Acceptable Substitute

So one day you’re strolling among the highways, byways and no-ways of Teh Intarwebz, when you discover this little piece:

Cute, huh?

Only she’s not real;  she’s an AI creation with her own website, even, where morons errrr people converse with her like she’s a real person and not something created by someone else.  [cue outrage]

Frankly, I don’t see her as much different from a modern-day Playboy centerfold, given how “retouching” has become so pronounced nowadays.

Modern Playboy model:

Classic Playboy model:

Anyway, it’s all becoming academic as women become less and less real thanks to surgery and “body sculpting”.

I don’t want to live in this world anymore, because unfortunately I prefer reality, in all its ugliness and beauty.

News Roundup

Here’s a spoonworthy target, in Lawn Awduh:


...the dirty rozzers. How dare they act like typical randy young men?

Problem is, a spoon-smack on the tip of the willie may well be a good idea to errr subdue the rampant male.  But what if the aggressor is a womyn?

From the Dept. of Education:


...I’m not sure that teaching the boy to scream “Oh god oh god oh god!” is acceptable religious instruction, but then I ‘m just an old atheist.


...LOL wait till they get to read Titus Andronicus.  “Mass suicide” would be my prediction.


...and yet they’re going to vote him back into office at the next election.  And speaking of the uneducated:


...also that wolves can’t hunt whales, White Men can’t jump, and Africans can’t govern.

From the Dept. of Global Warming Climate Cooling Change©:


...next thing, they’ll be telling us that electric cars are a waste of time.  Believe The Science.


...key word:  Germany.


...I think you’re a little late with the warning there, Mikey.

From the Dept. of Womyns’ Sport:


...and if the U.S. coach had any balls [sic], these ungrateful hussies would have been pulled off the team and sent straight back to… Cuba.  And speaking of Cuba:


...perhaps if the MassGuv were to lead the way and house a few dozen illegals in the Governor’s mansion…? 

In Showbiz News:



...perhaps if they’d stuck with just one, they might have got away with it.

And in INSIGNIFICA:

       

Finally, if we are to Believe The Science!, then:

Science’s loss is our gain, I suppose.

Why Indeed?

The question is asked:

Why DO US megastars Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and George Clooney prefer the UK to California?

The answer is actually quite simple, and it’s one of the reasons why I love going there too.

The pat answers, of course, are manifold — especially in the case of the above reptiles — and the first, obviously, is that anywhere in Yurp (including Britishland) is preferable to the shithole that California has become, especially when the said reptiles are also filthy rich and can buy things like “cottages” on the Thames River or castles in Devon;  and being all part of the same mutual admiration society, they can also count on their buddies to put them up for a day or week.

Then they can play the part of the “locals”, and go to quaint little pubs and tearooms and drink “pints” and drink PG Tips tea, go to Wimbledon and thus hobnob with all their precious little Hollywood buddies also visiting “for the occasion”.

And if the weather turns shitty (as it sometimes does in Britishland), they can simply jump into a first-class seat on an airliner and head off to, oh, Cannes, Como or Malibu.

The thing is, it’s very easy to fall in love with the U.K. under those circumstances.  All that British stuff and the matchless beauty of the countryside is like one big theme park, and it is just how it’s described:  charming, quaint and pretty.

And I haven’t even touched on the history, the kind one experiences when finding out that people have been worshipping in a little stone church since the 12th century, or stumbling across some broken clay pots from the Bronze Age in a field somewhere, or seeing the outline of a Roman road winding across an impossibly-green meadow where now a flock of snow-white sheep are grazing contentedly, safe from predators like lions, bears or even wolves.

It’s a gentle country, so unlike the harshness of the U.S. — and especially so when one is living in a wealthy cocoon like Clooney or Depp.  And it’s really easy to love a place when you’re not forced to live there as a native:  by family tradition, work or heritage.

If I sound familiar with the topic, it’s because I feel exactly the same way, having spent weeks and months living in Britishland, whether in Wiltshire at Mr. Free Market’s country house or The Englishman’s farm or in the latter’s cottage in an impossibly-beautiful Cornish seaside village.  After the first couple of weeks I was last there, I found myself browsing the real estate listings, wondering just how I could perhaps buy a little cottage in Devizes or Burton-on-Trent or Norton St. Philip or… or… or…

And if I had the wealth of the Cooneys, Depps, Cruises or their ilk, I would have done exactly what they have done.

Here’s the problem, though.  As I discovered, at some point you get sick of living in a foreign country, even one as pleasant as Britishland.  At some point, you get sick of the high prices (Brits are ripped off more than tourists in Manhattan, and it happens all the time);  sick of the tiny little roads that are so picturesque, and such a huge pain in the ass to use when you need to get somewhere in a hurry;  sick of the class- and wealth envy that you see every day on TV and hear in conversations in those quaint little pubs that serve delicious bitter ale, at £6 ($7.70) a pint.

You get sick of the stupid TV — oh, don’t get fooled by Downton Abbey or Midsomer Murders:  those are the very few jewels scattered around in the dreck and swill of Strictly Come Dancing, Love Island, TOWIE, the empty-headed morning TV hosts, and Piers Morgan.

And you get sick of how primitive the place is — a place which has simultaneously the best newspapers in the world and the worst Internet service (unless you live in London).   A place where you can wait a week for an electrician to come and fix your plug outlets, or where train service can be interrupted for days on end by chilly weather (!), not to mention the frequent strikes of the pampered working class.  Where a lowly bureaucrat can stop you putting up a privacy fence on your property, or after you’ve put it up, tell you to take it down because it’s six inches too high.

You’ll get sick of the petty crime that abounds everywhere — even in those postcard-pretty villages — and the indifference of the police to the problem.

And yes, you get sick of the weather, eventually.  Even those who prefer cooler temperatures and overcast skies will get sick of the ceaseless drizzle, the chill that seeps into your bones, and the inability of your clothes to ever dry out properly.  Like Seattle, only twenty degrees colder.  Why else would Britain boast the largest per-capita percentage of expats who move to Spain, Portugal, France and gawd help us Australia, in ever-increasing numbers?

None of this matters to our celebrity part-time Brits, because their careers take them off to film sets in California or Colorado where they can become, once again, Americans.


I still miss the place, terribly. I just don’t want to live there.

Melting Snowflakes

This one made me giggle like a little girl:

Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”

In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields. 

The team claimed 50 of 349 responses to their questionnaire on the topic contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.” Labeling them “malicious respondents,” they adapted their project to examine how the joke responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”

Oh, diddums.  So the “researchers” asked a bunch of engineering students some stupid questions, and a few of the responders responded with ridicule, the little scamps.

The result?

The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.

Sorry, I can’t carry on because tears.

Of scornful laughter.  Fucking snowflake weenies.

Oh, and the response to their survey’s conclusions?  Rejection.  Read it all for the full flavor.