Friday Funny: Kurt Vonnegut draws the shapes of stories

Delicious animation

A pretty awesome animation by Alexandre Dubosc using all kinds of delicious edibles.

Obesssion (for men)

The Republicans’ ongoing quixotic campaign against women’s reproductive rights is no longer even bordering on obsession. Lady Blaga has noted some federal and state-centric proposals, and it’s becoming clear that more than the economy, jobs, or even—gods forbid—guns, the House has made it a mission to, if nothing else, try and strip women’s reproductive rights so bare that they’re barely even visible.

What now? Well, how about taking away funding for medical training that includes abortion techniques?

The House has passed legislation that would bar teaching health centers that receive federal funds under the new health care act from using the money to teach abortion techniques.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the sponsor of the measure, says she wants to make it “crystal clear” that taxpayer money is not being used to train health care providers to perform abortions.

The legislation is an amendment to a bill, H.R. 1216, a generic appropriations reworking, which would turn funding for graduate medical education under the ACA from direct appropriations to an authorization for appropriations (meaning: instead of giving you the money, we’re just going to say that we intend to give you the money, maybe). Yet, Rep. Foxx, and the Republican caucus almost totally*, found it necessary to add in a line forbidding money from going to any program that might teach how to perform a totally legal medical procedure.

So, even beyond the red herring of “No Taxpayer Funds for Abortions,” this one wants to make sure you can’t even learn how to perform one. You know, in case you, as a doctor, might ever need to learn.

(I just asked a friend of mine, who works in medicine, if there was a good reason to know how to perform one if you are never going to do it. She responded that, well, if you ever want to treat somebody that had one, it’s a good idea to know how the procedure works.)

* Credit where credit is due: Republican Reps. Bass, Biggert, Bilbray, Bono Mack, Capito, Dold, Dent, Grimm, Hanna and Heck all voted nay.

No-Drama Obama?

Brendan Nylan wonders where the scandals are:

One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration’s streak will continue?

Obama has been extremely fortunate: My research (PDF) on presidential scandals shows that few presidents avoid scandal for as long as he has. In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

He finds that it’s very likely (to nearly a probability of 1) that an administration scandal will hit by early next year. Where might that happen?

Given Obama’s reputation for personal integrity, the controversy will likely concern actions taken within the executive branch. Just as the Clinton-era GOP shifted from an early focus on Whitewater to the Travel Office firings, “Filegate,” etc., Republicans in Congress today are shifting away from insinuations about Obama’s birthplace to attacks on his administration’s conduct in office. Recent examples includeallegations of an administration “enemies list” as a result of a National Labor Relations Board complaint against Boeing; claims of favoritism in decisions to grant waivers from regulations imposed under health care reform; and allegations that Department of Justice officials allowed straw purchases of guns that were smuggled to Mexico, prompting a standoff with Congress that House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) recently compared to Iran-Contra.

Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 26 May 2011

Good morning, peeps. Christopher Meloni, who played Detective Elliot Stabler on NBC’s Law and Order: SVU for 12 years, will not be returning to the show next season. Now, your morning constitutional:

Three explosions hit Chinese government buildings almost simultaneously, leaving two dead and six injured.

Former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic, the highest-ranking war crimes suspect still at large from the Balkan wars of 1990s, has been arrested.

The Senate yesterday rejected a House Republican budget plan that would have drastically changed Medicare.

More Americans than expected filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week.

Temp agencies are starting to charge more for temporary employees, a possible sign that salaries for permanent employees may increase later this year.

Republicans looking to unveil a jobs plan today based primarily on—you guessed it—tax cuts.

House Ways and Means chairman Rep. Dave Camp promises Wall Street that the debt limit will be raised.

As a result of the Obama administration’s push to review and overhaul regulations, 30 regulatory agencies today are unveiling plans to cut unnecessary regulations.

Law professor Goodwin Liu has asked President Obama to to withdraw his nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after senate Republicans invoked a filibuster to block a vote on his confirmation.

General Martin Dempsey will be President Obama’s choice to succeed Admiral Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

MSNBC host Ed Schultz has been suspended after calling Laura Ingraham a “slut” on his radio show.

A student physics presentation explaining the physics at work on My Little Pony, why it wouldn’t work, but offering suggestions to fix them.

What Paddington Bear teaches us about British versus German manners.

Finally, a dog is nursing abandoned Liger cubs in a Chinese zoo.

Hump-Day Song of the Week: Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa

Oh, hell yeah.

Watch as some firefighters rescue a baby deer

Because it’s Tuesday (the undisputed worst day of the week), shit’s bad all over this dang U.S. place because the weather is downright hostile, you effing need to watch a baby deer get rescued by some firefighters and a jaws of life.

From the description:

On the Morning of May 18th 2011 my wife noticed a deer in our yard that appeared to be franticly looking for something in the rocks that form a wall on property line in Brush Prairie WA. When we first went out with our neighbors, we didn’t see anything but the deer wouldn’t leave our yard. We went back to our house and watched after a few minutes the deer came back.

We went out to the area the deer was concentrating on and could hear a baby fawn crying in the rocks. We moved some of the rocks and smaller boulders and saw baby fawn’s face in the rocks. He had apparently fallen in our crawled in through one of the gaps and was now trapped. The larger boulders were too heavy to move and we didn’t want to have the rocks cave in on the baby deer.

We finally called our Clark County Fire District 3. The B Shift team came out and they were able to move the larger rocks out of the way with the Jaws of Life enough to be able to reach in a pull the baby fawn out and reunited it with its momma. The fawn was probably stuck in their most of the night quickly went on to nurse off its momma. One of our neighbors took some video clips of the fire department’s rescue. I edited the clips into this short clip. After sharing it with some friend they thought that it was just too cute not to share with more people so my neighbor agreed to let me upload the final clip.

You’re welcome.

One candidate for the Republican nomination doesn’t remember which one the Constitution is

CC photo by Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Meet former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain. He’s running for the Republican nomination for president. The Republicans—you remember, they wanted everybody to go back to the Constitution, and even made everybody read it on the first day of Congress?

Well, the good news is he agrees with the popular Republican sentiment:

We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution.

But, he’s afraid that maybe people won’t be so bold as that:

And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’

I’d also hate to get to the little section about the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Why? Because that would mean I’m accidentally reading the Declaration of Independence.

Now, to be fair, he’s never held public office, so there’s no reason he would have had to learn which one was which.

Nextelling your Alltel Boost

Send texts from you email.

* AT&T – cellnumber@txt.att.net
* Verizon – cellnumber@vtext.com
* T-Mobile – cellnumber@tmomail.net
* Sprint PCS – cellnumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
* Virgin Mobile – cellnumber@vmobl.com
* US Cellular – cellnumber@email.uscc.net
* Nextel – cellnumber@messaging.nextel.com
* Boost – cellnumber@myboostmobile.com

* Alltel – cellnumber@message.alltel.com

Helpful for sending out a text to a lot of people, or for those who may not like texting with a phone.

How to break an apple with your bare hands

Useful skill, fun party trick, or absolutely pointless knowledge?

We report. You decide.

Morning Constitutional – Monday, 23 May 2011

Good morning, and I hope you had a great weekend.  Sarah Palin’s son Track recently married his high school sweetheart.  Here’s some other stuff that happened:

After angering some Jews by saying the boundaries for a new Palestinian state should be based on pre-1967 borders,President Obama sought to reassure supporters of Israel in a speech to lobbying group AIPAC.

A tornado in southwest Missouri yesterday left at least 89 people dead.

President Obama begins a week-long trip with a visit to Ireland; he will also visit England, France, and Poland.

Icelandic volcano Grimsvotn erupted over the weekend, closing the country’s airport.

The Taliban denies that spiritual leader Mullah Mohammaed Omar is dead.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is not running for president.

But Tim Pawlenty is, as he announced in a YouTube video.  Yawn.

As you may have noticed, the Rapture didn’t happen on Saturday.  Believers, some of whom gave away large amounts of money, quit their jobs, or sold their homes, are confused.

The Tennessee Senate passed a bill that would ban teaching about homosexuality before high school.

“The Tree of Life,” a new movie by director Terrence Malick, took home the Cannes film festival’s top prize.

Finally, a couple in Ohio was sentenced to stand in a kiddie pool handing out water safety brochures after being arrested for rafting down a flooded river without life preservers.

Friday Funny: Jersey Shore Gone Wilde

From Playbill video:

Presented by “The Importance of Being Earnest” on Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company. What if the characters of Broadway’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” traveled through a time warp and woke up on the beach with Snooki, The Situation and the rest of the gang of MTV’s “Jersey Shore”? In an exclusive video series created for Playbill by “Earnest” stars Santino Fontana and David Furr, the Roundabout Theatre Company cast puts “Jersey” in the mouths of Oscar Wilde’s famed Britons. Think of it as a comedy of bad manners. Part 1 in a multi-part series.

Republicans Support Raising the Debt Ceiling

Treasury tried not to be ambiguous when they explained what the debt ceiling is all about:

Never in our history has Congress failed to increase the debt limit when necessary.  Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States.  Default would effectively impose a significant and long-lasting tax on all Americans and all American businesses and could lead to the loss of millions of American jobs.  Even a very short-term or limited default would have catastrophic economic consequences that would last for decades.

Republicans support raising the debt ceiling, at least former elected Republicans who actually governed.

Ronald Reagan understood the situation, he gave the same warnings as the current Treasury and asked Senate Majority Leader James Baker (R-TN) to raise the debt ceiling, saying “the full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.”

As for George W. Bush, he too understood the situation and addressed it in a the same way any government official who understands the gross responsibility of governing – he advocated for raising the debt ceiling.  Bush asked than Speaker Hastert (R-IL) and Minority Leader Gephardt (D-MO) to extend the same “bipartisan cooperation you have shown in our war against terror and creation of a new Department of Homeland Security” to avoid defaulting on the United States debt.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Republicans in the House today are using the need to raise the debt ceiling before August as a bargaining chip.  Principles have simply been removed from near every aspect of politics, but it is the poor manner in which they use the bargaining chip.

The House could pass a bill, raising the debt ceiling with all the cuts they want.  From their, perhaps there would be real negotiations to get something passed.  What is scary is the number of Republicans who outright say they oppose raising the debt – with the false arguments that doing so permits more spending, that spending cuts can be made to avoid raising the debt, or that defaulting on the debt wouldn’t be worse than a government shutdown.  All of these arguments are false.

Maybe they keep dismissing the issue because unlike Reagan and George 43. Its just another example that the Republicans in the House don’t understand they are governing this nation.  They’ll still in campaign mode, criticizing Obama, and appeasing their base.   I’m starting to get worried.

Bert grills Andy Samberg on life, literature, cuisine, socks

Not to willy-nilly post two videos in one day, but was too awesome to not share.

Interview with astronauts Mark Kelly and the Shuttle crew

This is awesome.

Google, YouTube and the PBS NewsHour took you aboard space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station for a live interview with Commander Mark Kelly and crew as they orbit the earth at 17,500 mph.

Very Important business in Ohio

The new Governor of Ohio John Kasich has a Very Important issue on his agenda: Getting rid of the new Ohio driver licenses. Well, changing the color at least. As he said to a bunch of Dayton-area business leaders earlier this week at the “Dayton’s Legislation Day in Columbus,”

“Oh by the way, we’re going to eliminate the pink drivers license, just as a side note,” Kasich said, drawing laughter. “I just got mine the other day and it’s going.”

….

Asked if he was serious about changing Ohio’s license color following his speech, Kasich told reporters his earlier comment was made “sort of tongue in cheek.”

“I just got my…license the other day, and everybody says** can you change it from pink?” Kasich said. “And then I looked at it and I went ‘Whoa.’ So I think we’re thinking about whether we can have a better color.

“I have the authority apparently to do it, so we’ll see. We’re thinking about it.”

Very Important business moving forward in Ohio these days. Guess we should just be happy it’s at least one thing that isn’t designed to strip women of important rights.

** As everybody should be aware, anytime somebody is in a meeting or presentation or whatever and says “everybody says” or “there are people who are wondering/asking,” it always means I, the person who is talking.

Poem of the Week: won’t you celebrate with me

Morning Constitutional – Thursday, 19 May 2011

Hello there, readers.  A Man Booker prize judge has resigned in protest after the judging panel decided to honor Philip Roth, saying “I don’t rate him as a writer at all.”  And now, your morning constitutional:

IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned from his post in the wake of rape charges against him.

But 60% of the French think Strauss-Kahn was set up.

Al-Qaeda released a recording purported to be made by Osama Bin Laden before his death, in which he praised the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

Maria Shriver has apparently hired a divorce lawyer.

A day after the US announced new sanctions against Syria, the Assad regime criticized the sanctions, saying they primarily serve Israel’s interests.

Senator Tom Coburn has left the Gang of Six, which had been trying to find a compromise on debt reduction.

A plane crashed and exploded in Argentina yesterday, killing all 22 people on board.

Danish director Lars Von Trier was banned from the Cannes film festival after saying he “sympathized” with Hitler.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Madrid, angry at Spain’s political parties and handling of the country’s economic crisis.

Viagra might make you deaf.

And speaking of penises, now men can apply stick-on crystals to their private parts with “pejazzling.”

Finally, the Centers for Disease Control is prepared for a zombie invasion.

Bridesmaids and Feminism

There’s been some buzz around the blogosphere about what kind of feminist statement, if any, the film Bridesmaids makes.  I don’t think the film itself contains a strong feminist message, so much as a yay sisterhood thing, but the fact that it was made is undoubtedly a good thing for women.  Ladies are underrepresented in Hollywood, both as writers and as stars of non-sucky movies, especially of the comedy variety.

I was rooting for Bridesmaids even before I saw it, but now, even more so.  Bottom line, the movie is funny.  Like, almost-peed-my-pants-funny.  Laughed-so-hard-I-almost-cried funny.

And as for its feminist cred, I think there’s something pretty cool, if not quite radical, about a movie that features women who seem like actual people instead of caricatures.  This is especially redeeming for Judd Apatow, whose films tend to feature women as shrill shrewish kill-joys.  Sure, they’re more mature  than their man-child counterparts, but who’d want to hang out with them?  Whereas the ladies of Bridesmaids seem like they’d be great fun to get drinks with.

Bridesmaids clearly passes the so-called Bechdel test, a measure of women’s role in movies.  Alison Bechdel came up with the idea in a comic strip in which one character says she only watches a movie if it meets these requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.

(Wikipedia)

It’s kind of startling how many movies fail this simple test.  In Bridesmaids, most scenes meet all three criteria.  I like the way the women’s friendship is the central relationship; even the main character’s love interest is a secondary plot line.  As my mom pointed out, even though it’s a “wedding movie,” the groom doesn’t actually have any lines.  Plus the wedding itself makes up about five minutes of screen time.

Also, it’s really funny.  Not just for chicks– my boyfriend liked it, too (I’ll admit, not as much as I did, but then, I really loved it).   Here’s hoping the movie makes a ton of money and leads to a whole rash of funny, female-driven comedies.

Congratulations UConn Huskies

Some say Jim Calhoun is getting a little too old for his profession, and that he’s likely to retire soon.  But the coach who led the UConn Huskies to their third national championship this year is looking pretty good by my standards.  Not only does he have a lot to look forward to with next year’s returning players, but he may want to consider a run for office.  Put Connecticut a little earlier in the primary season and the man has a legitimate chance.  There aren’t many who can cut through partisan hogwash like Calhoun, no one else with the respect, and no one else holds the trust of the people quite like he does.  If not President, perhaps Governor is in his future.