Sadly, No!

Cheney takes refuge in bomb shelter after Afghan blast
Tue Feb 27, 2007 10:14AM EST

MUSCAT (Reuters) – Vice President Dick Cheney was whisked into a bomb shelter immediately after a Taliban suicide bomber struck the main American military base he was visiting in Afghanistan on Tuesday.

Up to 14 people were killed, including one U.S. and one South Korean soldier, in the Bagram Airbase attack which rebels said was aimed at Cheney.

He had been in his room at the base where he had unexpectedly had to stay the night after bad weather forced postponement of his trip to the capital, Kabul, about 60 km (40 miles) away.

“At 10 a.m. I heard a loud boom,” Cheney said.

It’s time someone accounted for the fact that our Vice President’s life is punctuated with loud booms, invariably followed by tragedy unto others and a speedy whisking. Boom! — and a plane hits the Pentagon as Cheney is ‘whisked away.’ Boom! — and someone’s face gets in the way of his shotgun blast, whereupon Cheney is ‘whisked away.’ Boom! Suicide bomber, Afghanistan. Whisked. F-bombed in Mississippi; whisked.

Boom-whisk, boom-whisk.

“Rrrrr!”

For the love of God, Dick: Either stop with the booming, or stop with the whisking. Or whisk first, if you would; boom in private. Boom and whisk simultaneously if you like. Whoom! Bisque! That would be splendid. But no more of this, please, because we’re getting quite tired of the aftermath:

“They moved me for a relatively brief period of time to one of the bomb shelters nearby,” [Cheney] said. “As the situation settled down and they got a better sense in terms of what was going on, then I went back to my room until it was time to leave.”

NATO’s death toll in the attack was four, officials said. A Reuters photographer at the scene saw an additional 10 bodies, putting the total at 14.

A U.S. government contractor, whose nationality was unknown, was among those killed and 27 people were wounded, NATO said.

“We wanted to target … Cheney,” Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.

Wo-ho-ho, look who’s in the ‘undisclosed location’ now, Mr. Cheney. It’s Bomby McExplodowitz calling about the boom! Seems like Mr. Khan was pre-whisked. Although truly, how much whisking is necessary in Afghanistan if insurgents can target an American vice-president in a place he occupied ‘unexpectedly,’ and then have someone talk to Reuters about it, being all like, “Hey, this is Mullah Ayat Khan. Yeah, you can quote me. So, about that suicide bomber we just sent to kill the Vice President…”
Read the rest of this entry »

All right, Bradrocket’s done it now. The bed has been shit, the can of worms opened…

Oh yes, Ludds, it’s Glenn Reynolds’s theme song set to anime:

2095, 2095, 2095, 2095
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly…

I sent a message to another time
But as the days unwind, this I just cant believe
I sent a note across another plane
Maybe its all a game, but this I just cant conceive.

Can you hear me?

I drive the very latest hovercar
I dont know where you are
But I miss you so much till then
I met someone who looks a lot like you
She does the things you do
But she is an IBM.

2095, 2095, 2095, 2095
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly…

Shes only programmed to be very nice
But shes as cold as ice
Whenever I get too near
She tells me that she likes me very much
But when I try to touch
She makes it all too clear.

She is the latest in technology
Almost mythology
But she has a heart stone
She has an i.q. of 1001
She has a jumpsuit on
And shes also a telephone.

[…]

I realize that it must seem so strange
That time has rearranged
But time has the final word
She knows I think of you, she reads my mind
She tries to be unkind
She knows nothing of our world

Although her memory banks overflow
No one would ever know
For all she says: is that what you want?
Maybe one day Ill feel her cold embrace
And kiss her interface
til then, Ill leave her alone.

The Editors has opened up a world of hurt.

Imagine a stupid future where rock’n’roll has been banned and where morality is strictly enforced by fruity C3PO-wannabe robots. All looks hopeless when suddenly, out of the darkness, comes some loser whose most attractive qualities are his tight pants and shitty haircut. He can’t really act, and his voice makes him sound like he’s being chainsawed up the butt by Satan, but dammit, he knows the meaning of ROCK. And as Mick Jagger’s sexual history tells us, knowing how to ROCK can magically transform you from an ugly, ill-mannered lout with goofy lips and crappy teeth into a righteous baaaaaaaaaaaabe magnet. LONG LIVE ROCK:

In all fairness to the evil totalitarian government of the near-future: if Styx were still the biggest band on the planet, I’d want to ban rock as well.

The Poor Man is all talking about Rush again. (The band, not the pork foghorn.)

You can’t keep a good cape down

[…]

And when I was hanging outside the Worcester Centrum on a schoolnight, and when I had to subject my freely-chosen babysitting money purchase of “Hemispheres� to the haughty gaze of the punk rock clerk girl at Tower Records, I saw a lot of people, but I sure as hell didn’t see you there. I WAS THERE. Not you. So I fucking earned it. And I’m using this street cred to warn any kids out there who are thinking of starting a band, and think it would be a cool idea to dress like rejected characters from Barbarella and sing about happy Hobbits and space kingdoms and, like, how you went to Coleridge’s Xanadu BUT OMG IT’S A TRAP to just, like, not do that. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I’m just going to up the ante here a little bit.

Above: Zolar X, circa 1976

Update: Like a mighty hurricane, we just blew all the monthly bandwidth out of Zolar X’s Geocities page. Damn it.

…Ok, wait a second: A band from the 23rd Century is using Geocities. That’s like a retro hall of mirrors right there.

Later update: Splashcast channel recycled (you only get three of ’em, so you have to juggle stuff around. Sound clips available here.

Here is the Victory Caucus’ traffic for the last week (via Greenwald):

Here is Sadly, No!’s traffic for the last week:

Just imagine how well we’d be doing if we had Politico writing articles about us.

UPDATE:

Heh.

The supremely vile Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller, whose ‘loyal citizen’ fanbase seems to have dwindled down to Lord Spatula and the rotting crumbs from Dan Riehl’s eliminationist buffet, offers his gratitude for the efforts of the withdrawing Brits in Iraq:

Oh, and His Majesty would like to take this opportunity to, once again, thank Tony Blair (who is otherwise an odious socialist fuckwit that we wouldn’t piss on if his nose was on fire) for standing up for us in SPITE of his own party.

Two if by land, one if by sea (anti-psychotic pills, that is).

The Pogues sold out.

Cadillac?

This is a watershed moment in my life.

Also, I’m just drunk enough to lie to myself about quitting smoking tomorrow. Josh Treviño. Josh Trrrrrrrrreviño. Josh Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrayvinyo.

Really trill the ‘r’ when you say it. And unglottalize the ‘v’. It’s fun.

Cheers to Shane, who probably made more money with that one fucking Escalade commercial than he did his whole career.

Dr. Hilzoy writes:

I do not understand Japanese culture. I was reminded of this when I saw this picture of Prince Pickles, Japan’s new army mascot, on FP Passport:

The symbol of the Japanese army is a cuddly anime figure with great big eyes, named Prince Pickles?

Basically, yes. And it gets weirder:

Perky cartoon character Prince Pickles — with saucer eyes, big dimples and tiny, booted feet –poses in front of tanks, rappels from helicopters and shakes hands with smiling Iraqis.

The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and that is just the way the country’s leaders want it.

As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen to its Self-Defense Forces deployments.

“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”

The Metropolitan Police Department tries to lighten its stern image with Peopo, which looks like a cross between a rabbit and a space trooper.

The government hopes the same tactic can work overseas.

Foreign Minister Taro Aso has proposed sending animation or cartoon artists abroad as cultural ambassadors, and the government has named a panel of experts to advise ways to market Japanese animation and culture to foreign audiences.

Aso argues warm feelings for Japanese animation can translate into warm feelings for Japanese foreign policy.

I can only picture how well this is going over in Iraq.

“Oh hey, Iraqis, sorry that you’re being occupied by a foreign power, that you get less than six hours of electricity a day, that you have no real government and that your neighborhoods are being overrun by whack-bag sectarian militias. But hey, here’s a cute fucking cartoon character! Don’t you feel better now?”

At any rate, I’d like to address Dr. Hilzoy’s original assertion, which was this:

I do not understand Japanese culture.

See, I’m not an expert on Japanese culture, but it seems their particular expertise lies in taking elements of our stupid and vapid popular culture and making them vastly weirder. Here’s Exhibit A- the Japanese Spider-Man:

“How did the fake mariachi load his guitar with ammunition?” you might ask. “What are mariachis doing in Japan, anyway? Why did the guy in the winged helmet suddenly grow to be 100 feet tall? WHERE THE FUCK DID SPIDER-MAN GET THAT GIANT ROBOT?”

These are all valid questions, but they can never be answered. You might as well be asking, “Why are Americans so fat?” or “Why do the Brits suck at cooking?” or “Why are the French such assholes to everyone?” Doing weird crap with American popular culture is just something that comes naturally to the Japanese. There is no logical reasoning behind it.

Gavin adds: The thing that gets me is the franchising. I mean, that Japanese stuff doesn’t always travel well.

Above: Prince Falafel campaign has yielded little success

The following is a set of corrections, made as shown on 2/23/07, by Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis Schlafly) to the Conservapedia article, ‘Islam’.

Above: Andrew Schlafly

Prior version:

Islam is a religion of Abraham (the other offshoots of which are Judaism and Christianity) that has grown to be the second largest religion with over 1.4 billion followers. The word “Islam” means submission to God. The followers of Islam are called Muslims.

Corrected version:

Islam is a religion of Abraham that has grown to be the second largest religion with over 1.4 billion followers. The word “Islam” means submission to God. The followers of Islam are called Muslims.

Well, that clears that up. Islam is a religion of Abraham, while on the other hand, Christianity and Judaism are religions of Abraham. The confusion comes when you start mixing them all together.

Prior version:

Others have pointed to the pagan roots of various Muslim prohibitions, such as the ban on pork originating in the 3rd-century AD Damascene cult of the pig-god Jamal. There is some evidence that traditional Muslim scholars have been suppressing this information as well as various recently-recovered scrolls that hint at early Muslim human sacrifice (e.g., at Uhud) which can also be found in one of the foundational myths of Christianity, the God-given mandate for Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Corrected version:

Others have pointed to the pagan roots of various Muslim prohibitions, such as the ban on pork originating in the 3rd-century AD Damascene cult of the pig-god Jamal. There is some evidence that traditional Muslim scholars have been suppressing this information as well as various recently-recovered scrolls that hint at early Muslim human sacrifice (e.g., at Uhud).

The difference is that, okay, Abraham and Isaac. But Muslims stubbornly maintain that their so-called God commanded Abraham to human-sacrifice his son, with the… And this is especially appalling in contrast to the example of Christ, who… Because God said he had to… And then at the Last Supper, when he…

Because another thing is the unprecedented ban on pork, otherwise unknown to major world religious traditions.

Let’s hope Andrew keeps at it; there’s a lot of liberal bias in the Bible that needs uncovering.

Since the Atlas Pam photoshop contest was such a rousing success, I think it’s time to do another one, this time featuring Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a.k.a. The Ole Dirty Perfesser.

Your assignment is to photoshop the Perf’s head onto the body of a famous robot or cyborg. Feel free to include pics of any other wingnuts as well. Here is the first entry, submitted by our friend Scott of World O’Crap fame.

Send all entries to [email protected]. I will take the best ones and put them up fer judgin’ in a couple of weeks.