In which I demonstrate rule #173

Weekend uke blogging - the all-booty edition

The originals are here and here if you really need to see them

Another take on this vital issue via the magic of Ukulele


But the last word goes to the maestro - Mr. Richard Cheese

Obviously the real racists are the couple who complained

If you are a clergyman, you can pick and chose the people for whom you are willing to perform wedding ceremonies. If a couple comes to you and you don't think they should get married you are well within your right to refuse to perform the service or give the couple the blessing of your church, temple, mosque, shrine, coven or soltice circle. Catholics are under no obligation to allow gays or non-Catholics to marry in their church. Orthodox Rabbis can refuse to marry goyim. Druids can decline invitations to sanctify the handfasting of one of their congregation to a Republican. Churches are private organizations and can do what ever they want as long as it doesn't involve human sacrifice or annoying me in my home.
Government officials do not have that luxury. If someone meets the legal criteria for marrying - that is to say, they are of legal age and not obviously insane or under duress or siblings - you have to give them the licence, no matter what your personal feelings are.
So this dimwitted clown doesn't have a leg to stand on when he tries to defend his refusal to grant marriage licences to interracial couples. He should not be allowed to resign, he should be removed from office, yesterday. Naturally though, he claims not to be a racist, he's just thinking of the children:

However, [Justice of the Peace for Tangipahoa Parish’s 8th Ward Keith] Bardwell told the Hammond’s Daily Star that he was concerned for the children who may be born of the relationship and that, in his experience, most interracial marriages don’t last.
“I’m not a racist,” Bardwell told the newspaper. “I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.” Bardwell, stressing he couldn’t personally endorse the marriage, referred the couple to another justice of the peace.

Yes, I'm quite sure he has nothing against black people, he even allows them into his very own home. I'm sure he has a vast collection of Fats Domino records and thinks Tiger Woods is a credit to his people, some of his best friends yadda yadda yadda...

Which, of course is all bullshit. He is refusing to comply with the law and denying people a civil right on the basis of race. Despite his protestations to the contrary, this makes Justice of the Peace Crackerpants McCracker a racist.
I'm sure 200 years ago his ancestors were singing the same song - They were not racists, but they just could not support abolition because "what would happen to the poor children of the freed slaves without a white master to look out them? why they'd probably start stealing watermelons and the next thing they'd want to learn to read and before you knew it they'd be leering a white women and then where would they be? No, slavery was the only way to ensure those poor children didn't go wrong and get uppity and get themselves in trouble."
"Its for their own good," they'd say.

Bardwell's concern for the children of interracial couples is actually very touching, since the offspring of such relationships so often go wrong.

LOL Lulu

Funny LuLu finds a funny one.

"Socialist countries like Canada condone divorce. What did we even fight the communists in World War Two for?"

The 2nd Amendment means never having to say you're sorry

I know many states have "castle" laws (as in "a man's home is his") that allow residents to shoot anyone trespassing on their property that they feel is a threat to them for any reason without facing murder or manslaughter charges, but what if you shoot someone you thought was a burglar and it turns out to be your live-in fiance?

Better safe than sorry, I guess. It could have been some junkie trying to steal his big screen TV.

Rule#152 is my favorite

A message from the Nobel Prize Committee

Just for Our Man in Abiko


Disclose.tv Monty Python goes hard on Henry Kissinger Video

By the way, this post has the distinction of being post #1,500. Another milestone reached, hurrah!

A mysterious visitor from the east

He's wise, he's wonderful, he's that super sultan from the east and former travel agent from Washington D.C. - Ladies and gentlemen please welcome Karnac the magnificent!

I hold in my hand the question that has been placed in an envelope which a child of four could tell is hermetically sealed. It has been stored in a mayonaisse jar on Funk and Wagnalls porch since noon. What is the answer to this question, oh great seer from the east?

One is a pastime in which the participants take a standard vehicle, modify it until it is almost unrecognizable and then race around and around in a circle making a lot of noise and exciting the crowd of spectators, many of whom may not know much about the mechanics of the thing and are secretly hoping for a crash. The other is a big stock car race in Florida.

(Riiiiiip)

What is the difference between wingnut blogging and the Daytona 500?

Hiyoooooooo! Play us out, Doc Severinson....

And what did you do before breakfast today?

Because Barry Hussien MalcomXstalinhitlermugabemarxlenin Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Apparently he got for saying nice things about peace and international cooperation and basically repudiating American exceptionalism the last eight years.
Frankly, I think it is a bit premature to be handing out peace prizes before there is any actual peace happening, but if they can give it to Kissinger for extending ending the Vietnam War, I guess this is kosher.
This is the third Nobel Peace Prize handed out as a "fuck you" to the Bush Administration, after the awards to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. I don't see that as a bad thing, but it does seem a bit excessive.


That sound you hear like popcorn popping is wingnut heads a'splodin' .

From the Dept. of Sober Second Thought

From my comments at Our Man in Abiko: my first reaction when I saw this on the wires at work was that we would see a retraction and correction in a matter of minutes. It was sort of a "they gave it to who? for what?

I get the whole "ending American exceptionalism" thing and the whole "let's ditch the nukes" thing, but I'll believe that when I see some missiles getting dismantled and the US insisting that Israel obey the UN. I'm not holding my breath. I could see it a couple of years from now if and when he's ended the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, but this seems to be jumping the gun a bit.

Still, if they must hand this out every year, I suppose there are worse choices. As far as I know, all you need to get nominated is a letter from a sitting member of a national legislature, so I think we can assume that George W.Bush, Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin were among the more than 200 nominees.

The interesting part now will be seeing how he handles it. What charity will the money be given to? Will he attend the award ceremony and give a speech? Will Rush Limbaugh have a stroke on the air?

An armed society is a polite society?

Another couple of responsible gun owners killed.
I suppose we should be grateful it happened at home and not at one the kids soccer games to which Mom regularly brought a sidearm.
How long before the firearms fetishist choir declares "she'd still be alive if she'd spent more time on the range practicing her quick draw" or "if the kids had been packing too, they could have stopped Dad!"

Why cops don't belong in schools

My only question about this incident is why it took so long to happen.

Teens question authority. It is what they do, it is practically hardwired into the DNA. Putting an authority figure in their way for no good reason is just asking for trouble. If that authority figure is a coach or a teacher or a vice principal, even one with a chip on their shoulder, they are at least used to dealing with kids. A police officer may not be as experienced in dealing with kids. And one that decides to arrest a teenager for making "bacon" jokes or being a smart ass, is not someone who should be working in a school.

Who is the cop supposed to be protecting the students from? And who is protecting the students from the cops?

More cover-ups for the higher-ups

My guess would be that, as in most government scandals, the big problem here is not going to be the initial misconduct by some underling, but the subsequent bullshittery by the government in trying to hush the whole thing up.

Obviously, at some stage someone in the chain of command figured out a mistake had been made in handing over prisoners to the Afghans, and obviously they reported it to someone higher up who was eventually told it was not a problem, when it very much was a problem. The question is: Who was the amoral idiot who decided it wasn't a problem to hand prisoners over to be tortured, and how high up in the government ranks are they? Given the steps being taken to squelch this investigation, I think we can assume it was someone fairly senior, possibly Cabinet level.

The government is doing its best to delay things until they can appoint a new commissioner to the Military Police Complaints Tribunal when the current chairman, Peter Tinsley, reaches the end of his term in December. And they will probably manage to succeed and appoint some useful idiot to shut down the inquiry once and for all.

Which will probably lead the whistleblowers to take the case to the public in bigger and better ways. Eventually, even if it has to wait for a change of government, the truth will out, but it isn't going to set anybody free in this case, except in the sense that they will be free from being tied down to a government job anymore.

Our own little Nixon

Lots of fuss in the blogosphere about Steverino's big singing debut. Pale makes some nice points with a pop-up version of the video here.
Last year, big gala's were "elitist" and Steverino was hot and heavy to chop all the arts funding he could get away with. Now, he's appearing on stage with Yo Yo Ma at the National Arts Centre Gala? Well, his wife is the honorary chair of the event, so I suppose it makes some sense, but just to be clear about his feelings for the arts, Steve left the building before the event was over and went tieless to the blacktie event. When was the last time you saw him without a yoke of the corporate oppressor necktie?

Oh yeah, now I remember...



And how did that work out for ya Steverino?

This whole thing is just another sweater vest moment and it won’t work any better than it worked for Nixon. The people who like Harper are the same people who liked or would have liked Nixon and they like him for the same reasons – because he’s mediocre, just like them. They hate anyone smarter, better educated, better looking or more talented than they are and so they loved Nixon because, just like them, he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin and lacked any social graces at all. (See Rick Perlstein's Nixonland for myriad examples of Nixon being Nixon - Steverino is Nixon writ small)
They don’t like anyone different from themselves and they don’t like new ideas or change.
Read any posting on any Blogging Tories blog - its all about the resenting anyone different, anyone that they think is getting something that they aren't getting. And that, and fear of The Other, is what conservatives have been running on for the last 50 years.

That’s why they like guys like Steve. But you have to ask why they feel they need to sell this idea that he’s human. Why are they trying so hard to convince us that he’s a regular guy?
If he was a great piano player or singer, his advisers never would have let him do this--he'd look like an elitist, a star. Since he's merely adequate, he looks like a "regular guy" instead of the awkward, narcassistic, power-hungry, control freak that he is.


When I saw Harper at the piano keyboard, I immediately thought of Nixon, but Red Tory beat me to posting the video



Plus ca change, plus ca meme frickin' chose

Dept of "I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying" --Could it be that Harper is actually an android fuelled by the succulent flesh of tiny babies? Why doesn’t Stephen Harper, if that is his real name, level with Canadians and deny his baby-eating and the accusations that he’s really an android?

Sunday songs and cinema

As always join us on Radio Woodshed for some groovin' on your Sunday afternoon followed by our weekly movie. If you are among those clever enough to find us in Second Life, you can join us on the Red Zeppelin for both!

This week the Glorious People's Cinema Project wraps up the Dustin Hoffmann retrospective with "Midnight Cowboy"

the original:

and the cover

the return of The Rules

so that's how they reproduce

I always thought it involved pods and mitosis, but maybe not.

weekend uke blogging- extra long jamming edition

Once upon a time I worked as a coop student at IBM in Don Mills, but since apartments were very expensive in Toronto, I lived on the couch of some friends of mine. One was a serious musician studying double bass at the University of Toronto and lugging his huge stand up bass back and forth on the subway. Another was studying geography at Ryerson, was an awesome bluegrass guitar picker and did 200 pushup every night, no matter how may beers he'd had. The third was not ending classes by this point but was spending his time chain-smoking, teaching himself the banjo, drinking vast amounts of neo-citran and reading and then burning Stephen King novels as a way of training himself to become a writer. I paid rent by buying dinner once a week. Much to the considerable annoyance of the people downstairs, we painted slogans on the wall in the hallway, often used the floor for an ashtray, had a temporarily homeless sound engineer friend sleeping under the kitchen table a couple of nights a week, and listened to a lot of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Charlie Mingus and especially Neil Young. We also played a lot of bluesgrass together, drank a lot of beer (and neo-citran until the corner store wouldn't sell it to us anymore) together and wailed a lot of loud Neil Young jams together.

Ah, those were the days.

First, the original:

And then, the cover - dig the awesome uke solos and as a bonus the singer looks and sounds like a skinnier me

extra non-uke bonus jamming from the jammies (Grace Potter and Joe Satriani - hoo-ah!)

A different kind of private lesson

When I worked for NOVA, it was pretty clear that the way the company made money was by lending students the money to buy lesson packages from the school at usurious rates of interest. There were always rumors that the company president, when he and his brother parted company over their first language-teaching firm, had gone to the Yakuza for the money to start up what became NOVA. I'm guessing that might have been more than just a rumor and that maybe the teachers and students weren't the only ones who got stung.

2 gangsters held over holding of ex-Nova boss

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Two members of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate were arrested on the spot Monday on suspicion of confining the former president of the failed language school chain Nova Corp. inside a Tokyo hotel, police said.

According to senior police officials, the two men confined Nozomu Sahashi, 58, who has been sentenced to 3-1/2 years' imprisonment for professional embezzlement, inside a room of a hotel in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, from about 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday.

On the same day at about 3 p.m., investigators rescued Sahashi and arrested the two men. Sahashi, who is currently appealing the ruling, did not suffer any injury.

(Sep. 30, 2009)

If the mobsters had only had the presence of mind to sell tickets to former teachers for their little chat with Mr. Sahashi, they could have gotten back all their money in one fell swoop by selling out Toyko Dome at 500 yen a seat. (I'm sure there are still a few veterans who remember being paid, in cash, the first and only bonus NOVA ever paid its teachers - a nice, shiny 500 yen coin to mark the new millenium - I think I bought a beer and pack of cigarettes with mine)

None dare call it treason

Six or seven years ago, a commentator merely suggesting that the sun did not, in fact, shine out of George W. Bush's ass was usually good for a solid week of panel discussions on CNN and FOX about "Does the media have a responsibility to support the president in time of war?" and "Why do liberals hate America?" and "Is it treasonous to oppose the invasion of Iraq or does it just make baby Jesus cry?"

Fast forward to today and an open call for a military coup doesn't even merit a mention in the press.

America, you've come a long way baby!

Update Oct 1: NewsMax, which is sponsored in part by the Republican National Committee, has pulled the offending column in the face of blogospheric outrage that has started to seep toward the MSM. But Media Matters kept a copy on file for future reference.

Serious progressive political commentary...and tits

I've never much liked Arrianna Huffington. I didn't like her when she was a movement conservative screecher back in the Clinton years and I've never really trusted her conversion to progressive liberalism. I still don't get exactly what the heck she is supposed to be famous for, other than being a beard for a rich homosexual would be politician. Her site has been influential to a degree I suppose, but it tends to rely a bit too heavily on celebrity rants and gossip about the pretty people. I'm sure she has her defenders, and I like boobies as much, if not more, than the next guy, but I'll take my political activism straight up thanks, without the generous side order of cheesecake. No more blog roll for you, Arrianna!