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Archive | April, 2009

Carnival of Satire (#113)

By on April 30, 2009 in Carnival of Satire

Carnival of Satire (#113)Isn’t it wonderful living in interesting times? This month’s edition of the Carnival of Satire demonstrates how even dire news has its satiric side:

Lobo kicks things off with this useful advice on how to prepare for the biohazard finale.

Rickey has equally helpful hints in his (un)Official Guide to Swine Flu.

Up until this swine flu thing, the media seemed pretty excited about Twitter. Little did they know that Kneon has been making webcomics with his Tweets. You can jump straight to the comic here.

You may also want to check out the Twitterpocalypse, which we related last week.

Sticking with the web, Juliet Chase has A new approach to SEO .

And yes, the economy is still a worry. Generation Bubble puts it in perspective with Yakk in the USSR, or How I Learned to Love the Bubble .

Clearly, Diesel’s strategy for coping with the recession is to try and ride it out in prison. Or perhaps this is just a cry for help. He is trying to sell a novel, after all: I Got Yer Inconsistent Use Right Here. Decide for yourself, then go sign his book thingy so he’ll stop harassing nice people on Facebook. It’s literally the least you can do.

Mike Sowden has his own creative project on the go, and it looks like Fox might be interested — Stellar Quest 1: The Beginning .

Madeleine Begun Kane is still waxing poetic, but this time her limerick has gone to the dogs.

And we’re all not obsessed by current events. Ellis imagines what Elvis would be like if he were an elderly Jewish man.

You know, I had some of the same thoughts when I saw that picture of the five presidents together. Tim Slowikowski has a warning about Jimmy Carter, a bad muthaf*cka.

steven germain presents Rough Fractals: Blog Bail-Out.

Satire Patch presents NRA Releases Message On Recent Shootings .

In in our one non-satire slot: Vanessa Wolf has an intriguing tale about British PM, Gordon Brown: Confucius say: When glass eye fall in soup, remove with spoon .

And that’s it for the 113th edition. Thanks to these fine folks for helping us with webby-stuff: the Blog Carnival for their form; and the listings at the Ubercarnival, Ferdy’s permanent floating ping festival, and for the listings at the Blog Carnival too. Also, you may find some satire here if you poke around a bit. Here too. Thanks to Hobbit90 from Freaking News.com for the pic.

Two days of pain later

By on April 29, 2009 in General Skwib

Okay, we’re back. On a fresh install of WordPress and at a whole new host. And I’ve only aged 10 years.

A few kinks to work out, such as, “what the hell happened to all the links in the blogroll?” Totally gone.

So, if you were accustomed to seeing your blog over there to the right, I’ll be working towards getting it back as soon as I can. If you’d like to be added, or want to ensure to be returned, please leave a comment below.

Thanks for your patience, and now, back to our regularly scheduled monkeys…

Ask General Kang: Should I be worried about what the swine flu may do to the economy?

By on April 27, 2009 in Ask General Kang, Parody & Satire

Ask General KangAbsolutely. You should spend a lot of time worrying about it.

You should probably go on some kind of epic alcoholic bender to help you forget about it, but then discover that it’s not really making you forget, so then take a lot of drugs. (Start with anything that is best injected. Note: you can save money by sharing needles.) Don’t get any rest. Replace food with coffee. Stop washing your hands.

Really let it get to you. I’d like to see you on a regime of sleepless nights, and bone-crushingly torpid days, when all you can do is think, “what is the swine flu doing to my savings? What if the Nikkei average loses another .02 percent of value?”

So, when you’re really exhausted, and when your immune system is as depressed as you are, then I want you to go to Mexico.

Next time: I believe my accountant may have lupus. Will this affect my EBITDA?

Alltop and humor-blogs are both trading derivatives. Asinine G&M article that “inspired” this: Swine flu outbreak dampens recover hopes. A few cogent questions and answers from the New Scientist: what you need to know about swine flu.

Professor Quippy: Global warming caused by unleaded gasoline

By on April 20, 2009 in Odd Science

Professor QuippyResearchers have discovered that good old-style leaded gasoline protected us from global warming in the 20th century.

You may already know that particles in the air help create ice crystals in the atmosphere, which can reflect some solar radiation back into space. This helps keep the Earth from sweating its ass off.

Lead, as it turns out, is a super-ice-crystal forming substance. This forming of ice crystals is called “nucleation”. (Don’t get ahead of me here.) According to the New Scientist: “Dan Cziczo and colleagues of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, created artificial clouds in the laboratory to explore the ice nucleation efficiency of various particles.” Lead is highly effective at “nucleation”.

But you know what else is a boffo “nucleation” particle? Radioactive material. Yep, it’s true. Nothing reflects solar radiation back into space better than radiation suspended in dust and the upper atmosphere (except the rare chemical element known as IRONY-42).

So there you have it, the solution for global warming. Light up a few nukes in uninhabited regions — not enough to bring a full-on nuclear winter, but enough to turn down the thermostat a few degrees. To be extra “nucleated”, we could deposit all the Chinese-made children’s toys at ground zero, thus doubling our effectiveness. (Radioactive particles + lead = nucleation 🙂 )

Either that, or Dr. Tundra could finish his work on his ultimate weapon, the IRONY bomb. Personally, I’m afraid of the projected sarcasm fallout from this device.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are deadly isotopes of COMEDY-12. More details about the lead at the New Scientist.

Shake that little thing: teeny tiny fictions

By on April 15, 2009 in Skwibby fiction

Sometimes small is good.  I got to thinking this when I checked out the latest edition of the Storyblogging Carnival , which begins with a number of flash fictions.

That got me thinking about another website I’d visited recently, where you can send in the title, and they will write a 100-word story to explain it. (I liked “Unicorn Slaughter” and “The Day the Internet Stopped”. Elison is also a master of the short wad.

There’s also sites (ironically, a large number) devoted to 50-word stories [google search] and an equally large number devoted to the famous Hemingway 6-word story, and even within genres, such as this Wired collection of SF 6-word stories.

I’ve been toying around with microfiction — 140-character stories, such as the ones published by Outshine and Thaumatrope .

But I have a question: are they really stories at all?