Schadenfreudelicious: A Taste Of Your Own Medicine

*Snort*  (thanks to the incomparably engaging Iowahawk on Twitter)

Boo Freaking Hoo: Terrorist Groups Have HR Problems

Apparently the managers find that their employees are insubordinate, unstable, violent loose cannons who don't respond well to authority. YA THINK?

Then I read a WaPo sob story about how the Muslim Brotherhood is falling apart in Egypt and whining that now everybody hates them.  Awwwww.  Well, I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to feel much sympathy for people who loot museums, burn churches, and so forth.

Liberté, égalité, morosité: Boo hoo

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this monument to almost self-parodying ennui. Here's a bit of it:

The French are so busy wallowing in their existential estrangement — a state of mind Camus described as “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” — that they don’t even have the energy to be rude.  ... It’s not that they’ve lost faith in their own superiority. They’ve lost faith that the rest of the world sees it. The whole country has, as Catherine Deneuve says of her crazy blue moods, une araignée au plafond — a spider on the ceiling.

Poor baby. Watch this:

Society for the Prevention of Shopping to Boyfriends/Husbands

Come on, ladies, let's not do this to the guys.  Let them go.  Everyone's got cellphones.  Just call them when you're done.  (I still love this idea by IKEA in Australia.)  Oh, and kudos to the shops that offer lots of comfy chairs for the guys.  Throw in a TV or two, and that will be a vast improvement.  Poor fellows!

Scandal-a-Palooza As Animated Gifs

"How the Obama Administration Is Having the Worst Week Ever."  Sure, but seeing as it's self-inflicted and, especially in the case of the IRS scandal, born of a total abuse of power, I am utterly unsympathetic.  Karma's a b*tch ... and so am I.

UPDATE: Check out this video from Reason.

Well, I'm Offended That You're Offended. Get Back to Work!

Hmmm.  Well, I do tell my students flat out that at one point or another in my class, they are going to be offended, so they should just get over it and get over themselves.  People are always offended when I say this - which is exactly my point.  They're always stunned by the idea that they could be exposed to things they personally don't happen to like and that I don't care.  This related bit has a fabulous anecdote about those annoying, sanctimonious, brittle, humorless people who presume to speak for a group of which they happen to be part:

About thirty years ago one of my cousins, a novice within a religious order, brought some of his confreres to a family summer party. One of the friars chose to take offense at some trivial chatter, and presumed to stand there and do it “as a Religious of the Roman Catholic church!” 

To which my cousin, walking by, responded, “oh, lah-di-fecking-dah, so am I” and shoved him into the pool.

PERFECT.

Sympathy Violin: the Left's Campaign Donation Scrooges

Behold the return of the "sympathy violin" tag, which in this case is linked inextricably with the "Schadenfreude" tag as if they were BFFs.  As the Transterrestrial blog did say, "You’d have to have a heart of stone to read this story and not laugh out loud."

I laughed.  And laughed.  And laughed.  Awwwww.  Poor baby!  Boo freaking hoo!   Apparently the heady days of HopeyChangey 2008 are long gone and now replaced by the hand-wringing whinging and near-panic of 2012.

You really can't read the story and not connect it with another recent instance of fundraising in sheer laughable bad taste and unwittingly contemptible venality.  Oh, sure, some people are offended, but the rest of us are busy guffawing and tweeting our derision.  Come on, man.  The president of the United States of America is hankering for your birthday money and wedding gifts, citizens!  What, stooping to this?  Are you freaking kidding me?  Apparently it's so ridiculous an idea that people have gone to Snopes to see if it can be debunked ... but it can't, because it's actually true.  Here's the thing in all its garishly undignified and utterly blind stupidity, straight from the official Obama-Biden website.

Oh, FYI to my posse: If any of you tries to tell me that you didn't give me a birthday present in order to make a political donation instead, I will curl up my perfectly manicured fingers and proceed to punch you in the face, OK?  I'm glad we got that all straightened out.

You know, I've never donated a single red cent to any political campaign in my whole entire life.  I have to say, though, this one-two punch of fundraising bullcrappery from the Left makes me want to give my lunch money to that human Valium Mitt Romney - not so much as a donation for Romney as much as one against the clowns on the other side.  In fact, it's enough to make one wonder if there's some GOP operative buried deep undercover in the Obama campaign who suggested this entire "in lieu of gifts" idea in the first place.  Alas, I think in this case that simple overt foolishness is at play instead of glorious subversive cunning.

LOL: John Scalzi 1, Slate 0

Scalzi eviscerates a particularly awful and whiny Slate article.  The whole thing's worth a read, but I'll leave you with an ice skating reference and what he says about the hapless writing of that terrible piece:

It’s like a triple axel directly into a pile of pig manure. It’s impressive in its way, but you have to question the wisdom of skating on sh*t to begin with.

Bwahahahaha!

2 Thoughts on the Wall Street Protests/Temper Tantrum/Whatever

Thought the first and thought the second.  Professor Bainbridge: "absurdity."  Or perhaps we should regard it as performance art or comedy improv?

Chick Beer: A Lager for the Ladies

You've got to be kidding me.  Here's the ad copy:

Chick Beer finally gives women a beer choice that suits their tastes and their style. The bottle is designed to reflect the beautiful shape of a woman in a little black dress.  The six-pack looks like you are carrying your beer in a hip stylish purse.  Chick’s unique reflective bottle blings you up!  It’s fun, fabulous, and female!

I don't know about you, but I find this insulting, sexist, vapid, and STUPID.  Yeah, because the ladies haven't been drinking beer for millennia because we've all been waiting for it to show up in a pink frilly six-pack that looks like a FRIGGIN' GORRAM PURSE.  Idiotic packaging.  I feel like walking up to Chick Beer and punching it in the face -- that's the kind of effect that the packaging is having on me.  What next?  Will the bottles look like lipsticks and be laced with Midol and Pamprin?  Pffffffft.

Look, this whole thing consciously creates a gender rift in beer where none had really existed before!  Every beer-drinking girl I know talks about beer, not turning it into some act of gender revolution or whatever.  I don't know about you, but I don't look at a Sam Adams and whine, "Only a guy can drink that!  I'll have to wait for a beer called Abigail Adams.  Boo hoo!  The beermakers of the world are clearly a bunch of male sexist pigs who don't care about meeeeee."  Guess what?  They shouldn't care about whether you have ovaries or not!  The brewers of the world should only care about one thing: making awesome beer.  That's it.  Make great beer and everybody will show up and buy some.  Everybody, guys and girls.  Meanwhile, let the whiny chicks go drink fruity cocktails or wine coolers or something.  Anyway, real girls drink Guinness -- am I right, La Parisienne?

If you want a beer ad that might actually make me want to try the product, look at this Aussie gem:

I Play My Sympathy Violin For ... the US Congress

La Parisienne and I are disgusted at Congress critters wailing that they don't earn big enough salaries.  Boo freaking hoo, Congress.  The rest of us will probably never make six figures (much less get all your perks), and I don't want to hear a single gorram thing about this while the country's got 9% unemployment.  As it is, Congress critters already make 3 times as much as the average American worker.  You call this public service?  As I tell my slacking undergrads, SHUT UP AND GET BACK TO WORK.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Oh, PUH-LEEZ!  By the way, I'm sure we'll be hearing all sorts of whining and dipstick comments by politicians in the days and months ahead until November 2012, so note the new blog tags.  Also, I cannot believe the sheer scope of the "poor me, it's soooooo hard" undergrad-esque whinging coming persistently from the White House.  If you didn't want that job, you wouldn't have that job, so don't come crying to me about how hard that job is now that you've got it (and are plainly angling to keep it).  Man up already.  Geez.

Every Time I Google For Recipes and Shoes, Global Warming Kills a Cute Baby Polar Bear

Yadda yadda yadda.  Is there any part of life that the Greenies will not seek to control in their horrendous eco-crusade?  Is there not a single activity of normal life that they do not feel justified in pontificating about, unasked and unwanted?  Killjoy thermomaniac watermelons!  In the name of their implacable pagan deity Gaia, amid lurid visions of greenpocalypse, these frothing fanatics will stop at nothing.  Prius-driving, soy-latte-sipping, humorless little popinjays!  Pathetic, hypocritical neo-hippies with delusions of messianic grandeur and fantasies of power justified by an aggressive sense of moral superiority. What a toxic crew of obsessive miscreants who trade in guilt and misery as the expression of their perverse secular doomsday cult.  GO AWAY.  I don't care if you want to flagellate yourselves over your eco-sins, but I sure as hell mind when you attempt to flagellate me.  Hey!  Can we classify Greenies as an invasive species?

In the meanwhile, I am busy Googling away -- Payless Shoes is having another BOGO sale right now, and MM needs some nice new sassy but cheap sandals for summer!  (Though that too is evil, apparently.)  I'm also doing this while drinking a big vat of non-fair trade, non-organic coffee and frying up some eggs from non-free-range chickens.  Evil!  How many sins can I commit before breakfast?  Heh!  Oh, and Google already put the beatdown on this stupid Internet-search idea back in 2009: "...a typical individual's Google use for an entire year would produce about the same amount of CO2 as just a single load of washing."  Speaking of, I gotta do laundry today -- rack up yet another eco-sin for me, yay!

Schadenfreude Alert: Gaddafi Clan Wants Its Campaign Contribution Money Back

Here's the claim/accusation/complaint distilled into one line: "We contributed money to Sarkozy's campaign ... He's leading the coalition against us ... We want our money back!"  So you're telling me there's a possibility that Gaddafi totally got suckered by Sarko?  MWAHAHAHAHA!  Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Sympathy Violin: High Schools Not Stampeding to Get Obama as Commencement Speaker

All together now: "Awwwwww."  Way to win the future, people!  How bad is it?  Last year saw 1000 high schools apply for a presidential turn as graduation speaker.  So far this year ... 68.  Hmmmm.  The hot trendy magic is gone, dude. Oh, but high school can be brutal.  Aaaaand now I feel like watching "Mean Girls."

Public Sector Unions, Absconding Politicians, and the Flight From Reality

Read this.  So it's not only a gross abdication of responsibility, Brave Sir Robin?  Pathetic.

Quote of the Day: "a gross abdication of responsibility"

Read this commentary on Wisconsin's runaway politicians.  Anyone else thinking of Brave Sir Robin?

Boo Freaking Hoo: MM Plays the Sympathy Violin for a Shameless Wi-Fi Leech

Geez, you have GOT to be kidding me.  I was going to rant mightily about this, but then I found that someone else already had.  In short: GET YOUR OWN DARN INTERNET ACCESS, YOU PARASITE. (And you bet your sweet QWERTY keyboard I won't let anybody mooch off my wireless Internet connection.  My bandwidth is my own ... because -- um, hello -- I pay for my access.)  Possibly the most shameful bit of it all: the Wi-Fi leech is an academic. More, she's rationalized herself into thinking that she's somehow entitled to other people's Internet access.  Shocker.  

Satire Alert: Santa's Naughty List Leaked

This is delightfully funny, not to mention disgustingly cute:

Quotes of the Day: Feelings, Nothing More Than Feeeeeeelings

Quote the First:  The Thrill Is Gone and the Obamania Honeymoon's Over

The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

What a difference 18 months can make.  Good riddance indeed to that pernicious pseudo-religious "magic."  The ludicrous heights (or depths) of the weird "personality cult" were starting to creep me out when it wasn't making me roll my eyes.  I mean, come on, even the Onion piled on early.