Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

Note: I’m not sure I’d view either of these images while trying to eat.

This hilarious waste of perfectly good paint got linked from a comment thread on Unfogged sometime in the last few days. It’s well worth spending some time zooming around with one’s mouse and reading the explanatory text. Money quote: “Some stars shine brighter than others,” said of the stars on the American flag. My other favorite thing is probably the note that the little white boy represents both boys and girls and children of all races. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

At any rate, tengu was chatting with me the other night and asked if I had seen the response piece, “One Nation Under Cthulhu” and sent me the link when I said I had not. I’m impressed! It’s got buckets of blood, Great Old Ones, Deep Ones, some critters that could arguably be Mi-Go and/or Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and Satan wearing an expression somewhere between perplexed and pleasantly surprised. No Shoggoths, but I guess they would tend to crowd others out. The arm-stump Elder Sign being drawn on the Constitution is the crowning touch of class.

Best comment from the Wonkette thread on the response piece had to be, “If he passes out loaves and fishes, tell him you already ate.”

Finally, because the Internet is nothing if not a space that encourages creativity, this animated GIF. If you don’t get it, watch They Live sometime. It’s a classic.

Stay classy, John C. Wright.

Tonight while I was searching the YouTubernets for this, I found this.

So awesome.

I am closing in on Akismet having caught 100,000 spam comments on my behalf. Sweet.

NaNo thus far: 38,495 words.

I created a Wordle word cloud of the text so far. Hell yeah.

mrh has started what is basically the coolest thing ever: a blog that tracks pundit predictions in order to gauge the (in)correctness of pundits. Today he lines up a couple of posts about Apple’s now-present-future and some older political predictions we can now properly measure.

Do you want peace of mind?

Then don’t randomly look up your nephew’s MySpace page on a whim.

Just FYI.

Watch this.

But don’t watch it at work, or at least wear headphones if you do.

(Oh shit!  It’s Dr. Tran!)

I can’t remember where I first saw it, but I really enjoyed reading a Lovecraftian response to a 419 scammer.  Little did a realize it’s a bit of a cottage industry in its own right…

These four things are the keys to happiness, I think. Oh, and high-speed Internet access. Oh, and books.

And gaming.  Kittens, too!  OK, so I have a lot of needs.

Saturday afternoon we rolled over to Bascha & Kath’s place to start off the grilling season in style. Bascha’s enormo-grill was in full effect (she has mastered the use of a chimney to get it going quickly, something I should learn to do at some point) and Kath had a spread going before we’d even gotten there. We cracked open some wine, The Boyf marinaded some ribeyes for me to grill, and several pounds of meat (I’m not exaggerating, really) later I was laid up on their couch while the rest of the party got their fun on. One nap and a few Tums later, I was well into my second wind.

You know you are in good hands when one of your hostesses tells you that the other hostess has Advil in her bathroom and when you go check said bathroom there are both Advil and Tums sitting out, ready to be used by those who need them. Gods yes. They have great grilling parties, I am here to tell you.

Speaking of good friends and fun times, those of you who know fiend must check his new digs: Geek Nanny (FYI – fixed the link; that was weird). It’s good reading. Follow along as he twists young minds to his evil purposes!

I’m from the mountains, so I am well-accustomed to the sort of things that happen deep in shadowed hollows where the same genes have mixed and mixed again for generations. But when MAC alerted me to this story, even I was surprised. From Haywood County News:

WAYNESVILLE – At least six men traveled from across the nation and South America to have their genitals mutilated in what Haywood County authorities described as a sadomasochistic dungeon.

Three Haywood County men are now in jail on felony charges of castration without malice and practicing medicine without a license.

OK, um, wow. I didn’t even know “castration without malice” was a crime. I mean, wow. Some legislator, somewhere, must have had a fun time hearing about it in the cafeteria after they proposed that one.

Also, you really must visit the link for the mug shots. Damnation. No one, and I mean no one, in their right minds would walk into that house, drop their pants and hope someone produces a knife. Additionally, you have to respect a media outlet that captions the photo with “CASTRATION HOUSE,” then helpfully provides a map to the place in the same story.

They asked a neighbor about the guys, and got this:

Kurtz said the men kept to themselves, rarely waved and never spoke.

I hate to say this, but in the mountains that is every bit as good as putting a sign at the end of the drive that reads WE ARE DOING SOMETHING FREAKY HERE. It shouldn’t be that way – people should have a right to ignore each other all they damn well want, and I remember well when a neighbor accused a gay couple in my neighborhood, back in the ’80s (no, really), of being “drug dealers, or something,” because they didn’t talk to others in the neighborhood and occasionally had out-of-town guests. Still, if the allegations are true, maybe it turns out that even a stopped social clock like that one can be right once in a while. And I find it somewhat heartening that her suspicions were not raised by more than one unmarried man living together, but about their lack of neighborly ways.

My favorite part of the whole article, though?

The victims met the men through a locally produced Web site that published photographs of men engaging in sadomasochistic behavior.

Of course there was a website.

Yahoo! shut down the site in December 2004. The castrations took place last year beginning in March and continued through November, according to police documents.

The case is the first involving willing castration in the county and could be the first in North Carolina.

“This right here beats everything I have ever seen,” the sheriff said.

That’s the mountains, for you.

Are you reading Achewood? If not, you totally should. It is a webcomic about the hard lives of animals who live in the secret underworld of a California suburb. It’s not like Gaiman, it’s not like Disney, it’s like if John Steinbeck and Joss Whedon had gotten together to write Six Degrees of Separation and it had starred cats and stuffed animals.

The current storyline is basically my favorite ever. Start here, and read forward. It is awesome.

I sleep on my stomach. I awoke at one point very early this morning to find that Didi & Gogo were sitting on my butt – square in the middle – wrestling each other. I peeked over one shoulder and there they were. They noticed me looking at them, paused briefly to stare at me, then went back to wrestling.

Kittens are so weird.

Also, I am never reading Penny Arcade late at night again. Last night I dreamt that Patrick Swayze was conned into marrying a morbidly obese midget. The Boyf and I had to make the case to free him from this unwilling matrimony.

You see this guide right here? This is how Setherax, my level 31 Dwarven Hunter in WoW, is going to get to 225 Enchanting in a night. An expensive night, potentially, but a night well worth it.

Then I’ll turn into one of the channel-spammers who stands around in Iron Forge wasting four lines of text explaining that they can do all the same enchants as everyone else. And I’ll get rich doing it.

Is this what had Bush, er, I mean, Dear Leader so worked up about human-animal (manimal to those in the scene) hybrids?

It’s worth noting, because I haven’t yet worked out a good color for links and also because it is so fun to say it: by “this” I mean “that the characters depicted on DHS’s own ‘readiness’ page for kids are in fact human-animal hybrids.”

You know that shrill whinnying you hear in the distance? That’s me laughing my ass off at this.

Or is it…? After all, it could be a maniacal manimal!

Nay!

(First pointed out by the totally-worth-reading Overcompensating.)

So it’s 4:26pm, and I don’t have much to do at the moment. I don’t have it in me to be creative, despite desperately needing to write an update for PAGP – I’m two sessions behind. My excuse is that I need (again) to have Pants Wilder tell me a particularly cryptic thing we were told two sessions ago so that I can record it accurately. The truth, however, is that at the moment it just seems like a lot of effort to produce something original when I can, instead, merely consume the work of others.

So here I am.

I’ve already read apostropher and The Poor Man and checked fafblog and run through the Technology section of MSNBC.com and I even slipped and let myself read 8-Bit Theatre hours before my normal late-evening comics whirlwind I use to round out the day. My days are usually quite busy – slap full of things to do, frankly, and I am A-OK with that – and so I generally try to squeeze all my browsing and whatnots into one highly amusing twenty minutes or so at the end of the shift.

But, not today.

And what do I realize? That I need more to read. Not poliblogs, because my belly aches with hate as it is and I just don’t need something new to worry about. I want fluff. I want comics. I want another Fark – not as a replacement, just more of it. I want my DS, which is out in the car awaiting my dinner break.

So what should I be reading? Comics and amusing blogs of a non-political nature that you read are most welcome. Comments will be turned on for this post as they usually are – on the last one, I just didn’t want to put people in the position of feeling like they were expected to say anything, or anything like that, so I turned off comments for that one post. I was (am?) feeling emotionally fragile enough as it was; weird-ass latent guilt over foisting my mourning onto others via the interwebs didn’t need to get added into the mix.

At any rate, recommend something to me. Something hilarious! I like hilarity.

Or, talk about Battlestar Galactica. Gods, yes, talk about BSG. I’m already in two online conversations about it and they are not enough.