Barkeep! Prithee adimpleate me another homerkin of your finest ale!

For tonight, I toast the Great Cthulhu's lordship over the icthyarchy!  I beg your pardon?  You refuse to serve me?  Then you had best obarmate against my imminent pugnastics by which I shall immediately and impudiciously pudify thee in his great and terrible name!

No, "obarmate" does not mean to ruin the country, so you Tea-Tards keep that word off your signs.
 

Besides, most of you are obarmated enough already!

Won't you please donate just a few minutes of your time, and save the words?

(Heh, heh! I've finally figured out how to use "Randal words"...)

When Sarah Licked Christine

Gay Tea Party Witch Sex

Discuss...or run screaming...

Obligatory Swine Flu Post

Groan...I almost can't stand doing this, but it's low hanging fruit and I'm out of ideas...and I feel obliged to somehow contribute to the struggle to save humanity from just another strain of the flu before we are all turned into mutants for Will Smith to kill.

I could just offer my economic advice...

or are people trying to kill us?



or am I being too glib?

Hmmmm...probably. I tend to scoff at the masses when they lose perspective...or when they appear to lose perspective...or when the media tries to push a loss of perspective. I wonder if that last bit isn't the most true. Haven't seen a lot of panic around here.

So...YOU ARE HERE:


What this means is we have

human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.

If you read the page you see that it doesn't matter if we go pandemic or not from here. We've already got community infections in the U.S. and Mexico - it doesn't matter where else it goes within or outside our WHO region.

So I officially don't care if we have a pandemic or not. I want to not hear people say the word "pandemic" like they have one in their neighborhood. Because what they really have is a virus.

I guess we'll see some widespread infections...infections with what?

Streiffer said it's important to keep the threat of swine flu in perspective. It's a new strain of influenza, so people haven't built up immunity and vaccines won't block it, but there is no indication that it is any more virulent or dangerous for normally healthy people than the more typcial strains of flu.

"What people don't seem to understand is it's not worse than the average flu, except there's no herd immunity -- which means there's no immunity in the general population -- therefore, everyone's at risk, but not necesarily for anything more virulent or dangerous than average influenza."

Oh...so, we could be seeing lots and lots more of what looks and acts like the flu, a virus that killed slightly fewer people last year than automobile accidents. (h/t DrMomentum for the link!) Crap. I was hoping I'd get night after night of feverish dreams of Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.

So maybe the H1N1 virus is just the slugger the influenza team needs to get out of the basement and into a distant third behind heart disease. Then again, maybe not...we may just see a bunch of people on Nyquil and anti-virals (buy stock NOW!!). We have a pretty damned good track record against the flu here in America.

Would it suck to see a widespread outbreak of a flu few could avoid? Absolutely. By all means, I'm taking precautions for an extended flu season, especially with my younger children, and keeping myself informed. But beyond that it's biz as usual.

Oh wait, this just in...it's not a government plot! They've found patient zero!

h/t @billmarrs

Lovecraft, Age 9

Old, untitled books should not be casually opened, for you never know what horrors you will find inside. Especially if you're a parent stumbling upon your kids' writing journal.


Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl ch'ken fhtagn...

It's true. Why else would the Great Old One open a restaurant? I'd be pretty fekhin' hungry sleeping all those aeons.

Junior fancies himself a Lovecraft...

The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Musical

First - movies.

Now, musicals...


h/t HPLHS

Reality Imitates the Mythos...Again...

There's got to be a reason that this story from the core of the mythos is so appealing on so many levels...


This could be one of them.

Geologists say that mountain ranges such as the Alps or the Himalayas form in collisions between continents. The last time Antarctica was exposed to such forces was 500 million years ago.

"The mystery here is that the Alps are only 50 to 60 million years old, while here we have a mountain range that may perhaps be as old as 500 million years," Ferraccioli said.

Hmmm...think they'll find any triangular slates with striated markings when the ice sheet melts?

It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian - as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a thousand million years old.

I can't be sure. I wonder if we're going to see any aeons-old protoplasmic things or cylindrical, winged space beings. We just can't be sure. But he knows....

He knows...

Now this is religion in schools that I could be a fan of...

My Expert Economic Analysis

This Week's Breakfast Special

THE R'LYEH: two farm-fresh eggs and four strips of bacon, stacked on a tentacled pancake. So good, it's insane!.......................$3.95



I tried other arrangements like the following, but I think the "many-tentacled" effect was best.

The Book of Perverbs

So yesterday my wife and I are talking and she uses the word "proverbial". I forget the discussion and the comparison, but I always take notice of this "trouble" word. Too damned many lazy and/or ignorant people use "per" instead of "pro".

I know it's a tired complaint, but maybe there's a way around this. Maybe we make a new word. I propose:

perverbial (adj) - of or relating to or resembling or expressed in perverb.

What's a perverb? Well, it's from the book of Perverbs. That's the book in The Bible that tells you to marry seven underage girls and that it's okay to molest your parishioners.

Out of an inexplicable need to conserve the "per- / pro-" word balance, I searched for a "per" word that I could convert and define. I came up with the following:

prochance (adj.) - in favor of gambling or leaving important matters largely to chance. e.g. "This administration takes a decidedly prochance approach to economic and foreign policy."

But now, and I mean just now, everything is screwed up and my new found balance is upset! As my wife peruses a board she frequents, there was a comment about a "proformance" on American Idol this evening.

Ugh. People are so f@$#ing stupid...

How are you in bed?

First I was 87% Brazilian in bed.

Then I was 56% Swedish in bed.

Clicky Here

We call this a "self-licking ice cream cone"

You'd think that being on leave for a week I'd have plenty of time to post. Hah...that's a good one.

But I do have a few minutes to kill right now, so I might as well help you kill a few.

WARNING - this is 28 seconds you won't get back!



Hat Tip: Boing Boing

Senator Clinton was right!!! Whoda' thunkit?

Hat tip Barely Political.