Friday Ephemera
Measuring explosive duck erections. Make a donation and advance science! (h/t, Jim Cambias) // The museum of the modern snowglobe. // Baby teeth and adult teeth. // Wombat in a tea cup. // Pig-shaped pork. // On eating insects. // The hazards of running shoes. // HumanForm, a flexible phone. // Fenella Fielding’s voice. (h/t, Stephen) // The Iron Lady. // Stuttgart City Library. // The submerged cars of Thailand’s Honda factory. // Cheese cube. // Approaching bridges in a different way. // Burglary in the webcam age (but with a happy ending). // A brief history of beer. // Vodka-soaked tampons are the new thing, apparently.
That there Nuisance Cheese Cube seems aptly named.
If you donate more than a grand to the exploding duck boner fund, they’ll cook you a roast duck dinner. Not to mention the USB drive filled with all the exploding duck boner porn your donation will fund. The PBS fundraising drones will have to up their game to top that!
Measuring explosive duck erections.
I can now add ‘scary duck porn’ to the list of things I’ve discovered via this blog.
The Iron Lady.
Looks worth seeing. Wonder if it will be a hatchet job though…
“Wonder if it will be a hatchet job though…”
David Gritten in the Telegraph says it’s “relatively even handed,” and the Guardian’s Xan Brooks offers some grudging appreciation, at least for Meryl Streep, though there isn’t enough “dissent” for his taste. Naturally, other Guardianistas still feel a need to let us know how much they hate her. Apparently the film occasionally dares to have “a conservative narrative” and at times makes Thatcher seem “heroic,” which is scandalous, obviously.
“I can now add ‘scary duck porn’ to the list of things I’ve discovered via this blog.”
I like to think I’m providing a vital educational service for the community.
“Looks worth seeing. Wonder if it will be a hatchet job though…”
Well, it’s
upsettinginducing apoplexy in all the right people… 🙂Julia,
My favourite Guardianista comments:
And of course,
What’s interesting is the number of Guardian readers who insist Thatcher was “hated by everyone” and “totally despised” (i.e., by everyone). It’s as though they can’t quite grasp that other people, quite a lot of them, did in fact vote for her.
I did, though, like the suggestion that she should be played by Christopher Walken.
Can’t wait for the Michael Foot biopic. I’m sure Michael Bay is camped outside the offices of Universal right now with a pitch for that one.
Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine. I’m sold.
If you donate more than a grand to the exploding duck boner fund, they’ll cook you a roast duck dinner. Not to mention the USB drive filled with all the exploding duck boner porn your donation will fund. The PBS fundraising drones will have to up their game to top that!
They should market it as art instead, and charge Damien Hirst prices for it.
“I did, though, like the suggestion that she should be played by Christopher Walken.”
Me too! Especially if they threw in a musical number or two…
I actually believe Christopher Walken can fly.
‘What’s interesting is the number of Guardian readers who insist Thatcher was “hated by everyone” and “totally despised” (i.e., by everyone). It’s as though they can’t quite grasp that other people, quite a lot of them, did in fact vote for her’.
This is the classic Guardianista problem. ‘Everyone’ means those within their immediate circle, which does not of course include the hoi polloi who actually put her in office three times. Rather than ask why it is that people actually voted for Thatcher in 1979, 1983 and 1987, the default setting is a completely infantile one.
I’m also bemused by the fact that there are individuals out there who say they’ll celebrate when Thatcher dies. I’d understand this attitude if it was expressed (say) by a former miner in am impoverished pit village in South Yorkshire, but when it comes from one of the Islington Massive it seems to me to be both contemptible and sad. It’s also no surprise that when genuinely vicious and brutal people die – Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi – the default response from the dinner party set is one of shrill outrage, rather than ‘serve the fucker right’.
I also note that in her ‘article’ on the film Suzanne Moore describes the miner’s strike as ‘our last civil war’. I wonder what a Sri Lankan, or a Rwandan, or a Sudanese would make of such a fatuous statement.
I’d like to see a well-done biopic of Thatcher. Especially if it included “Back in Control” by Sabaton in the soundtrack!:-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWLX6NgOjew&feature=fvst
Duck erections? This looks like a job for:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/DickDuck%26theDorks.jpg
Burglary caught on webcam…
Some years ago, a Beatles fan set up a webcam with a view of a street in Liverpool which has some significance in the works or career of the Fab Four. Various Beatles fans from around the world visited.
One day, at 2 AM or so Liverpool time, a viewer noticed that the camera showed a man breaking into a store. He telephoned the Liverpool police, who went round and nicked the villain.
The viewer was in Houston, Texas.
I don’t like that library in Stuttgart. For one thing, are those all the books? It looks like all they have are a few old paperbacks. For another, that white glare would just make my eyes ache. Also, it’s dangerous. I can see someone coming down with a version of “snow blindness” and taking a wrong step and plunging down the nice, sharp, modern stairs to their deaths.
Sackcloth,
“I also note that in her ‘article’ on the film Suzanne Moore describes the miner’s strike as ‘our last civil war.’ I wonder what a Sri Lankan, or a Rwandan, or a Sudanese would make of such a fatuous statement.”
Well, it’s silly and revisionist, yes. But Arthur Scargill saw his bid for power in not dissimilar terms, as did many of his apologists, including Tony Benn. The megalomaniacal communist, who saw even tea drinking as a matter of class consciousness, famously paid “tribute” to Stalin’s totalitarian project, which, he claimed, had “defeated poverty, ignorance, injustice and inequality” and had done so “without the obscenities of the market economy… or what some misguided souls believe is freedom and democracy.” Democracy never held much appeal for Mr Scargill, who planned to win his “battle” to “overthrow capitalism” on the streets of Britain and, when triumphant, shut down the free press. (Despite his avowed egalitarianism and the “obscenity” of private property, Mr Scargill still retained his chauffeur and spent thousands on Saville Row suits.)
Even the term “miners’ strike” is misleading. Many miners didn’t strike and didn’t want to strike, even when the fight was at its ugliest, and large numbers of those who did were intimidated and coerced. (As Charles Moore notes in the article linked above, so-called “scabs” were routinely assaulted and harassed, with one taxi driver being killed in the crossfire when a concrete block was thrown from a road bridge, presumably to kill his passenger, a non-striking miner.) There was no national ballot of the miners themselves and the whole exercise lacked even the pretence of a democratic basis.
That Suzanne Moore should accept Scargill’s construal of those events as a “civil war” tells us quite a bit about her.
http://englishrussia.com/2011/11/18/declassified-bunker-of-the-ussr/
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=22984504&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=1&loop=0
‘That Suzanne Moore should accept Scargill’s construal of those events as a “civil war” tells us quite a bit about her’.
It’s also her reference to ‘Thatcher’s victims’, which to me seems utterly absurd (even as a non-Thatcherite and non-Tory). Were those who had to put up with the traumas of the 1970s (the strikes, the slump, the ‘winter of discontent’) ‘Callaghan’s victims’, or ‘Wilson’s victims’?
It’s just a childish approach to politics, and it makes as edifying a spectacle as some brat howling the words ‘NOT FAIR!’