Q: Why didn’t the shark eat the investment banker?
A: Professional courtesy.
Justin, Son Of Margaret
The latest from Canada’s best known member of the Lucky Y-Chromosome Club.
QOTD
“He could end all of this if he’d just show us his dog licence.”*
“International Burn a Koran Day”
Oh, boo hoo. A simple Google search will confirm that Muslims have been burning bibles for years.
Admittedly, they’re usually inside a church at the time.
Chasing The Pity Vote
Reader Tips
I’m Alan Partridge is an hilarious BBC situation comedy that follows the travails of a former talk-show host named Alan Partridge, an egotistical but insecure blow-hard in love with the sound of his own voice. As the series opens the recently-divorced Partridge, who is consumed at all times by his desire to be on TV again, has been living unhappily for six months in the Linton Travel Tavern while putting in time in the humiliating 4:30 am shift at tiny Radio Norwich (“From the Ouse to the Waveney…”.)
Partridge’s long-awaited lunch meeting with the head of BBC programming proves disastrous, as his increasingly desperate litany of last-ditch pitches for another TV show (“Inner City Sumo? Monkey Tennis?”) are serially rejected by an amused, and finally annoyed, Tony Hayers. Just when his professional prospects look completely hopeless, he receives a phone call telling him the good news: Tony Hayers has fallen off his roof and died, and will be replaced by a man named Chris Feather who had historically been much more supportive of Alan’s ideas. In tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, the utterly callous and ever ambitious Partridge, played by Steve Coogan, shows up at Tony Hayers’ funeral, not to mourn, but to schmooze with Tony Feather in the interest of cadging himself another TV show.
The comments are open for Reader Tips.
Pushing Back Eurabia
Cross Country Ride
Helpless
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Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy and How the Law Failed All of Us – Christie Blatchford Preorder here. |
Update: comments glitch now fixed.
Y2Kyoto: The “P” In IPCC
Stands for “plagiarism”.
McMichael’s Planetary Overload arguments rely on a Greenpeace report about global warming. His book frequently cites articles in non-peer-reviewed publications such as New Scientist and Scientific American. McMichael is, in other words, an environmentalist whose day job happens to involve the study of public health. He has no expertise in most of the topics his book discusses.
He is, of course, entitled to his personal opinions. But was he the best choice to lead an IPCC chapter? Let’s rephrase that: if one wished to deliberately stack the deck, to ensure that a certain perspective would dominate the climate bible’s first health chapter, would someone who had expressed views similar to McMichael’s not have seemed like the perfect candidate?
There is a straight line between what the UN’s 1995 climate bible told the world about health issues and what McMichael had already written in his 1993 book. Although Planetary Overload isn’t included among the 182 references listed at the end of the health chapter, entire passages of the climate bible were lifted directly from it.
Related! “Pachauri admits the IPCC just guesses the numbers”
Reader Tips
The 1958 wide screen extravaganza South Pacific was an adaptation of the highly successful Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, set during WWII, which centered around the culturally-conflicted romance between a French Plantation owner who had fled his country and a Navy nurse from Arkansas stationed on the unnamed South Pacific island.
Tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips, a musical number from one of the film’s subplots, sees a wily, scheming, and avaricious Tonkinese peddler named Bloody Mary trying to pressure U.S. Marine Lt. Joseph Cable into marrying her daughter Liat. Bloody Mary would later attempt to emotionally blackmail Cable by informing him (in a calculated, premeditated rage, before storming off with her daughter in hand) that Liat will now have to marry an older Frenchman instead, but first she guilefully tries to appeal to his dreams of an idyllic existence on the neighbouring, mist-shrouded island of Bali Hai, where the mother and daughter live, by encouraging him to keep dreaming, to distract himself with pleasant thoughts, and to keep talking Happy Talk.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.
On the Matter of Sherlock Holmes
For those who may be interested in or may be fans of Sherlock Holmes,
Doyle’s writings thereto, and/or portrayals by Arthur Wontner (1932),
Reginald Owen (1933), Basil Rathbone (1939), Douglas Wilmer (1965),
Peter Cushing (1968), and/or Jeremy Brett (1984), I have collected links
to the original texts of the four novels and the 56 short stories, plus (at
last count) 55 complete web-available movies and shows starring said
actors (including many of the Rathbone and Brett cases), into a newly
available Sherlock Holmes entry at the Sagacious Iconoclast.
Move Over, Demon Sheep
“But then it dawned on me…”
I was thinking, as I typically do, about the dire situation of America and exactly what measures could be taken to fix it.
To me it’s very simple;
Eliminate corporate taxes
Streamline regulation
Have a constitutional amendment that would limit fed, state and local spending and tax collection to a cumulative 15% GDP
and a bunch of other things, but in short unleashing the private sector, the animal spirits and the productive capacity of human nature to grow us out of this recession and dwarf our debt woes.
I Can See Nancy Pelosi’s Botox Tracks From My House
… to the message about Palin we’ve been getting the rest of the week, especially from that scathing Vanity Fair profile, and it’s starting to become increasingly difficult as we approach November to tell apart the real Palin from the smear campaigns, or the real Palin from the propaganda. But it also means the entertainment value of all three are increasingly exponentially, and if Palin continues to crank out apolitical and light-hearted moments like this one, she’ll only make it harder for those on the left to continue to find her irritating and noxious.
Reader Tips
There’s no beating around the bush in tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips: when our Romeo cuts straight to the chase, it’s bada bing, bada boom, mission accomplished. Playing in front of some seriously rhythmically-challenged Caucasoid dancers in a British TV studio, here’s Mississippi-born bluesman John Lee Hooker delivering the circumlocution anti-particle called Boom Boom.
The comments are open for your weekend Reader Tips.
Y2Kyoto: We Don’t Need No Stinking Twisty Bulbs
A reader reminded me that I had promised to send defunct CFL bulbs to my Congressman, so I’ve dug the latest failure out of the kitchen trash can and will send it off to Jimbo in Washington, labeled “hazardous waste’. Blogging may be suspended while I arrange bail.
For Canadians, the process is different:
1. Address your package to a non-existent recipient
2. In the “from” corner, write: 219-2211 West 4th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V6K 4S2
3. Drop it in a mailbox without adding stamps.
But you didn’t hear that from me.
From the comments; “what can I mail the good Dr. if I refuse to have those twisty bulbs in my house?”
A brick is nice.
They’re illegal, the war was not
Letters to the editor, published and not:
Iraq, deserters, and the war’s legality
How Many Bottles Of That Do You Go Through A Week?
h/t Dave S.
Reader Tips
I’m not sure if tonight’s musical selection is a actually a gospel song, as some claim, or if it’s an earthbound invitation, almost an admonition, to live, and to get off one’s high horse and face the proverbial music down here on the ground. It doesn’t really matter; any way you slice it, it’s a heartfelt invitation to communion, and an affecting and very human master stroke of a song. From his 1999 album Mule Variations, here’s Tom Waits singing Come On Up to the House.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.