kaisercrack

been there, done that, part ii. this is when u just pick your clumsy, non-mushroomexpert ass up, dust yourself off and walk away as if it never happened...

or, beforehand, at least read up a bit on the subject, ya goof!

via Kevba, via fark

Another Friday Afternoon Orgasm Article.

via arts & literature daily

protein wisdom takes on ted koppel:

protein wisdom: "Okay, serious question: Is Iraq today like Vietnam of 35 years ago?"

Ted Koppel: "My executive producer Leroy Sievers remembered, and asked me if I remembered and I did, a two-page spread in Life magazine back in 1969 on the Vietnam war dead for one week and the impact; he reminded me of the impact that that had had. And said, why don't we try to do something similar? For months and months and months now, in fact, we have been doing a segment at the end of 'Nightline' called 'In the Line of Duty.' And basically all I can do there, because that's all the information we have on any given day, today for example, I think so far 10 people, 10 Americans have died in Iraq. And all I'll be able to say was eight died in this incident and two died in that incident, and maybe I'll be able to give the branch of the service that they were in, but no names, no pictures, just the number of people who died over the last 24 hours. And we have been doing that for a very long time and our fear was by virtue of the fact that we've been doing it for such a long time, people are almost numb to it and really not paying that much attention anymore unless the number is extraordinarily high. And so we wanted to just take one program and say, here, let's show you the faces and the names of all these who have laid their lives down --"

protein wisdom: "-- I'm sorry, is that a 'yes' or a 'no'?

Ted Koppel: "I don't remember the question, sorry."

protein wisdom: "Is Iraq today like the Vietnam of 35 years ago?"

Ted Koppel: "If I can help it, yes."

damn. if i'm not careful, this site might turn into some AllProteinAllTheTime shrine. the kid kills me...

cuz the kaiser is always looking out for his readers... a Chuck-A-Rama update! y'all know we've got to finally come to terms and deal with the controversy plaguing our times:

...the company pledged to clear up the confusion over the difference between buffet-style and "all you can eat."

Something Special From Kaiser

i'm pretty sure i posted this awhile back, but it MUST be revisted from time to time. so classic...

via dave barry

obviously, this is very troubling. what sucks even more is that the antiwar left, lacking any sort of solutions, ideas, or intellectual integrity of their own, will shamelessly use such a shameful incident to trash the overall effort being made in iraq to make something horrible so much better.

me too, brotha...

or maybe not. maybe. i don't know. i'm sleepy and sore and my teeths is hurting.

go Nuggets. break Latrell's leg and kick Garnett in his nads. the t-wolves are a pack of little bitches...

this seems kinda cool. maybe. i don't know. i'm sleepy and sore and my teeths hurt.

go Avs. Sakic is backic...

nice. a recent golden discovery on my part... diggity check yo'self, and then check out this hilarious, gleefully inventive blog, protein wisdom, (which i linked to tuesday with the genius noam chomsky bit). he goddamn funny. now he's dissin' that squawking blowhard, frank lautenberg. anyone who uses the chickenhawk argument is a fucking unimaginitive sniveling chump. and excreting more cowardice and intellectual lameness than they could ever hope to hide.

Stereolab rocked my world a few weeks back (and yours too...perhaps u didn't notice, but u felt it...somehow) but, for some crazyass reason, i forgot to blog about it the next day (perhaps i was still hyp-NO-tized!) so i do it now. gothic theater - denver, colorado - 04/04/04 - a show for the ages; one of the world's elite bands, stereolab "kicks it with a tasty groove", galvanizing and enchanting the rapt listener with churning, surging litebrite spacey loungepop. one of their songs i swear to god i was witnessing the aural equivalent of a catastrophic, yet supremely gorgeous and trance-inducing, supernova. right the fuck in front of me. around me. goddamn. i say, goddamn. the entire show was sublime and i left with a most goofy yet radiant smile upon my tearstained and upturned face...

check em out if u already haven't. u will thank me eternally. for beginners: Mars Audiac Quintet. then graduate to, perhaps, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. after that, the sky's the limit, children...

holy shit...Sniglets!!! remember those?!?? "Words that don't appear in the dictionary, but should." freakin' genius. classic. actually, a month or two ago, legal memo and i had a conversation about it where i found out that he had at least a modicum of taste due solely to the fact that he enjoyed Sniglets as much as i did. anyway, today i found out that they have also been resurrected here and here. i was only a kid when i first encountered Sniglets and i probably went thru a 13 year period where i never thought of them at all, but now they seem to be back, gracing my easily-amused cerebral cortex, just as they should be. fuckin' Sniglets. awesome.

fake

charlatan, sham, fraudulent, phony, posture, bum, bunk, cheat, adulterated, baseborn, counterfeit, false, imperfect, impure, inferior, irregular, misbegotten, misborn, mixed, phony, scam, sham, spurious, suppositious, ungenuine, swindle, pseudo, bogus, illegitimate...
and phony.

courtesy of thesaurus.com

the fake-liberal brigade
woe to those who get their american history from howard zinn, their political news from al franken and their sociopolitical values and rhetoric from noam chomsky. the ignorant trendoscenti, paranoid delusionists and all-around poseurs swarm to these frauds like dung beetles to, well...shite.
chomsky, always ripe for parody, gets skewered here. this is brilliant.

ok, wtf. what the hell is a buffet for, other than to use it and abuse it??!?! i mean, who goes to a buffet, even if they're on a friggin diet, to suddenly stop eating at merely 11 slices of roast beef?! not me, by jebus!

gotta love our nascar nation. thanks to mi amigo Boon for kickin' this article my way...

pilfered from andrewsullivan.com:

QUOTE FOR THE DAY I: "In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq's transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed." - Senator John McCain, getting it right, again.

what's in your tamale?

been there, done that. this is when u just pick your clumsy-ass up, dust yourself off and walk away as if it never happened...

reading the catcher in the rye for the first time ever. yeah, i know, a little late. whatever, i know someone who has never seen the godfather (because it seems to him that it might be too long!), although he probably has seen more movies than the average american. that's kinda jacked. anyhoo, the catcher in the rye is one freakin' hilarious book, i never heard it to be so goddamn funny. for some reason i was under the impression that it was this dour, slightly hokey, coming-of-age book that everyone raved about cuz it was a "realistic" portrait of "misunderstood" youth, and that was about it. i never was very much interested in that. but the novel's tremendous charm to me emerges from it's humor. Holden Caulfield's conversation with a nyc cabbie is a gem. holden has just asked what happens to all the ducks in the central park lagoon in winter when the pond freezes over. he has this vague notion that like other birds they might fly south but he's not so sure. perhaps a truck comes and takes them away. he just doesn't know but really wants to find out. the cab driver is almost incredulous with what he sees as a ridiculous question. he doesn't respond at first, but then he wheels around and glares at Holden in the back seat.

"The fish don't go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddamn lake."

"The fish - that's different. The fish is different. I'm talking about the ducks," I said.

"What's different about it? Nothing's different about it," Horwitz said. "It's tougher for the fish, the winter and all than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake."

I didn't say anything for about a minute. Then I said, "All right. What do they do, the fish and all, when that whole little lake's a solid block of ice, people skating on it and all?"

Old Horwitz turned around again. "What the hellaya mean what do they do?" He yelled at me. "They stay right where they are, for Chrissake."

"They can't just ignore the ice. They can't just ignore it."

"Nobody's ignoring it. Nobody's ignoring it. They live right in the goddam ice. It's their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter."

"Yeah? What do they eat then? I mean, if they're frozen solid, they can't even swim around looking for food and all."

"Their bodies, for Chrissake - what'sa matter with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap. They got their pores open the whole time. That's their nature, for Chrissake."

i'm a big fan of this piece. check it out...

Sama Hadad, a clever, feisty 23-year-old Iraqi, looked like she had experienced these fears too. "But you have to remember that defending the invasion doesn't mean defending everything the Americans have done since. Some of it has been stupid - like an ABC of how to create extremists. Their behaviour in Fallujah over the past week has been wildly provocative and wrong. But you keep going back to the facts."

But what are the facts? The Human Rights Centre (HRC) in Kadhimiya has been set up by Iraqis themselves from the ashes of Baathism. They have been going methodically through the massive - and previously unexplored - archives left by the regime, which document every killing in cold bureaucracy-speak. The HRC have found that if the invasion had not happened, Saddam would have killed 70,000 people in the past year. Not sanctions: Saddam's tyranny alone.

"Even once you factor in the war and everybody who has died since, it's not as many people as that," Sama explains. "So this war has indisputably saved lives over the past year. Saddam's victims might not have been appearing on your TV screens, but they would be just as dead."

but the people who morbidly (and, shall i suggest, even gleefully) post u.s. soldier casualties in iraq or constantly invoke all the negatives over there with smug rapture, do u really think they give a shit? this might be a tad bit unfair of me, but deep down i don't think they really do. they couldn't give a rat's ass about either mass graves or dead american soldiers. it's all a political posturing game for them.

sweet...
now it's time to kick some real ass. let's do this! ain't no one gonna stop us now!

reminds me of Coach from Cheers. when he's studying for some geography test, or something. or tutoring Sam..

Albania! Albania!
You border on the Adri-atic!

mmmmm, squirrel...

this a somewhat fascinating and humorous piece, but it also partially illuminates why i'm vegetarian. i smile (perhaps smirk, as some people accuse me of doing) when people show off (and dazzle the ladies with!) their superiority to other animals by eating them and then boasting about it in a not-so-well-masked defensive, faux-easygoing, taunting and flippant manner. are they really convincing anyone of the integrity, and natural glory, behind their actions and how completely at ease they are with them? me thinks there lies a detectable guilt-driven neurosis behind the grinning facade of most toothpick-suckin', belly-rubbin' meat-eaters. yeah, i really think so. but i ain't judging them! eat whatever u wanna eat (be it an english grey squirrel, lamb chops, your neighbor's dog, Bella, a festering sewer rat, chicken nuggets, pastrami...) . just do it in good faith. and brush your teeth and floss vigorously when you're finished. toothpicks don't really do the job.

it doesn't take a genius to do this, but one does it anyway: the Hitch craps on the mindless uberfacile vietnam-lebanon analogies to iraq. it amuses me to no end that simpletons who use such 3rd grade analogies further distance themselves from any chance at intellectual credibility and meaningful debate with such astonishingly feeble and laughable formulations. i think they're just proud that they can actually point out lebanon on a map (but...can they, really? must remember to popquiz one of these creatures next chance i get) and perhaps receive a scooby snack for all their inane posturing and effort. who are they trying to impress and/or fool? fred durst? hillary duff? their mammas?
remember, kids: analogies are an indispensable component of logical analysis and rhetoric. but they need to be used skillfully, competently and with precision. faulty analogies betray a faulty logic, disable one's rhetoric and render the hapless user/offender completely dismissable. leave your silly analogies at home in your toybox where u can play with them all by yourself while mamma's making u kool-aid. the world of mature thought and discourse is not quite yet for u...

nice...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) -- A dwarf mouse named Yoda has celebrated his fourth birthday, making him the oldest of his kind and far beyond 100 in human years, the University of Michigan Medical School says.

Yoda owes his longevity to genetic modifications that affected his pituitary and thyroid glands and reduced insulin production -- and which left him a third smaller than an average mouse and very sensitive to cold.

On the other hand, at the human equivalent of about 136 years, Yoda is still mobile, sexually active and ``looking good,'' said Dr. Richard A. Miller, associate director of research at the school's geriatrics center.

via instapundit

sausage oragami (!) and a preposterous Hardee's sign, both from dave barry's blog. oh yeah, and don't miss out on a chance to bid on this...

damned if u do, damned if u don't: an alternate history...

oh, but some lileks first:

I am struck once again by the incomparable hold VIETNAM has over some people. They don’t seem to realize how the use of this inapt example demonstrates their inability to grasp the nature of new and different conflicts. When I was in college, El Salvador was Vietnam. When I was in Washington, Kuwait was Vietnam. Afghanistan was briefly Vietnam when we hadn’t won the war after a week. It’s Warholian: in the future, all conflicts will be Vietnam for 15 minutes.

Vietnam was an anomaly. Vietnam was perhaps the least typical war we’ve ever fought, but somehow it’s become the Gold Standard for wars – because, one suspects, it became inextricably bound up with Nixon, that black hole of human perfidy, and it coincided with the golden glory years of so many old boomers who now clog the arteries of the media and academe. A gross overgeneralization, I know. But it’s a fatal conceit. If you’re always fighting the last war you’ll lose the next one. Even worse: Vietnam was several wars ago.

So now we’re fighting Iranian-backed forces in their backyard. This is not a new war. It began the day the “students” swarmed the US Embassy in Tehran. And Senator Kerry worries that a military response to these thugs will inflame the Muslim world against us? If so, that speaks volumes about the Muslim world he seems to know so much about – by his logic they prefer death and defeat to comity and cooperation.

If that’s truly the case, then it’s best we face it now.

again...Riddle me this, brother, can you handle it?

just as i thought. these questions still haven't been satisfactorily answered. circular arguments and "rhetorical smoke bombs" do not count. why do the only decent "antiwar" arguments come from those who actually support the war? because some people are hampered by stodgy, prejudicial, reflexive and inert attitudes as opposed to those who, after extensive critical analysis and progressive, pragmatic thought came to the conclusion that intervention was the only way, are not. it's as simple as that. a fatal disconnect somewhere inside the self-suffocating mind leads some to believe they own the moral highroad when all they really advocate is defeatism and a limp nihilism- such a transparent copout, isn't it? but the world will never be theirs (no matter how much they hiss and scratch, beg and moan) and just that thought alone keeps me smiling...

have a glorious weekend!

but first, i can't leave u (however temporarily) without a fresh new minimasterpiece from the hitch.

There must be a temptation, when confronted with the Dantesque scenes from Fallujah, to surrender to something like existential despair ... But this "Heart of Darkness" element is part of the case for regime-change to begin with ... A broken and maimed and traumatized Iraq was in our future no matter what...

I hope I do not misrepresent my opponents, but their general view seems to be that Iraq was an elective target; a country that would not otherwise have been troubling our sleep. This ahistorical opinion makes it appear that Saddam Hussein was a new enemy, somehow chosen by shady elements within the Bush administration, instead of one of the longest-standing foes with which the United States, and indeed the international community, was faced. So, what about the "bad news" from Iraq? There was always going to be bad news from there. Credit belongs to those who accepted--can we really decently say pre-empted?--this long-term responsibility. Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand.

as u lovely patient readers may have realized kaisercrack has been in full slowdown mode lately. silly silly work (the only place i surf and blog from as i don't have the hookup at home) has been really sketchy and "they" (head office, hq, the big cheeses, the head honchos, los jefes) have cracked down on internet usage (and goofy hijinks, name calling, incendiary political talk and prolonged pee breaks in general) and i don't know when this all will change. so i shall blog, if much at all, very intermittently for awhile. might get the hookup at home and do this all properly but the last thing the kaiser needs is another monthly bill- i ain't made of money, u know. but i shall return to keep u periodically posted (no pun intended haha) on mi situación.

bye for now.