“Your search – ozymandias flaz gaz heat ray – did not match any documents.”
Really? I hereby create a document to match “ozymandias flaz gaz heat ray.”
(Book only. The movie’s ending actually sounds more appealing. Also, this is pretty awesome [click “Play This Movie.”])
The reason banana republics prosecute people for actions they didn’t agree with under previous administrations is that in banana republics the previous administrations committed crimes against humanity.
Steve Benen notes a Politico piece on Congressional Republicans and Amity Shlaes’s book about the New Deal:
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight. But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Steve seems irked about this. But from all the evidence I’ve seen, tearing through Shlaes’s pages is the right thing to do.
If you have the book in paperback, you can even tear through the cover.
(Read Eric Rauchway on the New Deal denialism that Shlaes exemplifies. Then read all those posts. They are legion.)
Hat tip to Benen’s commenter Henry Lewis for pointing out the crappy simile.
Apparently Amazon.com has caused a lot of innocuous books about gays and lesbians to disappear from its searches, while leaving up some desperately homophobic books (and some total obscenities). This is a clear case for a boycott (and frankly, I think the misconduct is so egregious that it might be worth continuing the boycott for a little while after they fix the problem–not indefinitely, but they should lose a couple of months of your business, and the longer they keep this up the more business they lose).
Here’s a link to Powell’s. Thanks to irony-chan.
[UPDATE: Amazon is saying it’s a glitch, but they’ve got some ‘splainin to do.]
[MUCH LATER UPDATE: It looks like it was some overenthusiastic employee goofed up some tags when trying to blacklist porn titles and got everything that was tagged gay or lesbian and a couple of other things. So you can stop boycotting. But it does suggest that Amazon should maybe get out of the business of trying to hide products from searches.]
The inset tips in Vermont’s income tax booklet are printed in Comic Sans.
Oh my God. I was just reading about the Komar/Melamid/Soldier “Most Unwanted Music” — they took a survey about what people liked and didn’t like in music, combined each set into a song, and recorded the results, yielding something that they say statistically should appeal to only 200 people in the world. Well, someone has to be one of those 200, and why not me, though it’s probably too long to listen to all the way through — but really, who doesn’t love an opera soprano rapping over tubas and occasional bagpipes about cowboys and Wittgenstein?
Out on the plains
Just me and my mind
Took me a break
To read some Wittgenstein
Born in Vienna in ’89
He obsessed with theories
Of language and time
Like the “Tractatus”
Where Ludwig would claim
“The logic of our language
Is misunderstood”
Philosophy is based
On a false pretense
So philosophy itself
Is nonsense, nonsense!
Philosophy itself is non-sense!
But that’s not what I’m posting about. I’m posting because the page from which I took the lyrics says at the bottom, “Complimentary ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ Ringtone.” I SO NEED THIS, if I can figure out a way to avoid being lynched whenever my phone rings.
Saucers of Mud 