma and the European public is generally revolting against the certainties of the European political class.
I agree up to a point, but it’s not like France has any shortage of third parties (the constellation of far left ones, the Greens, Bayrou’s centrist one, a couple of paleoconservative ones to the right of the UMP) for people to lodge their complaints against the system, and most of them are anti-EU as well. But the FN distinctly outperformed all of them, and not for the first time. It’s been the strongest protest party in France for a while now, which I don’t think can be explained entirely by individual personalities like Melanchon.
So even if you read it as a protest vote against the current political order, the fact is that a plurality of those dissatisfied voters have been choosing (despite all their alternatives) to throw in with a party universally recognized as the face of racism in France – definitely concern-worthy.
On the other hand, it would be foolish to take this analysis too far and claim that all or even a majority of the voters for Le Pen were not reactionary, or that if elected Le Pen would not be horrific and contrary to basic democratic norms.
Very true to both. But then I’m not that concerned about her getting elected. I’m more concerned that she puts pressure on the UMP to keep tacking farther and farther to the right in order to prevent the FN from undercutting them – something we’ve already seen to some extent with Sarkozy overtly campaigning on “taking back voters from the FN.” If the UMP keeps courting FN voters the way Republicans used to court Dixiecrats, the few decades ahead are going to be no fun at all.
People used to tell me to smile a lot. Actually, I shouldn’t say people. Men/boys. Seems pretty presumptuous now.
Regarding the Mittbot’s robotness:
Where does it keep the fluids? How are they refilled? And most importantly, how is it cleaned afterwards?
(I mean, because even if you’re a sociopath model robot, if you’re going to be candidate for president, you’ve gotta be somebody’s bitch.)
In case you missed it:
Take the Mother Jones’ “Romney or Robot” quiz…”
(I failed, with only 50% correct.)
Robot, sociopath, or both?
He is obviously a robot who was programmed by, and is controlled by a sociopath. I suspect Dick Cheney is the man behind the curtain.
(I failed, with only 50% correct.)
Heh, I omly got 10%. Which I take to be absolute proof that Rmoney is more robot but less clever than Claverbot.
60%; but I watch a lot of TV so I can usually spot bad robot writing better than most.
The funny part is, Mitt Romney may actually fuck transients during the convention. They just won’t be Transmet transients. Police force will be pushing the homeless off the streets of Tampa just in time for Romney to accept the nomination.
God, that month is gonna suck.
absolute proof
From your sudden decline in spelling accuracy, I surmise you have some recent familiarity with absolut proofs.
Tampa PD has to clear the streets for lobbyists and rent-boys to ply their wares. The Folsum Street Fair people will be looking at that convention saying, “Goddam, a little moderation plz!”
Being rich is not reason enough for a presidential candidate to smile alot. A smug “I’m in ur economy, havin’ ur money” attitude is out of tune. They’re supposed to be world-historical figures. It’s a serious business. Bill Gates doesn’t smile overmuch. Soros. Rupert Murdoch. These guys want to change the world. Their smiling-time has yet to fully dawn. If getting rich has made Romney so very pleased with himself, why is he running? Rest on your laurels, dude, you’re not presidential material, and that’s OK. I guess Romney sees no reason to struggle with matters outside his worldview. He does not drink the Kool-Aid: he’s that concentrate, the powder itself. Simply mix me in, he says, smiling.
Just a little reminder for Rmoney: It’s hard work being president!
I look at Mitt as a puppet, with his own moneyed hand up his ass, moving his mouth, uttering senseless word groups, and smiling. Always smiling.
I never noticed the resemblence between Romney and Trollface until now
(ahem away)
I love a Transmet reference, but I think Romney fits the story in Ellis’ THE CANDIDATE short far better than he does the Smiler (and fits it better than even Kerry did).
Oh, and btw not a gator, I assume you’re talking about PLANETARY. You can lay the blame mostly on the artist for that one. Ellis had made multiple statements over the years about how (a) he had many scripts in the pipe (b) Cassiday was all backed up and (c) Ellis felt that the series should have one artist all the way through, no matter what. You can blame him for that being an ill-conceived idea (I disagree) but the failure of it to come out promptly was on the shoulders of someone else and his decisions, not a result of him fucking about on livejournal.
Could we start a birther-like movement to make Mitt Romney prove that he is not, in fact, a robot?
We could, but since we’re not psychotic racist morons, it will be very difficult to do without breaking into fits of hysterical laughter. It takes an Oily Taint or a Donalde Chump to pull that off. You need that 1000 yard stare.
HM….Nader could lead it, yes?
“He’s a replicant, isn’t he?”
We won’t be able to tell that until he tells us how he feels about his mother.
We won’t be able to tell that until he tells us how he feels about his mother.
Mmmm. you ask him
Tonight’s Mad Men ep
Sang the praises of HoJo
My stomach, he turns
There was a time when HoJo’s was actually quite decent. Our family always stopped at a HoJo’s for clam chowder when we were on trips. In the early 60’s they hired a couple guys to develop their menu. Pierre Franey and Jacques Pepin were those guys.
My family always stayed at HoJos on trips. I remember the dyspepsia like it was yesterday.
We won’t be able to tell that until he tells us how he feels about his mother.
Or you could ask him how he feels about his dog:
“You’re watching a stage play, a banquet is in progress.
The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters.
The entree consists of boiled dog.”
“What the fuck’s a tortoise?”
I just watched that movie again this weekend. Such a well done film. Everyone was absolutely perfect in it. I really think that’s Harrison Ford’s best performance.
Heresy. What about the Star Wars Christmas Special?
With thorough apologies to everyone, I heard tell of Palin’s especially bad (as in lame, not as in funny bad) Obama dog-eating joke the other night and had one clear, precise thought:
“Looks like Sambo ate the bitch.”
“You’re watching a stage play, a banquet is in progress.
The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters.
The entree consists of boiled dog.”
Not a menu planned by Franey or Pepin.
Heresy. What about the Star Wars Christmas Special?
WAIT–I forgot about Air Force One!
“GET….OFF…MY….PLANE!”
LOL.
I also forgot that the was fantastic as Jack Ryan.
Shoulda subbed in Sam Jackson for that line:
Get the fuck offa my muthafuckin plane, muthafucka!
As if the USA would elect a non-milquetoast Black Man as President….
If you’d seen what I’ve seen, kid, you’d know even vegetarians will sometimes eat baloney on white.
WAIT–I forgot about Air Force One!
That movie would have been immeasurably improved with the addition of several crates of crazed snakes and Samuel L. Jackson. Which, come to think of it, could have immeasurably improved many movies, for example: ‘The English Patient’ or ‘Titanic’ or ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’.
you’d know even vegetarians will sometimes eat baloney on white.
You’re talking about TEH CLENIS, aren’t you?
‘The English Patient’ or ‘Titanic’ or ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’
Oh, yes! Schindler’s List also too.
Counterpoint: the Star Wars prequels.
Counterpoint: the Star Wars prequels.
I don’t blame Mr. Jackson for trying to deliver lines that were likely written by a 3rd grader. I can’t watch those movies either. But his soliloquy in the diner in Pulp Fiction was pure fucking magic. I really can’t stand that goddamn movie and struggle with the whole Tarentino “thing”, but that scene was fucking brilliant.
Excellent counterpoint, however.
the addition of several crates of crazed snakes and Samuel L. Jackson
This – & this alone – would justify a remake of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
That is pretty damn annoying.
Super-smiley people creep me right the fuck out. See e.g. the photos at the top of this thread.
When I run into in real life people that smile all the time I generally think they’re either mentally unstable/disabled, or new age grifters about to try to sell me a pyramid-shaped hat. But I guess I’m being redundant there.
And I rarely smile, honest real big show-your-teeth kinds of smiles. I’ll throw out a small grin anytime, but I dunno, it seems like a real big, politician-esque smile is a rarity. Maybe because they seem somehow, oh I dunno, cheapened by folks like possible-next-president (shudder) Smiley McMormon up there.
And I’m actually a really fucking happy person, gawdammit!
Anywho, continuing a few random thoughts:
1) Welcome back Cerberus, an excellent post as usual.
B) Pup — was your motorpickle ride photo taken at Seaside, or somewhere else on the North coast? It looks familiar but I wasn’t sure. I actually didn’t ride my motorcycle this weekend for some reason. I did ride my bicycle a bunch and did an awesome trail run in the for-some-reason-nearly-completely-deserted Mac Forest trail system though.
iii) S. cerevisiae: I tried to go to Block 15 to get one of those beers but even at 4:30 in the afternoon there was a half an hour wait to get a table. I mean the beer is good and the food is fine, but come on people! I’m hopeful that the rumored new brewpub (which will be Corvallis’s fifth!) that’s being built down between first and second streets by Bar 101 will be good and balance out some of the crowdedness.
Q) It is fucking beautiful outside and I shouldn’t be trapped in this office. I feel a long lunch coming on. Oh, and it really must be spring, a yellowjacket just flew in through my open window. Yay.
Q) It is fucking beautiful outside and I shouldn’t be trapped in this office. I feel a long lunch coming on. Oh, and it really must be spring, a yellowjacket just flew in through my open window. Yay.
agreed…except for the yellowjacket part…
I’m thinking Samuel L. Jackson as Clark W. Griswald taking his family and several crates of crazed snakes on a cross-country trip to Wally World.
Clark: I think you’re all fucked in the head. We’re ten hours from the fucking fun park and you want to bail out. Well I’ll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. I’m gonna have fun and you’re gonna have fun. We’re all gonna have so much fucking fun we’ll need plastic surgeory to remove our godamn smiles. You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of you’re assholes! I gotta be crazy! I’m on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Holy Shit!
WAIT–I forgot about Air Force One!
They actually filmed parts of that movie here at Rickenbacker. Some of the people in my Guard unit were extras in it.
They leased a 747 from Kalitta and painted it to look like AF1. The first time he cranked up his engines he blew over a stand with a $100,000 camera on it.
That is pretty damn annoying.
Super-smiley people creep me right the fuck out. See e.g. the photos at the top of this thread.
When I run into in real life people that smile all the time I generally think they’re either mentally unstable/disabled, or new age grifters about to try to sell me a pyramid-shaped hat. But I guess I’m being redundant there.
Fake happy people are the WORST because it’s so plainly obvious that it’s all an act. Most of those I encounter are devout Christians who need to be smacked like the bitches they are.
The Star Wars Prequels were missing Samuel L. Jackson and several crates of snakes. In the prequels, Mr. Jackson was not playing his usual bad ass larger than life self. If he had been, the movies would have been better. Also, snakes.
Yoda is vaguely reptilian.
Hmm, “Vaguely Reptilian” as band name?
This – & this alone – would justify a remake of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
The French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman?
The French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman?
It’s called a “Royale With Cheese” in France.
Oh, lord no. Mainly that there’s only so much the magic of Samuel L. Jackson’s grade-A ham can do, especially when lashed at the waist to a guy named “Mace” with a sword made of purple fire that he uses to hit other people’s fire swords until they’re done hitting swords and one of them says something wise.
The one virtue of Pulp Fiction is that there are jokes in it at the author/narrator/director’s expense, and explicitly the message is ‘what a fucking cretin you’d have to be to write this crap and expect it to be taken seriously’. The foot massage scene is especially powerful in this respect, knowing what we now know about Tarantino.
Kill Bill is all of the camp without the irony and becomes trash.
Inglorious Basterds slips into kitsch, offering up loving worship of a pedestrian revenge fantasy and defiantly failing its ideas. (The idea of a Dirty Dozen plot with a happy ending is an obscenity, an X-rated Nick Fury, and I’m increasingly convinced that he threw in elevated material like the discussion of Nazi film or the game of twenty questions just to smear it with blood and shit.) Tarantino would respond to this with ‘why should the bad guys win just because your big, snooty brain understands on a cellular level that’s how it works?’, and I would counter ‘fuck you, you guido weasel, why don’t you just go full Lucas and make a version of Pulp Fiction where the last four reels are just Marcellus Wallace being raped to death’.
Success is on some level artistic poison is the best thing we can conclude from this. There’s a point at which no one you have to take seriously has anything bad to say about anything you do, and that’s death.
When I run into in real life people that smile all the time I generally think they’re either mentally unstable/disabled, or new age grifters about to try to sell me a pyramid-shaped hat.
Don’t be knocking pyramid-shaped hats, now! Or pyramid-shaped heads, for that matter!
The Star Wars Prequels were missing Samuel L. Jackson and several crates of snakes.
They would have been even better if he fought with a lightsnaker- like one of those “novelty snake cans” that shot out a stream of glowing serpents.
“There’s a disturbance in the motherfucking Force!”
Three words: “Jar Jar Binks”.
I’ll grant that’s cheating, but do you really want to see George Lucas find a way to ruin dozens of poisonous snakes the way he ruined laser swords?
Equally bad ideas – Devo is cool and Pyramid Head’s a raper. Either way, not worth it.
Gah!
New rule: Jar Jar Binks is like Hitler, as soon as somebody mentions him (it?) the discussion is over.
No. He could digitally transfer the Indiana Jones scene with the snakes directly into yet another Star Wars remake/sequel/prequel. We shouldn’t tempt him.
Jabba the hut.
Oh God! I made that remark not even realizing – in Crystal Skull – that George Lucas, having ruined Indiana Jones, found a way to ruin snakes. I had literally blocked that snake rope out of my memory.
I will leave Patton Oswalt with the last word.
Jabba the hut.
Mel Brooks was declining by the time he got around to this genre, but “Pizza the Hut” was still pretty good.
The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters.
Are you testing to see if I’m a Republican or a lesbian?
Meesa no like these snakes on meesa plane.
You’ll have to take everything I say with the grain of salt that Men in Tights is one of my favorite movies. Blazing Saddles is better, but any Mel Brooks movie needs the cultural amnesia (about a generation’s time) it takes for all of the lame topical jokes to become business – he has the old Borscht Belt affliction of being unable not to tell a joke, which results in a rich grainy patina that looks way, way worse up close.
Note the latest Jonahnism.
“The French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman?”
Pr0n version: “The French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking MILF.”
Cinemax version: “The Naked French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman.”
Note the latest Jonahnism.
part of my favorite comment:
Cinemax version: “The Naked French Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman.”
Food Channel Version: THe Naked Chef’s French Fries for the Lieutenant’s Motherfucking Woman.
Mmm… pommes frites…
Mel Brooks movie needs the cultural amnesia
Well before those two jerks (Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer) came and sucked the soul out of the whole “Spoof” genre, Brooks and the Abrahams/Zucker Bros. Combo had it locked down. But yeah, Brooks got older and 9/11 scared the crap out of some from the other camp…
Did someone say Pyramid-shaped hat?
OBS – Rockaway Beach, just about. We had come down glorious Rte. 53 then Miami River Rd. but everyone wanted to go touch the ocean so we went back up north a little.
Locals: The New Old Lompoc on NW trendythird is closing. Sure to be some good times there this week. I hope top try the “Lompocalypse” special brew tonight. http://blog.oregonlive.com/thebeerhere/2012/04/last_call_at_the_new_old_lompo.html
vs et al. – I used to get that “smile!” shit all the time. I veen had firends trained to tell the presumptuous asswipe saying to say “Hey, his mother just died. Really now.” I also enjoyed replying, in absolute deadpan, “I am smiling. [pause] Inside.” Also, angily, “Where the fuck do you get off telling me how to live my life?” Try it, it’s fun. It will make you smile. … Inside.
Those blessed with free time might be interested in a truly insane trolling performance by Jim Teacher. 507 comments thus far!
Those blessed with free time might be interested in a truly insane trolling performance by Jim Teacher. 507 comments thus far!
ain’t that a bag of tits? he is…uh…something else? wow…i’ve not read any of his stuff…although earlier today i tried, but when i got to ‘via don surber’ my brain shut off…that tells me all i need to know about this douchenozzle…
Treacher that is. Because he’s, like TREACHEROUS or something. It’s right there in the name, like “socialist” in “National Socialist”!
507 comments thus far!
In fairness, 2/3rds of those are Treacher saying a variation of “Obama eats dogs.”
“Truly insane” was misleading?
*Ahem*
I like Tarantino.
*Cough*
“Truly insane” was misleading?
Well, considering that last election’s attacks were an amalgamation of “He has an American-hating reverend!,” “He said he wanted to be president…at 9-yrs-old!,” and “he’s a communist/terrorist sympathizer who may or may not be Christian!” I get your point.
Something looks a bit, uh, off kilter? Hmm… test…
Anyhow…
Ah, no wonder it looked familiar — I stopped at that beach last time I was there on the way home from Cannon Beach. It had snowed actually down on the beach (rare here), so we wanted to go down and see it.
And I, for one, welcome our new slanted overlords.
For the record, I blame Pryme.
That clever bot sure contradicts itself a lot, but he’s funnier than Romney.
Who do you invite to your birthday party?
With a beautiful girl from Tahiti.
Do you know a beautiful girl from Tahiti?
I’ve heard that Paris is very beautiful.
Paris Hilton?
I know Paris Hilton. We are BFFs.
WOOHOO! Pryme broke it already!
Test.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
the failure of it to come out promptly was on the shoulders of someone else and his decisions, not a result of him fucking about on livejournal.
Oh, I can blame everything on him fucking about on livejournal. Watch me.
(Seriously, he was really annoying on livejournal.)
I feel like his excuses (=blaming somebody else) only go so far on that issue. Every time you turn around, Ellis is whinging with some excuse for something. I get it that he’s a delicate flower artiste, I do… but tell everyone you were drunk or something. I spent a couple of years being a delicate flower and living off others… it’s called being a fucking unemployed loser. I wouldn’t have a job if I pulled that shit now. Rubber hits the road, stop feeling sorry for yourself. I guess if I weren’t the way I am I would be way more Zen about all his whining and blaming and deflecting and laziness (and stereotyping Asians… I mean, seriously–you turned a technocrat/computer hacker/new age Asian villain into Fu Manchu??? and congratulated yourself for your overweening cleverness? whattadouche… but white Southerners are the real racists, because strawman). But I am the way I am, I resemble his remarks, and I just have no patience for it.
IMO, delicate flower artistes should stay the fuck off social media. It’s a guaranteed way to stop writing. Much more effective than alcoholism.
And Pup makes it a bolder break. Nicely done!
When did this blog start tilting right?
Pup & Pryme sounds like a 30 min current affairs show. I’d tivo it.
Pup & Pryme sounds like a 30 min current affairs show. I’d tivo it.
or a place where you could order anything from hot dogs to prime rib…
All we need for the trifecta is underlining.
I like some of Tarantino’s stuff too. He suffers the same affliction that Apple does. HIPSTER LUVS, which attaches a certain douchery that all the blowtorches and hammers in the world can’t pry off.
See, I liked stuff before it was cool before it got cool to like stuff before it was cool… Ya know, THAT guy/girl.
I always assumed it was because I was too lazy to earn enough to buy nice things and too clumsy to keep nice things, because they broke so quickly.
All we need for the trifecta is underlining.
well, that didn’t work…ain’t that a bag of tits?
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Romney is basically Richard Nixon with more money and without the insecurity-fueled resentment.
The “Obama eats dogs” thing was workmanlike in a kind of dumb troll way, but he’s moved on to trying to claim that it matters that Obama ate a dog. I think the claim now is that he was boasting about it.
Mostly I think he’s offended that not only does nobody care, nobody bothers noticing how much he pretends to care. Nobody cares about Barack Obama in 2012 and nobody cares about the horse race, but he’s got a coal seam to slave away at.
Treacher loves to Google himself and harangue anyone who says anything mean about him. This would be understandable of a fifteen-year-old girl, but this is an Internet comedian we’re evidently talking about. His main talents is his ability to pay attention to shit nobody but Jim Treacher, Special Boy cares about and his ability to dodge the issue by picking at meaningless bullshit.
PENISAlso, the HTML tag is “blockquote”. Come on, buddies.
The Underlined
LOL…the mn gop can’t have nice things either!
I think it’s time we got a guy with a handle back in the White House. Willard “Mitt” Romney just screams badass motherfucker. Like WWII bombardier…
Pup & Prympe
Doggy Day Salon
Pup’n’Pryde
Obedience School
Puppy Pryme
Robot dog, sold in fine ToysRUs’ everywhere
In fairness, 2/3rds of those are Treacher saying a variation of “Obama eats dogs.”
and goddamn all of you who tempted me into that fray…you know who you are…
Speaking of nice things, I’d like to get my hands on a bag of tits. Anyone got a lead for me?
I went over to the Village Voice to see what the fuss was about, and man, that Treacher guy is one weak-ass troll.
I only made through a few of the comments though, something about that site’s javascript gives my browser conniptions. I made the mistake of viewing the page source to see if I could disable what was causing the trouble, and now I just want to kill the Voice’s “content” people for crimes against webmanity. Some things just can’t be unseen. [shudder]
Glad I nipped that in the bud before we got to the blink tag.
Hey! WTF?
Yaye, blog has been fixd!!!
(speaking of pups)
Aw, I was just getting used to it!
tsam, aren’t there laws against importing rare fowl across borders?
I think these birds are allowed anywhere they wish to fly
You’re WRONG and you’re a GROTESQUELY UGLY FREAK
He’s okay, but his recent career is a giant leap backwards and I defy any reasonable person to identify him more accurately than “guido weasel”.
Shows what you know. The marquee tag doesn’t even work, you fascist thugs.
From bbkf’s link:
In regards to the MN GOP getting evicted from their offices for not paying rent –
Why the fuck didn’t I think of that when I lost my house – that’s fucking brilliant! Cagey bastards….
When are you going to fix the upside-downess? Of course then I would have to turn my computer desk the right way up and throw away my head cushion.
Sadly cannot take responsibility for the experiences of people who, like their criminal ancestors, refuse to stand on the correct side of the Earth as God intended.
Yeah, I dig Tarantino too. I thought Grindhouse was pretty damn great.
IS ROTH GOING TO MAKE “THANKSGIVING?”
Two Cleverbots chatting.
It’s oddly philosophical, in its way.
Ordinarily I can take him or leave him. He is who he is–a Violence Nerd, like John Irving. “Inglourious Basterds,” though, really annoyed me, starting with the goofy-ass spelling of its title. WWII is too important a slice of history to fuck with, especially by a nihilist like Tarantino, who seems to care about nothing but movies.
New post.
New thread!
Yeah, that’s the sense I got too. Oddly enough, I can forgive the shooting / exploding of Hitler – although even for that the gore was sort of excessive, and the “face of Jewish vengeance” bit actually made me physically recoil in embarassment – but the refusal to accept that officers like Landa were accepted warmly into the postwar order, and exactly by men like officers like Aldo Raines, was what went over the top for me. In the last visceral instant of self-indulgence, Tarantino crosses the line, like a child unsatisfied with the disgust of the adults as he eats an entire stick of butter escalating to shitting his pants.
aren’t there laws against importing rare fowl across borders?
Mynahs are not rare.
I knew those immortal porpoises were full of shit!
Violence nerd. Answered the question I was thinking but didn’t ask because I was too afraid of being poo-poohed upon for not being a sophistimacated arthouse film connaisseur.
I believe the proper term, however is Violence Otaku.
Brilliant post Cerberus!
Each point hits a spicy evil note in the symphony of soulless curry that is our Republican presumptive nominee.
So did you have one of these in the chamber for Santorum?
Oh. So it’s like the whole thing was for Intrade arbitrage.
Counterpoint: the Star Wars prequels.
I don’t blame Mr. Jackson for trying to deliver lines that were likely written by a 3rd grader.
What sank the prequels was not having Harrison Ford. No, I don’t mean Han Solo. I mean someone on the set who could walk up to Lucas, tell him “you can type this shit, George, but you sure as hell can’t say it,” and proceed to rewrite his own character’s lines into something awesome.
Oddly enough, I can forgive the shooting / exploding of Hitler – although even for that the gore was sort of excessive, and the “face of Jewish vengeance” bit actually made me physically recoil in embarassment – but the refusal to accept that officers like Landa were accepted warmly into the postwar order, and exactly by men like officers like Aldo Raines, was what went over the top for me.
True but also true IMO of almost any action movie that even remotely touches on history or current events. E.G. James Bond, in real life, would’ve spent most of his career guaranteeing the foreign holdings of men like Goldfinger, Stromberg and Elliot Carver, not stopping their evil schemes – and SPECTRE would probably have earned most of its paychecks helping him and Felix Leiter to train death squads and overthrow democracies. If you can ignore that and take it as fantasy, or if you think World War Two’s a bridge too far in terms of playing with that stuff, it’s obviously up to the individual viewer. Personally Inglorious Bastards didn’t bother me much more than your average action flick in terms of that.
Incidentally, I know this thread’s probably dead but on the off-chance it’s not – anyone formed opinions yet on Tarantino’s next flick, Django Unchained? Same type of revenge flick as Inglorious Bastards, but with black people instead of Jews and Southern slave-owners instead of Nazis. Not sure what to think yet, except that no Slave Revenge Flick could possibly be as bad as the eighty years of Confederate Revenge Flicks “liberal Hollywood” inflicted on us.
I always thought that the movies basically followed the books in that regard – less openly over time, but SPECTRE, like the SMERSH it replaced, was a wingnut fantasy version of international terrorism, dimly-realized by someone with a background in international terrorism (broadly left-wing, probably under Soviet dominion, etc). Le Chiffre was originally a sinister union organizer and his probable Jewishness was taken as a point against him; that’s always sort of kept me at arm’s length from Bond as an idea. (It doesn’t hurt that being born in 1987, the Bond I am used to is Brosnan, who was not great at it.)
Basically it evolved from a dumb story about a noble spy shooting evil leftists in the head to a noble spy shooting evil cartoon characters in the head, and outside of the movies which push for relevance with stuff like Scaramonga’s evil rice plot and Mr Big’s drug empire (you know, stuff Western intelligence actually sorta involved itself in) the cartoons aren’t recognizable at all.
I guess it’s more that Bond’s antagonists are barely recognizable as human, whereas Landa is a pretty thinly-disguised amped-up version of your Hans Globkes and your Wernher von Brauns, and it sort of defies good taste to simultaneously glorify Anglo-American high command (with a reverent little cameo for Winston “let’s negotiate with Flensburg to keep the Soviets out” Churchill and everything) and shy away from what kind of a resume item “Jew hunter” was postwar.
The collective amnesia on the subject by Western culture – which has spent the last ten years preferring to weep big fat tears over the German victims of the Soviet advance, to the point of making a fucking Hollywood movie about the conservative officers’ bombing clique – is what puts it over. The nerve is all the more raw for its burial, which makes touching it more painful.
I feel like Bond is a misreading of history – it was reasonable, from a certain insane perspective, to see intelligence officers as some strange, murderous kind of hero. The last scene of Basterds is a deliberate lie about history, a sweeping-away of history that would otherwise make his story seem petty and ridiculous, and when you’re treading on as basically thin ice as Tarantino has been with his gore porn for the last decade that’s the last thing you want to do, especially not about the Nazis, especially not in a film where you have a pretty young woman deliver the phrase “the face of Jewish vengeance” in actual seriousness.
I also sort of resent this: the scenes between the British commando being introduced and him being killed are a fantastic little movie in their own right, and they’re sort of shoehorned into the whole movie to move along a less fundamentally interesting or useful plot. Abandoning that to paint a little picture of Hitler with his guts totally shot out and his brains flying everywhere is not just stupid but perverse – an artistic crime, even.
It’s a little early yet to form opinions on, but I’m not hopeful, especially because it suggests Tarantino’s idea of returning to his roots is giving that “Honorary Black People” badge he made himself a good polish.
The bias of Hollywood is towards capital, because it inhabits a culture where capital produces beauty. (Ways of Seeing is a seminal text on this subject.) O, those beautiful plantation homes, and O, those beautiful plantation dresses.
Also, a subtext to every movie made in Hollywood – and ‘provocative’ or black-oriented movies especially, i.e. the sad tempest in a teakettle that was Red Tails (which did what a TV movie in the 90s did, worse, for hundreds of millions of dollars, on account of if George Lucas could ruin Star Wars he could sure as shit ruin the Tuskegee Airmen) is this:
Danny Glover has been trying to produce a Toussaint Louverture biopic for decades and can’t get literally anyone in Hollywood to touch it. The ostensible reason is that it lacks a place to insert a white lead; after that the usual issue is that American audiences wouldn’t really eat up a movie about a foreign war two centuries ago. Considering neither was an obstacle to a movie about the Boshin War which was inexplicably made into a Tom Cruise vehicle, we can read both of these as “no way in Hell are we producing, or allowing anyone we know to produce, a movie about a slave revolt”. Probably Glover’s been adamant about not sidlining one of history’s weirder and more significant figures for Tom Cruise / Brad Pitt / Ryan Gosling in a period costume, but even if he weren’t, probably nothing doing.
Venezuela has offered matching funds if they film there, but that’s as far as things have gotten.
Evidently 50 million dollars, but still. Crazy money, especially for a relatively independent studio like Lucas’s.
(It doesn’t hurt that being born in 1987, the Bond I am used to is Brosnan, who was not great at it.)
Oh, Goldeneye still holds up, I feel. Plus there’s the one where James Bond basically fights Rupert Murdoch, that’s good for a laugh.
Also, you being four years younger than me bums me out.
I didn’t say Brosnan was bad, just not great. Also the movies made during his tenure were flat-out the worst on average, which isn’t exactly his fault. After Goldeneye they seem to have decided that Bond’s job was continuous one-liners, which if they had taken to its literal extreme would be funny in a strange dada way but as was was just silly. Also, the book Tomorrow Never Dies was based on had the Murdoch guy inherit his father’s empire by seducing him with a boy-prostitute and driving him to suicide for fear of exposure.
“Goldeneye” had the best tie-in video game, of course.
Also, “Die Another Day” wasn’t even a new title.
Surely you’ve at least gotten used to not being a youthful ephebe any more. My youngest brother – who I still kind of think of as a baby – is turning 21 this year. And if experience is a guide, the people getting their teeth into the Internet as I did in my time were born in like 1999. There are at least some people ineptly looking for porn out there – maybe your porn, maybe even porn with you in it, secret porn you don’t remember making and don’t know exists, fraudulent porn made to discredit you and all you stand for – who were conceived due to 9/11.
Little girls whose parents met because of the Iraq war are already discovering strange, difficult feelings that will come to dominate their adult lives. Little boys? Give it a year or so.
These children that I mentioned – these real, live children, conceived on and around September 11, 2001 – are old enough to encounter I Like To Watch, and experience a nameless and complete weltschmerz they will only grasp when they work backwards from their birthdays years and years later.
So if you know any children born on the first week of June any year past 2002, now you know . . . the whole story.
*applause*
That was one of your good ones, Cerberus.
Ron Paul’s Alaska payback
By CHARLES MAHTESIAN, 4/29/12
Despite a disappointing third place finish in the March 6 Alaska caucuses, Ron Paul is looking like a winner there: A Paul supporter was voted in as the new GOP chairman Saturday at the state convention.
It’s more evidence of the political maturation of the Paul forces, who are beginning to seize the levers of powers from within state parties.
From the Alaska Dispatch:
This weekend, it was the young, sometimes bedraggled but always politically strident and not always so polite, supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul who were certain that if they were in charge of the party, Alaska and the country would be a better place.
And now they’ll get their chance to prove it.
After at least 12 years of the Alaska GOP being run by what those party newcomers call “establishment Republicans,” a new force is taking over: Alaska Republicans voted Russ Millete as the party’s new chairman and Debbie Holland-Brown as co-chair. They are both supporters of presidential candidate Ron Paul.
There are signs that this might not be the smoothest of transitions — the Dispatch reports “the state GOP transferred all, or nearly all, of its roughly $100,000 to the local Capital City Republicans in Juneau” in advance of the vote.
It was a tough weekend all around for the GOP establishment in Anchorage — from this KTUU report, it looks like Sen. Lisa Murkowski also had a rough go of it at the convention.
Read more about: Ron Paul, Alaska Dispatch, Alaska 2012
And, surprisingly enough, Romney was telling the truth. That’s another reason the Republican base doesn’t trust Romney. Sure, Romney lies most of the time, but how can you trust someone who, when he’s under pressure in a high stakes debate, falls back on the truth?
How to sum up the reality of the 2012 campaign and who goes or stays in the Presidency is crucial to American welfare.
What we’ve mostly seen by now is that if you are Osama Bin Laden, President Obama believes in killing. But if you are Seamus the dog, Romney believes in torture.
Hence, the choice between being killed or being tortured is relevant to define the two campaigns.
Most rational people prefer neither, and that is the dilemma for the 2012 election. Without sufficient government safeguard, either option is made possible. It is the election of the least worst candidate as many elections turn out to be when the economy is doing poorly.
Although it may be highly probable that the answers lies within the Electoral College, lobbying, Congress, or the Supreme Court, and not with the Presidency and who resides there. And in that case, we have a much larger problem as American citizens….
Since most of government is more inclined to blame the people rather than the government, it becomes an unsolvable equation of major proportions when you’ve tried it one way, and then tried it another.
Returning to Constitutional principles may be all that is left to take back government and prevent both from becoming the norm that the majority can accept, and adding enforcement of law and human rights principles prevalent at the U.N. to achieve the overall goal of good government without its hazards of self interested, self propelled, and the self indulged disguised as valid and legitimate leadership.
The writer has got this completely the wrong way around. If anything, Romney is Heller, and Obama IS The Smiler. Just take one look at the world collapsing around you one constitutional right at a time (“Now where do I start cutting….”).