Dirty Red Commie

When the world's gone crazy, let Mad Magazine be your guide.

The secret reason for War, Pestulance, and the other riders is a million monkeys, which is something we all knew anyway, but monkeys rule, right?  Cracked.com explains the Monkeysphere, which is all around us, even now in this very room.  

(Oh, warning: some swearing, but well worth the read.)

It's coming.

Are you ready?

September 19th is the big day.

It's less than two weeks away!

So grab a parot and a pint of rum!

Sit back and yell, "Arrr matey!"

Talk like a Pirate Day

According to the BBC, UK airports will no longer allow you to have carry-on baggage.  This is apparently in response to the foiling of a plan to blow up a plane. 

 The only things you'll be able to carry onto a plane are wallets, small quantities of non-liquid medication, glasses (but no cases), contact lens holders (but no solution), baby food (you have to taste it for them), diapers and such, tampons and tissues (unboxed), and keys (no electric keyfobs).

 Notably, you can't have a laptop, a music player, a book, or even a magazine.  Not even a couple crayons.  You also can't bring any liquids onto the plane. 

Can you imagine a trans-atlantic flight with no reading material, no music, no laptop, no video games?  I would go completely batshit insane.  I would hijack the plane and crash it into the sea just to end the interminable boredom.  (Note to NSA et-al: This is meant humorously.  I would never do such a thing.  Unless it was a plane full of politicians.  (just kidding))

 I'm interested to know how exactly I could hijack or blow up a plane with a paperback novel.  My first thought was the possibility of malicious paper cuts, but they do allow you to bring necessary travel documents--presumably printed on standard paper.  Maybe it's the content of the books they fear.  Incendiary language, perhaps.  Magazines, I understand.  I heard someone once robbed a bank with a rolled-up magazine.  And glasses cases are understandable.  They could be hiding anything in there.  If only there was some device they could use to see if anything dense or metallic was inside--some kind of ray machine.  But that's just science fiction, right?

(From BoingBoing) 

From BoingBoing:

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 Matt Fraction shares a sneak-preview of his forthcoming graphic novel, The Five Fists of Science, starring Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla in a race to save the world from Thomas Edison and J.P Morgan.

 

This is one of the more compelling synopses I've read in a while.  I'm going to have to check this one out. 

Some of you may have heard that Wikipedia has been having trouble with Congress and House members or their staff editing articles to either make themselves look better or to make their opponents look worse.  These edits range from political whitewashing to juvenile name-calling. 

I just read that WikiNews has done some investigative reporting and tracked down the sources of some of these edits.  So far, they've only identified Congress members, since House computers go through a proxy.  Among the culprits they've identified so far are Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, Tom Harkin, Norm Coleman, and Montana's own Conrad Burns.

Instead of doing their jobs, these elected officials (or their staff) have been vandalizing a community project.  I can't find the words. 

I recently decided that I need a watch.  Specifically, I need a watch that I'm likely to wear.  I do own a Matrix Binary Watch, and it's cool, but it's bulky, hard to read, and has a beep that can't be turned off. 

After getting distracted for a while and learning about what it means when a watch has a certain number of jewels, I decided that I want a watch with a tactile alarm.  At one point, I googled "watch vibrating completely silent" and was shocked to find that my own fiction blog appeared as the fourth result.