Football season

I like how the announcers just can't believe this is a real thing that happened.


I wish I could find better videos of these poor KSU linemen getting absolutely outclassed every single play by one Quentin Demonic Groves:

Football season

Maybe our most posted single video?:



Rashard "Stay out of my yard" Gilyard:

Ice cubes recipe

Ice Cubes
By CHRISSYG on April 14, 2010
    Prep Time: 2 mins
    Total Time: 2 hrs 2 mins
    Yield: 2 trays
About This Recipe:
"I am publishing this recipe, because I am sure that there are other families who have members who don't know how or have forgotten how to make ice when the ice tray is empty."
Ingredients:
        2 cups water ( approximately)
        2 tablespoons water ( addtional if needed)
Directions:
    Empty the ice cubes that are left in the trays (if there are any left) into the bin.
    Take the trays over to the sink and fill them with cold water.
    Place the water filled ice trays back in the freezer.
    Replace the ice bin if you had to remove it.
    Shut the door to the freezer.

Ice cubes recipe

Baby bunny

We love Parry Gripp here at 3E.

Midweek links

1. Automobile Anatomy

2. Shakespeare Insult Kit

3. Calvin & Hobbes GIFs

Vowels

On July 4, 1960, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard rang in Independence Day with a dire Associated Press report by one Norma Gauhn headlined “American Dialects Disappearing.” The problem, according to “speech experts,” was the homogenizing effect of “mass communications, compulsory education, [and] the mobility of restless Americans.” These conformist pressures have only intensified in the half-century since the AP warned “that within four generations virtually all regional U.S. speech differences will be gone.” And so as we enter the predicted twilight of regional American English, it’s no surprise that publications as venerable as the Economist now confirm what our collective intuition tells us: “Television and the Internet are definitely doing something to our regional accents: A Boston accent that would have seemed weak in the John F. Kennedy years now sounds thick by comparison.”

Before you start weeping into your chowdah, though, I have some news: All these people are wrong. Not about the Boston accent, necessarily; that one might really be receding. But American linguistic diversity as a whole isn’t dying—it’s thriving. Despite our gut-level hunch about the direction of the language; despite the fact that 70-cent, three-minute, off-peak, coast-to-coast long-distance calls that cost four inflation-adjusted dollars in 1970 are now free; despite cheap travel, YouTube, and the globalization of film and television, American dialects are actually diverging.

Northern Cities Vowel Shift

sorta appropriate monday metal

Monday metal

Sea otter stacking

fer tha cap'n

It really picks up around the three minute mark.

Thursday links

1. Horsey Surprise

2. Writer's Diet

3. Ice is complicated

4. Autobiographical memory

Hearing voices

Hans used to be overwhelmed by the voices. He heard them for hours, yelling at him, cursing him, telling him he should be dragged off into the forest and tortured and left to die. The most difficult things to grasp about the voices people with psychotic illness hear are how loud and insistent they are, and how hard it is to function in a world where no one else can hear them. It’s not like wearing an iPod. It’s like being surrounded by a gang of bullies. You feel horrible, crazy, because the voices are real to no one else, yet also strangely special, and they wrap you like a cocoon. Hans found it impossible to concentrate on everyday things. He sat in his room and hid. But then the voices went away for good.

Living with Voices

Horrible destruction blotting out the works of man

Friday games

1. Tequila Zombies 2

2. Turbo Golf

3. ASCIIvania

4. Eskiv

Strongest Man

Fort Lupton is a city of eight thousand on the dry plains north of Denver. In a bigger place, Shaw might have been corralled into peewee football at eight or nine, and found his way among other oversized boys. But the local teams were lousy and, aside from a few Punt, Pass & Kick contests—which he won with discouraging ease—Shaw stuck to basketball. By seventh grade, he was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. When he went in for a dunk on his hoop at home, he snapped off the pole, leaving a jagged stump in the driveway. By his late teens, his bulk had become a menace. One player knocked himself out running into Shaw’s chest; another met with his elbow coming down with a rebound, and was carried off with a broken nose and shattered facial bones. “It was bad,” Shaw told me. “One guy, we dove for a ball together, and I literally broke his back. It wasn’t that I was a dirty player. I wasn’t even trying to do it hard.”

Like other very large men, Shaw has a surprisingly sweet nature. His voice is higher and smaller than you’d expect, and he tends to inflect it with question marks. His face has the bulbous charm of a potato carving. “He’s almost overly friendly,” Terry Todd, a former champion weight lifter and an instructor at the University of Texas, told me. “It’s like he thinks that if he’s not you’ll be frightened of him and run away.” At six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, Shaw has such a massive build that most men don’t bother trying to measure up. His torso is three feet wide at the shoulders; his biceps are nearly two feet around. His neck is thicker than other men’s thighs. “I know I’m big,” he told me. “I’ve been big my whole life. I’ve never had to prove how tough I am.”

The Strongest Man in the World

overheard (actually directed at me)

"Do they still have beer on tap? Oh wait, this isn't BSC."

had 'em stealin' out their cribs cause my crack tastes like ribs

Video description:

YOUTUBE I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THESE RIGHTS SO DO NOT FUCK WIT ME

THIS JUST IN

Friday science

Political comedy

But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

The Joke's on You

Psychopathic politicians

Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one's actions, among others. Psychopaths are not all the same; particular aspects may predominate in different people. And, although some psychopaths are violent men (and women) with long criminal histories, not all are. It's important to understand that psychopathic behavior and affect exist on a continuum; there are those who fall into the grey area between "normal" people and true psychopaths.

The question, then, is whether it is reasonable to believe that people with serious abnormalities in the way they interact with the world can be found running for (and winning) office. However unsettling as this may be, the answer seems to be yes. It's possible for psychopaths to be found anywhere -- including city hall or Washington, D.C. Remember, psychopaths are not delusional or psychotic; in fact, two of the hallmarks of psychopathy are a calculating mind and a seemingly easy charm.

The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as 'Psychopaths'

Friday links

1. ButtonBeats

2. The Amazing Fact Generator

3. The Internet Map

"Oh please, oh please, don't murder me, for I'm unprepared to die you see."

Busy-ness

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

The Busy Trap

A natural combination

Friday links

1. Classic movies in miniature style

2. Awwwwwww

3. Political parties chart

Update! 4. Cryptocat article

Cop killa

I'm here, there, I'm everywhere, I can't be seen

Order and state power

The Star Wars prequels, whatever their failings in other respects, dramatise the corporatist dynamic rather well. Their central plot concerns a civil war between two factions — one the central galactic government led by Chancellor Palpatine, and the other a collection of corporate interests (the Trade Federation, the Commerce Guild, the Banking Clan) led by Count Dooku. But while Palpatine’s and Dooku’s interests are by no means harmonious (each attempts to stab the other in the back, and one eventually succeeds), they are actually in collusion with each other for the most part, and the civil war is largely a hoax whereby each partner seeks to aggrandise his own side, and thereby the partnership as a whole, by portraying the other partner as a bogey (as when Palpatine invokes the need to defend the Republic against Dooku’s pseudo-rebellion as an excuse for claiming expanded powers for himself).

But the Palpatine-Dooku partnership is a conspiracy; and to the extent that the libertarian analysis of corporatism resembles the plot of the Star Wars prequels, it might thus seem to be a conspiracy theory, which is surely the opposite of an analysis in terms of invisible-hand mechanisms. Or even if “conspiracy” is not quite the right word (since conspiracy implies secrecy, while much of the collusion between the governmental and corporate elites is done quite in the open, as for example in the case of corporate interests’ publicly lobbying and campaigning for the supposedly anti-big-business regulations of the Progressive Era), still it may be wondered what role there could be for spontaneous order in libertarian class analysis.

Invisible Hands and Incantations: The Mystification of State Power

3E Presents: 3E Concludes: Cosby Week

It's been a thing.

3E Presents: Cosby Week

William Cosby (1690–1736) served as the British royal governor of New York from 1732 to 1736.

During his short term as governor, Cosby was portrayed as one of the most oppressive royal placeholders in British Colonial America. In 1735, Cosby accused publisher John Peter Zenger of sedition and libel for publishing unflattering reports about Cosby. In spite of Cosby's efforts, Zenger was acquitted of all charges and the case helped to establish the concept of freedom of the press.

William Cosby

3E Presents: Cosby Week

People putting their clothes on backward: Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong? ... People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up ... and got all type of needles (piercing) going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a ... thing about Africa.

Bill Cosby Can't Say That, Can He?

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

Last month, Bill Cosby broke the unwritten rule of keeping black dirty laundry in black washing machines. While at a multiracial gala dinner in Washington, D.C. commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Cosby targeted under-educated lower-income blacks as the source of various social problems. Among his comments: "People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around...the lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal. These people are not parenting." And he mocked the way some blacks name their children: "With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap, and all of them are in jail....They are standing on the corner and they can't speak English." Let's hope Fantasia Barrino, Shaquille O'Neal and Muhammad Ali never see a transcript of Cosby's comments.

What Bill Cosby Should Be Saying

3E Presents: Cosby Week

Bill Cosby Sucks

3E Presents: Cosby Week

Bill Cosby Gifs

3E Presents: Cosby Week

Harry Lillis "Bing" C[...]osby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor. C[...]osby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation.

A multimedia star, from 1934 to 1954 Bing C[...]osby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. His early career coincided with technical recording innovations; this allowed him to develop a laid-back, intimate singing style that influenced many of the popular male singers who followed him, including Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized C[...]osby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also in 1948, the Music Digest estimated that C[...]osby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.[8]

Bing Cosby

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.

This Is How We Lost the White Man

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

Rita Cosby (born November 18, 1964, Brooklyn, New York) is a television news anchor and correspondent, radio host, and best selling author. She is currently a Special Correspondent for the CBS syndicated program Inside Edition, specializing in interviewing newsmakers and political figures. Cosby has received three Emmy Awards, the Jack Anderson Award for investigative excellence, the Matrix Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the Lech Walesa Freedom Award.[1] October 11, 2010, was declared "Rita Cosby Day" in the State of New York for her “extraordinary journalism and exemplary service on behalf of her community.”[2]

Rita Cosby

3E Presents: Cosby Week

House of Cosbys

3E Presents: Cosby Week

It's his Blame-the-Poor Tour. He should pick on someone in his own class. If he had come out swinging at Condi Rice or Colin Powell, they could defend themselves. But he's beating up on poor black people, the most vulnerable people in this nation. And why jump on them?

Bill Cosby's Not Funny

3E Presents: Cosby Week

3E Presents: Cosby Week

In the last decade, legendary comedian, film and television star Bill Cosby has transformed himself from America's dad into a cultural critic determined to whip black America into shape. It started with what is now known as the "pound cake" speech, an address he gave in 2004 at an NAACP ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v Board of Education US supreme court decision. Cosby took the time to chastise black Americans for what he viewed as failures, including the use of Ebonics, the number of single-parent households, wasteful spending and conspicuous consumption, and certain sartorial choices.

Bill Cosby's erasure of race from the Trayvon Martin case

Bill Cosby believes guns are no laughing matter, and are the real reason Tayvon Martin was killed.

Bill Cosby on Trayvon Martin case: Neighborhood watchmen shouldn't carry guns

3E Presents: Cosby Week

William Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr. (born July 12, 1937) is an American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs, then landed a starring role in the 1960s action show, I Spy. He later starred in his own series, the situation comedy The Bill Cosby Show. He was one of the major characters on the children's television series The Electric Company for its first two seasons, and created the educational cartoon comedy series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, about a group of young friends growing up in the city. Cosby has also acted in a number of films.

Bill Cosby

Gallows pole

The Maid Freed from the Gallows 

Friday links

1. YOU CHOSE WRONG

2. Pants and horses

3. DJ TRex

4. Clam eating salt on a table, too creepy to embed

5. I didn't even know this song had a name.

You were my thrills, you were my pills, You dropped a bomb on me

State names

Before Europeans landed on American shores, the upper stretches of the Alabama River in present-day Alabama used to be the home lands of a Native American tribe called – drum roll, please – the Alabama (Albaamaha in their own tribal language). The river and the state both take their names from the tribe, that’s clear enough, but the meaning of the name was another matter. Despite a wealth of recorded encounters with the tribe – Hernando de Soto was the first to make contact with them, followed by other Spanish, French and British explorers and settlers (who referred to the tribe, variously, as the Albama, Alebamon, Alibama, Alibamou, Alibamon, Alabamu, Allibamou, Alibamo and Alibamu) – there are no explanations of the name’s meaning in the accounts of early explorers, so if the Europeans asked, they don’t appear to have gotten an answer. An un-bylined article in the July 27, 1842 edition of the Jacksonville Republican put forth the idea that the word meant “here we rest.” Alexander Beaufort Meek, who served as the Attorney General of Alabama, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and the President of the First American Chess Congress, popularized this theory in his writings throughout the next decade.

Maine is another case where no one is quite sure how the name came about. Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason, who received a charter for land in Maine, were both English Royal Navy veterans, and the name may have originated with the sailors differentiating “the mainland” from the many islands off the state’s coast. Maine’s state legislature, meanwhile, passed a resolution in 2001 that established Franco-American Day and claimed that the state was named after the French province of Maine.

How All 50 States Got Their Names

That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed when the "Gales of November" came early

Friday links

1. Quotes

2. World History Atlas and Timeline since 3000 BC

3. The Eyeballing Game

4. Henderzones

5. How to use a squat toilet

It's strange but it's true

R.I.P. Andy Griffith

Writers in Hollywood and TV

Ten years ago, Nix might never have had the opportunity to create his own distinctive world, populated by a colorful assortment of sleuths and sleazeballs. TV was still a closed-off culture, largely presided over by network behemoths who rarely gave even the best writers — think David Chase or Matthew Weiner — the freedom to push the envelope until they'd spent years laboring in the salt mines.

Now it's a new ballgame. Cable TV is crammed with original series that are bursting at the seams with the kind of creative bravado that hasn't been seen in Hollywood since the early 1970s. If you're looking for great storytelling, the real action is on your TV set, not at the multiplex.

The origins of this trend can be traced to the decline of network television and its one-size-fits-all model. Once a dusty repository for old movies and second-run network shows, cable now has an insatiable desire for original programming. The splurge on new programming was inspired by increased competition from pay TV outlets like HBO — which had created a huge splash with "Sex and the City"and "The Sopranos"— as well as the loss of once reliable network reruns, whose value had plummeted. Unlike reruns or reality shows, original programming also generates additional revenue from DVD sales and Netflix licensing.

The hunger for fresh material also came at a time when Hollywood was increasingly obsessed with creating Big Event franchises, and abandoning the kind of sophisticated dramas and comedies that have hit pay dirt on cable. The rise of new media has also helped cable replicate the communal experience of moviegoing, with TV show devotees turning television viewing into a participatory experience, spending endless hours sharing their enthusiasm, outrage or puzzlement over various plot twists on blogs, Twitter feeds and elsewhere in cyberspace.

The Big Picture

Friday links

1. Animal photobombs

2. The Manufactured Debate over Obamacare

3. kitty!

We'll kill the fatted calf tonight, so, stick around

just a little "found" poetry

i don't want to close my eyes. i don't want to fall asleep. cuz i'd miss you babay. and i don't want to miss a thing.

Dread Zeppelin

Dog I got cake like everyday my birthday

(posted solely for the lyric in the title)

Civilization II

-The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

-As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout.

-Only 3 super massive nations are left. The Celts (me), The Vikings, And the Americans. Between the three of us, we have conquered all the other nations that have ever existed and assimilated them into our respective empires.

I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result.

Round up from yer Noble Cap'n's past

EPL blasts from the past as we work out rootability.

Aston Villa

Norwich City

Swansea City

West Bromwich Albion

Nice work, Daxler. Take a bow!

Elton's Pinball Wizard

Blog question

So are we done with labels? Maybe mostly?

Invention

Harris' Foam Corner

1. Harris Wittles

2.Harris' Foam Corner

3. Tapas the Mornin' to Jah

the three Fs

Shaking hands was like shaking a hot, fat, oily bone

Paper size

Many paper size standards conventions have existed at different times and in different countries. Today there is one widespread international ISO standard (including A4, B3, C4, etc.) and a localised standard used in North America (including letter, legal, ledger, etc.). The paper sizes affect writing paper, stationery, cards, and some printed documents. The standards also have related sizes for envelopes.

Paper size (Wikipedia)

ok here goes again

i can summarize Group C thusly: you should cheer for Ireland and not for Italy.

from the easiest to...

THE HARDEST. This is where the big dogs play poker. This ain't the kiddie pool. This is where big ol' dogs play poker in the deep end of the pool. welcome to your OFFICIAL 3E GROUP B PREVIEW AND ROOTABILITY THING Poor Denmark. In group A they would actually be right in the mix but here we got what are probably the 2nd and 3rd best teams in the whole tournament in The Netherlands and Germany and Portugal is no slouch either. I guess It will be the Neths and the Germs in some order getting out. You should cheer for the Dutch, they're orange. Cheer for Denmark, ya know, rootin for the underdog is popular these days. Do what you want, i don't care. Germany isn't really that likeable but they're not actual nazis or anything. Portugal are greasy and they have Cristiano Ronaldo. 1. neth 2. den 3. germ 4. port



flags: they're all pretty good.

nevar forget

hey remember when...

I did that flag thing for the world cup? I'd do something like that for the Euros but I hate the blogger layout so much now that I don't know if I could stand it. Instead, I'm doing this! Group A starts today so here's your official 3E GROUP A PREVIEW AND ROOTABILITY RANKINGS. Anyway we got Poland and Greece kickin it off and then Russia and the Czech Republic in the afternooncap. This has gotta be the easiest group. Gotta be. None of these teams are really that good. Greece is probably the best. Poland is at home but it probably won't matter. I'm going to pick Greece as group winners with the Czechs runnin up. As far as who you should cheer for, Greece used to be deplorable in their tactics and were unwatchable at the last Euros. I hear tell they're better now but they're still hairy. They have funny names though so that's something to think about. I'm biased toward Poland, being 1/8th Polack and all. I kinda like Russia. I don't know about the Czechs. As a 1/8th Slovak, I don't trust em. So rootability will go (i guess) 1. poland 2. russia 3. greece 4. czechs. there you go!


ps if we were doing the flag thing, Russia would win and Greece would pip Poland for runner up.

Wildcard

Sports conspiracies

Maybe I know exactly how many envelopes accounting firm partner Jack Wagner conspicuously bangs against the side of the clear plastic drawing cylinder. (One, and only one.) Maybe I've committed to memory the precise moments when Stern appears to thumb the bent corner of the winning envelope he's plucked from the cylinder, after grabbing and flipping and discarding two others. Maybe I can tell you that upon exposure to room temperature of 70 degrees, a plain manila envelope stored in a home freezer remains cold to the touch for 52.3 seconds.

None of this makes me crazy.

No, a crazy person would accept the lottery at face value. A crazy person would review the entire fortuitous chain of events that produced Patrick Ewing, New York Knickerbocker, and chalk everything up to dumb luck. Coincidence, even.

A sane person doesn't believe in coincidence.

The Truth Is Out There: From The 1985 NBA Draft Lottery To The Olympics To Game-Fixing ... Which Conspiracy Theory Can You Believe?

Pulp Fiction music mash up

Friday links

1. Movie Simpsons

2. Swimming dachshund

3. Law & Order: SVU analysis

4. The Same Picture of Dave Coulier Every Day

5.

Hot Bat Dog Man

slow week

did we post this before? If not, we should have.

hey it's a rootability thing part 2: everybody else with colors

17. Stoke City - Giant, hulking thugs. They play the way everyone thinks all English teams play.

16. West Ham United - Owned by a pornographer. Russell Brand's team. Cockney.

15. Manchester City - Likeable enough, historically. Too $$$ these days to really pull for all the time.

14. Liverpool - I don't know why I like them as much as I do. Owned by the people that own the Boston Red Sox.

13. Sunderland -meh

12. Queen's Park Rangers -mehh

11. Aston Villa - they fired their horrible manager, at least.

10. Tottenham Hotspur - shouldn't be this high, probably.

9. Reading -Pronounced like 'bedding.' so you can seem really smart.

8. Newcastle United -Newcastle beer is good. They have a terrible owner but a big, loyal fanbase.

7. Wigan Athletic -I used to not like them but now I think they're ok. They might have a less handsome manager next year.

6. Everton -Seem like a good choice.

5. Fulham -Even if Clint Dempsey is gone, they're still adorable. They have a statue of Michael Jackson at their stadium.

4. Southampton -Don't know why but I think you should cheer for them.

3. West Bromwich Albion - Funny name. Likeable.

2. Swansea City -WALES.

1. Norwich City - Not stupid. Might get relegated. Your kind of blokes. They wear green.

hey it's a rootability ranking part 1: NO

 


20. Arsenal - you're not going to do this so we're moving on. also I hate the way you have to make posts now.











19. Manchester United - this is stupid i can't make this do anything. you're not going to cheer for manchester united either.





18. Chelsea - I got frustrated with trying to find their crest.

COMING SOMETIME LATER: PART 2! THE SLIGHTLY LESS OBNOXIOUS.

Rap puppets

R.I.P.

"It's important for America to remember Wesley [...] Brown. He was a pioneer like Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson," said Navy historian Robert J. Schneller Jr.

[...]

"The Naval Academy was damned lucky to have such a fine gentleman that Wesley Brown was [...]" said Mr. Schneller. "He was a man who had deep respect for his family, military service, education and his community."

Broke Color Barrier at Naval Academy

Fake basketball uncle

They didn't show the part where somebody hard fouled an old man for showboating, and it ended up costing a twenty-year-old kid millions of dollars in future lifetime earnings.

Incredible Bongo Band

Honest trailer

Marriage

Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.” So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures. It’s a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage. In a few cases, before the 14th century, it was even celebrated in church.

This is an example of a widespread phenomenon: myth-making by cultural conservatives about past relationships. Scarcely challenged, family values campaigners have been able to construct a history that is almost entirely false.

The unbiblical and ahistorical nature of the modern Christian cult of the nuclear family is a marvel rare to behold. Those who promote it are followers of a man born out of wedlock and allegedly sired by someone other than his mother’s partner. Jesus insisted that “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters … he cannot be my disciple“. He issued no such injunction against homosexuality: the threat he perceived was heterosexual and familial love, which competed with the love of God.

Moral decay? Family life's the best it's been for 1,000 years

Name ten things that aren't Skrillex

This is what it feels like every single time I visit your home, Wes.

ur noble captain on TV

Wednesday links

1. All the world's water in an 860 mile diameter sphere.

2. Wolfenstein

3. Hey kids. How you boys doin'?

this just in

It's Friday!

LET CLAW-PLACH ... BEGIN!

 

Wall Street justice

"There hasn't been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI," says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government's response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. "You need heads on the pike," he says. "The first President Bush's orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there's a new sheriff in town."

Obama delivered heated rhetoric, but his actions signaled different priorities. Had Obama wanted to strike real fear in the hearts of bankers, he might have appointed former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or some other fire-breather as his attorney general. Instead, he chose Eric Holder, a former Clinton Justice official who, after a career in government, joined the Washington office of Covington & Burling, a top-tier law firm with an elite white-collar defense unit. The move to Covington, and back to Justice, is an example of Washington's revolving-door ritual, which, for Holder, has been lucrative--he pulled in $2.1 million as a Covington partner in 2008, and $2.5 million (including deferred compensation) when he left the firm in 2009.

Why Can't Obama Bring Wall Street to Justice?

Monday links

1. The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

2. Alien banana sculpture

3. HowToBasic. Just put it on autoplay.

R.I.P. Adam Yauch

:(

Dog herding deer out of town

Sitting

But admirable efforts have been made, though with only limited success. A number of Scandinavian designers have designed ball chairs, kneeling chairs, and chairs that encourage sitting in several different positions. These are improvements but not total fixes. They also frequently don’t work properly at common table heights and their unconventional appearances make them unacceptable in most workplaces.

After decades of trying, perhaps it’s time to admit that there is no way to win.

If chairs are such a dumb idea, how did we get stuck with them? Why does our culture demand that we spend most of every day sitting on objects that hurt us? What the hell happened?

It should be no surprise to readers of Jacobin that the answer lies in class politics. Chairs are about status, power, and control. That’s why we like them. Ask any furniture historian about the origins of the chair and they’ll gleefully tell you that it all started with the throne.

Against Chairs