When veteran DC cop Det Baylor drove his maroon hummer through a snowball fight, it was pelted with snowballs. (More details here.)
Unfortunately, he overreacted and started waving his gun around — and now he’s famous on teh interwebs. Ho ho ho!
(Image stolen from icanhazcheeseburger)
…goes to the well.
One day the bottom will drop out.
Especially if the well is full of cement.
…I guess it’s really a question of who was there first.
Try as I might, I can’t actually think of a better solution.
Continuing with the motoring theme –
Just look at the dreadful scuff marks on this guy’s Bumper Protector.
Clearly, he’s in the market for a Bumper Protector Protector.
I’m all over it, babe. Fire up those production lines! This could be even bigger than the anatomically correct, inflatable, washable, self-lubricating cabbage patch dolls.
In the battle of the sexes, size matters. Here’s a species where the male is about as big as a fruit fly, while the female is approximately the size of a banana. Oh, all right then, if you don’t count the legs, she’s only as big as an unshelled peanut. Anyways, I’ll leave you to do the proverbial math.
This little minx set up shop right outside our kitchen window. Which is fine with me because it means I can shoot her from pretty close up secure in the knowledge that there’s a reassuring pane of glass between us. I’m speaking from experience here: I once tried approaching one of these puppies outdoors and she spat something (silk? venom?) at me from out of her back(?) — or maybe it was ventrally launched? All I remember for sure is how she re-oriented herself, hunkered down and took aim before letting fly… Luckily I was using the old ‘hat on a stick’ trick, so she squirted the hat rather than my face, but hey, lesson learned.
This is more or less actual life size. The species is Nephila maculata, and they’re pretty common in forest areas all over the island, especially in the fall. They weave classic ’spiral orb’ webs about 4~6 feet across. Here’s another nice picture showing the underside on one of these things. And there’s a bunch more pictures and info here. Whoa, and some cool ethnozoology stuff here.
‘His eyes were beautiful, and despite being tired they sizzled[.]‘
It’s not a page turner, and I’m not sure if it can really be said to have much of a plot, but judging from the first chapter of her debut novel, The Mistress, Martine McCutcheon is right up there with the Master himself when it comes to inept phrasing.
Of course, the density of her ineptitudes inevitably falls far short of what the Master can achieve; Brown often manages to shoehorn several clunking infelicities into a single line, whereas McCutcheon seems to average only about one per page. But the comparison is hardly fair: Brown has been perfecting his ’style’ for years, while this is McCutcheon’s first attempt. And she definitely shows considerable promise.
She skipped down the stairs in her satin high heels, trying to avoid slipping in the puddles [...]
Mandy [...] tried her umbrella[...]. ‘Eureka, it works!’ she trilled, as if discovering a new invention.
[H]er make-up sprawled on the shelf in front of her[...]
She moved to walk away, her body turned round – but her feet stayed firmly planted on the floor. Mandy found herself hopping from one foot to another [...]
‘We have also been expanding and going down new avenues.’
And for dessert, a bizarre unmotivated laugh-fest that runs from giggles to guffaws and back again –
Something about his sincerity made Mandy want to laugh. Maybe it was nervousness at such emotional honesty. There was a tickle in the air and the two of them burst out giggling like school kids as if it was some kind of forbidden release. Mandy saw an even more gorgeous side of Jake when he was laughing so much. He seemed lighter, more alive.
‘What are we laughing at?’ he said between guffaws.
‘I don’t know, but at least it broke the ice!’ Mandy giggled.
Lastly, by way of encouragement, here are some words that Martine’s protagonist, Mary Sue Mandy, has lived by ever since ’she’d read a greeting on a card once in Paperchase on the King’s Road’ –
‘Reach for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.’
Not ’shoot’ or ‘aim’, either of which would actually make sense, but ‘reach’. You’ll need very long arms for that. But go for it, girl! You can do it! On your tippy-toes now, and st-r-e-t-ch….
Martine McCutcheon before and after application of her sprawling makeup.
Oh, all right then. Yes it is.
My Favorite Mushroom. I found this little puppy growing on the kitchen window sill this morning. Yes, we have a problem with damp.
It’s true of course:
But these days, everyone suspects it.
…Hoist with his own petard.
OK, this is somewhat convoluted, but I’ll try to keep it as straight as I can.
The topic is public persuasion: given that you want to minimize everyone’s carbon footprint, what’s the most effective way to get people to change their behavior?
What follows is basically my take on a story that can be found on the Climate Safety Blog, although the original poster, Tim Holmes, doesn’t seem to enjoy the irony as much as I do. Indeed, he doesn’t actually seem to notice it at all.
So. The IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research; a UK left-wing think-tank with strong ties to the Labour party) commissioned some market research that was ‘designed to identify the communications approaches and policies needed to facilitate a change in behaviour among mainstream consumers’. Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing was the company commissioned to do the research, and they used a ‘deliberative workshop’ approach with six small samples (n=7) of individuals from the ‘Now People’ subset of their ‘Values Modes’ model of psychographic types. They also conducted in-home observations and in-depth interviews with another(?) small group of ‘Now People’ (n=10).
*DIGRESSION*
I remain very skeptical about this whole approach — this ‘Values Modes’ model sounds like marketing bullshit to me, and as far as I’m aware the method has never been scientifically validated. The best supporting evidence offered by Cultural Dynamics themselves (according to a ‘note’ by Rose and Dade) seems to be that there is no relationship between the Values Modes system and the standard personality and behavioral based systems, such as MBTI. They manage to interpret this as a good thing — they conclude that they must therefore be measuring something completely new! — although in the absence of any evidence eg of repeatability or predictive power, it is hard to be sure that they’re actually measuring anything meaningful at all.Nevertheless, Cultural Dynamics have gone ahead and collected and compiled UK survey data for decades. They claim that these survey data can be analyzed into clusters (no statistical methodology is described, but it would be quite surprising if they didn’t form clusters; so far so OK). They further claim that these clusters are meaningful (quite a sizeable leap of faith here; no independent validation is provided). And the money shot: They claim that you can leverage this analysis to target your ‘communications’ so as to maximally influence a population’s behavior. Well, we’re in fairyland at this point, but hey, they’re a marketing company and this is the particular variety of fairydust that they’re selling. And credit where credit’s due: they do a good job of making it sound plausible and ’sciency’ — good enough anyway to sell it to the IPPR.
*END OF DIGRESSION*
Taking this ‘Values Modes’ model at face value and assuming that it really works, the idea is that you can manipulate the behavior of an entire population by manipulating the behavior of these ‘Now People’. That is, change how the ‘Now People’ behave, and everyone else will follow. Based on their research, Cultural Dynamics came up with a report that included their ‘Top 10 tips for communicating with Now People about lower-carbon behaviours’. You can download the complete report here. This is pretty cynical, Machiavellian stuff — and who knows, it might even have worked — but anyway, now at last we get to the fun part…
The IPPR gets the report, and they now believe that they know how to manipulate the population in the desired direction (mwahahaha!). However, instead of quietly implementing their plan, these would-be social engineers decide to publicize it.
With an inept press release.
That is promptly misinterpreted by the media — with the hilarious result that high-carbon behaviors are now expected to become more entrenched in the general population than they were before.
Doh!
Propaganda. You’re doing it wrong. Goebbels must be spinning in his grave.
Winner of the Finbarr Saunders award for September 2009 –
Fnarr fnarr
