Month: September 2014

The headline is “Chuck E. Cheese shooting appears to be gang-related”.  It took place in Pico Rivera (in the Los Angeles area), and according to witnesses, it’s started when two men got into an argument.

Ayn Rand is big with teenagers because her writing resonates with their rebellion, with businesspeople because she’s largely about greed, and with techies because she appeals to their revenge fantasies.

As a teenager, I had a brief Ayn Rand phase for about six months (I’ll admit it, revenge fantasies), but between the empty philosophy, leaden writing, heroes who in other novels would be villains, and a fan base of made up of some of the worst people I’m aware of, my fandom turned out to be rather short-lived. Many high-schoolers go through the same phase, although she’s been enjoying a renaissance of those whose livelihoods rest on making the real world like high school but with more money: namely CEOs and Republicans.

Being a techie and living in America, some of the people I know and love are big fans of Ms. Rand, and I try to keep my fun-poking of them to a minimum. But I do poke fun at them, and by doing so on this blog, have managed to make money from it, and when they complain, I tell them to “go start your own damn wildly popular blog and espouse your own views, you bargain basement Wesley Mouches!”.

Click the photo to see the video.

All this is prologue to an amusing short featuring on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver who asks: How is Ayn Rand still a thing?

Originally posted on my Ello account. Click to see it on Ello.

Her facial expression is priceless. It could say:

• “Wow, I’ve wasted my life living up to others’ expectations.”
• “I’m not sure these new Dallas Cowboys uniforms are all that practical.”
• “Now I know how Microsoft felt after hiring Joey deVilla.”
• “I knew I should’nt have left mine at home!”

Boop!

I know that it’s difficult to get decent sleep the night before your wedding, but I’m going to try in order not to recreate this scene.

What do you do when you campaign on a lie and it gets exposed on a fact-check, but the lie turns out to sell well? If you’re pond scum or Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton (R), you double down on that lie:

In Arkansas last week, Rep. Tom Cotton (R), his party’s U.S. Senate nominee, was caught in one of the most brazen lies of the 2014 campaign season. The right-wing congressman claimed he voted against this year’s Farm Bill because President Obama “hijacked” it, “turned it into a food-stamp bill,” and added “billions more in spending.”

As a factual matter, literally none of this is even remotely true, and fact-checkers came down hard on such shameless dishonesty – all of which might matter if Cotton gave a darn. But as Peter Urbanreported yesterday, the congressman just doesn’t care about getting caught.

Rejecting criticism of its latest TV ad, Republican Senate hopeful Tom Cotton plans to keep running the “Farm Bill” message beyond its current ad buy.

“We’ve gotten such great feedback from farmers, taxpayers, and supporters that we’re actually going to increase the size of the ad buy,” said David Ray, a spokesman for the Cotton campaign.

For more, see:

• The Washington Post: Tom Cotton’s invented version of Farm Bill history
• Politico: Fact checking the Arkansas senate race 

I think I’d better just close with this classic alt-rock piece by MC 900 FT Jesus, Truth is Out of Style:

Thanks to Michelle Gimore Day for the find!

Last time I checked, they were called English muffins on this side of the pond (in England, they’re just called “muffins”; and they call our muffins “American muffins”).

I took the photo above this morning at Trader Joe’s, who insist on calling them British muffins. Someday, we may tell unproven stories that “British muffins” unintentionally led to the recent Scottish referendum in the same way that the Great Wall of China Hoax perpetrated by four bored journos in Denver unintentionally led to the Boxer Rebellion.