The Funny Farm

Quick Note To The Telemarketers Calling On Behalf Of The Michigan Association Of Police

^{Thursday, 2 Sweltring (Wedmath) 2005}

The phone call you made to our home the other evening while we were trying to have dinner has been reported to the Michigan Association of Police. We also noted the way you prefaced the call by informing us that it may be recorded or monitored (which we consider to be done for intimidation purposes), the aggressive tone of your questioning, and the way you hung the phone up in our face when we asked you why the tax dollars we already contribute to the various governments wasn't enough. We also informed this organization that we actively avoid dealing with business entities that engage in the practice of harassing consumers during their free time aggressively extorting money from the masses unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers.

You might be hearing from the people you ostensibly work for about this incident sometime in the near future.

Coming Up For A Quick Breather

^{Humpday, 1 Sweltring (Wedmath) 2005}

We've been a little busy behind the scenes with a new responsibility - we're administering the Big Brass Alliance community webpage over at the Truth Laid Bear. So far, we have almost 300 of the more than 750 online sites entered into the community, and we have submitted most of the rest of them that we could find already existing within the ecosystem.

We've also been able to respond to an inquiry by one William Beutler, writing the Blogometer for the National Journal Hotline*, about the origins and reasons for the Big Brass Alliance.

Here's his request:

And here's my response:

We haven't had time for much else - we promised one of our friends that we were going to go to Caribana with them, and so we've been busy getting our ducks in a row in anticipation of a wondrous weekend in the Big Smoke.

Random guerrilla blogging may take place at the funny Farm from various locations in the North American midwest over the weekend. Beware Romulans bearing gifts!

* - we haven't linked to the actual hotline itself because it seems to be one of those sites that require remunerative outlay in order to peruse. This is the page that tells you how much incredible value you get by subscribing to their service.

Great Sentences In Blogs

^{Tuesday, 30 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

We already knew this because we have had the unfortunate and soul-searing experience of reading AnnThraxx Coulterbeast*, but The Poor Man says it so well:

* - as well as the immensely gratifying experience of showing you, dear reader, a web page entitled Ann Coulter speaks her mind with an ocean of empty white space under those words. It is as it was. And always will be.

Just Wondering

^{Sunday, 29 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

Why is it that this article* is titled Despite $2 billion spent, residents say Baghdad is crumbling, and nobody seems to be concerned? Since we've spent over 300 billion on the war so far, one could be thinking that slightly more than one half of one percent of that money should be going towards rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure. One might also consider the possibility of, oh, say installing solar and wind power generation in an area being more or less completely rebuilt that gets a lot of sun and wind. That way the Iraqis can sell the oil under their feet to pay for their own reconstruction, instead of having to buy it from the illegally occupying foreign insurgents.

* - registration required (coughcoughusew wwdotbugmenotdotco mtogetexi stingusridpwdcomb oscoughcough)

Jeebus H. Koresh On A Crutch

^{Thursday, 25 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

The God Squad wants YOU! to pray for the Invisible Cloud Being to save the United States and this Honorable Court. We assume they're talking about the Supremes when they loosely use the term honorable while referring to Repugnicants in any way, shape, or form.

And we can all see how well the last one worked. So hopefully we can expect the same rousing success (cough) as we got the last time, too...

There's No Intelligent Life Anywhere Down Here

^{Humpday, 24 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

So now we hear that Scotty has died from our good friend Xoverboard. We would love to bet him on his belief that every single cartoonist in the country draws the exact same cartoon of Doohan "beaming up" into Heaven.

Every. Single. Cartoonist. Guaranteed.

We would have to believe that there would be at least one cartoonist who was stubborn enough to resist the trend and pen something else. Hell, we'd even pretend to be a cartoonist long enough to put something non-Doohan related into the media - just to discredit Xoverboard's theory. Maybe it's just us...

We have also been deprived of hearing what we've been waiting to hear for a long, long time (in that fake Scottish brogue Jimmy D used when playing Lt.Cmdr. Scott):

We Be Gitmo-Tized!

^{Sunday, 22 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

We've been working overtime here at the Funny Farm, getting ourselves ready to record Next Plane To Gitmo on the weekend. To that end, we have noticed a couple of things:

- the words to the song as listed on any website are wrong. There's an extra verse at the end of the song, which is taken care of in the original by repeating the first verse at the end of the song. In other words, in between the last stanza (where it says we're pretty sure you're never going home) and the repeat and fade at the end of the song, the first verse is repeated again. If they would have told us that was the case, we would have written the extra verse when we originally came up with the idea last month. Instead, we had to screw our thinking toque on tight last night and come up with another stanza for our ode.

- we screwed up the meter of the song a bit in one of the verses. It has caused us to add an extra word to the original lyrics.

So, we're reworking our first big hit just prior to taking it into the studio and cutting a demo. We can't say for sure if or where we will look to officially release it, but we're thinking about offering it for download with a place for you to donate to our cause if you like the tune well enough.

Stay tuned for further developments...

The Big Wiener

^{Saturday, 21 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

We apologize for being away these last few days. But we've been busy - we managed to make it (for the second year in a row) to the Chicago Pokerfest held by Bartcop over the weekend. It was refreshing to see so many of our fellow Bartcop readers once again.

We were also able to make it to the final rooftop party held by Bartcop fan Lisa last Friday. She's moving out of the property in a couple of weeks, and we hope that all goes well with that job. And whoever it is that will be moving in has a real treat - a beautiful view of the city from the rooftop garden, a wonderful living space to go along with the rooftop zone, and a spot right in the thick of a trendy part of Chi-town.

After a wonderful Friday evening spent checking out the Chicago skyline, drinking fine tequila and other assorted refreshments, it was time to get some rest in anticipation for our acting bull$hitting image alteration management at the poker tables. After a tip from fellow pokerfester Dave, our first trip of the day was to Binny's Beverage Depot, where we purchased our first ever bottle of Chinaco Anejo. Once we returned to the room and stashed our treasures, it was time to go and find another highly recommended Chicago establishment.

We were trying to get to a place called Nancy's Original Stuffed Pizza for Saturday lunch, but we were slightly ahead of schedule, and the place wasn't open when our hunger was ravening. So we settled (cough) for the fare at La Creperie - banana rum crepes with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream on top. Yum! This place has a beautiful back patio with open air seating. It was very nice to kick back with some excellent coffee in the noonday sun and stuff our tummy with good victuals.

Then it was back to the room for our traditional Saturday afternoon nap before getting ready to meet our fellow gladiators of the poker tables. We were a little surprised to find that there were so few of us playing - we figured that this would be a much bigger draw. But you have to go to the tables with the poker players you've got, not the poker players you'd like to have. Or something like that...

There were a couple of others who had committed to playing, but who never made it to the tables on time - so there was an empty seat feeding mandatory bets into the pot for most of the first round of play, and two vacancies in both rounds. We managed to come through with some big wins in the first hour, and so were playing with the big stack for a large part of the first round. It got whittled down over time, though, so when we got down to the final three in the first round, we were still in possession of the most chips - but barely. Chicago Jim and (formerly from) Vegas Dave had their killer concentration and hold'em skills in overdrive, and our concentration, focus, and patience started to flag at the end of the first round. We stayed in a couple of pots that we should have avoided like the plague, and we got bluffed out of a couple more that we should have won. All in all we were relatively fortunate that we managed to hold on to third place and a stake in the winnings.

After a slight break, the contestants were ready to go at one another for the second and final time of the tourney. We managed to catch a couple of huge breaks (including a pot were two others went all in, and we just couldn't figure out why: there were two kings in the common cards on the table, and we had one of the other two kings in our hand. Turns out that one of them was bluffing, and the other had the fourth king in his hand, but a lower kicker than we did. So for all intensive purposes we blew away two other players and scooped a lot of chips in one hand) and were sitting with the big stack for most of this round, too...

We couldn't help thinking about how we lost it in the first game, and we started to get concerned about that as time went on. We made a couple of calculated gambles (and probably held on to some four-flushes* and some open-ended four-straights** longer than we should have, especially when they both happened in the same hand), but for the most part just tried to remember what the book says about playing as the table's resident four hundred pound gorilla and stick to that.

Amazingly, we held on to our chips, our cool and our patience long enough to be the winner of the final round. So now we can proudly claim props for at least a year. And of course now we have to make plans to visit Chicago again next summer (at the very least)...

Thanks to Lisa for hosting us on the rooftop on Friday night, Chicago Jim and his lovely wife Christine (the host and the hostess with the most and the mostest), BartCop savior Sam Dent, Dave no longer of Vegas, Rich, Bob, Trevor, Jim P, Corey, Lance the Young Space Cadet, Mrs. Bartcop for her support and patience, and especially Bart, for taking the time to inspire, support the endeavor, put this together, come to the gathering, and enjoy themselves for a day in Chicago. Thanks also to the others who we have managed to overlook in our list above. It was revitalizing to find a place where ditto monkey was not only not spoken, it was officially frowned upon as a means of communication.

Our regular bile-laden screeds will be returning once we get the insufferable grin off of our face in a couple of days.

* - The Funny Farm defines a four-flush as four cards of the same suit. It is very bad to bet on one of these once all the cards have been turned up unless you're pretending it's a real flush and the others at the table believe you.

** - The Funny Farm defines a four-straight as four cards in sequence (but not necessarily of the same suit***) with at least one card of lower and higher rank - such as 6-7-8-9. The possibility exists that a straight could be achieved at either end of the run. In our example, either a 5 or a 10 could fill the straight.

*** - which would be a four-straight flush in our mangled lingo and considerably more valuable, with more chances to catch either (or both) possible winning combinations.

the Incredible Shrinking Work Force

^{Humpday, 17 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

[A Day (cough) Late and Dollar Short post from the Funny Farm News Burro]

June Hiring Up, Unemployment Rate Falls. Or at least, so says the Associated Press.

Funny thing, though... they say that Hiring around the country picked up in June with employers adding 146,000 jobs — helping to push the unemployment rate down to 5 percent, the lowest in nearly four years. only thing is, we remember hearing somewhere that the US economy needs 150,000 new jobs added to the workforce every month just to keep up with the new workers entering the job market. Which means that either the US economy just lost some workers, or this is just some media whore BS to cover for the junta. We certainly have a strong opinion as to which of these two explanations is nearer the mark...

Update early AM: so much to do, so many to see when you're a one-person band on the run, mixed metaphorically speaking. We checked and didn't see any late breaking adjustments to the unenjoyment ratios. We'd like to note as well that we think this means that there are lots more people this week who have run out of benefits to add to those who ran out the week before and helped push that magically delicious number down to an Orwellian recent low. Unless you count any recently legally elected presidents that anyone could think about from the last millennium. You might even consider the historical precedents. Especially when you consider how we don't have the numbers for the Great Depression in this government document. It conveniently (cough) begins just before the US entered World War Two. Perhaps pRezNit What, Me Worry? has some different reasons for his warmongering behavior. Or maybe we should take off this frelling tinfoil helmet before it gets too tightly entwined into the ol' synapses.

Random guerrilla blogging may take place from various locations in the North American midwest at the Funny Farm over the next few days. We hope that you manage to get some happy time into your busy schedule.

It's Okay If You're A Repugnicant Bastich

^{Tuesday, 16 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

[Which should be one of those neverending series of posts we seem to keep coming back to]

In today's segment, we learn that's it's okay to accept bribes if you're a Repugnicant bugman with: no socially redeeming qualities, no conscience, and no moral or ethical principles. Funny how that works...

We wouldn't have said anything about this, except that we found this quote from one of Delay's traitorous unamerican spokesweasels:

DeLay spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty said DeLay wasn't swayed by the donation. "Anyone who has worked with Majority Leader DeLay knows that his legislative efforts are based on sound public policy alone," she said.

and we couldn't help but be amazed that the undernourished melon perched atop her shoulder pads did not explode from the cognitive dissonance involved in uttering those words. Can anyone inform us of the sound public policy involved in pontificating about the Terri Schiavo case? In abusing taxpayer-funded federal government resources on a witch hunt for your cronies in your home state? How about when you shuffle committee seats so you can get away with your criminal deeds? And those are just the highlights (cough) of this vile excuse for a human being's public abuses of power. what has he done that will never see the light of day?

Found via the awesomely bloggy goodness available over at O Dub's place.

Nerds! Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!

^{Sunday, 15 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

Found via T.Rex's Guide To Life.

Blogronicity Too

^{Thursday, 11 Promise (AfterLithe) 2005}

It's been several days since we wrote about a strange coincidence we noticed. In that time, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem ranks The Funny Farm with the same number of links as 18 others, who we are ecstatic to say include Norwegianity* and not quite so enthralled that it includes The Powers That Blog**.

William Gibson is slightly above us, and The Informed Christian is slightly below.

We have a few other things to tell you before we take a couple of days off***:

We have also been reminded of our accursed touch of late by the abrupt departure of a new (to us) voice on The Fashionable Left Bank of Blogistan. The Blaghdad Cafe is back up and running a fading memory once more. Hopefully that story isn't quite over yet...

In the numerical eccentricities area of our existence, there's a certain number that seems to bedevil us somewhat. To that end, we managed through sheer coincidence to be number 20,669 on the list of signatories calling for Chimpeachment over at Chimpeachment Central. Why don't you add your name to the list?

Thanks to Follow Me Here for finding this and pointing it out:

omnipelagos determines the connections between two things.

Just for fun we decided to search for the connections between:

George W. Bush and Satan

and

Jerry Falwell and Satan

You'll be amazed at what you see if you're a Repugnicant of the faith-based variety, and completely unsurprised if you're pretty much anyone else.

Go try some for yourself.

P.S. - by the way, this web site tells us that there is no connection between The Funny Farm and Satan. See for yourself!

Other activities of note: Rumsfeld has until July 11 to produce Iraq benchmarks (found via dKos). Funny thing about that, though: we have just recently heard about some changes in US war strategery that are being planned (found via our good friends at Blah3). Changes that we speculate might make a little difference in how the numbers in Rumsfeld's Fraudluent War Assessment could be perceived by the average voter. Once the media whores have had a while to pound some disinformative propaganda down their throats.

* - especially considering that we are and honorary Viking, after all...

** - even though they do have a kewl blog name and a self proclaimed Beautiful Belgian Babe (we're of relatively pure Belgian descent - all four of our grandparents came over from Belgium), they seem awfully faith-based and somewhat fixated on the brain-dead husk that was recently mercifully removed from life support.

*** - besides sneakily injecting the news of our lack of postings for the next couple of days into the conversation.

Dispatches From The Fourth Estate

^{Humpday, 10 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

[A Day (cough) Late and Dollar Short post from the Funny Farm News Burro]

Here's a couple of things from Congressman Conyers you should take a look at:

Next Steps Taken on Downing Street; Letter to Speaker on Another GOP Abuse of Power; Bush Hits Another Low

Fixing the Facts and Intelligence Around the Policy - How?

Re: the second Conyers' piece, also see Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo post, which begins to link the Plame leak and the associated phony Niger uranium documents.

Also see this Daily Kos diary which explains possible connections between the Plame case and the fixing of intelligence before the war. (Hat tip to Peter of Lone Tree who blogs at BlondeSense for forwarding that to me.)

Rove being the possible leaker may yet tie in to much of the information revealed in the DSMs.

Also worth noting: Raw Story's report on bombing in Iraq under Clinton exceeding that under Bush.

And Judy's turn to cry, Downing Street float sightings, and smelly Danish bimbo* sightings (among a bunch of other posts) that have been put up at After Downing Street. We got the other links from Shakespeare's Sister. Read now - read often. And sharpen up your chimpeachment skills - you never know when they might be needed...

Update: You know that they've posted even more too, right? And that the Big Brass Blog also has about a gazillion or so contributors and oodles of content as well - so much so that you might need a full-time job just to keep track of it all. Right?

* - actually, it's a story about the Danish smelling a bimbo that just blew into town...

What A Surprise!

^{Tuesday, 9 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

House Agrees to $3,100 Pay Raise for 2006. After all, it's less than a two percent raise from their current salary of $162,100 per year for the extreme time demands, huge expenses, and difficult work they do with our tax money every day. Except for all those vacation days - aren't they getting almost two months off for the summer starting last Friday? And all of those perks*. We are finding it hard to conceive of the hardships that these poor people have to go through.

Irony Overload Alert: Amerikkka's favorite bugman, froths forth on the subject, because, you know, he's so morally upstanding (cough):

"It's not a pay raise," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Dances For Corpo-Weasels. "It's an adjustment so that they're not losing their purchasing power."

What about the purchasing power of all of those regular people that haven't had a raise for years, or lost their high-paying job and now have to make do with 1/2 their previous salary? How about the purchasing power of those who make the minimum wage? Their lesser (and more needed for basic sustenance) wages should be even more protected from the ravages of inflation, right? Guess again.

Funny how that seems to work - high income wage earners (cough) get to keep on receiving cost of living adjustments to their wages, but low income earners have to learn to get by on less. What a country!

* - at least, if you're one of those Repugnicant politicians in Washington, it appears that you can count on the illegal free golf outings, the illegal free boats conveniently docked so's that you can live on them, and all of those illegal free extras that you might think a person making $162,100 (at the current time) could afford to pay for themselves...

Irony Alert Overload

^{Sunday, 8 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

Cool off rhetoric on court, Bush says. You're distracting us from the Chimperor's rhetoric about enilsting in the military! And his rhetoric about stealing Social Security! And his rhetoric about Iraq! Etc. etc. Boy howdy, good thing Smirky McFlightSuit doesn't listen to the polls - otherwise he'd know that his base are amongst the worst in dealing out this rhetoric lately. Oh, wait...

What's that word again? Hyp-, hypocr-, Republican! Yeah, that's it...

From the "No $hit, Sherlock" Department

^{Saturday, 7 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

Apparently some of the media whores have caught on to the junta's reverse Robin Hood* theory of tax assessment:

The Nontaxpaying Affluent Grew by 15% in One Year. The year being referred to is 2002 for any ditto monkeys who would like to pull out the Clenis^TM and start blaming it for this situation.

So, the chances of being a filthy rich bastich and not having to pay any taxes has more than doubled under pRezNit Executroid's reign. Funny how things like that seem to work these days...

We were amazed that they had it down as low as the 64 such examples when they first bothered to start keeping track of such things. And of course it bears pointing out that these are only the ones that have managed to game the system well enough to get away with the IRS knowing they're not paying taxes. We can think of a number of examples of how someone could have a net taxable income that would be more than $200K if it was reported. None of them are legal in any case, and every one we've thought of so far has had so many moral qualms attached to it that it's certainly not going to be on our list of recommended activities any time soon. We know we should be careful what we ask for, but we'd really like to tackle the problem of how to deal with more than a quarter of a million a year** and handle the difficulties involved within living within those means.

Infotained with this morsel by our favorite blogger not aggressive enough to sell furniture, the Suburban Guerrilla.

* - that would be robbing from the poor and giving to the rich for those unfamiliar with the Robin Hood legend.

** - which we'd gladly accept it in Canadian, US, or Australian Dollars, Euros, or British pounds, in case anyone's interested in sponsoring a Force For Good In Our Time...

One For Brother Hugh

^{Fryday, 6 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

Dude! You got some serious issues with faith-based government down in your neck of the woods. Check it out:

we're utterly shocked that our brother lives this close to such instances of state sponsored religious insanity. We realize that his innate ability to direct attention away from himself* should shield him from immediate complications. But we also know that he's a Roman Catholic, and sooner or later the evangelical christians will get around to dealing with them too. We tried to warn him about the plan to turn South Carolina into a christian nation, but he just said that it would improve his property values.

Found through the good graces of the Fishwars Blog.

* - particularly when he is engaging in what many would consider to be questionable behavior, our brother has an uncanny ability to lay blame in any convenient direction but his own. You might say he has a natural SEP field generator. Unless his bioengineering skills are far greater than he has led his family to believe...

Ghost In The Machine

^{Friday, 5 Promise (AfterLithe), 2005}

Well, we've done put our feets in it once again. Your Humble Narrator has requested and been given the task of community administrator for the Big Brass Alliance over at NZ Bear's TTLB Ecosystem:

So far so hoopy. Except that our userid/password combo doesn't seem to be registering over at the Ecosystem Community Admin Interface, so we can't add anyone else to the blog list. As a result our blog is the only one out of almost 650 that shows up on the community page, gets crawled for rankings, etc. Which is also not necessarily the worst thing in the blogsphere. But we'd rather the spotlight was put on some more thoughtful analysis of the Downing Street Memos. That's what our Big Brass Alliance blog community is here for - to make sure as many people as possible are kept aware of, among so many other things that have going on for the last few years***: the probability that the world, and especially the American people, were lied to and rushed into war by the current cabal running America (into the ground).

Late Breaking update: we're in! And we're updating things even as we update this blog post. The question in our mind right now is: there are a number of blogs that are not in the TTLB ecosystem right now. We can bulk add them to the TTLB but we don't want to put anyone there who doesn't want to be there. Or anyone that the automation thinks isn't there. So, we're going to update the status of those who are found within the ecosystem as being a part of the Big Brass Alliance. We'll get to the rest of youse sometime next week. We think. Stay tuned for further details...

* - we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you. And we don't think we should sign on to the whole applied violence gig, so we're not going to tell you.

** - we could tell you, but then we'd probably bore you to death. And we don't think we should sign on to the whole TMI gig, so we're not going to tell you.

*** - by a strange coincidence, the time frame has a direct relationship to the time that tha Smirking Chimperor has been usurping power. Funny how that seems to work...

Another Voice Is Stilled

Luther called to ultimate performance if you believe (as he did) in that sort of thing...

We guess that we will have to be reconciling with the whole concept of terminality one of these days. But it's not the sort of topic that springs to mind in our melon on any sort of regular basis. We have a long track record of problems with funerals and grief management in general. And we're going to be rather busy prepping for a few things, and assuming some additional administrative duties, and some additional low key sales duties*, and... well, you get the picture. As far as we're concerned on the subject at the moment, we'll have more than enough time to reflect on that sort of thing when we're taking the big dirt nap anyhow. So why not focus on making things better for the ones above ground while you have the chance?

* - with the added duties of keeping track of the fabulous wealth pouring in the coffers as a result of such low key sales pitches. Which reminds us - have you ordered your Midling Calendar yet? And you know that we know that you haven't even emailed us about it yet! So get with the program, and email us and ask about the limited edition year-and-a-half 2005.5-2006 Midling Calendar. You'll be glad you did!

Canada Day Plea

^{Thursday, 4 Promise (AfterLithe) ,2005}

Anyone having access to a copy of The Canadian Conspiracy that might be able to lead us to a spare copy of the mockumentary* would be lavishly praised within these hallowed pages if they so desired.

We'd also like to present you with a trifecta of busy busy busy Haiku:

* - even better, if they would allow us the honor of borrowing their copy in order to viddy this amazing piece of performance art once more.