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January 14, 2009

Silent Night, Holy Shit!

blairmas08.jpgIt's here! It's here; it's here; it's here! It's finally goddamn here! OK, technically, it's here, but no matter where you stick it, it's still Lisa "Blair" Whelchel's Cauble Family Christmas Letter 2008!!!
You can read the whole thing yourself or you can just read my summary, below. I guess you could both, but that really seems like overkill.

[Note: Blair's Xmas letter's always seem to start the same way, with "Sorry this is so late but..." Here's here 2007 letter]

Blair kicks things off by announcing that she's in the second year of her "one-year Sabbatical from writing". No, I'm not sure why she capitalized sabbatical. Maybe it has something to do with the etymology of the word. Or maybe she was DWI - Drunk and Writing Incoherently - who knows? Blair then goes on to say that she wrote thirteen books in six years. She doesn't say how many books she read during that period, so I'm going to guess negative four. Apparently, Fundie books aren't selling as well as they were during the End Times. In fact, the entire Fundie economy seems to be in a tailspin.

Since Blair is no longer a writer, she turns the reins of the letter over to her immediate family: sadness ensues.
Steve pens a crappy sixty-five words about how much 2008 sucked balls, and how he's positive that the ancient, invisible god of a desert people will bail his sorry ass out in '09.

Tucker got kicked out of college. He deftly explains the abrupt end to his promising academic career thus: "I really don't like to study at all. Or take tests. Or show up to class. Or even just get out of bed until the PM." I'm pretty sure that at least one of those thirteen books Blair fired off in the past six years was a How To book about homeschooling. Blair, sweetie, don't inoculate the village until you cure the fever at home.

Haven is depressed; which is putting it mildly. A more accurate phrase would be that she's one step away from goin' Emo.

Clancy is going to Africa; I don't know why, but I really hope it involves an episode of MTV's Exiled. "...don't worry you'll get the donation letter in the mail soon", Clancy slyly tosses in. Fuck that. I chipped in $228 for Tucker's college fund only to just now learn that it went to beer bongs and midget porn.

The only family member we don't hear from is Donut, the Whelchel/Warner/Cauble family dog. Then again, if you were named Donut and shared a house with Blair, you'd keep a low profile too.

PS. My good friend Elizabeth Fiend pointed out that, in the previous post, I should've identified her as a "gonzo health and environmental activist". She is now, hereby, identified!

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 08:15 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 12, 2009

Meme at Work

dcurves.jpgRebecca at Skepchick tagged me (along with five other bloggers/plumbers) with a sort of meme experiment/chain letter thingy. To play along all I needed to do, basically, was complete the following checklist:

One: Link to the person who tagged me: DONE

Two: Post the rules: DONE

Three: Write six random things about yourself. DONE (see below)

1. I fell into an open cesspool, and nearly drowned, at the age of three
2. From approximately the age of five until I was eight, I was terrified of nuns
3. My paternal grandmother was blind
4. I have terrible handwriting
5. Both of my sisters are much smarter than I am
6. Although I swear to Darwin that the above statements are true, I have told the following lies about my past: I went to University in England. I played Lee Harvey Oswald in an episode of Dangerous Curves. I was kicked out of a "Gifted students" program for making a crude joke (Apart from a gift for stretching the truth, I was far from ever being considered a "gifted" student).

Four. Tag six people. DONE (See below)

Yikes (egad, and gadzooks), this was tough one. I didn't want this virus to just make its rounds among the scientific and skeptical communities. No, I needed to make like Typhoid Mary and see how many people from different walks of life I could infect. So, after much internal debate, I went with Eleanor "The smartest person on The McLaughlin Group" Cliff , Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker, comedic terrorists Tim and Eric, The Dalai Lama, and Elizabeth Fiend

Five. Inform the tagees and the person who tagged me: DONE

Speaking of Skepchick, Jeff Penalty recently had a great post on the site about when the worlds of Creationism and Pee Wee Herman collide

PS. Check out the first comment - sweet reductionist Jeebuz

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:22 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 10, 2009

Editions of you

I'm off the Brian Hickey benefit...here's some Roxy Music

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 06:19 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 08, 2009

Gaza Strip Mall

Sure, he's not actually a plumber, nor is his name really "Joe", but I'm hard pressed to think of another human being (and I'm using that term in its broadest possible sense) who has managed to hit the snooze button on their fifteen minutes of fame more times than Sam "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher.

Today it was announced that Sam/Joe is on his way to Gaza.

"Being a Christian I'm pretty well protected by God I believe" - Joe the Target

* Or "plummer" as it was spelled on far too many crudely hand-lettered signs during the election)

Here's Joe clearly explaining that Welfare isn't socialism because he benefited from it.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 06:40 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 07, 2009

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Charlie "Smokeless Dick Cheese" Daniels has posted a new piece titled "Global Hypocrisy". Here's a small taste:


Hamas has been raining Katyusha rockets down on Israel, not military targets but civilians, and as far as the United Nations and the governments of most it's [sic] members are concerned, Israel should just sit there and do nothing while it's [sic] citizens are maimed and killed by their avowed blood enemies.
…

What would you do if the guy a couple of blocks down the street was taking a high-powered rifle and randomly shooting at your house or in your backyard where your children were playing?

First of all, Chartard, I live in the Mid-Atlantic States where real men don't need high-powered rifles to destroy their neighbors; we can crush a man's soul with a single biting remark. Once, while visiting The Art Museum, I actually overheard a man say "That looks like a Lautrec". So I walked up behind him, cleared my throat and loudly said, "I think you mean a Toulouse-Lautrec. His full name was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec."

Overcome with shame-by-association, the man's wife and children burst into uncontrollable weeping. The man then ran from the museum and hurled himself under the wheels of a passing SEPTA bus. His dying words were "I feel like such a Charlie Daniels."

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:28 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 06, 2009

Cause and Reject

Yesterday, I was getting some enjoyment (See Enjoyment in Hell. Enjoyment in Hhhhhheeeeeelllllllllllllllll) out of mocking Sheryl Crow's attempt to save our planet by designing reusable shoplifting bags for Whole Foods when it dawned on me that, during the course of the day, I do absolutely nothing to benefit a single living organism. Generally, I'm OK with that, but lately I've begun to get the feeling that I should be doing more (or at least something) to make the world a better place.

Let me make this clear: I don't necessarily feel a burning desire to help people – I just want to feel better about myself. And if my feeling better about myself results in someone else's life being a little less crappy, then it's all the better.

At this point, I realized that I needed a Cause. But which Cause? The Environment? To be honest, I'm really not that big on saving the Earth. This is probably because I don't have any (American) children and most of children I know seem perfectly capable of fending for themselves in the nightmarish Mad Max-esque future.

What about Animal Rights? Well, what about them? When did the animal kingdom become a constitution monarchy? When the animals draft a Bill of Rights, I'll support it. Untli then, they're on their own. The same thing goes for children (See above. And see Enjoyment in Hell. Enjoyment in Hhhhhheeeeeelllllllllllllllll).

OK, I'd narrowed down my Cause to something involving adult humans. This is what I've settled on.


Enjoyment in Hell

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 07:12 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 05, 2009

Ten Gallon Asshole

As you might remember, a few days back I attempted to alert as many Free Thinkin' bloggers as I possibly could to Charlie Daniels magnum opus of redneck retardation "He Must Be a Miserable Man". I mentioned that the mighty PZ Myer was benevolent enough to pitch in, but what I didn't know was that the story would grow legs.

The wonderful women of Skepchick posted about it under the terrific heading of Fundie Country Music Grandpa Hates You

Other bloggers who were equally outraged by CD's digital dumbness included Lies.com, Musings from the Coast, Incertus, Better Than Faith, and Crutch of the Weak


By today, even the Drudge Report had picked up on the story.

We're not done with Charlie Daniels yet, gentle readers. I'm hoping to get a chance to explore ideological inbreeding this week.

In the meantime, please enjoy this thoughtfull piece I posted earlier on the Clog

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 08:42 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

January 03, 2009

The Night Climbers

narescraig.jpgIt's one of the few things that are universally true for all of us, that there are things out there that we love: we just don't know that they exist yet. Case in point, a few weeks ago I was checking out the news items posted on The Museum of Hoaxes when I noticed a piece about a group of Cambridge pranksters who placed (Son of ) Santa hats atop some spires that had previously been perceived to be un-scalable.

The story included a link to the online version of The Night Climbers of Cambridge written in 1937 by the pseudonymous "Whipplesnaith". I followed the link and fell in love.

The Night Climbers were a group of fearless students who would sneak out of their dormitories late at night and scramble up Cambridge's medieval edifices. The Night Climbers of Cambridge was written as a How To guide for scaling different buildings and serves as a fascinating insight into the minds of England's pre-WWII upper class - and I mean that in good way: the books is filled with wonderful droll humor like this:

"As you pass round each pillar, the whole of your body except your hands and feet are over black emptiness. Your feet are on slabs of stone sloping downwards and outwards at an angle of about thirty-five degrees to the horizontal, your fingers and elbows making the most of a friction-hold against a vertical pillar, and the ground is precisely one hundred feet directly below you.

If you slip, you will still have three seconds to live."

I can't explain why, maybe I'm being nostalgic for my college days, but I love the idea of shimmying up an old building - and I'm scared shitless of heights. The other day I was passing by the Henry Charles Lea Library and I thought to myself "I bet I could climb that mutha".

So awesome is the em>The Night Climbers of Cambridge that it not only inspired a sequel, written in the Sixties, titled Cambridge Night Climbing, but - as we've seen from the Santa hats, it still serves as a handbook for lunatics around the world.

By the way, Nares Craig, pictured above standing atop St. John's College, is still going strong at 91.

Bonus links:

To get an idea of what these building look like in the daytime, click here.

To find out about the current state of Night Climbing, click here

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 09:56 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 02, 2009

He Must Be a Miserable Sack of Shit

asshatcd.gifOK; it's not like we needed any further evidence that Charlie Daniels rides on the short, yellow tour bus, and yet Ms. Daniels has been kind enough to provide us with such evidence. Feast your eyes upon the latest post at the Soapbox: He Must Be a Miserable Man

I was so pissed off by this family-sized order of assholery with a side of moron fries that I fired off a quick email to just about every freethinking blogger I could freely think of. Praise Jeebuz, the good Prof. PZ Myers himself was kind enough to mention it on Pharyngula. This is damn good thing, since I'm so pissed by Charlie's crazy littlr rant that all I can think to do at this moment is to invite Charlie to go fuck himself in his eye socket with his fiddle.

I'm going to take tonight and make a valiant attempt at calming down. Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow night with a post about something I love: night climbing.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 08:11 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)