I used to have a “Best Of” set of links in the sidebar of this blog that listed what I thought were my best blog articles. The sidebars are a little crowded these days, but there’s a “Best Of” page.
It’s not complete — I still have a few more articles to add — but it should provide an hour or so of interesting procrastination. Enjoy!
[via Superfrankenstein] The mash-up the world’s been waiting for — Family Circus comics with captions taken from H.P. Lovecraft!
Congratulations to fellow blogger Maria “Adventures in Downtown Toronto” Davo on becoming a Canadian citizen today! From one immigrant to another, welcome!
Being a well-known blogger in Accordion City, Maria is probably the second best-known Mexican immigrant to Canada. The mantle of best-known Mexican-Canadian goes to “Ren”, from Ren and Stimpy, pictured below:
Now, let us all rise for the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem [1.9MB, MP3].
When public service announcements try too hard to be hip, this sort of train wreck is usually the result:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, a few thousand people are sacrificed in Manhattan to appease the angry god Grover. Luckily for me, I was in Boston…
Here’s something fascinating yet spooky: the newly-elected Polish government has opened its military archives from the days of the Warsaw Pact, which includes a 1979 scenario called “Seven Days to the River Rhine” based on the ridiculous assumption that NATO would be the aggressor in a nuclear exchange. Here’s a map that outlines the scenario…
Radek Sikorsky, the Polish defence minister, displayed a map of USSR strikes which shows a barrage of Soviet multi-megaton nuclear strikes on key river lines, including the Rhine and the Meuse, and a Nato counter strike with smaller more accurate nuclear warheads on the Vistula as it runs through Poland.
The Nato strikes are supposed to have been mounted to interdict the movement of Soviet reinforcements from Russia to the battle front.
The whole scheme, codenamed Seven Days to the River Rhine, is predicated on the idea that Nato would be the aggressor and that the Warsaw Pact, under Soviet control, would respond only in self-defence.
Yeah. Right.
Sikorsky didn’t consult with Moscow before opening the archive, which is sure to ruffle some feathers in Russia. In an article in The Independent, who covered the event in the sensationalistically-titled Soviet Plans to Annihilate Europe Revealed, Sikorsky is quoted as saying:
“We need to know about our past. Historians have the right to know the history of the 20th century. If people did some things they were not proud of, that will be an education for them too.
I think it is very important for a democracy for the citizens to know who was who, who was the hero and who was the villain. On that basis we make democratic choices.
I think it is also important for the health of civic society for morality tales to be told: that it pays to be decent and that if you do things that did not serve the national interest, one day it will come out and you might be called to account.”