From Decepticon Hijack, a Transformers storybook:



From the Velveteria, a black-velvet museum in Portland:



I'm just sayin'.

ATTN: hooper_x and recharge138

Figured you'd appreciate this image as much as anybody.



( Context is for jabronis, my dear Cobra Commander. )

In an e-mail to me, my girlfriend mentioned that she had gotten "a Latvian scam email," which I of course read as "Latverian." Then my brain immediately gave me this:

The magnanimous DOOM is holding an inconceivable amount of your
nigh-worthless money in a special account, which he needs to transfer
through your soon-to-be-vassal-state's financial system for reasons
with which you need not concern yourself.  YOU HAVE BEEN PERSONALLY
SELECTED BY DOOM to bear this honor.  You shall submit to DOOM all
personal information immediately.  Upon completion of the transaction,
DOOM shall reward you handsomely by calling off the assassination
squad currently assigned to you.  HAIL DOOM.

Conversation I had with my girlfriend last night:

HER: My mom always sends me Easter stuff early because she thinks it's going to take a week to get across the country, but then it shows up the next day. Which I don't even know how that's physically possible, but...

ME: Well, with FedEx's Previous-Day Delivery...

HER: "When you absolutely, positively need to get it there yesterday."

ME: I like to send things to myself. I can get the coolest stuff for a day!

HER: What do you mean?

ME: Like, let's say I decide that tomorrow I'm going to send myself a puppy. Then, ta-da, a puppy is on my doorstep today. I never have to actually buy it; all I have to do is make sure I send it back the next day. The puppy just goes through the loop forever.

HER: You know, the puppy would keep ageing.

ME: That's true. So my memory of it would keep changing to be a day older.

HER: It would?

ME: Right. Every time the puppy goes through the loop, it would change history by being one day older. And, assuming that every day for the puppy corresponds to a day that I live into the future, as the years went by I would keep remembering an older and older dog.

HER: Until about fifteen years from then...

ME: I'd be like, "Why did I send myself a dead dog fifteen years ago?"

HER: Schrödinger's puppy.

I feel a little too underinformed about this question, and I'd like people to explain/answer/correct/confirm me on it. I admit it makes some sweeping generalizations, so if it's a strawman, let me know where it falls apart, but here it is:

Why for the past eight years has the American conservative (principally Republican) movement been cavalier about the loss of actual freedoms like habeas corpus and the need for warrants, but is suddenly terrified that the partial nationalization of failing banks and/or other industries (even for a weekend) is a ticket to Stalinism?

The best answer I can come up with is pure faith in the people in charge: the "good monarch" philosophy that says that as long as one's own party has the reins, power won't be abused. But I'm sure there's far more to it than that, and if you can enlighten me (especially if you skew conservative), I'd love to hear it.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many details about life within the fearsome Red Army have come to light.


Right about the middle they break out the wild cossack shit, and then from 3:30 on it's pure insanity.

Apparently this has been around as a meme for at least a year, and somebody edited it to Run DMC's "It's Like That". The sync gets kind of uncanny toward the end.

(Run DMCCCP?)

You may have heard of "Where the Hell Is Matt?", a serious of videos of this guy named Matt dancing in various locations across the globe. It started as a personal project, but then he got corporate sponsorship and made more extensive, vaguely more professional versions as he globetrotted. Well, the last series he did ended in Seattle, where he lives. And where I live. He put the word out that he was going to be dancing at a certain time and place, and anyone was invited to join him. So my girlfriend and I went, and as our big crowd was bouncing around, she and I grabbed each other's hands and spun around till we fell over. The moment of falling is where the Seattle clip starts. You can see us in the very upper-right. The most identifiable moment is when I stand up and wave my arms instead of helping her up; I'm wearing a black shirt with white sleeves, and she's wearing a red jacket. It's the end clip:


Unfortunately, the video is so small and compressed that you can't really tell that a third of the crowd is dressed in anime costumes for no reason I was ever able to discern. They'd just been milling around the park, and they watched us set up for a fair while before wandering over and joining us. Did we ruin a perfectly good LARP session? Hopefully.

When my old friends jamesan and his wife came back to town, showing off their barely-formed larva, we had to play Paper Telephone for old times' sake.



ROUND 1
Smoking
Seas
Monkey
Internet
Swing
Forest
Raccoon
Hammer

ROUND 2
Robot
Animals
Peppermint
Giants
Bruce Campbell
Grim
Ill-smelling
Math

ROUND 3
Deadly
Rocker
Ow
Lightning
Treasure
Sun
Cowbell

I recommend "Seas," "Animals," and "Bruce Campbell." But I think the game of the night was "Grim," whence came the terrifying Panty Nose.

(You tell him it's a poor fashion choice.)

Irony.

(But this guy's username is way less entertaining.)

The same lady at work who gave me the "trustworthy" pen also gave me an awesome foreign holographic-print LotR promo cup:



I... think it's Polish, but that's just based on running this bit of fine print through an online translator:



It says, roughly, "On movie screens Jan. 1, 2004." Strangely, though, the same translator couldn't get anything out of "Władca Pierścieni" or "Powrot Krola."

But the real gem is on the OTHER side of the cup, where we find this:



NO TO HOOP, indeed!

hooper_x, your rivalry with the Dutch is well-documented. But I don't know what you did to piss the Poles off so much they named a soft drink after you just so they could shun it.

Where I work, we get sample products from companies that make promotional items - say, cups or bags or (seriously) knives with your logo on them. Or, in this case, pens:



A better set of misplaced quotation marks, I may have never seen.

I am completely enamored with this site:



It works like this: The guy who runs the site has put up a bunch of truncated Japanese commercials. Anybody who registers can then write subtitles, and the resulting "foshata" goes up for the world to see. There's a voting function that's open to all registrants, and the results are a decent gauge of quality.

Here are some more of my favorites:

"Alzheimer's"
"Found this"
"Roof wizards"
"Little boy"

To surf for more, I recommend using the box in the upper-right corner of the page. Clicking on "best" will show you which foshatas made in the last day have gotten the most positive votes. (There are also "week," "month," and "all time" options.)

Or if you just want to try your luck, you can click "random foshata" on the left-hand side. Plus in the same menu is the "plagiarizer," which takes random subtitles from other foshatas and throws them on random videos. Good absurdist fun! "New foshata" is what you click to create your own, which you need to be registered for. Luckily it's free and extremely quick. (We'll see how long the free part lasts, if this site gets popular enough.)

And if you come across some foshatas by "astro-l"... yeah, that's me. I think I might be getting addicted to it.

(Oh yeah, props to memepool for the gankage.)

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeah. Not only did I find an actual copy of it, it's now signed by the Liefeld himself:



So of course I had to ask him what the deal was. His explanation was that he and his cohorts decided "Godyssey" would be a cool name for a comic, so what should happen in it? Well, you always see gods running around in comics, but you never see Jesus. "What would Jesus do?" I added.

"Yeah, so I figured the other gods'd be all, 'Ha ha, look at him on the cross!' And then he'd be all, [makes tearing-hands-off-of-cross motion, with guttural sounds]," Liefeld explained. Then after a pause, "We were totally in on the joke. We thought it'd be fun."

"Well, it's pretty amazing. I saw scans on the Internet and just knew I had to find it."

[Looking at two-page spread again] "Y'know, the Passion happened, then this."

"The Passion was the prequel to the Godyssey."

"Right!"

All in all, Rob was pretty jovial, and we were both laughing. Oh, and you're probably wondering now, what happens in the REST of the comic? Well, this is on the page following all the scans already on the Net:

( Cut for brevity and mildly-NSFW content )