Every month (almost, anyway) I post a video compilation of people failing, just for fun.
A pattern immediately emerges each month. Most people caught on camera doing stupid things are doing so while skateboarding, riding a bike or performing an attempted physical derring do.
Hey guys (and it's almost always guys), don't you know that the most common last words uttered by mankind are "Hey, watch this"
Maybe you can write me off as a coward for not ever doing strange and wild tricks on a skateboard or bike. But I'm also sitting here blissfully free of broken bones and road rash. Sometimes it pays to be a wimp, I guess.
In any event, now is the time to feel superior by watching this clip of various people almost surely much dumber than you are.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
Torture the Enemy With This Video!
I'm opposed to torture, but if we were to start violating the Geneva Convention big time and tormenting people to death, I've found the perfect instrument to do it.
It's got all the elements to send people off the deep end. Weird noises, a squeaky singing voice, a bad ukelele, terrible production values, stupidity, a person who thinks she's a celebrity and is not, and especially, whackadoodle politics. Watch the video below as long as you can to see how much endurance you have.
So, courtesy of the boingboing.net, here is (drum roll.....) Victoria Jackson singing about the communist in the White House!!!!
It's got all the elements to send people off the deep end. Weird noises, a squeaky singing voice, a bad ukelele, terrible production values, stupidity, a person who thinks she's a celebrity and is not, and especially, whackadoodle politics. Watch the video below as long as you can to see how much endurance you have.
So, courtesy of the boingboing.net, here is (drum roll.....) Victoria Jackson singing about the communist in the White House!!!!
Saturday, September 1, 2012
The Gays are Causing Horrible Hurricanes!!
The gays did it. Again.
That awful Hurricane Isaac which caused so much damage on the Gulf Coast, was all the fault of gay people, at least according to some whackadoodle "religious" pundits.
You see, New Orleans is holding it's "Southern Decadence" gay festival this weekend. The city was also hosting the yearly event back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina stopped it when it practically leveled the Crescent City.
The "logic" is that the hurricanes are God's way of punishing New Orleans for putting up with those sinful gays.
Never mind that Southern Decadence is largely held in the New Orleans French Quarter, which mostly escaped damage from Isaac. And I looked at Entergy's Web site today. They're the big power company down there in Louisiana. Almost the whole area around New Orleans had no electricity, but the lights were on and the refrigerators were humming quite nicely in the French Quarter, thank you very much.
And from what I understand, Southern Decadence will go on this weekend, as scheduled. If God tried to stop the event, he's being a bit ineffectual, don't you think?
If God really wanted to punish "the gays" why did he cause such awful flooding in Plaquemines Parish and Slidell and other Louisiana cities and towns? After all, the people from those communities were just trying to live their lives. I'm sure they have no influence over Southern Decadence. Why punish them?
Stephen Colbert actually had the best "explanation" as to why hurricanes happen and why gay people cause them. Said he: "Hurricanes form from rising moisture created by hot steamy man action aboard a gay Caribbean cruise. When that sin gets high enough it makes the angels cry and those tears fall to earth in the form of massive precipitation because homosexuals are a vital part of the water cycle." That's why the gay symbol is a rainbow!"
I'm sure Colbert's thesis is coming to a fundamentalist science school curriculum soon.
That awful Hurricane Isaac which caused so much damage on the Gulf Coast, was all the fault of gay people, at least according to some whackadoodle "religious" pundits.
You see, New Orleans is holding it's "Southern Decadence" gay festival this weekend. The city was also hosting the yearly event back in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina stopped it when it practically leveled the Crescent City.
The "logic" is that the hurricanes are God's way of punishing New Orleans for putting up with those sinful gays.
Never mind that Southern Decadence is largely held in the New Orleans French Quarter, which mostly escaped damage from Isaac. And I looked at Entergy's Web site today. They're the big power company down there in Louisiana. Almost the whole area around New Orleans had no electricity, but the lights were on and the refrigerators were humming quite nicely in the French Quarter, thank you very much.
And from what I understand, Southern Decadence will go on this weekend, as scheduled. If God tried to stop the event, he's being a bit ineffectual, don't you think?
If God really wanted to punish "the gays" why did he cause such awful flooding in Plaquemines Parish and Slidell and other Louisiana cities and towns? After all, the people from those communities were just trying to live their lives. I'm sure they have no influence over Southern Decadence. Why punish them?
Stephen Colbert actually had the best "explanation" as to why hurricanes happen and why gay people cause them. Said he: "Hurricanes form from rising moisture created by hot steamy man action aboard a gay Caribbean cruise. When that sin gets high enough it makes the angels cry and those tears fall to earth in the form of massive precipitation because homosexuals are a vital part of the water cycle." That's why the gay symbol is a rainbow!"
I'm sure Colbert's thesis is coming to a fundamentalist science school curriculum soon.
Friday, August 31, 2012
"Once in a Blue Moon" Comes Tonight
I don't think it will actually look blue. It's not made of blue cheese, after all. Actually, the moon often looks blue, especially on frigid winter nights when it glows a bitter cold blue light.
The next blue moon is scheduled for July 31, 2015, so it will be awhile before we see it again.
Speaking of the moon, apropos of nothing, why is there the following glitch in the English language? Why can we have sunny days, but never moony nights? Why must evenings be so formal, as in moonlit. If it's clear tonight, it will be moony in my book. Deal with it.
Seems that all my associations with the term "blue moon" no matter how tangential, are positive, so I'm looking forward to tonight's blue moon. Maybe I'll buy some Blue Moon beer, which I like, to accompany my lunar musings.
The blue moon gives me an excuse to dredge up The Gong Show, of all things. Unrelated to a blue moon you say?
But of course it is!! There was a 1979 episode of The Gong Show featuring contestants called "Daddy-O" singing "Blue Moon." Bonus: It's a song I really like. The band is actually quite good, even if the show was the drug fueled, hazy mess we all know and love.
I wonder what pharmeceuticals host Chuck Barris was on. It really looked like the drugs knocked him for a loop most nights. And what did J.P. Morgan ever do besides judge on the Gong Show?
The Gong Show was ahead of its time, let me tell you. After all, it's basically the same format as "America's Got Talent." Though it seems AGT's host, Nick Cannon, does not appear to abuse drugs, like Barris might have.
See what the blue moon is doing to me? It's making me loony. So I'll stop now, and let you watch that brief, wonderful episode of the Gong Show, just for old time's sake. :
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Stupid Hurricane Follies
Another hurricane has hit, Isaac this time, and we've endured the usual hurricane tradition: Reporters standing out in the worst of the storm, struggling to stay on their feet amid the wind and rain.
Why, oh why do they do that? Yes, we know it's windy. It's a hurricane, for crissakes! Your cameras are showing us the swaying trees, the damaged buildings, the flooded streets. Struggling to keep your nifty Eyewitness News rain slickers on as you yell unintelligbly into a rainsoaked, shorted out mike doesn't add anything to the report.
Except, that is, for the comic relief when a reporter is tossed by the wind down the street like a discarded, crumbled up piece of paper or your $1 milllion TV news truck gets pushed by the flood into the refreshing waters of Lake Pontchartrain
We can't hear what you're saying. The wind is drowning out the sound, and your struggle to stand up in the gale isn't conducive to sharing information. What we hear is "Wind gurgle gurgle picked up, grumble gurlg oomph, ugh, warned to evacua...., oooh, ugh, huh, damage to gurgle ah! ungh tropical oooohhh."
Not exactly enlightening, is it?
Reporters struggling out in the wind during a hurricane have become a cliche. Can't you think of anything more creative to do when covering the storm? I didn't go swimming in the raging Mad River in Vermont while reporting on Hurricane Irene last August. I just talked to victims to get their story. And nobody complained that I didn't float through somebody's ruined house to report the news.
Remember, it's not about the reporter. It's about the real people affected by storm. Do your job and stop showboating in the gale.
Look, I love weather porn as much as the next guy. Hell, I film it when I get a chance, from the dry confines of my truck or a building, thanks. Us TV viewers expect and want to watch the sad videos of houses ripping apart in the wind, floodwaters washing through city streets and century old trees toppled into useless heaps.
But while you're showing us the destruction, calmly, out of the wind, please, tell us if anybody has been hurt, how bad the damage is, where the hurricane is going, how storm victims are getting aid, and how we can help.
While we're all enjoying the storm on TV, why not commit some real journalism for a change?
Here's a video to prove my point:
 |
| NBC's Al Roker and the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore struggle with Hurricane Isaac in New Orleans. Live! On the Air!!! |
Why, oh why do they do that? Yes, we know it's windy. It's a hurricane, for crissakes! Your cameras are showing us the swaying trees, the damaged buildings, the flooded streets. Struggling to keep your nifty Eyewitness News rain slickers on as you yell unintelligbly into a rainsoaked, shorted out mike doesn't add anything to the report.
Except, that is, for the comic relief when a reporter is tossed by the wind down the street like a discarded, crumbled up piece of paper or your $1 milllion TV news truck gets pushed by the flood into the refreshing waters of Lake Pontchartrain
We can't hear what you're saying. The wind is drowning out the sound, and your struggle to stand up in the gale isn't conducive to sharing information. What we hear is "Wind gurgle gurgle picked up, grumble gurlg oomph, ugh, warned to evacua...., oooh, ugh, huh, damage to gurgle ah! ungh tropical oooohhh."
Not exactly enlightening, is it?
Reporters struggling out in the wind during a hurricane have become a cliche. Can't you think of anything more creative to do when covering the storm? I didn't go swimming in the raging Mad River in Vermont while reporting on Hurricane Irene last August. I just talked to victims to get their story. And nobody complained that I didn't float through somebody's ruined house to report the news.
Remember, it's not about the reporter. It's about the real people affected by storm. Do your job and stop showboating in the gale.
Look, I love weather porn as much as the next guy. Hell, I film it when I get a chance, from the dry confines of my truck or a building, thanks. Us TV viewers expect and want to watch the sad videos of houses ripping apart in the wind, floodwaters washing through city streets and century old trees toppled into useless heaps.
But while you're showing us the destruction, calmly, out of the wind, please, tell us if anybody has been hurt, how bad the damage is, where the hurricane is going, how storm victims are getting aid, and how we can help.
While we're all enjoying the storm on TV, why not commit some real journalism for a change?
Here's a video to prove my point:
Flower Season Fades Fast
It's cool this morning here in St. Albans, Vermont, cooler than it's been since early June. Fall is coming. The lawn is littered with a few colored leaves, the first scouts of an army of foliage that will drop onto the yard in the coming weeks.
Flower season is waning fast, too. Zinnias are still colorful at the edge of the vegetable garden. Sedum is turning pink. There's black eyed susans blooming, too. But the flowering season in the yard has largely passed.
It's time to start planning next spring and summer. I'll figure out how to add more color to the gardens so that in subsequent warm seasons, I can enjoy something that isn't just bland lawn.
I've been carving out perennial beds for three years now. Every summer, there's a bit less lawn, a bit more flowers. This fall, I'll probably make the yard look even more like a construction site, as I remove sod, prepare dirt, and wait until spring when I can happily plant as many more perennials as I can.
Yup, I'm always looking forward to more gardening. Even if it means waiting through the upcoming long months of Vermont cold and snow to get there.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy whatever flowers last into the fall. And dream of next spring.
Flower season is waning fast, too. Zinnias are still colorful at the edge of the vegetable garden. Sedum is turning pink. There's black eyed susans blooming, too. But the flowering season in the yard has largely passed.
It's time to start planning next spring and summer. I'll figure out how to add more color to the gardens so that in subsequent warm seasons, I can enjoy something that isn't just bland lawn.
I've been carving out perennial beds for three years now. Every summer, there's a bit less lawn, a bit more flowers. This fall, I'll probably make the yard look even more like a construction site, as I remove sod, prepare dirt, and wait until spring when I can happily plant as many more perennials as I can.
Yup, I'm always looking forward to more gardening. Even if it means waiting through the upcoming long months of Vermont cold and snow to get there.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy whatever flowers last into the fall. And dream of next spring.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Vermont Sadness A Year After Irene
It's been a year since Hurricane Irene trashed Vermont. In just a day, hundreds of homes drowned in floods that came on so suddenly that some people didn't have time to flee. Businesses drowned, or simply washed away that Sunday.
Big chunks of Vermont's road network fragmented into short stretches of pavement interspersed with yawning canyons where culverts and bridges had been the day before.
At least five Vermonters died in Irene's onslaught on August 28, 2011. Perhaps only the Great Flood of 1927 was a worse disaster for the Green Mountain State.
The post-Irene cleanup went fast. Armies of volunteers swarmed swamped neighborhoods, doing their best to put the pieces back together. The state's road crews fixed the roads in a flash. Most were paved and smooth by the fall foliage tourism season, which came only a little over a month after Irene.
Now, if you drive through the towns hit hardest by Irene, you could almost believe the disaster never happened.
What were mud caked streets last August are tidy lanes, with perfect flowers in perfect planters on perfect sidewalks in front of perfect gift shops which greet, well, imperfect but still very welcomed tourists.
Restaurants are open and look like they're thriving. Houses have been repaired. Fresh white paint gleams on clapboards. Homeowners have long since finished cleaning muck from the basement and gutting soggy rooms. They are now busy tending neatly trimmed lawns and foisting bumper crops of zucchini from their gardens onto their neighbors.
Except.
It's jarring when you turn a corner and see it. The wreckage of the epic flood. It's still there in spots. A sagging tilted houses amid a sea of gravel, left just as they were the minute the water receded after the rains of August 28, 2011 ended. Twisted metal knotted around dead trees, representing what was once somebody's mobile home. A shed deposited upside down in the middle of a field.
These scenes are even more jarring than they were right after the storm because they seem so out of place amid the newly repaired villages and streets.
You wonder why the wreckage is still there.
And you know, as anyone opening the pages of Vermont's Burlington Free Press this morning can attest, the disaster continues.
In Stockbridge, an old farmhouse still lies tilted and warped in a ditch where the rushing waters of Irene deposited it. The house became a widely photographed iconic image of Vermont's Irene disaster. The roofline of the house remains perfectly even. The shades in the unbroken second floor windows are closed, as if the occupant in the house has decided to take an afternoon nap. But the bottom of the house is bowed out,, and the whole structure tilts precariously, as if trying to outdo the Tower of Pisa.
Poignant signs are still attached to some wrecked properties. "Please keep out. Irene already robbed us" is spray painted on a boarded up house window near Plymouth, Vermont. The scrawl hints at creepy opportunists who used a person's tragedy to steal from them and just make things worse.
Another sign invited people to take pictures of the wreckage. Maybe that would help them gain attention, and maybe help the rebuild. A year after the storm, they so far haven't rebuilt.
Another hurricane is bearing down on the United States as I write this. New Orleans, again. It's seven years since Katrina wrecked New Orleans and they still haven't fully recovered.
Nobody deserves a disaster, to lose their homes, their livlihood, their sense of place. Let's hope that if it happens, nobody stays in limbo for a long time afterwards, like victims of Katrina, or a few unlucky people in Vermont who were blindsided by an ugly rainstorm named Irene.
 |
| This mobile home near Saxtons River, Vt. lies in ruins in August, 2012, a year after Irene. |
Big chunks of Vermont's road network fragmented into short stretches of pavement interspersed with yawning canyons where culverts and bridges had been the day before.
At least five Vermonters died in Irene's onslaught on August 28, 2011. Perhaps only the Great Flood of 1927 was a worse disaster for the Green Mountain State.
The post-Irene cleanup went fast. Armies of volunteers swarmed swamped neighborhoods, doing their best to put the pieces back together. The state's road crews fixed the roads in a flash. Most were paved and smooth by the fall foliage tourism season, which came only a little over a month after Irene.
Now, if you drive through the towns hit hardest by Irene, you could almost believe the disaster never happened.
 |
| A sad sign on a flood damaged house near Plymouth, Vermont in a photo taken about a year after Hurricane Irene wrecked the home. |
What were mud caked streets last August are tidy lanes, with perfect flowers in perfect planters on perfect sidewalks in front of perfect gift shops which greet, well, imperfect but still very welcomed tourists.
Restaurants are open and look like they're thriving. Houses have been repaired. Fresh white paint gleams on clapboards. Homeowners have long since finished cleaning muck from the basement and gutting soggy rooms. They are now busy tending neatly trimmed lawns and foisting bumper crops of zucchini from their gardens onto their neighbors.
Except.
 |
| This sign was still up at a wrecked farmstand near Plymouth, Vermont in August, 2012, nearly a year after Irene. |
It's jarring when you turn a corner and see it. The wreckage of the epic flood. It's still there in spots. A sagging tilted houses amid a sea of gravel, left just as they were the minute the water receded after the rains of August 28, 2011 ended. Twisted metal knotted around dead trees, representing what was once somebody's mobile home. A shed deposited upside down in the middle of a field.
These scenes are even more jarring than they were right after the storm because they seem so out of place amid the newly repaired villages and streets.
You wonder why the wreckage is still there.
And you know, as anyone opening the pages of Vermont's Burlington Free Press this morning can attest, the disaster continues.
In Stockbridge, an old farmhouse still lies tilted and warped in a ditch where the rushing waters of Irene deposited it. The house became a widely photographed iconic image of Vermont's Irene disaster. The roofline of the house remains perfectly even. The shades in the unbroken second floor windows are closed, as if the occupant in the house has decided to take an afternoon nap. But the bottom of the house is bowed out,, and the whole structure tilts precariously, as if trying to outdo the Tower of Pisa.
 |
| This house in Stockbridge, Vermont, became an iconic image after the Hurricane Irene disaster last year. This photo was taken two weeks ago, nearly a year after Irene. |
Poignant signs are still attached to some wrecked properties. "Please keep out. Irene already robbed us" is spray painted on a boarded up house window near Plymouth, Vermont. The scrawl hints at creepy opportunists who used a person's tragedy to steal from them and just make things worse.
Another sign invited people to take pictures of the wreckage. Maybe that would help them gain attention, and maybe help the rebuild. A year after the storm, they so far haven't rebuilt.
Another hurricane is bearing down on the United States as I write this. New Orleans, again. It's seven years since Katrina wrecked New Orleans and they still haven't fully recovered.
Nobody deserves a disaster, to lose their homes, their livlihood, their sense of place. Let's hope that if it happens, nobody stays in limbo for a long time afterwards, like victims of Katrina, or a few unlucky people in Vermont who were blindsided by an ugly rainstorm named Irene.
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