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If the Gods existDo you think they would createHell on earth for us?
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I have been (and continue to be) most fortunate to have enjoyed the company of many strange and wondrous individuals over the course of my meandering through this life. And it has been brought to my attention that there will be a gathering of some of those individuals in the near future that would be reasonably certain to increase my enjoyment of this life should I be able to attend.
No - I'm not talking about the pie-in-the-sky International BartFest Freedom Festival* that I proposed to my good friend Bartcop. One of my friends up in the Great White North has informed me that the twentieth Uptown Jazz Festival** in Waterloo has a fantastic lineup of artists headlining the festival that I have enjoyed over the years. And it's free!***
Any non-Canadians should be ready to present identification and be prepared to be thoroughly examined at any border crossings between you and the greater metropolitan Kitchener-Waterloo region of Ontario, Canada. when you get to the festival, tell them that the Funny Farm sent you!
As always, if you wish to comment on this post, please email me, as the spambots find and overwhelm my blog posts within an hour, so comments are closed until I can find a way to address the issue.
* - basically, getting the Bartcop bunch to get a bunch of rooms in one of the casinoes and having a Texas Hold-Em tourney during the International Freedom Festival that is held in the metro Detroit/Windsor area during the July 1-4 timeframe. Especially if we could get a special delivery of Bixby sweet corn from Conrad Farms Market and have a barbecue here at the Funny Farm over the course of the festivities. Maybe next year...
** - it seems to currently be officially named the Sun Life Financial Uptown Waterloo Jazz Festival. I believe it was originally named the Uptown Jazz Festival and has undergone various name changes over the years. Feel free to offer any corrections, should you happen to have some sort of expertise on the subject...
*** - it will cost me about a tank and a half of gas (the hybrid's not as good as it used to be now that the battery is pretty much fried) and $8 US in tolls. Plus, I'll probably pick up booze and smokes that will be consumed by all and sundry during the festivities. But, all in all, a very inexpensive way to watch an entire frelling weekend of great jazz - the music starts at Noon Friday and Saturday (with a Jazz for Kids show) and goes until the Shuffle Demons leave the stage after their scheduled 3PM Sunday start.
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If the Gods existDo you think they would createHell on earth for us?
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Amazingly (cough), the web site organizing the May Day protest seems to be rather difficult to access with my web browser - whichever of NetScrap, IECarumba, FireFox, Opera, or Chrome I try to use.
]]>Through the magic of the internets, I have been most privileged to be able to listen to radio stations from quite a few far away places. And, right as I am putting this post together, I am listening to CHOM-FM in Montreal, Canada, and their morning show describe an April Fool's prank by WestJet Airlines:
And then talking to the person responsible at WestJet Airlines - in Calgary, Alberta - and giving away a trip anywhere in Canada on WestJet.
There are two things I would like the studio audience (such as it is) to note regarding the wonders of the Great White North:
- point the first: this is not the first time WestJet has put together a commercial to be broadcast on April Fools' Day that was a tres bon prank. Here's another that I found on YouTube:
- point the second: up in the Great White North, things are both more relaxed and more stringent at the same time. It is relatively common for Canadians to watch their elected officials interact with the media, and it continually amazes me to see the things that happen there that would never take place in the american media. On the other hand, if one of the 99 per cent gets a little bit out of place, civil liberties can take a flying leap into the nearest snowbank.
As always, if you wish to comment on this post, please email me, as the spambots find and overwhelm my blog posts within an hour, so comments are closed until I can find a way to address the issue.
]]>Since the blatant Republicant partisanship, the conservative corporate sellouts, and the wingnut welfare that current individual members of the United States Supreme Court have been engaging in haven't yet been cause enough to impeach (much less investigate, or even question the judicial impartiality of) any of the Reich wing clowns on the Supreme Court, will we finally be able to consider it once the Supremes dismember the Affordable Care Act?
Inquiring minds want to know...
]]>Now that the reich wing Republicants running all that pink ribbon crap you've been seeing all season long have finally exposed themselves to be the religiously insane female controlling farging iceholes that they are, are there three of you willing to donate a quarter of a million dollars each to cover up the shortfall over at Planned Parenthood?
Also, too: can anyone tell me why there's such a huge fuss about $680K of discretionary funding coming from an organization that reported earnings of approximately 400 million dollars in 2010? So much so that you can't even donate the equivalent of some of your executive bonuses for the year to Planned Parenthood due to your religious insanity?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Update: Big time props to NY Mayor Bloomberg for matching $250K for Planned Parenthood. Are there two more insanely rich people ready to step up to the plate?
Update too: PP has gotten more, with less sanctimonious lip-pursing, than they would have from the Komen Foundation. And even more people see Nancy Brinker and the rest of the conservative corporate welfare queens at Komen for what they are.
Now, if there were only at least one relatively well off liberal who could put half of Brinker's annual salary towards helping out some of the less fortunate liberals out there...
]]>The Funny Farm, along with The Church of the Afternoon Nap, would like to ask you, dear reader, to heed the words of our good friend and internets guru, Marc Perkel. He has been the driving force behind The Church of Reality for a while now, and he would like to talk to us all about the (warning: horking big PDF file) Stop Online Piracy Act and some reality-based solutions to the problem that avoid all that messy treasonous internets-killing Republicant kimchee in the previous link.
I'll let Marc take it from here:
Dear Church of Reality Members, I have been actively opposing legislation in the US congress called SOPA. This bill is aimed at stopping piracy, but not only won't it work, it will break the Internet. It is important that this bill be stopped. To that end I had a meeting 2 days ago with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who wasn't that thrilled with SOPA and she thought it wouldn't pass. However she said that she considered piracy to be a big problem and that something needed to be done about it. In response I mentioned that I had produced a lot of intellectual property (software) and I understood the problem. I told her that if she helped kill SOPA that I would write a technical specification and a plan for an alternative that would actually work without breaking the Internet. So - keeping my end of the bargain - I have written an alternative specification that changes the paradigm of how movies and music are sold. I'm going to email this to her staff and hopefully be able to meet with Senator Boxer as well sometime soon. Here is a link to my idea. I need two things. I need some feedback as to how it might be improved, and I need this link posted to blogs everywhere that deals with this issue. So if you all can help spread the word that would be great. The Internet is the most significant step in human evolution in thousands of years. Maybe the biggest evolutionary jump ever. It directly affects what we are going to evolve into. That's what makes this so important. So - thanks in advance for helping save the future of humanity. Marc Perkel |
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About that blogging thing - it seems to me that the whole writering thing is not going to be feasable within a survival-mode lifestyle. At least that is the way I feel about it these days. Especially with the tremendous amount of feedback (cough) that has gotten through the cone of spammy silence I've put up around the funny Farm.
But, hey - I'm not here to ask you (again) to help me get through the Bush Depression. I might not be here soon at all if we get a Chinese-style internets policy like the one percent are trying to put in place.
I'm here to tout Get Your censor On, the latest effort by David Rees (I hope - I didn't see, during my brief mad scan before posting this, any accreditation for David* - that this is something he's put together). He has a ton of good stuff up already, and you can monitor his newest material through a new entry in the links zone over to the left. For as long as they let any and/or all of us stay on the internets.
A couple of haikus in honor of Get Your censor On:
Careful what you say - No more free speech internets Unless you gots coin Super toll thruway Gets you better internet Got to pay to play |
Go haiku yourself!
* - then again, I don't do Facebook and the Twitter so I didn't check out the facebook info associated with the Get Your censor On page...
]]>Hopefully this won't go the way of so many blog posts over the past year or so - a few graphs tossed out and then tossed away. But I'm running out of options and time, and I might as well put something down before the whole house of cards falls apart.
First of all, thanks to Marc Perkel for hosting this web site for me for free for the last few years - since I was laid off in 2009, I believe. Marc, please email me so's I can talk to you about the ongoing helping hand you've been giving me.
Second of all, thanks to the wonderful bloggers in my links zone for saying what needs to be said and pointing out the severe and persistent lies and hypocrisy foibles of the Republicants, the mainstream media, and the Democrats while they erode away what's left of the middle class and toss them into the bucket of crabs that is life in the less respectable areas of town. In particular, Hullabaloo, the Rude Pundit, and alicublog have been of immense help in fighting the gradually worsening depression that comes from trying to survive through the Bush Depression whilst being unable to find gainful employment in the real world. Was it something I said?
Third of all, thanks to the small and upcoming (warning: Google Chrome doesn't think this site is safe) businesses who have given me some small rays of hope and a bit of cash in my pocket since the unenjoyment ran out in October 2010. I don't really want to get into the details of how some (cough) businesses in this Cheneyed-up world pay cash under the table to their workers - especially as I am hoping to get more of said cash and don't want anyone to get into any trouble over it - other than to say I am intimitely aware that such businesses exist, and how they do business.
There is hope that I will be able to help in getting a mini hydro power station set up during the year, and some in my immediate circle have been making vague noises about installing solar and wind power. So the official business (which still does not have an official web site) and my official current position as starving up and coming CEO of a renewable energy consulting company might provide some small amount of gainful employment over the next twelve months.
Last (but most certainly not least), thanks to all of the family and friends who have offered their support should things become desperate enough that I would require it. Everyone (that I'm talking about here, I don't really know any really wealthy people) has been being squeezed and stressed by the Bush Depression for years. A lot of good people have snapped under the pressure, and most of us are getting close to fraying their last nerves. I'm not sure, from day to day, whether it's encouraging or frustratingly disappointing that I am managing to keep it together, and that I am making out better than most these days. All I can say is hopefully we can all help each other get through this mess and get to a world of hope and promise for most of the humans on the planet.
I'm not really sure how long and how much the desire to put forth more bloggy goodness will last. For now, I will leave you with a few haikus I put together for the Rude Pundit end of year haiku retrospective:
Where did the coin go? Rich got richer - poor got screwed History repeats. Class warfare has been The bane of humanity Since the dawn of time. Where to go from here? Is it time for the pitchforks? Or better Soma? |
Go haiku yourself!
]]>Yeah, it's been a year since I thought I was going to turn blogging into some sort of paying position. And here we are, with my internets interactions constricted to asking you to email me as my comments are a fetid swamp of spammy spammers. And hoping that someone will see the benefits of providing me with gainful employment before I run out of things to sell. But that's a story for another time if and when I manage to come up for air long enough to want to write about these trying times.
Anyways,... I'm hoping that DJ Riko hasn't quite gotten to checking out last year's Xmas Mega Mixx – cause now there's another one out for 2011! Still in the upload page but this time you can download the Xmas Mega Mixx 2011 mp3 file, and enjoy a fine selection of holiday music without all that tedious mucking about with zip files and such. The mp3 file is slightly larger than the zip file would have been, but not even enough to worry about pulling through a dialup modem.
Here's the song list:
Xmas Mega Mixx 2011
Ella Fitzgerald - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
Weezer - We Wish You A Merry Christmas
Perry Como - Home For The Holidays
Devo - Merry Something To You
Barenaked Ladies - Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah
Liz Phair - Winter Wonderland
Jane Siberry - Hockey (censored version)
Mary J. Blige - Christmas In The City
Tom Robinson - Truce
Honky Tonk Confidential - Christmas Prison
Billy Paul Williams Orchestra - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
No Doubt - Oi To The World
Gary Walker - Santa's Got a Brand New Bag (intro)
Vince Guaraldi Trio - Linus & Lucy
Louis Armstrong - Christmas In New Orleans
Shelly Adams - Snow, Snow, and Mistletoe
Louis Prima - What Will Santa Claus Say?
Blue Mountain Boys - Santabilly Boogie
Billy Ray - Christmas Mambo
Stompin Tom Connors - Merry Christmas Everybody
Lenny & Squiggy - The Jolliest Fat Man
Xmas Jug Band - S A N T A
Lionel Hampton - Boogie Woogie Santa Claus
Surrogate - Rockin Around The Christmas Tree
Dance Hall Crashers - I Did It For The Toys
Swingle Sisters - Xmas Medley
Share and Enjoy!
]]>In light of recent events (particularly the incident where Milan Lucic of Boston flattened Ryan Miller of Buffalo and put him out with a concussion), the Funny Farm Security Service would like to offer the following advice to the rest of the goalies in the NHL:
You are amongst the largest players on the ice. You have a lot of equipment on to protect you from getting hurt on the ice. Utilize your advantages. When they take a run at you, brace yourself and take them out instead of letting them hit you.
I can guarantee that, once a goalie has established that he will be one of the ones doing the checking, players will think twice about running them over.
Full disclosure: I have played all positions on the ice, and was very much an in your face type of goalie who was body slamming anyone foolish enough to pull cheap shot crap like Lucic's while I was goaltending. Lucic would have been airborne and spinning upside down into the net, back first, if I was in Miller's skates that evening...
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Last night's Daily Show was most awesome, and I was talking to one of my Canadian friends* and telling him that I would be imbedding it into my website for his (and his fellow Canadians) viddying pleasure.
Little did I know...
It turns out that imbedding infotainment content from Comedy Central in order to show it to my friends in the Great White North is more involved than meets the eye - The Comedy Network in Canada has the rights to broadcasting (among other things) The Daily Show in Canada as well as hosting the streaming video content in Canada. Which means that anyone trying to watch yesterday's Daily Show in Canada has to go to the Comedy Network to do it, and anyone not in Canada has to go to Comedy Central.
I have watched the online version of the show (they cut off Granholm's extended interview in the 'exclusive' online version - after making you watch the entire portion of the interview that was broadcast again in that exclusive extra clip only available online - just sayin' you could've shown us the whole interview instead of loading the edited broadcast interview twice and then cutting off the rest) using Comedy Central's feed. I cannot check that I have the proper web address on the Comedy Network until I get up to Canada again, and the lack of funds not available due to my living not paycheck to not paycheck for the last year or so curtails my traipsing off to the Great White North and verifying web links for the studio audience.
Hope you like the show no matter where you are watching it from.
* - Like, How's it goin', eh?
]]>There's been a lot going on this summer, and I haven't the desire to talk about the Republicant scorched earth policy too much*. But the tragedy in Norway points to a problem that really hasn't been mentioned as a problem in the discussions I have seen (and tried to comment on**) about the right wing christian terrorist:
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This clown might have said that he was an Islamaphobe, but he was killing liberals at a liberal youth camp. Can we please agree that the liberal bashing has gone on long enough? And that the reich wing media is letting this slide, and has been doing so for years?
I can only imagine the hand wringing from the Cheetos brigade if anyone even remotely liberal suggested that conservative right wing christian terrorists and their supporters in the media should be hunted.
Funny how that works...
* - a) what can be said that hasn't already been said (and then twisted, lied about, and fearmongered about by the conservative media)? And b) why bother wasting my breath (and drawing attention to myself) when the Reich wing Republicants (especially the teabaggers) are going to continue their liberal jihads anyway?
** - I'm not quite sure what unsavory activities I may have been up to, but for some reason I can't seem to get a comment posted at Balloon Juice - I'm guessing that my email has been flagged as spam. If anyone over there sees this, would you please email me and let me talk to you about how I can stop this from happening...
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