“Fuck
fuck fuck! Mother mother fuck. Mother mother fuck fuck. Mother fuck mother fuck noise noise noise.
Smokin bombs, smokin bombs, doin DU, drinkin blood
Drinkin blood blood blood.
Smokin fatties, smokin blunts. Who smokes the blunts? We smoke the blunts.
”
Mostly I was just excited to keep the last lines verbatim.
(Wikipedia says the sign translates as “Poppies are the crop of death. Grow wheat instead so children can eat and live.” But, really, re: Syria, this is some Cry Havoc Let Slip etc shit. When this AM’s NYT was all “ohhh there’s gonna be an offensive on Aleppo,” I thought- “they’re gonna Benghazi it.” They’re, um, going to Benghazi it.)
If taking an active interest in international news is grounds to prevent your getting a job with the State Department, is that really a job you want? The emergent theme from the cables for me so far has been the United States living up to every entitled bully stereotype you could fear— threatening our bilateral relationship with Spain over the 2009 Bush administration criminal probe, whining about Canadian television shows making villains of Americans, working with the emotionally needy British to stash illegal cluster bombs on UK soil… I really hope things as patently stupid as this social networking threat helps swing the zeitgeist in favor of Wikileaks. I maintain that it’s disingenuous to blather about theoretical, unproven blood on Assange’s hands when the policies being exposed lead to deathsdirectandindirectdaily.
“GOP leaders set sites on next target— Sarah Palin!” Haha; that is D-U-M dumb. Unless their goal is to make her more powerful than ever, crucifying her is probably the easiest way to energize her base.
Nobody seems to have solid percentages on how much of NPR’s $166 million annual budget that ends up being, but it’s definitely somewhere in the single digits. For the sake of argument, let’s use the 2% in the same article I got the $166 million from.
Two percent of that budget is equivalent to a little over three million dollars— or the cost to support three US soldiers in Afghanistan for a year. If you want to use the higher numbers favored in this article, it’s eight percent, or $13 million dollars/ 13 US soldiers. We have something over 100,000 troops over there right now. So: a high-end estimate of federal funding of NPR amounts to 0.01% of the federal funding for our forces in Afghanistan.
So. Last night, playing Bananagrams with some friends, I laid down the word “jigger,” thinking of the bartending unit of measure. My competitors were aghast; they knew it only as a racial epithet, which was (unpleasant!) news to me. A dictionary confirmed the bartending term— as well as a traditional fishing hook, a parasitic flea and the aftmost mast on a four-masted sailing vessel— but not the slur. It took the Internet to confirm their definition but, yup, I’m sad to say that the story checks out.
Here’s the coda: less than five minutes after the whole Bananagrams bang-up, somebody started singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” to themselves, leading me to remark “Now there’s something unambiguously racist.” It resolved that, while some folks had vague memories of a Br’er Rabbit movie, nobody else knew Song of the South for the racially coded 1940s cesspool it is. Disney executives themselves have even referred to it as “antiquated” and “fairly offensive” in explaining why it’s never been— and probably never will be— released to the United States home video market.
James Baskett was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for playing Uncle Remus— the first Oscar for an African-American man. He wasn’t able to attend the festivities for the film’s premiere since it took place in then-segregated Atlanta.
I tried really hard to find a halfway decent compilation of supposed Disney subliminal messaging but they all have irritating overlong exposition or Panic at the Disco soundtracks added so, um, here’s this classic instead.
fuck!
Mother mother fuck. Mother mother fuck fuck. Mother fuck mother fuck noise noise noise.
Sam and Devin dot com 