Total Dismay

“Every time I traveled to foreign countries, I wore the costume of the country”

I advise against buying plastic toys, and here I am coming up with an idea for a repackaging idea for one. Enjoy my idea, but don’t buy a Hillary doll, or any other plastic doll from Walmart.

(edit: They don’t sell Hillary dolls in Wal-Mart. The image is a transformative work using the nutcracker that was so popular among Republicans and masochists last Christmas. Don’t buy one.)

There is a gigantic ball of gas burning all the time in the middle of our solar system. You might as well cook something while it’s on.

Summer seems like it’s just around the corner and I am moving into a place with a south facing back yard. I have been thinking about cooking with the sun. I don’t know how useful the kit in the picture would be, but it looks pretty simplistic.

SCI has developed a very simple solar cooker for use in refugee camps. After reading up on this program, I felt compelled to make a modest donation to the organization. Here is a video showing people in Chad building and using the cookers…

For some reason, the largely unreported allegations being made by Larry Sinclair have gotten me thinking about the psychology and sociology of lying. The short YouTube video in which this man makes his claims doesn’t have any ‘tells’, but rehearsing and doing several retakes gives him a great advantage. There is also an extended radio interview of Larry, carried out by a controversial conspiracy theorist.

Larry’s tone and mannerisms on this audio reminded me of a liar that gave an audio interview last year. My other blog, Slamboard.com was used to help expose a fraud last year. It features surveillance pictures taken of a Diet Guru who had been using fake after pictures stolen from a mail order bride website. The interview was recorded some time before that.

Heidi Diaz had been sort of anonymous as Kimmer, the founder of Kimkins.com. When a critical mass of people became very doubtful about her claims of weight loss and the safety of her diet plan, an affiliate arranged an audio interview that he had hoped would put everyone’s doubts to rest (or not). There is this amazing moment on this audio interview where all but the truly delusional can hear the lying. The interviewer changes his tone quite perceptibly after that moment.

Larry Sinclair gives his interview to a man who loves anything that is hard to believe. I only listened to a small part of it.

Animal knows just enough HTML to really mess things up.

I do not know how this can be an animated JPG. I don’t know why it is either.

If you are experiencing seasonal affective disorder, or even some nameless blah feeling, you should look for your favorite muppet skits on YouTube. I started singing “But, It’s Cold Outside” the other day and it made me think of the sketch with Miss Piggy and the Russian ballet dancer. Then I started thinking about how unacceptable it would have been if they had switched parts with that duet.

Years ago, I told an Australian that I had never before eaten Vegemite. She told me that I had to try it. It was salty and weird and kinda gross. Trying it didn’t detract from my life a great deal. It didn’t change my life.

Nutella was different. We had a nutella discussion during break and my Roman coworker sold us on the idea of trying it. He was less insistent than the Australian. He didn’t have a special reserve of nutella to push onto the naive whenever they revealed themselves in the same way that Australians seem to with regard to Vegemite.

My life will be divided into two parts, pre-nutella and post-nutella. It’s just that good.

I try to stay focused with my internet activity, but sometimes I get sucked down a rabbit hole. Today I read that Woody Harrelson’s father had confessed to the assassination of JFK. I haven’t corroborated this story with other sources and even if he really did confess, that doesn’t mean that he did it. It is a very compelling story, though. He confessed to two murders after surrendering to police when he was suffering from what may have been a drug induced psychosis. His state of mind was reason enough for the authorities to ignore the JFK confession and yet they convicted him and sentenced him to life for the other crime to which he confessed. You can see an interview with Charles Harrelson on this page. Thank goodness Woody legitimate acting as an outlet for that stuff. Charles Harrelson died in prison last year.

Someone gave a scathing review of my recent post about the Hillary movie. Here it is in its entirety…

Another deluded liberal. 1. The tasteless and unfunny ‘joke’ about Stan Lee drawing “really bodacious tatas on Aunt May” is not only unfunny but also quite impossible. As anyone who has read a comic book within the last, say, 50 YEARS knows, Stan Lee is a WRITER, not an artist. 2. As far as Ann Coulter having some “reasonable and believable sounding quotes”, this person again proves her ignorance by not only misspelling Coulter’s name, but having no clue that Ann’s books routinely have hundreds upon hundreds of footnotes, sources, and bibliographical information. Of course you should believe her; she sources the shit out of her subject matter and fact-checks your ass. 3. The end of this poor review claims that the MSM “know(s) from experience that these guys can safely be ignored”, which has nothing to do with the last 15 years of constant struggle to ignore anything and everything they can involving shady behavior on the part of the Clintons.

Calling my ‘joke’ unfunny was kinda hurtful, and I don’t check the box beside deluded liberal when the census man comes to the door. I will concede that I wasn’t well versed in the facts and details surrounding some of the stuff about which I offered my opinion. It was the first time that I created a short blog post and then expanded it with several edits as I formed an opinion about the subject. If you read the post yesterday, you should look at it again to see if I added anything that you disagree with. My critic seems to think that, by saying negative things about critics of the Clintons, I was trying to defend them. I wasn’t. I really don’t like them. I don’t like the movie either.

I don’t know if this movie is going to stay up on Google. I haven’t watched it yet, but I did watch an excerpt of it on YouTube a few months ago. Basically it is some small time movers and shakers that got schmoozed and later spurned by the Clintons. One of them is Spiderman creator Stan Lee. Since these are Hollywood types, they have one recourse that the Clintons may have failed to consider when they wrote them off. They made a movie.

I always thought Stan Lee was a little weird because he sometimes drew really bodacious tatas on Aunt May. Maybe I was a little weird for noticing. Maybe I am more than a little weird for remembering it for a couple of decades and then blogging about it. Anyway, the Clintons aren’t very nice.

edit: I have watched 26 minutes of the 90 minute movie. It is pretty unrelenting and illuminating. It paints a much broader picture than I had anticipated. One of the tarriest brushes is wielded by none other than Anne (shudder) Coulter, who benefits from a skillful editor in this movie. Someone who honestly believes that the enemy of their enemy is their friend cherry picked a number of reasonable and believable sounding quotes from the awful harpy. I had to stop watching after 26 minutes, if I can bring myself to watch more, I will update again.

2nd edit: I watched another few seconds of the movie, but I was asked to pause it. I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a key Clinton basher known as Peter Paul. This man is a convicted criminal and has repeatedly committed fraud in various ways, shapes and forms. If he is the driving force behind this movie, I don’t think it deserves that much attention. Maybe the Clintons are guilty of carrying out character assassination on their enemies, but Paul’s character has been dead man walking since the 70s.

Researchers in the Republic of Congo recently observed (and videotaped) two gorillas having sex in a face to face position. They were holding each other and looking one another in the eye. One scientist told TIME that they had not seen this behavior in 13 years of research. I am pretty sure he was talking about the gorillas.

They held hands afterward.

I am actually curious about the possibility that the gorillas observed this particular behavior in the researchers or other nearby humans at some point. TIME did not ask.

Bloggers have begun to use tools that add an outgoing link to the last post made by commentators. I think this is a really neat way to encourage dialog. I went looking for the Wordpress plugin that does this and found this. I am too lazy to gear this up today, but it’s something that I am planning to add.

The title of this post looks quite nifty with the default preamble to the link.