And if you think naming a destructive storm after a woman is sexist, you obviously have never seen the gals grabbing for items at a clearance sale.

That's true... but he shouldn't say it.

So my thoughts about the lack of power was realizing just how much of the world runs on power. Wait you mean the air conditioning doesn't work either? It seemed like the whole world was falling apart. No lights, no fridge, no stove and no toilet. Obviously death is was on its way, the only question is how long will we manage to stave it off before the inevitable. Luckily there were ritz crackers and cheeze-its to eat. Plus a giant bag of popcorn leftover from a weekend get together so at least death was not imminent.

But then slowly through trial and error, i came to realize that not everything was shut down by the power outage. Books for example seemed completely unaffected. (At least those made of paper and ink.) I wasn't sure if they had some sort of complete natural immunity to the effects of the power outage, or if they were just resistant and would soon succumb. In either case i decided to take advantage of my find and start reading. I have now successfully finished reading the hobbit in lithuanian. Not the easiest thing ever but you'd be amazed how much of an incentive having nothing else to do is. Likewise while the lightbulbs have been rendered completely nonfunctional, their dullard cousins, the candles and the oil lamp, seem to be if anything brighter than ever. They don't quite make it bright as day like lightbulbs manage to, but cast enough light to play cards after the setting of the great light in the sky.

Yesterday i came to realize that while my own little neck of woods had reverted to the middle ages there were still some places where people managed to live like kings, using electricity without concern. specifically middletown. So i made the sojourn out to find out exactly what the situation was. Not only do they have an entire depository full of books, and lights by which to read them (what a goldmine,) they had actual computers with access to other computers all around the world. So i managed to set my fantasy sports teams and check on the best sandwich recipes to use when your only ingredients are bread and unrefrigerated cold cuts. It turns out the best thing to do is put the cold cuts (no longer cold) on the bread and then eat it. Success. Who said cooking is hard.

Nature also seems largely unaffected. Except for the loss of a couple of orchard trees, admittedly extremely unfortunate, nature just keeps going along. The stars seemed particularly bright last night, possibly the brightest i've ever seen them, as if to say sorry about my half sister irene, she can be a bit of a jerk sometimes when she's drinking. The grass continues to grow, rejoicing in its ability to live without electricity, but its victory is short lived. For while the grass might have thought it had come to a golden age with the demise of electricity, it turns out that the grass's nemesis, the lawn mower, is also functioning as normal and ready to begin a bloody wholesale massacre of the jubilant little grasses.

In conclusion thanks a lot irene for being a big jerk. Knocking out the power is one thing, i get that joke it's kind of funny. Look at all you little goofs so addicted to your electricity, won't it be funny if you had to live just a couple of days without electrical power, the way human beings have had to live for more than 99% of our existence on this planet. And then we all scramble around all frantic and beside ourselves. That's a good one, and i'll give credit where credit is due. But why did you have to knock down our pear tree and our peach tree? That's not funny. We only had 2 pears and peaches left, and now we're down to 1 each. Even if we manage to get new trees to grow (dubious) it will take 10 years for them to get big enough to start producing fruit. That's really a jerky move irene.

Things aren't as happy as they used to be down here at the unemployment office. Joblessness is no longer just for philosophy majors.

Useful people are starting to feel the pinch.

Even the new york times is now saying that green jobs have been a failure. (i didn't link to them because who wants to read the new york times, but it's there if you want to look at it.) I think this guy who tends to be very articulate does a good job of pointing out the allure of green jobs to obama/the democrats while also showing why it's complete fools gold.

Do you know how many memories I have? Three! Standing in line for a movie, having a key made, and sitting here talking to you. 38 years and that's all

I believe aras has been interested in the idea of a medical fountain of youth for some time. This guy is proposing way more than that. The only question is will we live long enough to bathe in the fountain.

Bonus simpsons quotes (i was looking for the one in the title (or similar about the flour bag, etc.) but stumbled across these other awesome ones by accident.)

Bart: Dad what are you doing here?
Homer: Reading about this Edison character. They wont let me in the big people library down town. There was some.. unpleasantless I can never go back.

Homer: And these hearty boys books are great too! This one's about smugglers.
Bart: They're all about smugglers.
Homer: No, not this one: "The Smugglers Of Pirate Cove", it's about pirates.

Or what? You'll release the dogs, or the bees, or the dogs with bees in their mouths, and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?

Well, go ahead. Do your worst.

Do my worst", eh? Smithers, release the robotic Richard Simmons.

It's like they are trying to create skynet. This article could be right out terminator II. Learning computers? That's exactly what arnold claims to be.

when a blade of grass rises above the others, do we applaud it? No, we cut it down.

No need to read all of these articles. But it's a little round up of people fleeing extreme liberal areas that have collapsed, and/or increasing various liberal mandates causing people to flee. Essentially atlas has started to shrug (not really because people are fleeing to some secret location, but rather to less liberal locations around the world, but the effect is the same for liberal areas.

Briton
New York
Greece
Detroit
The states in general

You'd think there would be some sort of lesson here. About how being super liberal and having giant governments causes states to collapse. It happens over and over throughout history, the Soviet Union being the most obvious example. Meanwhile what is government that has collapsed from being too small? I guess you could argue that countries that lost wars should have spend more on bigger armies, but i think for the most part countries spent everything they could on wars and then collapsed from not having anything left to spend, not from not spending enough. Hong Kong and other small government countries are doing pretty good right about now. But what lesson to liberals learn? Obviously they failed countries haven't been spending enough money on the government because if they had been everything would be dandy. More government spending for all.

there's only one sure way to make him realize how much he loves you. And that is a phony kidnapping.

Jon steward wonders why nobody is paying attention to Ron Paul. While this clip is funny, and i wish ron paul had a chance, the fact of the matter is, he doesn't. To some extent it's a self fulfilling prophesy. Media decides he has no shot so they don't bother to cover him, nobody here's anything about him, they don't know anything about him, so they don't vote for him, hence justifying the media for ignoring him. And maybe that's true, but he's got plenty of other things that make him unelectable. For one he's just too old, nobody is going to elect a 75 year old. Also while libertarianism is a growing brand right now, i just don't think his libertarian views could possibly pull enough in the primaries where religious voters won't back him. Unfortunately religious voters make up such a big segment of the republican population that you have to kowtow to them in the primaries even if it might hurt in the general election.

It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.

Well this is crummy news. Watching an hour of tv a day cuts your life expectancy by 22 minutes. So really that hour of tv you watch is wasting more than an hour of your life, it's wasting almost an hour in half. Waste 3 hours watching tv, the 4rth is wasted for free. Of course this is extremely foolish. This study is almost certainly measuring correlation and not causation. The implication is that doing anything for any hour where you are not moving around will cost you 22 minutes of life. So reading for an hour, or blogging for an hour will both cost you 22 minutes. Working at a desk for 8 hours sucks almost 3 hours of your life away. That may be true to some extent, but i doubt these researchers are going to tell kids they should stop reading books (unless they are willing to runaround while reading them of course.) I have read suggestions of getting standing desk so you have to stand over them, instead of sitting at them, and that could be good, but these researchers don't mention it, even though people spend far more time hunched over a desk than watching tv. Ultimately the point of this study is that people who watch the most tv, (as opposed to reading/working at a desk) also tend to be the laziest, and so they probably also exercise the least, eat the worst, have worse jobs, worse health care and die the earliest. That's not exactly news, but it is kind of funny.

Okay, you just bought yourself a 317, pointing out police stupidity.

Well this sounds like another good use of government resources. Quick, drop everything, somebody is making fun of the police. We need to arrest this person immediately, and then we'll figure out what crime they've committed later. The city attorney who is trying to prosecute this case, and any judge who grants authorization for any kinds of searches or subpoenas should be disbarred. This is a clear indisputable (by reasonable people) violation of the constitution and these people's positions of power. They should at a minimum be fired, and better prosecuted for corruption.

But first, lets check the death count from the killer storm bearing down on us, like a shotgun full of snow.

Finally!!! The government accomplishes something. It took a year of investigation, and 15 different government agencies working tirelessly in conjunction, including several brave men who offered to put their lives on the line by going under cover, but a dangerous gang of individuals who were selling illegal goods on the streets of california has finally been put away. Thank god we can all rest easy. What were they selling? Coke, Heroine, possibly Swank, (it's 10 times as addictive as marijuana) maybe guns or bomb making equipment. No they were selling unpasteurized milk and cheese. Also they weren't so much selling on the street as in a store. And as it turns out unpasteurized milk is legal in california as long as you have the proper permits, but this group allegedly didn't have the permits. So what is the death count from this deadly barrage of raw milk bearing down on us like a grenade full of cheese? Well as of the now the death count is 0, but it is ready to shoot right up. Damn you cheese!!! Thank god these intrepid government agents spend a year of their life investing this abomination unto humanity. Government salaries for the dozens of operatives working day in and day out on this investigation well worth the millions of dollars as long as we could prevent people from buying raw milk from somebody who hadn't filled out the proper paper work.

Son, when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose: it's how drunk you get.

TMQ is generally well written, often hilarious and definitely worth reading if you are into sports. But he does right like million word columns, which is fun if you enjoy sports/his writing, but a bit of a downside if you just want to skim through to see what's funny. There were quite a few good things in this article, but the best was this

"Standard & Poor's Call for U.S. Debt to be Reduced by 10 Quintillion Zimbabwean Dollars: In Zimbabwe this winter, the country's 100 trillion-dollar bill was trading for about $5 US. This means that expressed in Zimbabwean currency, the United States national debt is 240 septillion dollars."

It's funny because it's true.

I want a crystal bucket for my slopwater and a brand new filthy blanket.

This could be good news. The unfortunate thing about the current economy is that whenever the economy starts looking good oil prices go up and they strangle the economy. The strangling of the economy then causes oil prices to fall. If some big oil developments (or any big energy developments, gas/solar/nuclear) could cause the price of oil/energy to drop it would be a huge boon to the economy both here and world wide (except for maybe places like saudi arabia which are completely reliant on the sale of energy at high prices.) Of course if this oil is close and readily accessible the US would get the biggest boost from the oil sands specifically.

Ach! They call this a soccer riot? Come on, boys, let's take 'em to school!

Unfortunately Nothing funny or clever for aras to boast his day. Just a recap of media coverage about the tea party vs. coverage of leftist rioters. And of course this opinion is not restricted to the media. If you think of some of the liberals you know (or if yourself a liberal reading this post) you know that many of them (or you) agree. Tea party activist are violent racist bigots, despite not being the cause of any actual violence, deaths, or property damage. But when liberals, or people who represent liberal causes (inner city blacks) are violent and do cause deaths/property damage they are not bad people, but simply an oppressed minority striking out in righteous justice.

Everything changes when you hit the big one-oh. Your legs start to go, candy doesn't taste as good any more...

Shocking, government interference causes shortages in health care markets? If only there was some way to have foreseen this. Like if only there was a history of government interference causing shortages like in rent controlled housing markets. Obviously the only solution would be for the government to become even more involved, in the health care market so they can solve these issues they've created. In fact we should just put all our health care eggs in the government basket, that's sure to lead to a good outcome. It's sure working out well for the brits, except for the shortages caused from the government being in charge of health care, but as has already been mentioned that is completely unforeseeable.

I am imposing a curfew. Any kid caught on the street after dark will be shot. Or, returned to their parents, as the situation may warrant.

Occasions like this cry out for a return to corporal punishment. This huge increase of flash mobs of groups of teenagers getting together and committing crimes (mostly groups of black teenagers attacking non blacks.) Obviously something needs to be done to discourage this kind of behavior, but even if we could there's no point in imprisoning all of them. The best solution is that anyone who is caught being part of a violent flash mob simply has some sort of corporal punishment. Nothing too extreme no scarlet letter of anything, maybe just a nice paddling.

Nothing get's chocolate out, see.

Interesting article about the possible exercise benefits of eating dark chocolate. It's not clear if the chocolate helps with only muscle fatigue, or could also help with muscle strength. In the actual article (which is linked to by this site) it suggests that the chemical in chocolate induces the growth of more mitochondrias in the mice's muscles which helps provide energy to the muscle which helps prevent exhaustion. Nice for distance running, like the rats were doing, but maybe not as helpful for people trying to build muscle mass. Anyway the suggestion is to eat 5 grams, 1/6th of an ounce, of dark chocolate a day (which is not very much) if you eat more than it might undue and helpful effects. Milk chocolate is not helpful.

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and i wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

This guy is hilarious. I've read some of his stuff before, he did in fact make me laugh out loud. Highly recommended. In fact, I'm going to go back through some of his archived stuff to read because i really enjoy his style.

The most rewarding part, was when he gave me my money.

Well the bad news is i have no control over whether or not i live to be insanely old. It's been predetermined in my genes, and nothing i do matters. The good news is that i have no control over whether or not i live to be insanely old, and nothing i do matters. So might as well start that all bacon diet i've been contemplating. (Probably won't do it for a while, but sometime before i die i do plan to eat nothing but pork products for a whole month, and see how it goes. Man, that's going to be an assume month. I'll inundated in bacon, sausage, and ham)

Up and away in my beautiful my beautiful motor boat! Da da da da!

So here's a bit from the simpsons, enjoy that first. (from snpp which i use for all my simpsons needs.)

Bart: But we didn't enter any police raffle.
Homer: That doesn't matter, the important thing is we won.
[parks]
Marge: I don't know, there's something very peculiar about
this!
Homer: Sheesh! You're the most paranoid family I've ever been
affiliated with. [gets out]
-- Care-free Homer, "Lisa the Skeptic"

% Snake beat Homer to the station, but Homer tries to cut to the front of
% the line.

I'd like a yellow boat please, with extra motors.
-- Homer knows what he wants, "Lisa the Skeptic"

Snake: Yo! No cuts bro! Where's my motor boat pig?
Wiggum: Right through that door [he laughs. Snake enters we hear screams.]
Wiggum: Alright, Simpson, Homer. Your'e next.
Homer: Wohoo! [goes through] Howdy gents. I'm hear to collect my free...
[they get him] Oh, oh, my boating arm. What's going on?
-- He walked right into it, "Lisa the Skeptic"

Wiggum: Your'e under arrest slimebag, what's this punk in here for Lou?
Lou: 235 unpaid parking tickets, totalling $175.
Wiggum: I hope you brought your'e check book, wiseguy.
Homer: [gets it out his back pocket.] You lousy cops. Lucky for you I'm
double parked. [gives him check] Now, can I please have my motor boat?
-- Uh, sir, you didn't quite get the point, "Lisa the Skeptic"

% Within no time, our favorite family are driving home. Homer isn't happy
% about what happened, and seems to be giving everyone the silent treatment.

Bart: Dad, why arn't you saying anything? Where's our motorboat?
Homer: I didn't like it. The mast had termites.
Lisa: Why would a motor boat have a mast?
Homer: Because... the thingy was... shut up!

You might think think Homer acts so stupidly it couldn't happen in real life, but that's where you'd be wrong. Now read this article, and enjoy. As usual it turns out the simpsons is funny because it's true.

that's the saltiest thing I've ever tasted! And I once ate a big heaping bowl of salt!"

It's nice to know after years of public indoctrination that in fact salt is not bad for you, and there was never any actual evidence that salt was bad for anybody. But since some time in the 20th century the government decided it was their job to start telling people how to live and had to come up with stuff for people not to eat salt made the list. Similarly despite a complete lack of evidence (in fact despite evidence to the contrary) the government decided that fat was bad for people and commissioned all manner of studies to prove that fat was bad for people only to continually fail to prove that there is anything wrong with fat. Meanwhile they managed to jump of the carb bandwagon only now to have us find out that all those carbs are what made america so very fat. Carbs were good because they were cheap and full of calories. Only it turns out that they make people fat because they are cheap and full of calories. Well done government. I can't wait to see what plan you come up with next.

Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so that it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be

extracted for our personal use.

This sounds good, lets be more like them. Lets have governmental healthcare for all that will restrict people's access to medical treatment based off of what government managers think is worthwhile and cost effective care. Now this isn't to suggest that in a free market system people could get all the surgery and medical treatment they want. Or that you wouldn't have some corporate beauracrat going 5 layers deep to find a reason why the insurance company doesn't have to pay for your surgery. But the nice thing about private companies is that there's more than one of them. If you think one of them is doing a bad job you can switch, and if enough people do then it will go bankrupt. No such like with the government. You are unfortunately pretty much stuck with the mess they put you in.

The further point is that this idea of unlimited medical treatment is really just crazy. No society is going to be able to maintain unlimited medical treatment for all. Treatment has to be restricted either by how much a person can afford to pay, or by government waitlist like the one in this article. I guess some people may prefer the latter to the former, they know they won't be able to pay anyway, so might as well take their chances with the waitlist. I just wish people who promote the waitlist strategy would at least be honest about what's going on instead of pretending that we can have unlimited healthcare for all. What if someone thought we should have unlimited food for all. That anybody should be allowed to just show up to a supermarket take whatever food they want and the government will pay for it. Would anybody think that was a good idea? because i'm pretty sure they wouldn't. There's a difference between having soup kitchens which can provide basic food, and having a complete unlimited supply for people. There's a difference between a 70 year old break his leg and having it set at tax payer expense, plus some pain killers to go with it, or the tax payers paying $500,000 for an 80 year old to get a new heart. Maybe medicare could continue to exist in a greatly reduced form or in some sort of capped system, but the rate it's going now is obviously unsustainable.

Won't somebody please think of the children.

This is another in the series of adults trying to destroy children's childhoods because of their own phobias and insecurities. Note, children are not adults. They do not act or react to situations like adults. You should not treat them as if they are adults. My main pet peeve is when kindergartners get expelled for sexual harassment or something because a little boy/girl touched somebody else's butt, or some other stupid thing. But this is just as bad, and if the research is accurate parents are in fact doing a serious disservice to their children by trying to protect them. (Not in this article, but i've read similarly that not letting children ever play in the dirt or do the various crazy non hygienic things kids do can hinder them from developing proper immunities/resistances to diseases/etc.) Kids have been growing up for 1,000s of years in roughly the same fashion exposed to all sorts of dangers/violence/etc. why is it that all the sudden we believe kids can't handle it and need to be protected from it at all costs. (admittedly for 1,000s of years child mortality rates were much higher, but their a difference between having modern medicine/measles inoculations/good nutrition/etc. and not letting a kid play on the monkey bars.) I guess i can't really blame parks and schools if they are getting sued when a kid falls and breaks his arm, but i can blame a court system that seems to feel that every time somebody is hurt somebody else must be to blame, and must be made to pay. And i can blame parents who would sue over their kid getting hurt and parents who would make a big stink about kids safety.

On a similar note I watched an episode of the closer recently and a kid goes missing at the beginning of the episode after which the father blames the mother (who also blames herself) because she let the 9 year old ride his bike 2 blocks to the summer camp unsupervised. Really? 2 blocks? Since when can a kid not go 2 blocks on his bike? First off it's barely worth getting onto a bike for 2 blocks, but beyond that it's certainly not worth owning a bike if you parents are afraid to let you ride more than a block away. Somehow we want to on the one hand treat children like adults and demand that they act like adults. But on the other hand we want to treat them like babies and supervise their every action. Just like them be normal kids.

That's his stomach eating itself.

So good news for all of us dieters. It turns out the reason we are hungry while we are dieting is because our brains are litterally eating themselves. I don't know what that is supposed to mean for our future thinking abilities, i take it not many brain cells are consumed, probably not any different than getting drunk which also kills brain cells.

Are you kidding me? This baby is off the charts.

It's nice to see the government is out doing the hard work of making the country better for us ordinary citizens. I'm not even going to comment further for fear of blowing up the sarcasm