Category: Nonsense

10 Famous People Who Claim to Have Seen Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

Scoop, ... 7 comments.

The highlights of the list:

  • Alicia Keys revealed that she has not only seen a UFO, she’s ‘met some aliens’ in her life.
  • Ariana Grande told Complex magazine that although she’s never actually seen a UFO, she’s seen a ghost and a demon.

Who can decipher the ways of those aliens? They bypass all of Earth’s leaders to speak directly to Alicia Keys. Those alien dudes must really love their jazz-infused R&B. I wonder if they got her autograph.

Although the aliens’ vast intelligence and sophisticated musical tastes are clearly far beyond our ken, Earth music is surprisingly popular throughout the universe. Not many people realize it, but the most popular musical group in the entire galaxy is actually Earth’s own Dino, Desi and Billy. In some remote corners of the Milky Way there are entire religions that worship Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

I would mention that aliens also like Celine Dion, but that’s not surprising because she is obviously one of them. You would know that if you had those Roddy Piper glasses.

Or eyes.

Matilda De Angelis see-thru

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Matilda De Angelis showing a hint of nipple in a see through dress while posing on the Dracula red carpet at the 20th Rome Film Festival!


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Christoph Waltz sure is creepy for a good-looking guy. He’s like Jeremy Irons with a weird accent. I think it’s the voice that makes those two creepy. So, there’s a topic for discussion. Which actor has the creepiest voice. Is it one of those two? Is it Til Schweiger? Willem Dafoe? Vincent Price? Peter Lorre? Or another player to be named later?

If Bobby Kennedy Jr. became an actor, in addition to a roadkill fancier and brainworm host, he’d get my vote.

“20 Photos Teenagers Today Won’t Get At All”

Scoop, ... 12 comments.

I always love lists like this one because they demonstrate how fast things come and go. We live in a disposable world where landfills are filled with old technology, and immense fields are filled with old tires.

Questions: How does one operate that TV without a remote? I’ve never seen one like that. Do you use those sliders to change the channel? If not, how do you change the channel, and what are the sliders for?

One more question: Are cigarette machines really gone completely? What happened to them? Are they scrap metal, or are they in the third world somewhere?

Answer from the comments:

I’ve seen where they’ve repurposed cigarette machines as Art-O-Mat machines as a way to distribute art.


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Irina Shayk as Cicciolina for Halloween

Scoop, ... 11 comments.

She looks just like her, but does anyone remember the porn star turned politician?

I like the concept. I think I’m also going to dress as a person nobody remembers. I can’t choose between Horst Wessel, a Cliquot Club Eskimo, Ish Kabibble and Joe Biden.

I can’t actually go as Ish for Halloween because I can’t commit to the haircut. If you don’t remember Ish, you’ve probably seen his doppelganger. Jim Carrey used his exact look (and a lot of his schtick) to play Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber.

I think I can go as Biden. He and I have the same dance moves. It’s an American tradition for the Presidents. The founding fathers wanted poor dancing to be a requirement for the American Presidency, but Ben Franklin got them all drunk and they forgot to add it into the Constitution, so George Washington slipped through the cracks. (He was reputed to be an excellent dancer.) Then, in honor of Washington’s unique stature in American history, they didn’t want any future Presidents to duplicate his unanimous victory in the electoral college or his good dancing, so many states specified that voting rights belonged only to property-holding white men. They weren’t racist or sexist, as most people believe, they simply couldn’t allow even the remotest possibility that a good dancer would be elected.

NOTE: The part about Washington being a good dancer was true.

One commenter suggested that if I really wanted to go for the “forgotten” vibe, I could dig in my closet for a v-neck sweater and go as Howard Dean. Demonstrating how on-point that was, I had to use Wikipedia to see whether Dean was still alive. He is, and is younger than Trump! (As are Bush and Clinton.)

While on Wikipedia, I found this nugget:

Although raised as an Episcopalian, Dean joined a Congregational church in 1982 after a dispute with the local Episcopal diocese over a bike trail.

Theologians have believed since time immemorial that the basis for all spiritual belief should be the proper use of old railroad right-of-ways.

Yes, the ancient prophets foresaw a future with railroads. Hey, they were prophets. Foreseein’ shit was their job.

Anyway, that’s the same thing that made me a Zoroastrian for a brief time in the hippie era.

Hey, I got better.

I finally came to my senses when I came down from that trip and realized that Zoroastrians didn’t worship Zorro.

Which is something of a shame.

The one I really wanted to worship was Zorro’s dad, Burro. Maybe you remember his song:

Burro,
The ass so cunning and free
Burro –
He makes the sign of the B.

Unfortunately, Burro’s vigilantism came to an untimely end. One of his typical, daring, last-minute escapes failed because it took him too long to form a B with his sword. Upon seeing that, his son changed his name from Burro Jr. to Zorro, and the rest is history.

McDonald’s Foods from Around the World

Scoop, ... 3 comments.

The iced banana chocolate shake sounds good. Some of these, not so much.

If I recall correctly, McDonald’s in Norway three or four decades ago had a sandwich called a McTorsk (literal translation: McCod), but they changed the name to Happy Fish. I don’t know why they changed. Perhaps the name change allowed them to use pollock instead of pricier cod, or maybe they were just making it English-friendly. The sandwich itself was nothing weird – just a local variant on Filet O’Fish.

Surprisingly they had no reindeer or herring items.

The Top 11 Inventions That Have Become Obsolete in the Last 50 Years

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Not mentioned on the list: personal tape recorders, hand calculators. In my lifetime, first they didn’t exist as consumer products, then they were important, then they were obsolete.

Many inventions have not only become obsolete, but their non-existence has made many old TV shows and movies incomprehensible to kids today.

In old shows:

People are unable to communicate with the police or sources of rescue. People frequently need to knock on somebody’s door to use a phone. People need to find a pay phone. Photographs need to be developed. People need elaborate ruses and/or bulky devices to record conversations. People communicate through messages in the newspaper. Teachers can’t be fact-checked in real time. Teens have to steal Playboys from their dads, because it is impossible for kids to see naked bodies. Tanks cannot be defeated by silly-looking devices no larger than a medium-sized bird.

It wasn’t just inventions:

  • There were nine Radio Shacks in 1960, and there are six Radio Shacks today.   In between those years, there were as many as 8,000.
  • There were no giant toy stores; then they were in every city, then they disappeared. Toys R Us once had more than 1000 stores and 25% of the toy market. Walmart took over as the top toy retailer when Toys R Us failed, but that’s temporary. Barring a miracle, the long-term winner will be Amazon.
  • Kodak was a massive company. At its peak, Kodak had 145,000 employees. Today, there are 4,000. Rochester was basically a company town, with more than 60,000 Kodak jobs.
  • Book Stores? Their ranks diminished for twenty years, but surprisingly, Barnes & Noble is making a comeback. Can that last? I love book stores, but now buy 100% of my books on Amazon.

First PCs, then the internet, then the hand-held phone/camera/computer, then sophisticated drones, have totally transformed our lives.

Usually for the better, but not always.

When you’re ready to make your first heist, Böcker can give you a lift

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Capitalism at its finest.

The Louvre thieves used Böcker equipment to get up to and down from the second-story window, so the company took the opportunity to promote their products.

The NY Times reported:

When thieves climbed to a second-floor window of the Louvre, grabbed jewels of staggering worth and descended to their getaway scooters via a furniture elevator, many in France were stunned and furious.

But the German company that made the elevator saw a once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity.

Alexander Böcker, the chief executive of the German machinery company Böcker, and his wife, Julia Scharwatz, recognized their Agilo truck-lift instantly, he said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday. A day after the heist last Sunday, they rolled out a new advertising campaign.

The managers of the German company took great pleasure in the fact that the crooks were unwilling to rely on French equipment to assure their success.

SIDEBAR:

When I lived in Norway, I was shocked by the fact that I could have removed valuable paintings from the wall of the National Museum, and handed them right through ground-floor windows. I didn’t, of course, not because I’m an honest guy, but because I wouldn’t know what to do if I somehow got away with it. The hardest part of a heist like that for a schmuck like me is not the stealing part, but the fact that schmucks have no idea how to convert stolen art to cash.

OK, let’s imagine that I had somehow succeeded, and had Munch’s The Scream in my apartment, next to my golf clubs. How would I have unloaded something like that? It’s not like I could find a high-dollar fence in the phone book, and I couldn’t just fly around the world to drop in on art-collecting billionaires. Some of them might have talked to me, but the honest ones would have ratted me out, and the corrupt ones would have just had me killed, taking the painting for free.

At least I guess that’s what the corrupt ones would do. It’s certainly what I would do if I were a ruthless, corrupt, art-collecting billionaire.

Come to think of it, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. Fuck my current job as a peripatetic philosopher-prince and soft-core pornographer. Where is the university where I can major in ruthless, corrupt, art-collecting studies?

It sounds like something they might teach at Heidelberg, along with “White Superiority 101” and “Choosing the monocle that’s right for you.”

“15 Of The Most Time-Wasting College Classes Ever Conceived”

Scoop, ... 1 comment.

It’s difficult to pick a favorite from the list, but one of them hits close to home. One of my kids went to Centre College, an elite private school that has graduated many people who distinguished themselves in government and jurisprudence. Presumably neither those notables nor my son took the class called “The Art of Walking.”

I’ll let Google’s AI pick up the story about another favorite:

‘The Sociology of Miley Cyrus’ was a special topics course offered at Skidmore College in 2014, taught by Assistant Professor Carolyn Chernoff. The class used Miley Cyrus as a ‘lens’ to study sociological concepts like race, class, gender, sexuality, media representation, and the commodification of childhood

Not on the list: The Joy of Garbage. Professor Virginia Matzek created this course at Santa Clara University.