The Funny Farm
Where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats...
Adventures of a Basic Force For Good in Our TimeTM
Thursday, 3 Betteroff 2005
We see that a Target pharmacist was allowed to refuse to dispense contraception because of their religious beliefs. We also notice that Target executroids have defended this decision.
We were just wondering: what do you think Target's reaction would be if someone went into one of their stores, filled a shopping cart (or two) with products, and then, once their purchases had been rung through the register and the cashier asked for payment, the consumer said something along the lines of "It's against my beliefs to support corporate sponsored religious intolerance" and walked out of the store? What would their reaction be if this happened in multiple stores around the country?
To any brave souls who are willing to perform this experiment, we would humbly request that you let us know in the comments (or send us an email if you try this after the comments are closed - we'll add it ourselves into the comments in such a case) how it went. And thanks for playing...
Tuesday, 1 Betteroff 2005
...How to get to
Schwarzen-Ecker Street?
This one is definitely a must-see.
Sunday, 30 Gathring 2005
We're not particularly enamored of the horror movie as a film genre. We even had to avert our eyes when watching the movie Poltergeist.
Imagine our surprise when we found out that we ave seen eleven of Boston.com's Top 50 Scary Movies of all time. And, yes, for the record, we couldn't watch any of these in their entirety*, either:
Number 4 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Number 8 - Halloween (although we just caught a bit of it while channel surfing, and flipped away when we thought some of the gorier elements were going to show up on the screen...)
Number 17 - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (another one that we sorta saw a bit of - while in university - but then ducked out once things got a little too gory. We vaguely recall somebody sucking blood from somebody else just before we beat a hasty retreat)
Number 20 - Event Horizon. Now we know why Sam Neill was considered to be such a scary dude...
Number 23 - Seven
Number 24 - Videodrome
Number 28 - Altered States
Number 32 - Nightmare On Elm Street (we think we saw part of this one, but we're not sure. It might have been one of the sequels - but we saw enough to know that we don't want to see any more...)
Number 42 - 28 Days Later
Number 45 - Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory This is one of the scariest movies of all time? Seriously?? While we are in firm agreement that the montage that takes place on the freaky ferry boat was pretty scary, there is no frelling way that this should be in the list at all.
Number 50 - Arachnophobia We would like to add here that we have a serious problem with bugs in the first place. And a more serious problem with toxic bugs in the second place. And that we consider spiders to be bugs with an attitude in the third place. Although it was good for us to see Mimi and her hubby (who we couldn't help but recall was the psycho psychiatrist in Total Recall) get theirs towards the end of the movie.
It appears that we are not alone in our belief that this is a fairly crappy set of scary movies - read some of the comments that others have made in reaction to this list. A top 50 scary movies of all time list without any Hitchcock in it? It is interesting to see a number of Stephen King movies in the list, but not Carrie**.
How about you? Are there any scary movies that you think should be on this list? And any that should not be there?
* - the exception being Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, which we don't think is very scary at all...
** - while watching this movie, someone got us to jump out of our skin when they grabbed us right at the end (when Carrie's hand comes up out of the grave to grab the heroine).
Thursday, 26 Gathring 2005
It may have something to do with our current malaise, too:
Fool Like Me
Have mercy on a fool like me All my heroes have been laid to rest Nothing here is certain Go lightly on your judgement please They say you learn something new every day Nothing here is sacred Nothing here is certain Have mercy, have mercy , have mercy... lyrics by Joe Puerta, from the album Road Island by Ambrosia |
Humpday, 25 Gathring 2005
Courtesy of our good friend T.Rex:
| What religion do you fit in with? You fit in with: Atheism Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people. 60% scientific. 60% reason-oriented. | ||||
| ||||
| Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com |
Tuesday, 24 Gathring 2005
As usual, we're a day late and a dollar short in terms of our television watching habits. So it was only a few minutes ago that we got the chance to watch last night's Daily Show, and the interview with the Loofah Kink. And we gots to tell ya, we can't believe that anyone pays that farging icehole to do anything. What an unbelievably dense horse's posterior! In a short few minutes, O'Really? managed to:
- try and control the interview while being in the role of interviewee;
- get pissed because he wasn't greeted with the adulation that he seems to have come to expect;
- call Jon Stewart a pinhead, and insult Lewis Black and Stephen Colbert;
- act like an ignorant partisan jackass on national television;
- try and shout down the host when he felt threatened, and the questioning wasn't casting him in a flattering light; and
- threaten members of the crowd when they said a few things he didn't like.
We would have really liked to have been in that audience last night. We're pretty sure you would have heard us tell O'Really? to go Cheney himself. And, in the unlikely event that the All-Spin Zone takes a look at our humble web zone, we would be happy to let the vacuous blowhard know, up close and personal-like, that we think he's an untalented hack who should be harassed every day of his life in the same manner that he treats those who dare to contradict him.
Humpday, 18 Gathring 2005
Our muse has continued to be somewhere we're not, with the resulting dearth of posting here at the Funny Farm.
We did manage to find one of those online quizzes, and retained our concentration enough to complete the questionnaire:
Found via the good folks over at The Frinklin and Fred Show.
Fryday, 14 Gathring 2005
What could possibly make an individual of the Hebrew faith appeal to Santa Claus?
|
|
We'd like to be on record as well: Anyone who is interested in doing so can safely give us one of these for Christmas this year without worrying about offending us with their choice of largesse. We'd like the version with the rechargeable electric motor, please...
Thursday, 12 Gathring 2005
Thanks and a tip to lambert at Corrente for pointing out this info-nugget:
Apparently there is still enough pork in the federal budget to pay for harassing students who take pictures showing the Drunken Cokeheaded Usurper in an unfavorable light:
Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students. But that's what happened on September 20. Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster." According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect. An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. [-snip-] "Halfway through my afternoon class, the assistant principal got me out of class and took me to the office conference room," she says. "Two men from the Secret Service were there. They asked me what I knew about the student. I told them he was a great kid, that he was in the homecoming court, and that he'd never been in any trouble." Then they got down to his poster. "They asked me, didn't I think that it was suspicious," she recalls. "I said no, it was a Bill of Rights project!" At the end of the meeting, they told her the incident "would be interpreted by the U.S. attorney, who would decide whether the student could be indicted," she says. [-snip-] Jonathan Scherry, spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, D.C., said, "We certainly respect artistic freedom, but we also have the responsibility to look into incidents when necessary. In this case, it was brought to our attention from a private citizen, a photo lab employee." [-snip-] |
Gee, we wonder what would happen if we took some pictures like that, except used the Clenis or PapaDoc Putsch or Carter or Ray-Gun as the subject, and then took it to a Wal-Mart to be developed?
We have a number of interesting thought experiments to propose in the near future. For example, we wonder what would happen if a radio host were to say this?
I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every baby born to rich white elitists in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down |
Would they still hold on to their phoney-baloney job?
There may be a few more of these radical ideas floating around this webspace in the near future. Stay tuned for further bloggy goodness!
Humpday, 11 Gathring (Wintring/Winterfilth) 2005
Why is there a spring in our step today? Two things that have lifted our spirits over the last 48 hours:
Item the First: the National Hockey League finally got back to playing hockey last night; and
Item the Second: our favorite team notched its' first win of the season against one of its' traditional rivals.
Of course there's a couple of wonderful bonuses that came up along the way:
Another of our traditional rivals lost in overtime; and one of the best Canadian cartoonists out there made some pretty pictures with a hockey flavor we'd like to share with you:
|
|
Tuesday, 10 Gathring (Wintring/Winterfilth) 2005
While not gathering the ardent readership of any of the titans of the left, nor even close to getting five percent of the traffic of our favorite online bush kangaroo, we've still maanged to make it through our third year of webbed insight in convenient online form. And the secret, as we mentioned in our first post back in 2002, is still to keep banging those rocks together...
Thanks to all of those who have stopped by to check out the things we've had to say in that time. And we hope you make us a regular stop on your tour of The Fashionable Left Bank Of Blogistan. Take care!
Sunday, 9 Gathring (Wintring/Winterfilth), 2005
We have received a reply from the powers that be at the Metro Times regarding their decision to replace This Modern World and Red Meat: Unfortunately, it is their canned response - which they took a couple of weeks to fart toss in our general direction - but we thought we'd provide you with some of that independent confirmation sorta thing in case you were keeping score.
We're always glad when people feel strongly enough about the content of Metro Times to take the time to e-mail us. We have received many passionate letters about our decision to replace Red Meat and This Modern World with The Perry Bible Fellowship and The Boiling Point. This was a decision we did not make lightly. We wouldn't have run the work of Tom Tomorrow for more than 10 years and the work of Max Cannon for more than five years if we didn't like the strips. But we felt that Tom Tomorrow, who has been doing his strip for more than 20 years, has become so widely known and read that we began to question whether our mission was to provide a platform for somebody who is syndicated in scores of papers, has published several volumes of his cartoons, and is accessible on his own Web site. Similarly, Max Cannon has gained a national prominence and has published a few books of his collected work. The question wasn't whether the strips were any good -- clearly we have carried them so long because of their quality. What prompted the move was a larger debate on the function of alternative newsweeklies. Just as Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon could never have reached audiences without the help of publications like Metro Times, we feel that we have a duty to present newer, younger cartoonists exploring new styles in the medium. It was with this in mind that we sought out fresh voices with a quality beyond their meager syndication. Mikhaela Reid is a 25-year-old political cartoonist for the Boston Phoenix and Bay Windows. Her work has appeared in a handful of national magazines. Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall says that, "Mikhaela B. Reid is, at the start of a promising career, already one of America's sharpest political cartoonists." Nicholas Gurewitch is a painter, actor, filmmaker and cartoonist living in New York state. Since winning the Baltimore City Paper's comic contest in 2003, his unusual strip has started appearing in several papers, including The New York Press. Last month, the strip won a jury prize at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD for "Best Online Comic." Thank you for your thoughts on this matter, and we hope you can appreciate the factors that went into our decision. Needless to say, if you absolutely need your weekly fix of the wit of Tom Tomorrow and Max Cannon, their work is available electronically at thismodernworld.com and redmeat.com. Sincerely, The Editorial Staff of Metro Times |
We have absolutely nothing against either of the two fine cartoonists that have replaced Dan and Max*. We wonder why it isn't possible to include them all - then again, we're not involved in the process, and have no idea what would be involved in making sucha a decision (an extra page to fill? Might we suggest Amptoons or XQUZYPHYR and Overboard or Bruce Yurgil? Or all of them? Or a "Best of the Web" comics page with many different indy inkers each week? Perhaps a page of progressive cartoons which just might serve as a unique feature to capture a sadly neglected niche market?
You may recall that we sent them an email about their decision a couple of weeks ago. Have you sent yours**? And gotten this same reply? Inquiring minds want to know...
* - as a matter of fact, we have a personally autographed copy of Mihaela's first published collection, and we're planning on getting a copy of her second as well...
** - it would be preferable if you reside within the Metro Times distribution area when you send the email - it helps them to know you actually read the paper and provide them with some revenue. It would also be preferable if you were polite when you told the Metro Times how you feel about their decision...
Update: Interested readers could also check out this note from Tom Tomorrow regarding the situation. Apparently Dan doesn't buy their canned response so much.
Saturday, 8 Gathring (Wintring/Winterfilth), 2005
We see that Putsch has nominated a cypher - who just happens to be pRezNit Never My Fault's personal legal counsel since he's supposedly been sober he can remember - to fill the open Supreme Court seat. And we were wondering if anyone else thinks it's not that good of an idea to install someone on the Supreme Court who has absolutely zero experience as a judge? We'd ask about the wisdom of Drinky McDumbAss nominating an inner circle sycophant to the highest court in the land, but wisdom and the Cokespoon Cowboy don't seem to be able to be fit into a rational sentence at the same time without distorting reality to an almost Faux Snooze-like level*.
We knew that it was the wrong week for the Usurper In Thief to stop sniffing glue...
* - not quite to the fact-distorting level of Spammitization or the O'Really? Factor.
