TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.
TRUTH, n. A commodity that can be used as a political weapon. Often traded for money.
Welcome to the carnival. We’ll get straight to the good stuff:
Websurdity has a theory about the destruction of the Death Star being an inside job.
Plebian goes one better and proposes something that we’ve always needed, a Unified Conspiracy Theory.
Elisson has an alternate theory/future history that explains the new system of ELECTION.
Mime is money baby! Vincent McBurney presents Calling for a Living Statue Code of Conduct.
Madeleine Begun Kane has a political limerick that finally answers questions about Iraq in Merchants Of Hype.
Pistol Pete wonders about Art for Christ’s Sake.
Deepak Jeswal presents Culture Attack.
Damian G. presents It’s not easy being green….
The Epicurean Dealmaker presents Jabberwocky.
TekTak F. Mechanoid presents Point / Counterpoint- Hello, Imus Be Going….
And if you’re worried about the Canadian-US border, The Ominous Comma has news of a Pharmaceutical Troop Surge, that may be of interest.
Thanks to everyone for submitting their satire. If you submitted something, and it didn’t make it into the carnival, it’s not that we don’t appreciate your work, but we just felt it wasn’t right for the carnival. In fact many submissions were quite funny/interesting/entertaining, but not really satire. Defining that is a moving target, but you’ll find our take on it here, in an essay on Satire’s Ugly Sisters. Thanks to these fine folks for helping us with webby-stuff: the Blog Carnival for their form; and the listings at the Ubercarnival, and at the Blog Carnival too.
You’re a Blackberry user, right?
Heh…heh…hehe…heh.
Perhaps you should get some heroin to take off the edge. I’m sure they’ll fix the system soon.
He was born Jars Peeblefrench, son of Bjorn and Nellie Peeblefrench, of the Stavenger Peeblefrenches — a family of well-established merchants in the toenail clipping district. Jars was tired of being Norwegian, and he left his family for a life of adventure and creeping insanity on the high seas.
Frustrated by his eternal desire for lutefisk and herring, eventually, he tamed the Turtle-Beast of Neepneep; he then conquered most of the Japanese Islands through a combination of terror, sheer chutzpa and cartoons that had no discernable plot or coherent narrative.
Later, he was bronzed while riding the massive reptile, and is now known simply as “Barry.”
Part of the Toulouse Le Grandfig collection. | Photo by QbiT
A few Sunday diversions:
The first ever (and brilliant) Carnival of Military History.
A childhood whiskey story from United by Yucca
You’ll find more stories at the Storyblogging Carnival.
And this video of a suicidal monkey and two tigers proves that sometimes, having a bigger brain doesn’t make you smarter
And then there’s The Carnival of the Insanities
It’s hard to process the idea that Kurt Vonnegut died last night. He wasn’t immortal — at least in the “not dying” sense — but it felt like the world was a better place knowing he was still in it.
I was deeply saddened when I read Timequake, mostly because he said it was his last novel, but also because I realized that meant he would be going soon too. Then again, he had this to say about death in Slaughterhouse Five:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
Still, this means I’ll never get a chance to meet my literary hero outside of his pages.