60,539 and going.

                In this post we leave it to a Marxist to be a pragmatic buzz-kill and John Scalzi makes me laugh out loud and thus forces me to explain to my colleagues what I thought was so funny.  Oh, and beer.  No twins though.

First up:

Britain’s China Mieville (Kraken) allowed a light shower to fall on this parade. “Unfortunately, awesome plus awesome doesn’t necessarily lead to more awesome,” he pointed out, before making himself very unpopular with the audience by casting aspersions on the utter bliss of the Reese’s formula. “Above all, genres are marketing categories. Even what’s described as literary fiction is a genre; in Britain, it’s just the result of a very successful marketing campaign to persuade readers that it’s not a genre. But even if you think genre is a marketing idea, that isn’t to say it doesn’t have its own integrity and protocol. If you set really stupid, rigid rules for yourself, you can rise to the occasion.”

Now Scalzi:

Recently I read a piece about what it will mean when we switch over to app-based operating systems, and I was all, what? So the new hotness is a screen on which icons are used to access the programs they represent? Just like the Macintosh in 1984? Somebody get me a chair, the future is blowing my goddamned mind.

In fact, after reading it for about the eight time I still chuckle.  It’s the kind of ironic humor I like so much. It also points out the fact that, quite frankly, the hoop and stick could be the hottest new toy for Christmas with the right marketing campaign. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing for our society either.

And beer: Apparently Water Into Wine Means God Hates the Alcohol.

• You can’t abort herpes.
• Sarah Palin really fucked up on this spy ring. Who was she watching from her house?
• The United States is like the Oprah of the World Cup. You get a goal and you get a goal. EVERYBODY GETS A GOAL!
• My only regret of the world cup is that France didn’t get the chance to fail against Germany.
• I think it’s time to bring back the British Empire, if only so that the English speaking world has a chance to win the World Cup.
• England: When failure is an option.
• This just in U.S. loses World Cup, nobody surprised. Coming up at eleven, nobody cares about that one sport.
• So much for Obama’s plan to turn us into Europe, we still can’t beat third world countries at soccer.

Somebody needs to come up with a good joke about aborting born again Christians.

Darth Vader is clearly an allegory of Catholicism and celibacy.  All it would have taken was allowing Jedis to get laid and the entire empire would have never happened.  Seriously, how many well laid assholes go on to try and conquer the world?

English literature is just the anthropological study of upper-class white people.

Some people mistake me as making jokes; no, I’m just a bitter, angry, cynical person.

So here’s the thing about the tea-baggers.  If they’re going to be for smaller government and deregulation then they also need to be for the deregulation of big government rules that infringed on the citizen’s right to beat the fucking shit out of corporate executives when they and their corporations massively fuck up.   If we’re not going to bother protecting the environment and other necessities of life, I don’t see the point in spending money to protect rich assholes.

A couple million gallons of oil is a really disproportional response to a couple crates of tea.

And the government doesn’t trust the people; I can’t say I blame them.

A recent guardian article reported that Mexico of all places is banning fatty foods from their schools, removing all doubts that America is still the leading exporter of fatasses.  Seriously, we’re so good at making fatasses that we got Mexico to ban tacos from their own schools.  And quite frankly, all those tea-baggers bitching about immigration and Arizona’s new law are going in the wrong direction. No, what we need to be doing is opening up a McDonalds in every town south of the border.  You ever see a fat guy run?  No, neither have I and that’s exactly my point.  Ain’t no fat man going to get across the border.   It’s in our national interest to make Mexicans just as fat as the rest of us.