Sachi and I found this several days ago, and I have seen it mentioned in more and more blogs and news stories. Apparently, it’s become a mini-craze, or at least a viral video, though this is streamed video. Someone in San Francisco has a Shiba Inu who had a litter of six puppies, and set up a video camera over the puppies’ sleeping box. And since Sachi just adores Shibas, especially Shiba puppies, this channel has been getting a lot of play in our household.
If you missed their younger days (they are currently five weeks old), you can view their previous videos on the main site. But here’s the feed, usually on the air during daytime hours in the U.S.:
A few images from the past for a sample:
When I last checked several days ago, just under a million views had been recorded; now it’s up to 1.75 million. I have to wonder if Shiba Inus, a less-known breed in the U.S., might get a big surge in popularity after this.
Do you remember this guy on the right? Gabriel Schwartz. An attorney, and a “fixture in Colorado Republican politics,” he was an acting GOP delegate for the state of Colorado. He was interviewed for LinkTV, and he said some really hardcore right-wing stuff, delivered with an arrogant, smug, self-important grin. I forget where I saw this interview, but I remember it pretty well–he kind of personified unrestrained, uninhibited right-wing ideology–kind of what you would expect a neocon to say when under sodium pentathol or something. Watch the interview:
Here’s a transcript of the first half:
Hamilton: What is your vision for change under a John McCain administration? Schwartz: Less taxes and more war. Hamilton: Less taxes and more war? Schwartz: More war. Hamilton: So, where should the United States bomb next? Schwartz: Iran, baby! Hamilton: Why? Why should we bomb Iran? Schwartz: To protect Israel. Hamilton: So you think Iran is threatening Israel right now and the US should intervene on behalf of them? Schwartz: Absolutely. Or Israel do it themselves. Hamilton: So what would that look like, what would a war on Iran look like? Schwartz: Hopefully, just bomb the hell out of them from the sky, no troops. Hamilton: Um, are you worried about the escalating costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? I mean, how would we pay for our war on Iran? Schwartz: We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money. We deserve reimbursement.
That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Well, it turns out not. While this may be old news, it is still quite a thing to behold. Just a few hours after the interview, Schwartz met a good-looking lady in a hotel bar who introduced herself to him. He asked her to go up to his room, and she agreed. She told him to get undressed, and she would mix some drinks. That’s the last thing he remembered, as the knockout drugs took effect. When Schwartz woke up, $120,000 of his money and belongings were gone. Schwartz disputes that report as inaccurate. Not the part about the woman, but about the amount. He says it was only $50,000 worth of stuff that was stolen.
Which makes it all much more understandable. The haul, according to police, included “a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, a necklace valued at $5,000, earrings priced at $4,000 and a Prada belt valued at $1,000, police said. … Aside from the watch, ring, necklace, earrings and belt, Schwartz also reported a $1,000 purse or wallet, a $1,500 cell phone, $500 in cash and a couple of rings worth $50 had been taken.” What the hell, is this guy an attorney or a jewelry salesman? Who the hell brings along $50~120,000 in money and jewelry to a political convention? And how did the police report get this all wrong? They just write down what the victim says; when he said “$10,000 watch,” did the police officer inflate it to $30,000? That’s kind of strange.
In any case, you’ve got to admit that the irony is dazzling. The woman took his advice: she planted her flag and took the money. She deserved reimbursement. Didn’t she?
And really, this serves as a pretty good metaphor for the whole country. Liquored up, we see these Republican candidates who talk pretty to us. We vote for them, inviting them to run the nation for us, and the next thing we know, all of our money is gone and we’re sitting there stripped naked, feeling like idiots.
Schwartz’s sum-up of his experience? “I used poor judgment.” No shit, Sherlock. You’re a McCain delegate. The question is, can the country show slightly better judgment this November? Let’s hope so.
That pretty much sums it up. And talk about being prettied up for show. How much you wanna bet that suit’s fresh off the rack and paid for from a political fund somewhere? And I’m sure he has always worn a flag pin everywhere he goes. Some talk about shotgun marriages–I think the lucky kid has found himself a gravy train.
It’s a little hard to say exactly what McCain is looking at here. But it’s hard to imagine that he’s looking at something else, particularly with his beauty-queen fixation. Even if it’s not what it seems, it’s still funny creepy as hell.
Here’s a video from Comedy Central, a recent “Threat Down” from the Colbert Report. While #1 is about the iPhone (with a zinger aimed at the Zune), the entire list is just great–I had Sachi wondering why I was slapping my knee over here.
I photographed this housewife’s pot holder in rural Japan back in 1983:
It should be noted that in Japanese, the word for “cook” (the person, not the action), borrowed from English, is homophonous with the word “cock.” Ergo the likely cause of the mistake.
JibJab has outdone themselves. This may not be their funniest (though it is pretty damned funny), but they have turned the Flash video into something of an art form. The musical number s flawlessly performed, and by the time you get to the part where people are marching to the ritual performed every four years, you get the sense of real artwork being performed.
French winemakers are finally abandoning the cork and switching to screw-tops. And it’s about time, too.
I have always hated corks. If they provided any advantage in taste, I could never detect it; in fact, in preventing oxidation of older wines, screw tops can actually be better (not that I really understand this, but the article says so).
For me, the cork has represented the worst of persistent use of outdated technology. It has probably persisted more because of image than anything else; screw-tops simply “seem” cheap, whereas corked wine comes across as being more classy. The QWERTY keyboard, another example of a persistent anachronism, at least has a pragmatic reason for continuing: it would be expensive the replace all the keyboards and re-train all the typists. Corks have no such excuse, as far as I know.
But it’s more than just not being as good as newer technology–corks are simply bad, period. They make it harder to open the product, and sometimes break into pieces, polluting the wine. Most corkscrews are badly designed, making the task even more difficult. And once out, they don’t fit back in very easily, requiring you to use a secondary cap device.
At least some cork alternatives are not so bad; some wines have plastic or other alternative corks which don’t break or disintegrate, but even these substitutes, though easier to extract, can also be hard to put back in.
Anyone out there have examples of other persistent outdated devices or technology?
It’s an Indian (?) music video, or maybe a musical segment from a movie. The kind that baffles Americans even more than our own musical numbers do–you just can’t figure out what the heck they’re thinking. But the person who made this video noticed that the language spoken in the video sounded a lot like English words, so they went to the trouble of transcribing it and adding the English version as subtitles. Not a translation, mind you, but just what the words sound like if they were English.
It is, in a word, hilarious. Turns out there’s quite a few videos like this, the original guy seems to have started a trend. Some are pretty funny.
A few days back I posted on the McCain Store and Golf Gear, but apparently there is a lot more going on there, so much so that Obama supporters are watching the site as a new entertainment venue.
First, there was the Golf Gear, which, as I mentioned before, came across as white and elitist. But then McCain actually started allowing people to post reviews of the gear, Amazon.com-style. You can guess what happened:
They finally wised up and shut down comments.
But now, there’s even more fun at the site: McCain has branched out his sports line and is selling nautical gear. Presumably because nothing helps steer you away from the elitist white guy image better than yachting.
But it gets funnier: his modestly-priced $200 nautical lapel pin shows three nautical flags, which, in order, mean:
“On Fire, Keep Clear; Engines Going Astern; I Am Stopped.”
I will leave it to you to make the obvious connections.
I probably shouldn’t even be linking to this, but I just can’t help it–it’s too hilarious. Some bad, bad person got ahold of (a) photos of sumo wrestlers, and (b) Photoshop. Japan Probe (h/t) posted one of the photos in their blog by way of linking to it, but I won’t go that far. Very, very naughty indeed.
One of my favorite cartoons in Bizarro, by Dan Piraro. It’s a more sophisticated successor to The Far Side. I don’t know how I missed finding out about his blog, where he features and discusses his comics, in addition to some other rather comically uncomical commentary, and celeb+Piraro photos. Maybe because it’s only been around for four or five months. But I’m adding it to my daily bookmarks, and may add it to my LinkBoard™ as soon as I get around to redesigning it. Won’t he be honored.
It may surprise some of you to know that I was sort of a “teen for Jesus” for a few years back in the early 70s, and went through some of the sort of evangelical Christian indoctrination that the film [Jesus Camp] depicts. I was older than the kids in the film, and so was better able to form my own opinions about what they were teaching. Still, it is difficult for kids to discern between fact and fiction, and I believe that heavy indoctrination in anything as a child has the potential to cloud your reasoning skills later on. The ease of the Neo-cons and Fox News in convincing people that the ridiculous things they were spouting were true, and everything the rest of the world was saying was false, is a case in point.
Hillary got a big boost quoting a Saturday Night Live skit when it parodied the media having an Obama love-fest. I wonder if she’ll be quoting this SNL bit:
Yes, it absolutely savages Hillary in a totally unfair manner. If you’re a Hillary supporter and don’t like it, then just join the club. Maybe the media can get you a pillow or something.
In Nagoya today, a man was arrested after dousing himself with kerosene. The police kept asking him to change out of his clothes, but he refused. The police didn’t seem capable of getting rid of the kerosene by either removing his clothing by coercion or force, or by shoving him into a shower and washing the stuff off of him.
Instead, they gave him cigarettes and a lighter.
Oh, I’m sorry, I misreported that. According to the news source, the man, who was being held in police custody, somehow “gained access to a lighter.”
I read a news article about the Romanovs just now, and I remembered something funny from more than a decade back. I had been working part-time at a movie theater in San Francisco, and we had displays up for the animated film Anastasia (that would have made it 1997). A couple with a young child were walking into the theater; the youngster saw the display and excitedly pleaded with his parents, “Mommy! Daddy! I want to see Anesthesia!”
Here’s a rather interesting pro-Barack video lasting five minutes, made almost in cartoon form. Hardly professional quality, but not bad, either. Sometimes over the top, there’s a lot of fun stuff in there as well. Via FSJ.
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