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AlterNet: Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening

From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.

These are the winners, the smooth talkers, the sundogs; certain the losers deserve to lose, and they themselves deserve to win. They believe in the wall, in the way things have always been, in examples and lessons. But a time is coming, and they are afraid of it, when the wall will be used for reasons other than those they built it for. When that time comes, it will come heavily.

Simply the oddest thing I’ve ever seen on the internets.

Found on this photo blog.

Shorpy | The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog

I’d never seen this photoblog before recently, but now I see references for it everywhere. By “everywhere,” I mean in 3 different places.

Sign in the window says “Register here… Hop pickers… Picking starts Aug 29… Lakeside Hop Yards… Free tents, stoves, tables, wood, lights, camp.”

Here it is, in case your references aren’t my references.

Funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Apparently it’s also/really a game, but the video is wonderful by itself.

Jury nullification – Wikipedia

Jury nullification is a de facto power of the jury, and is not normally disclosed to jurors by the system when they are instructed as to rights and duties.

This totally changes how I’ll behave if I’m ever on a jury. Not that I’d tell the judge that.

A remote cam 70 feet in the air in Maine watches birdies sit and tweet and occasionally fly off. Baby birdies are in there, too; at least one was borneded this week.

Imagine, if you will, surfing through Youtube from music video to music video and finally ending up here; Paint Box, by Pink Floyd. As the video loads, I read several of the comments: “Syd’s great! David’s great! Syd’s lip-synching! He’s not; you suck!” Standard stuff. Now, when the video finally loads, and I’m prepared to see an old Pink Floyd video that I may or may not have ever seen, instead I see….Christopher Walken! Sitting in a chair in a deserted hotel! It all looks kind of familiar. I figure this will be one of those videos in which the scene cuts back and forth from the band to the actor. Fine.

Now the music begins in earnest, and Christopher Walken is dancin’ around like all get-out. I have the volume set really low because the hour is wee. It’s pretty amusing, really, and still kind of familiar, like I saw this video a single time long ago. But the music… the music is completely unlike any Pink Floyd song I’ve ever heard. “That can’t possibly be Syd Barrett,” I say to myself; “It must be Gilmour. It must be after Roger Waters left, and they’re doing some weird one-off job to help out their dear friend Christopher Walken.”

I watch the entire video, and it’s pretty funny. But the song simply can’t be from Syd days, or even Waters days, like some of the posters are saying. I know that much. And David Gilmour sounds really odd, like he’s intentionally disguising his voice, and the music sounds completely unlike any Floyd music I’ve ever heard. And how on earth did the posters’ conversation about lip-synching get started? All I saw was Christopher Walken shimmyin’ and flyin’ around. Did I look away from the computer at some point? I don’t remember that.

Really: what’s the story behind this video? It’s got to be from some album from the ’90’s, when I didn’t care anymore. And what’s Floyd’s connection with Walken? Who’s reviving whose career here?

So after the video ends, I wander through Google, just to connect some unconnected dots. I google through to another “Paint Box” video on Youtube. It loads up, and…it’s black and white! With jangly sixties noises! There’s Syd! WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SEE?

This is what I saw, somehow in place of the actual Pink Floyd video. And for seven or eight minutes, I’d convinced myself that I was watching some odd David Gilmour-produced thing that somehow escaped my attention when it came out. I haven’t been that disconnected with reality in a long time, and the return to earth was bone jarring.

In conclusion, it takes a special kind of idiot to confuse Fatboy Slim with Pink Floyd.

Apparently they still show this in biology. We called it ‘the tRNA Sutra.’ Or maybe I just called it that, I can’t remember.

Just 11 years after this film was made, we considered it an oddity created by a Martian culture. I remember being saddened that the film could not possibly be made ‘now,’ that nobody had been that earnest or unselfconscious in a long, long time.

Very, very weird to see this again.

One of the comments at Youtube:

smartgun (2 months ago):
“Because of the advances in virtual 3D modelling and CGI we’re missing out on seeing other important scientific processes explained via the powerful medium of hippies.”

This will either slap you to the ground in a fit of nostalgia (if you remember it) or do something else I know not what (if you don’t).

“I have the energy of a bear that has the energy of two bears!”

A Man & His Mountain.

“I’ve had a few different jobs, a few different apartments and a lot of girlfriends, but one mountain,” he says. “And it’s the thing that never lets me down.”

I remember reading about this guy during his streak. He ended up climbing Mt Monadnock every day for 2,850 consecutive days before a bout with pneumonia stopped him.

It’s another Google conquest: I didn’t remember who it was, which mountain, or how long ago it happened. All I knew is that, eventually, I would succeed in re-discovering the story. The golden search terms: “climbs the mountain” and “every day.” Seems kind of obvious, now, but you’d be surprised.

I want a magic mirror, and a home windmill, and an incredibly expensive electric car. I want a locator-thing because I’m too lazy to make my own, a floating bed, and a toy horse-racing track because the actors are so excited about it. These are things I have to have in order to live, Santa. Don’t let me down.

for when your computer explodes and you need your best links safe somewhere else:

Stellarium: a nice open-source planetarium for your computer. Zoom in on some planets, why don’tcha. And check out some Chinese constellations while you’re at it.

South Park, seasons 1-10. It’s South Park.

TVlinks: links to various tv shows and episodes. This link has a bad habit of dying and moving; I can usually find it again by googling “tvlinks” and taking it from there.

There used to be a site at allsimps.com which had, naturally, all the Simpsons episodes, but the proprietor got hassled by the Fox Man and it went away. Most (if not all) of the Simpsons episodes can be had at the TVlinks site linked above.

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny: Official Movie Site

Well, I can’t wait.

Moran at Dumas

“Here at Dumas we know people are fascinated by tug boats.”

I was googling for a law office with the unfortunate name of “Dumas & Moran,” but this is as close as I got.

from GYWO:

from this photoblog. It’s a great note, but the editor in me wants to substitute “odd” or “unsettling” for “weird.” “Weird,”  as a word that still means what it was meant to mean, is just about dead.

Colbert loses it from massdestraction.com (now from ectoblog, in order to remove the irritating massdestraction logo. It’s a realmedia file, but I couldn’t find anything else mpg file.) You’ve probably seen it, but I hadn’t. There’s something about great comics breaking character that’s hilarious.

“Stephen, I have to tell you, that story all sounds pretty gay.”

“Not gay John, aristocratic. It’s a different culture than ours.”

“And what’s different about it?”

“Mainly how gay it is. John.”