We're All Alive Together At The Same Time!

A map of asia drawn from memory

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:37:10 +0000

A map of asia drawn from memory

Only Three African Armies Have Ever Beaten A European Army In Battle

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:40:00 +0100

Hannibal of Carthage against the Roman Empire
The Zulus against the British Empire
Abyssinia (Etheopia) against Italy

Some abuse that has been given to the semicolon

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:35:00 +0100

“ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”

“transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”

“Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons”

“girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever invented.”

“like an ink smudge on a new white carpet.”

“we’ve never missed yet with the girls we...

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:09:46 +0100

“we’ve never missed yet with the girls we meet”… really? Classic stuff though. check out Mike Love’s primate dance on 0:55, and his mime for ‘girls’ on 1:10. It’s an hourglass. xxx

Ten Odd Travel Guides

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:40:49 +0100

Ten Odd Travel Guides:

via cynical c

Q&A

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:35:00 +0100

the guardian’s Q&A on Saturday was with Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher who you may remember from such channel 4 programmes as The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema.
He gave some of the most morbid and depressing answers I’ve ever seen. it was great stuff e.g.

What is your earliest memory?
My mother naked. Disgusting.
_____________

What was your most embarrassing moment?
Standing naked in front of a woman before making love

_____________

What makes you depressed?
Seeing stupid people happy

_____________

What do you owe your parents?
Nothing, I hope. I didn’t spend a minute bemoaning their death

______________

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To my sons, for not being a good enough father.

_______________

What does love feel like?
Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

________________

What is your favourite smell?
Nature in decay, like rotten trees

__________________

What is the worst job you’ve done?
Teaching. I hate students, they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring

___________________

If you could edit your past, what would you change?
My birth. I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it

____________________

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
That life is a stupid, meaningless thing that has nothing to teach you

…aaaaand man crush.

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:59:50 +0100

…aaaaand man crush.

The first monkey astronaut was Albert Bernstein in 1948

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:29:00 +0100

The second was Albert II. They were both rhesus monkeys.

catbird: Best Lowbrow Comicbook-Based Bad Pun Animated GIF of...

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:18:17 +0100

catbird:

Best Lowbrow Comicbook-Based Bad Pun Animated GIF of the Day

Happy Birthday Jenny

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:25:29 +0100

lapsus: malty: (via dazzlingdelta)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:35:05 +0100

lapsus:

malty:

(via dazzlingdelta)

Blogopticon

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:58:50 +0100

Blogopticon

Video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:28:00 +0100

Video of Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded:

“Waterboarding is a form of torture that consists of immobilizing a person on their back with the head inclined downward and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages.Through forced suffocation and inhalation of water, the subject experiences the process of drowning and is made to believe that death is imminent … CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the technique have lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in”

Here’s a picture of Christopher taken some time before he was waterboarded, when he still thought he was the coolest man in the world

Complaints to the FCC received for various TV programmes

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:22:00 +0100

Complaints to the FCC received for various TV programmes:

e.g. [sic]

“I was wathcing the world series on Fox with my family which includes my son who is about to turn 5. Fox ran a promo for what I believe is there show the Family Guy, the promo shows a cartoon baby shooting his mother on a cruise ship, who then falls overboard and presumamly drowns, while he trips, crys and asks for his mommy, and then realizes he had just killed her. The remote was not near me so I could not change it in time and my son asked why was he crying and why was his mommy in the water. This is utterly ridiculous and I am ticked off. How Fox alonws that promo to run during the world series early in the evening is beyond me. The content is innapropriate for small children and frankly it is offensive to me. I tuned into watch some baseball and some simple Chevy commercials.”

The Five Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:49:00 +0100

The Five Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High:

Sarah Foster

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:00:00 +0100

refers to her boyfriend as ‘R’ in real life. Eek!

"I’m sorry and I apologise are pretty much interchangeable, although the only exception is at a..."

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:50:38 +0100

“I’m sorry and I apologise are pretty much interchangeable, although the only exception is at a funeral”

- can’t remember

Wikipedia

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:47:00 +0100

One thing about wikipedia is that most information on it is unuseable if you are writing an essay or article that you want to be original. It’s such a massive taboo to rip off wikipedia that you have to consciously be different from it. So if I wanted to write an essay on essays, I couldn’t really quote Aldous Huxley saying this

“The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist”

because wikipedia does it straight away at the beginning of its entry on essays. That’s annoying because this quote is pretty important. And I would be reluctant to use the word ‘pedagogical’ because for some reason wikipedia makes a big deal of this word by using it in its first major sub-heading.

But the effect is biggest on quotes. It effectively neuters them, making them instant cliches. Poor Aldous.

I get this all the time writing history essays - I did one on liberty last term and half the quotes and angles I wanted to use were, I realised when I got round to checking it, on the wikipedia page. You could say it serves me right for having a predictable line of thinking.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:07:00 +0100

“The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”

Pauline Kael, 1968

Cannibalism

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:27:00 +0100

If you were eating a human being, which part would you eat first?

AA Gill: “Hands are always supposed to have been a great delicacy. When the football team in the Andes had to eat their own fellow passengers, who were semi-preserved in the snow, once they’d got over the concept of eating people, which they got over really quite quickly, they got bored. They craved different tastes and textures, so they’d go back to corpses they’d already eaten and go and look for bits of offal, just for the sensation of something different.

I suppose what you would avoid is brains, because of kuru, which is an illness you really don’t want to get. I think thigh would probably be rather good. I think that if you butcher people like pigs, which is probably the best way of doing them, then I think a long ham would be rather good. I think people would make quite good ham. Dry-salted, like Parma-person. The other thing that always interests me about cannibalism is what is the ideal age? We mature very slowly, so if you’re farming people, it’s never going to be a profitable business, because to get something like a lamb, they’d have to be fed for five or six years, and to get mutton or beef you’ve got to keep them for 16 years. That’s ridiculous.”