Bungee Bachelor!

The poor guy.  His "friends" convince him that marriage is like a blind bungee jump.  So, to prepare him for that metaphor, it just makes sense to do that really:  A blinded bungee jump into a ravine.

And that's what he thinks he's doing.  It takes him awhile to be willing to give it a shot.



I guess this is a tradition in Norway.  A little odd....
But then, we have dealt with the oddity of Norway before in this space, in the butter crisis.

Hell, Meet Handbasket

Why are things so bad in the U.S.?  This is a theory I had NOT heard before.

The decline of the US is that people go to Wal-Mart wearing saggy-butt PJs!

With thanks to Jeff...

President to Sign Indefinite Detention Bill

He is going to sign the thing.

He is not capable of telling the truth, because he literally cannot tell true statements from falsehoods. His speeches are just applause lines strung together.

I give you... George Hussein Busbama!

UPDATE: My friend Stefan D has this quip, on FB--"Well it's not like the detention is forever...it's just indefinite. I would think the detainees would enjoy the guessing..."Will I get out tomorrow?" Every day is like Christmas Eve."

Nando's Chicken Commercial

I think this commercial is pretty funny....

Which almost certainly means it is inappropriate.  Does it make you HUNGRY?

scenes from a marriage

The end of a bromance

My favorite basketball player for a long time was Shaquille O'Neil. Then I read this blogpost (which I got from Shaq's twitter account) on "10 Fun Facts about Shaquille."

Consider #4: "My best NBA moment was scoring 61 points in a game against the LA Clippers."

This from a man with 3 rings and 2 finals MVPs? Really? Going Barry Switzer on the Clips is the highlight of your career? Not winning a title in Miami after getting run out of LA?

It also appears that one of us does not know what Top Ramen is.

Chris Dodd Must Go

In which I rant about Chris Dodd. I don't really admire the senior senator from CT very much.

The cool thing is that Michael Moore reams Dodd a new one in Capitalism: A Love Story. Makes it worth watching the movie. (Barney Frank, the rankest Dem on House Finance, also gets pounded by Mr. Moore).

There were no bogus rules like this in 1880!

Good Question!

Q: how many education professors does it take to run an acceptable school?

A: more than Stanford has, apparently!



hat tip to Malcolm.

Wow, we really have our work cut out for us

The big news in Norman is that Tommy Mason-Griffin Esq. a 5' 9" freshman basketball player who was named 3rd team all big 12 is quitting school to go pro.

Really.

He announced it on his facebook page as follows:

"on a mission...its a official dat i am leavin skool and enterin draft so if yue see me and ask me y i aint doin anotha yr yue mite get ignored."

People, can I get an LOL?

Here is a further analysis, and here is another.

After a promising start, Jeff Capel's program appears to be in total free-fall, and we educators appear to be badly failing at our jobs (don't blame me, I only teach grad classes).

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

"For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large have tended to think about empires in such cyclical and gradual terms... Yet it is possible that this whole conceptual framework is, in fact, flawed... Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components ... somewhere between order and disorder -- on 'the edge of chaos'...A very small trigger can set off a 'phase transition' from a benign equilibrium to a crisis...Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of 'fat tail' events -- the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as 'the narrative fallacy': the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc...Perhaps the most famous story of imperial decline is that of ancient Rome...But what if fourth-century Rome was simply functioning normally as a complex adaptive system, with political strife, barbarian migration, and imperial rivalry all just integral features of late antiquity? Through this lens, Rome's fall was sudden and dramatic -- just as one would expect when such a system goes critical...What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters.

Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century -- inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle -- shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe...Other great empires have suffered comparably swift collapses...Ming China was the world's most sophisticated civilization by almost any measure...The transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade. In much the same way, the Bourbon monarchy in France passed from triumph to terror with astonishing rapidity...The sun set on the British Empire almost as suddenly...the United Kingdom's age of hegemony was effectively over less than a dozen years after its victories over Germany and Japan. The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union...In imperial crises, it is not the material underpinnings of power that really matter but expectations about future power."


[Niall Ferguson, Foreign Affars, ATSRTWT] [LA Times excerpt]

(Nod to Kevin L, who ill NEVER fall)

Roasted Euro-Weenie

"You have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clark."

Nobody can ream you a new one like a Brit MP. Even a Brit MEP.

Well played, sir.

(Thanks to Tommy the Gotta Be Brit)

Cheeky Greekys

This is so great in so many ways. Thank you Mr. Reuters!

Greek opposition lawmakers said on Thursday that Germans should pay reparations for their World War Two occupation of Greece before criticising the country over its yawning fiscal deficits.

"How does Germany have the cheek to denounce us over our finances when it has still not paid compensation for Greece's war victims?" Margaritis Tzimas, of the main opposition New Democracy party, told parliament. "There are still Greeks weeping for their lost brothers".

So, I am sure you don't need any help in breaking this down, but seriously, WTF???

Greek public finances are shot because of the lost interest on German reparations? 

When caught with both hands in the cookie jar, the first thing that occurs to you is to try and play the Nazi card? 

In 2010?

But the very best part of all this is that Germany HAS ALREADY PAID REPARATIONS to Greece!

OMFG!

From the same article:

In 1960, Germany paid Greece about 115 million deutschemarks to compensate victims of Nazi persecution.

Oh, Greece, is there anything you won't stoop to?

Hat tip to RSP

 

Some Links: Do the Hoaxie-Pokesie

Some links. No rhyme, no reason, but some links.

1. Dean Smith wants terminal groin. His neighbor, John Edwards, already has one.

2. A remarkably successful hoax, and my attempt to put the hammer down (P. 3). But I have to give the OP credit: it worked beyond all expectations. Well done, lad(dette).

3. "Do employers discriminate by gender? A field experiment in female-dominated
occupations," Alison Booth & Andrew Leigh, Economics Letters, forthcoming. Abstract: We test for gender discrimination by sending fake CVs to apply for entry-level jobs. Female candidates are more likely to receive a callback, with the difference being largest in occupations that are more female-dominated.

Chin Music

From some dude allegedly named Glenn Thrush:

Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) is retiring, but he's not the retiring type, ridiculing congressional job creation efforts on "The Early Show."

"If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months," Bayh said.

A senior House Democratic aide:

“It is hard to stomach lectures from Sen. Bayh on Jobs. For most Americans, if they were as unproductive in their jobs as Bayh has been in his, they wouldn’t have the luxury of quitting — they would be fired.”

Awesome! Can I get a Kaboom?
 

another one bites the dust

Man, people. Democratic politicians are, how shall I put this politely, PUSSWEILLERS!!

Evan Bayh is the latest to announce that he won't face the voters this fall.

Will the last Demo pol left please turn out the lights?

While I think it's very funny how little fight appears left in the Dems, please don't think I am pleased about the possible return of the Republicans. Heaven forfend. I am kind of a "pox on both your houses" guy. As is well documented in this blog, I love gridlock!

  

Rowland S. Howard has died!

People it has been a very bad week for the music world. On the heels of Vic Chesnutt, Rowland Howard has died of liver cancer.

I am a huge Rowland S. Howard fan. He was a member of The Birthday Party, the incredible, seminal Aussie punk/garage/noise/grunge band.

Beyond that, I loved These Immortal Souls, which I took to mainly to be a solo project and his collaboration with another one of my now dead heros, Nikki Sudden.

Man, Nikki Sudden, Epic Soundtracks, and now Rowland Howard are all dead.

YIKES!!

Just too obvious

Tiger Woods was named the PGA tour's "Playa of the Year"! 

Natch, who else could match his "record"?

ps. if you are looking for a Christmas present for Tiger, here is a good suggestion.