I love this video of Mark Aaron James singing his summertime ode to self-expression, black rubber & piercing. In addition to being a gentle and pointed satire, it is a lovely tune. Great lyrics:
I know you’ve got show the world you’ve got the deepest pain,
But now the PVC is chafing where it meets the chain,
Goths of summer, it’s a hard, hard world…
You can find it here if the embed thingy doesn’t work.
HT to Q and Goths in Hot Weather for leading me to this gem.
Oh great. It wasn’t bad enough that every hack headline writer forced to slap a four-word précis on an article they didn’t understand has been using this bromide to bludgeon creativity into a senseless mess for years, now some kind of institution that claims to have expertise about language has elevated this linguistic turd by declaring it the one-millionth word in the English language.
If you have to be convinced of the dubiousness of this “institution’s” claims of expertise, you might want to know that their one-million-and-first word is “Financial Tsunami”. What’s wrong with that, right? It’s in wide use at the moment. I totally agree, but if I’m not wrong, “Financial Tsunami” is a phrase, not a word. *
You probably think I’m quibbling; the Phrase Freak lives for the elevation of the noble quibble to a full-length post.
My main concern with this thing (you will notice that I’ve avoided using it as much as possible, but just so we’re clear, it’s “Web 2.0”) is it encourages mediocre thinking and writing. I’ve already seen Medicine 2.0, Library 2.0, Business 2.0, Government 2.0, etc., so I suppose this trend will only continue, and perhaps accelerate now that the progenitor cliché has now been anointed.
This one gets nine gobsmacks out of ten:
Cross-posted at When Falls the Coliseum.
*According to my OED, a word is: “n. 1. a sound or combination of sounds forming a meaningful element of speech, usu. shown with <em>a space on either side of it</em> when written or printed.” back
The French Harpy once roamed free in the pre-Euclidian Dynamic Structure Era, somewhat before the ascendancy of today’s Hyper-Clones, but well after the Genetic Fruit-Topping Wars.
When we say, “roamed”, we really mean “flew”, because as you can see from this French Harpy we meticulously reconstructed from a fragment of DNA, the Frarpy — as it was known colloquially — had rudimentary legs that was incapable of doing much more than gripping tree branches and wallets. Even from a flying perspective, the Frarpy was not well-designed, and could barely achieve enough velocity to cause lift.
However, they had pinpoint accuracy whenever they wanted to crap on someone, and a voice that was excruciating. The only other species of harpy with a more painful call was the Asian Harpy, though they tended to be less well-endowed and not nearly as nice dressers.
Here at NaziWorks 3000, The Caring Company, we hold it self-evident that all cybertronic humans are created equal, no matter if they are eye-barred, groin-grappling, finger-pointing CEOs of major multi-dimensional super-corporations, or whether they are tiny and polite unmodified humans waiting to be eaten by their betters.
We care about everyone.
Especially how they taste.
Welcome to the futuristic edition of the Carnival of Satire, where we take the old carnival form and kit it out with rocket boots, heat rays and robotty goodness. From now on, we’ve changed the carnival submission policy. If you’d like to submit to the next carnival, keep in mind that we would like you to find someone else’s satire. Give us your URL too, so we can credit you. (So it’s altruistic, but you still get a link.) More details are at the Carnival of Satire page. And please, remember we’re looking for satire.
Let us being our journey to The Astounding World of the Future. This hilarious YouTube mashup takes old newsreel-style narration and runs it over suspect footage; it’s hard to understand why the narrator is so happy, but it sure is funny: “The little lady of the future will no longer slave over the stove to prepare her hubby’s meals. She’ll use a heat-ray oven.” [Grumpy person nukes hot pocket.] The “picture phone” bit floored me. Watch here or the embedded video below. Thanks to Flarf for finding this gem.
Over at Fengtastic!, we can see how easily we get used to the conveniences of the Internet, our technology of the future: 
While not from the future, LOBO is as freaky as the future, though I found his worries about Home-Grown Terrorists fairly sensible.
Personally, I don’t see why humans can’t marry robots either. (BTW, I think we should all make every effort to pronounce the word “roebut”, like they did in the 40s.) Speaking of marrying robots, you should be careful of Wanda, at least on your wedding night.
When it comes to creating spoofy poetry, Madeleine Begun Kane is a machine: The “We Did Nothing Wrong, & Nancy Should Have Stopped Us” Song.
Scunt (hey that’s their name) has a frightening report about A new drug that’s claiming millions of lives.
Carl Milsted takes us to the present and informs us about Obama’s Massive New Subsidies for the Rich.
Chris has karate irony: The Devil’s Dictionary of Martial Arts.
Davidwilliams presents Satire Patch: CHINESE ADMIT FEEDING PRISONERS TO TILAPIA.
Banquet Manager presents World History Lesson: Conservative vs Liberal.
And to take us back to the future, in particular, the rapture for nerds, Rick is waiting for the singularity and listening to The Very Model of a Modern Singularitarian. [YouTube clip].
And that’s it for the 114th 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 Richard Scott for his awesome robot cartoon.
There was no denying Sister Mary G-String’s “enthusiasm”, but Father LeClerk was pretty sure it was going to get her in trouble some day.
Perhaps even later that evening, if he was lucky.
Part of the Toulouse Le Grandfig collection. Photo by Gazelle