The Agonist - Humor & Satire

Fork whets Pasadena's artistic appetite

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:34:45 -0800

The 18-foot-tall utensil was stealthily erected as a birthday present. Now the city is considering keeping it as a piece of street art.

Los Angeles Times, By Nicole Santa Cruz, November 7

Pasadena has a fork in the road. And it's 18 feet tall.

Where south St. John and south Pasadena avenues divide, there's a towering wooden silver fork in the traffic median. The utensil has a black steel skeleton and is rooted in 2 1/2 feet of concrete.

The art was originally intended as a surprise for Bob Stane of Altadena, who celebrated his 75th birthday Oct. 29. But Caltrans, which owns the median, and Pasadena, which maintains the land, are deciding whether to keep it up for a while as an impromptu piece of street art.

"It was just the best birthday present I've ever had," said Stane, who owns the Coffee Gallery Backstage, a coffeehouse and showroom in Altadena, with the fork's artist, Ken Marshall. "It was the only time I've ever been surprised for my birthday."

The fork was finished about 9:50 a.m. on Halloween after friends worked to erect it clad in fake Caltrans uniforms and hard hats. Friends surprised Stane 10 minutes later with the utensil and chocolate cake.

[...]

"To my knowledge, there hasn't ever been a mystery piece of public art just popping up in the city," said DeWolfe, who has been with the city for 20 years.

F*k u and other Austrian idioms from California

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:14:53 -0800

... examining the King James translation of the Bible for coded messages with letters spaced at equal intervals in the code turns up such messages as "get lost," "go to hell," "you loser" and "I hate you."

Warning: The link above leads to a Republican propaganda newspaper called WSJ.

Some More Friday Fun

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:36:09 -0800

Many of you, I have a feeling, will like this one:

Friday Catblogging: Canadian Version

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:29:51 -0800

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

This one is for our Canadian friends.

So you think YOU had a bad day???

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:12:10 -0800

Oh yeah, and if that wasn't bad enough, those are cases of brandy and vodka!
Thankfully, the driver wasn't hurt (except maybe for the probable job loss thing). That's him at the end of the video climbing up to help the others dig himself out.

Rumors indicates Kashmir Bear on U.S. Payroll

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:15:33 -0800

Many suggest the US CIA and Indian Intelligent services have created a "fifth column" of specially trained anti insurgent forces composed of BEARS, in an effort to control the influx of militants. I would suspect an impending "anti bear fatwa" being proclaimed shortly.

Bear kills militants in Kashmir

A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.

Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8339549.stm

Hallowe’en is the devil’s work, Catholic church warns parents

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:10:11 -0700

Graham Keeley & Richard Owen | Madrid / Rome | October 31

The Times - When Victoria Romero, 6, dressed up as a witch for a Hallowe’en party this week she could hardly have imagined that she was provoking the wrath of God by attending a celebration akin to a Black Mass — at least in the eyes of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in Spain.

Wearing skeleton suits, dressing up as vampires, witches or goblins or slapping on fake blood is not far removed from communing with the Devil, according to the country’s bishops.

However, the bishops, with Vatican backing, have reserved their venom for the millions of parents who allowed their children to celebrate this “pagan” festival.

Father Joan María Canals, the director of the Spanish Bishops Conference Committee on Liturgy, condemned parents for permitting their children to go to “un-Christian” parties when they should be focusing on All Saints Day today and All Souls Day on Monday.

His views were endorsed yesterday by L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, which reported his views under the headline “Hallowe’en’s dangerous messages”.

It quoted him as saying: “Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.” Parents should “be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death”, he said.

[...]

José Sánchez González, the Bishop of Sigüenza-Guadalajara, in central Spain, went further, suggesting that Hallowe’en parties had a “background of the occult and anti-Christianity”. He said that he saw the dark influence of Hollywood playing with the young minds of Spanish children as they danced innocently around pumpkins, little realising that they were attending a pagan festival.

U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort In Afghanistan

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:19:24 -0700

Kabul | October 27

The Onion -
According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.
"We've spent a lot of time and money fostering the turmoil and despair necessary to make this a sustaining quagmire, and we're not going to stop now," President Barack Obama said in a national address Monday night. "It won't be easy, but with enough tactical errors on the ground, shortsighted political strategies, and continued ignorance of our vast cultural differences, we could have a horrific, full-fledged quagmire by 2012." more

Unfortunately, all too true...

Trader Talk

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:29:21 -0700

I've dealt with a few traders in my time. And one aspect I always enjoyed, being that I like language and words and whatnot, is the argot in which they speak. It's rude, impatient and very euphemistic. Here are some good examples:

Better Lucky than Smart – The only thing we have going for us.

Buyer Outside – Something sales traders say to force your hand when they get tired of watching you play stock market.

Clean up - If you believe that I have a bridge to show you.

CSA – Clusterf**k Service Alternative: When it’s easier for you client to just write a check rather than trade with your team of farm animals.

Discount Bid – Chinese trading fire drill. There’s a 1 in 10,000 chance you actually get a trade on at the price but it’s a good exercise for going through the motions and a great way to kill a few minutes and piss some people off.

Down a Touch – This thing just came off like a f**king prom dress.

Fair and Reasonable – Something the buy-side has no concept of.

Fast Money – Just means they’ve got money moving out the door quicker.

Fill or Kill – Respond this second or deal with the consequences of this extremely illiquid stock not trading and me miraculously catching a second buyer who wants to bid you for the exact same amount in about a half hour or so.

Find out who’s moving the stock - Pick a name out of a hat.

Floor Looks: The only way to be 100% wrong 100% of the time.

Good Guy – Doesn’t ask me any difficult questions.

Great Guy – Doesn’t ask me any difficult questions and gives me business.

Happy – “Happy to get involved”, “Happy to get you started” – Although coming across like Mr. Sunshine, It’s Wall Street’s way of reminding you that your sales trader is just a whore at heart and willing to take one in the keester if it gets him an order.

I have a call into my analyst – If it’s important, go get the info somewhere else.

Enjoy the rest at the link, here.

Friday Cat Blogging

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:22:13 -0700

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

The New Zim Zam Optimistic Vision Protector

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:30:57 -0700

Yes folks, now YOU can have the new Zim Zam Optimistic Vision Protector:

Zim Zam helmets are immune to pessimism and are even safer than burying your head in the sand. Worried about another financial disaster? Peak oil? Climate change? The war in Afghanistan? ... Your Zim Zam helmet filters out everything but optimism; Read the Wall Street Journal and never have to worry about seeing an article quoting Nouriel Roubini. Pessimism is filtered out through a digital HTLS system.

Do you have a love one who is anxious or down because they read the Internet? Zim Zam has the equipment you need to turn their lives around. You can even rescue followers of Michael Rupert by slapping one of our helmets over them. In a matter of days the most pessimistic person will invest their remaining 401K or IRA in high risk securities.

Don't worry be happy, wear a Zim Zam.

Support our troops stickers extra.

yes, but does it come with batteries? ~eds.

Friday Cat Blogging

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:23:39 -0700

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Archaeological Discovery Of The Day

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:09:13 -0700

This is quite funny, too. The real question is did Jesus require loyalty oaths too?

Going, Going, Gone!

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:05:08 -0700

Now this is funny:

A collection of essays about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, titled Going Rouge, will be released the same day as Palin's own much-awaited book, Going Rogue.

The essays, collected by The Nation senior editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed and written by Max Blumenthal, Katha Pollitt, Matt Taibbi and several others, will examine "the nightmarish prospect of her continuing to dominate the nation's political scene."

And yes, the book is available for pre-order.

The real question is can they get placement in bookstores?

Postmodern Pastoral: a rouge non-consumer with 500 kilos of apples

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:06:13 -0700

With my father-in-law's help this morning, we harvested 500 kilos of apples from our coveted Belle de Boskoop tree. Tomorrow we'll have our annual supply of pure, unmolested apple juice! I say unmolested as I've been thinking a lot about how corporations basically control our entire food chain and how our humble garden provides small yet meaningful spaces of resistance at the margins of our predatory economic system. Plus, I finally got around to reading Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting with Jesus.

I'm too busy, and mostly too tired to log online these days, much less write blog posts. Don't know when I'll get around to the next one either but here goes...

The exhaustion stems mostly from the unbelievably tiresome task of being a “stay-at-home dad” with our 6 month old. When she does this, like today, I get a little work done. Walnuts, check. Potatoes up before the frost, check. Finish siding the house, check. Replant the blackberries, not yet. Prepare for next weeks lecture that's been on my calender for four months, oh hell no. So I'm "working" tonight.

more after the break

I check my email about once a week, if that. I hardly have time or energy to read a book, especially after all that heavy duty cramming for Ph.D. research grant applications a few months back. And I can't remember the last time I actually completed a movie from start to finish before passing out on the sofa. Auchentoshan has got my back tonight! But I finally figured I should start reading more than wonderful Julia Donaldson stories to my two year old so I grabbed some "light" reading from the library. Actually, I reserved it through the national public library system (which includes university libraries!) which mailed Dear Hunting from the Royal library to our little podunk branch in the sticks-- free of charge. Every book anywhere in the country is available to anyone with a library card in the country. And if it isn’t in Denmark then they'll borrow it from one of their Scandinavian neighbors and send it to me. Oh, those fucking commie, socialist, Nazi bastards! What will they think of next, universal health care? So, we do have a few systems where the social contract isn't based on some Hobbsian dog-eat-dog free for all. But the freakonomic neo-liberals are definitely here! And outside the well established social democratic institutions, privatization and consumerism order our lives here as well.

My wife asked me, “what the hell are you reading” after looking down at the title she reads it out loud, each word slow and deliberate; Dear Hunting with Jesus: Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America. “This doesn’t look like the typical academic crap you read.” I say, “just some light reading.” And Bageant’s style is light, and tragically witty too. But this is heavy stuff, like David Harvey in Redneck drag. Camilla was not amused. So she says, “hey, my uncle says he heard you’re giving a presentation next week to the local Rotary Klub.” We live in a small town. “Yeah, how did he hear?” “He’s a member, he’ll be there.” She says he’s looking forward to my talk on “Obama and US/Danish foreign policy.” I'll be making most of it up over the next few days. Then she says I should really get in good with them because they fund all the exchange student programs to the US for the local high school kids. She’s obviously thinking ahead. But I don’t need my kids doing an exchange student program to the US. I figured summers with their uncle in Texas, an Austin bartender, should give them all the cultural exchange they’ll ever need. Besides, most of the European kids who've done the exchange trip tell me horror stories of being stuck with fundamentalist Christians or no dancing Mormons, or worse. A summer with Uncle Scott could save the kids from such a risk. He could tell them stories instead of our own born again Catholic childhood over a few cold Shiner Bocks at his Congress St. bar. Mama aint hearin it. Fuck, I gotta do this damn gig.

After Camilla walked on, I surfed over to Bageant’s blog, thinking I might pick up a rhetorical bomb to throw out at this group of unsuspecting civic business heroes next week. Instead, I got sucked into today’s “letter to Joe.” I didn’t find anything too clever to add to my PowerPoint presentation. However, reading his pessimistic reply to Carol’s gloomy letter our garden, and this morning’s apple harvest came back into focus. Bageant doesn't hold out much hope for social movements or grassroots politics. But he does offer a theory of resistance:

However, I do believe that rediscovering the natural self and truly discovering that there is a whole wide world outside the national hallucination liberates the individual and pokes a stick in the eye of authority. Admittedly a small one, but if there are enough of them. A liberated individual does not consume very much, nor succumbs to the sales job that permeates our consumer society, and therefore does not own or purchase very much. Nor pay many taxes, since he or she does not need to earn anything near the national average, being the worst kind of rogue imaginable by the state -- the rogue non-consumer.

This is as good a reflection as any of my philosophy (and desire) of colony gardening and its potential for liberation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Self-Reliance, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." It’s the kind of Thoreauvian economic logic I strive for at brief interludes during the day but forget once I’m home, falling asleep to re-runs of Camilla's Desperate Housewives. Yes, I too am in danger of becoming a desperate housewife! What would would Emerson say about that? I know Thoreau disapproves. I’m probably as consumer rogue as Sara Palin’s lipstick. But hell I’m trying. And the man aint gettin a dime of juice money from me this year! Resistance is not futile.